how the artwork during its magazine run is often "sketchy" and missing backgrounds, but that Togashi goes back and fixes it for its collected tankōbon release. Mentioning Togashi's love of gore he stated "the whole manga is about the mixture of childish adventure and creepy, adult themes" and noted how some panels later in the manga are apparently censored for gore by being covered with screentone. Reviewing the first story arc, Chris Sims of ComicsAlliance called Hunter × Hunter one of the most "fun, ridiculous, and ludicrously violent comics I've ever read." He stated that while it has every idea about shōnen manga in force, what sticks out the most is the violence. Sims summed it up as "full of clever setups and characters that, while simple to the point of almost seeming one-dimensional at times, still manage to be solid and entertaining based on their reaction to the increasingly strange, increasingly deadly events around them". Charles Solomon, a writer for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, praised the moral seriousness of Gon, a quality that gives the protagonist "an appeal his relentlessly upbeat counterparts lack". Publishers Weekly gave a positive review to the first volume of the manga, stating that Togashi "shows a deft touch" with its standard story, calling his artwork "clear and graceful", and mentioning that his characters are "endearing and complex". While Rika Takahashi of EX.org and Claude J. Pelletier of Protoculture Addicts found the art style in Hunter × Hunter to be much simpler than Togashi's two previous serializations, Level E and YuYu Hakusho, both reviewers appreciated the intricate narrative and characters. Anime 1999 series The first Hunter × Hunter anime series has enjoyed much more modest popularity than its manga source. Newtype listed it as having a Japanese television rating of 10.5 for the fourth quarter of 2000. The show's viewership was ranked number six among the top ten anime television series in Japan for February 2001. The series was voted as the 16th best anime of 2000 in the Anime Grand Prix, but rose to fourth place the following year. In 2001, the staff of the magazine listed Hunter × Hunter as the 94th most important anime of all time. In a 2006 web poll conducted in Japan by the network TV Asahi, the Hunter × Hunter television series was voted 28th best anime of all time. In 2010, Mania.com's Briana