REVIEW: An earlier look into the lives and minds of a group of killers who hunt criminals, some disturbingly overzealous, others reluctant, by Kotegawa Yua.

IT ALMOST SEEMS A DRY RUN FOR HER LATER SEINEN MASTERPIECE "KIMI NO KNIFE". Weaker but similar art and familiar character profiles, using the now-familiar plot devices of guilt-driven hallucinations and love+circimstances forcing a mild-mannered, shy, guilt-wracked, and cowardly man onto the path of the reluctant killer... However, "Anne Freaks" is shorter, less mature and less coherent, with less detail less realism less believabilit and far less emotional impact, lacking its powerful mood-setting devices and strong introspectives...

SERIES DESCRIPTION:
10 years after a cult violently splinters into a small extremist terrorist core and a horrified majority of newly minted outcasts, many pursued or killed by their former comrades for their "betrayal", the cult leader's daughter Anne gathers her childhood friends, now teenagers, for her revenge - to end the cult once and for all...

The three live in hiding, Anne knowing the truth, and the two boys remembering nothing past being haunted by strange dreams. Anne, a hunted fugitive since age 6, is an embittered stone-cold outcast raised hiding among yakuza, and has grown into a wildly reckless, ruthless killer that hunts down and brutally massacres every cult cell she can find. Nor does she hesitate to kill any civillians or police that get in her way.

Meanwhile, Yuri, a mild-mannered, battered, studious and somewhat creepy boy in glasses, has spent these ten years with a psychotic, abusive, and suicidal mother. Mitsubu, leader of delinquents and self-proclaimed "strongest student of Kyoto", resides with a hikikomori father who sleeps his days away, supported by an older sister forced to play mother and breadwinner in the household.

As their seemingly-normal but not-quite-right lives come apart at the seams, Anne tracks down childhood friends Yuri and Mitsubu. Their families dead, themselves hunted fugitives, the two join her cause, to annihilate the extremist cult that wrecked their lives.