TOKYOPOP has obtained licenses to produce manga based on numerous film, television, and media properties. The quality of these manga (called "Global Manga" because they aren’t native manga, which is created and published in Japan) is mixed. Some, like the ones based on the Star Trek and World of Warcraft franchises, are surprisingly good and even faithful to the source material. Others, like the manga based on the Sci-Fi Channel’s recent Battlestar Galactica series and on the Ghostbusters movies, are plagued by amateurish, ugly art.

Then, there is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Intern at Your Own Risk, a manga adaptation of the long-running CBS television series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Written by Sekou Hamilton and drawn by Steven & Megumi Cummings, Intern at Your Own Risk takes the thoroughly adult CSI TV program and turns it into a juvenile detective tale and teen crime procedural. Also, thanks to the Cummings, who are capable graphic storytellers, the art in Intern is quite pretty.

Intern at Your Own Risk follows 15-year-old high school student Kiyomi Yates, a working class girl living with her single father. Ambitious and smart, Kiyomi applies for an internship with the Las Vegas Crime Lab (the central setting of "CSI"). Although this internship is described as an outreach program for high school students, only the students with the top five scores will get a spot in the program.

Though Kiyomi obviously wins a spot, she has no idea how deep this internship will take her into the world of crime scene investigation. Kiyomi and her four fellow interns become intensely involved in the investigation of the murder of Gretchen Yates, a girl they are surprised to learn was a classmate of theirs. The more these young investigators research this grisly crime, the more they realize that they must confront what will be an unthinkable resolution.

Intern at Your Own Risk would not be a CSI story without appearances by some of the most popular characters from the show, and Dr. Gilbert "Gil" Grissom (played by William Petersen in the TV series) and Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) have major roles in Intern. However, this story is about the interns, and the work of finding the major clues and all the crime solving fall on Kiyomi and her four male colleagues.

Intern is like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on steroids, mainly because this is a story in which teens must solve a mystery that would challenge even skilled professional investigators. Writer Sekou Hamilton basically reaches out to the ‘tween and high school age readers and allows them to imagine young people in a police procedural (fiction which attempts to accurately depict police investigative activities). I consider all three of the CSI television series to be as gruesome and as creepy as they are imaginative and inventive. Hamilton simply takes the adult investigators of CSI, who usually seem like superheroes with a Batcave full of futuristic crime solving technology, and replaces them with smart teenagers, but the crime scenarios remain creepy and gruesome.

Reality says that under no circumstances would children, even interns in a police program, get to examine corpses, have unsupervised use of crime labs, or get free access to crime scenes. Success dictates, however, that this television crime drama, which is popular with adults, become a teen detective comic book that is every bit as engaging, shocking, and suspenseful as the original, but in a kid friendly way. The highest compliment that I can pay CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Intern at Your Own Risk is that I’d kill for more of this.

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