The first word I’d use to describe Bloom Into You’s manga, particularly in contrast with its animated adaptation, is sparse. Panel compositions are often defined by their vast, empty spaces, leaving plenty of room for the characters’ lingering, unspoken thoughts. This is a fine choice for a story like Bloom Into You, a story so preoccupied with the sense of deficiency or emptiness that haunts its two leads. Emptiness is what Touko sees when she considers what the future might bring – a wholly empty sky, the nothingness where her voice trails off, and the blueprint of behavior left by her sister ends.
Tag Archives: Manga
Witch Hat Atelier: Magic and Its Misuses
The first volume of Witch Hat Atelier was absolutely delightful for all sorts of reasons, ranging from its charming heroine Coco to the ornate illustrations that bring her world to life, imbuing every page and panel with a vitality born of soft line and incidental detail. But what most impressed me about this manga, so much that I in fact centered my first reflection on it, was Atelier’s insistence on treating magic as a practical, practice-oriented craft, rather than some fantastical power that some gain naturally and others could never possess.
Chainsaw Man – Volume Two
The second volume of Chainsaw Man is a good deal like the first: irreverent, incendiary, and too preoccupied with the base necessity of things like food and shelter to concern itself with high-minded heroism. As Denji and Power are drawn further into the machinations of the Public Safety Bureau, they remain emphatically indifferent to its goals, finding more motivation in the prospect of boobs or gum than the pursuit of justice or civil order. And how can you blame them? What has justice or civil order ever done for them, either when they were wild and desperate on the streets, or now as imprisoned agents of the state? If Denji and Power come across like beasts, it is only them reacting to a world that’s already assigned them that designation, a world that wouldn’t accept them even if they played by its stultifying, hypocritical rules.
Intimacy’s Vanguard: Kaze to Ki no Uta
Modern anime convention rests upon a scaffolding that has been built up over decades, a series of aesthetic and narrative conventions established one seminal work at a time. The more I explore this scaffolding, the more I find to appreciate in modern anime; as such, I was eager to check out Kaze to Ki no Uta, the film adaptation of one of the earliest and most influential works of shounen-ai manga. The manga’s explorations of sadomasochism, incest, and other charged topics made it controversial from the start; in fact, author Keiko Takemiya’s editors waited seven years from her first conception of the story to actual publishing. And its release was a lightning bolt; a hit from the start, it would help popularize shounen-ai more generally, opening the door for manga and anime’s subsequent explorations of queer identity.
Yuureitou – Volume 4
It’s been six chaotic years since I last wrote about Yuureitou, yet the work is such a singular, insistent creation that jumping into it was as easy as if I’d never left. Yuureitou clearly has a few key influences, and is not afraid to bash them together in strange, sometimes even ludicrous ways, all for the sake of promoting a unique emotional or dramatic result. Part Hitchcockian thriller, part reflection on gender identity, and part grindhouse or Hammer horror, Yuureitou is happy to swing wildly between these passions at a moment’s notice, daring the audience to challenge its nature much like the manga’s characters often do. The manga buries itself in the messiness of identity, and through its meandering course exemplifies the multiplicity of our experience, the reality that we are all composed of jagged, contradictory instincts and emotions.
Spirit Circle: Why Do We Live?
Why do we live, and what do we live for? There is no score sheet to play towards in human existence, though some might frame wealth, power, or some other metric as their own measure of success. But can a human life be measured in terms of success or failure? Is failing to seize opportunity failing at life itself, or are such disappointments themselves intrinsic to the experience? Is a life born into suffering worth any less than a life born into splendor, or is suffering somehow meaningful as well? Maybe seeking meaning in life is itself a trap, one designed to rob us of enjoying what is in favor of pining for what might be. If our only certainty is change, perhaps our most vital skill is mutability, and thus “why do we live” demands an answer as flexible as life itself.
The Crafting of Magic in Witch Hat Atelier
From your first glance at its volume cover, it is clear that one of Witch Hat Atelier’s great strengths is its lush illustrations, which delight in both their whimsical form and detail-rich content. Even the chapter index is adorned with herbs and baubles, speaking to the love of tiny mysteries and scene-setting details attendant in this realm of old woods fantasy. A pinch of this rare herb, a shaving of root, and something bright and glittering from the high jars of the atelier; the magical artisan at work is this story’s quintessential image, capturing both the wonder and the skill of true creation.
Hope and Wonder in Girls’ Last Tour
Since its beginning, Girls’ Last Tour has been a story about coming to terms with the end of things. Its very title points to the finality of this journey, preemptively putting to rest any thoughts of surviving beyond the apocalypse. Most stories find their characters rallying against fate with all their might, hoping to change their very destiny. There is no such hope of upending fate here; Girls’ Last Tour knows its characters’ destiny, and is instead focused on the more intractable conflict of how you comport yourself when you know things are ending. When the hubris of assumed immortality is stripped away, what defines us as fundamentally human? When we cannot be comforted by the endurance of our legacy, what else do we have left?
Endurance and Inheritance in Girls’ Last Tour
Snow falls gently on a disused battlecruiser as we return to Girl’s Last Tour. In the years since the anime adaptation’s release, our world seems to have spun significantly closer to the future as posited by this story, with climate change, the revival of economic serfdom, and an ascendant far right all pointing towards mankind’s self-inflicted decline. Given our increasing proximity to apocalypse, I can appreciate all the more the lessons provided by Chi and Yuu: Chi’s industrious, pragmatic preoccupation with immediate tasks, Yuu’s zen appreciation for whatever life offers her. Like the heroines of Girls’ Last Tour, we possess no way of directly challenging the conditions informing our lives; whether it’s through busying ourselves with what we can do or learning to “get along with the hopelessness,” this manga seems to increasingly be providing a blueprint for navigating our modern age.
Chainsaw Man and the Poverty of Our Dreams
Chainsaw Man commences with a grim litany of prices paid, as our hero Denji recounts all the body parts and organs he’s sold to winnow down his overwhelming debt. Having hacked off all expendable kidneys, eyes, and testicles, he announces he’s reduced his debt to a mere thirty-eight million yen. It’s not a price he could reasonably pay, not a price he expects to pay with all the fruit of his desperate labor. It is a death sentence, executed by way of a thousand financial cuts, and it will follow him until the day he finally gives up.