Astral Project, vol. 1
Written by marginal (Garon Tsuchiya)
Art by Syuji Takeya
Rated M, Mature
CMX, $12.99

Astral Project is a smartly drawn supernatural tale set in the grittier parts of modern-day Japan. If this first volume is any indication, it’s more of a mystery than a horror story; it just happens that the ability to leave one’s body and float off into the night sky is an important plot element.

Masahiko is your typical alienated young man of fiction, estranged from his parents, living alone in a small apartment, working nights as a chauffeur for a high-end call girl service. As the story opens, he gets a call from a total stranger telling him that his sister, Asami, has died. He goes home for her funeral, dodging his father, and takes back with him only one thing to remember her by, the CD she was listening to when she died. But when Masahiko listens to the music, something startling happens: His soul departs his body and goes floating over the streets of Tokyo.

At first, he thinks that this is what killed his sister—she left her body and couldn’t get back in time. This story is far more complex than that, however, and the creators unspool a number of plot threads in this first volume. Masahiko takes the CD to a jazz expert who identifies the musician performing the music, but this session is like none other ever recorded. There are hints of plots and conspiracies. Yukari, Asami’s friend who broke the news to Masahiko, pursues him, but he’s not interested; all he wants to do is figure out what happened to his sister. Tantalizing clues are dropped along the way.

As that plot develops, Masahiko is also testing out his newfound power to leave his body behind and travel around Japan. He starts to meet others who have similarly shed their skin: Zanpano, an old man who is a wino on earth but more of a wise elder in the astral plane, and a mysterious, gruff young woman.

Although Astral Project tries to be dark, there is an element of innocence to the story. Masahiko works with call girls, but his one friendship with a co-worker is strictly platonic. What’s more, he is drawn not to the alluring Yukari but to the younger, more innocent girl he meets on the astral plane. This, plus his resentment towards his parents and his boyish love of his big sister, make him seem very young. Aside from the scantily clad call girls, there isn’t much in volume 1 to merit an M rating; perhaps, as often happens, the sex and violence will be ramped up in later volumes.

Takeya’s art is intriguing but rather odd; the faces and figures may seem stiff and out of proportion, and the backgrounds seem to have been designed by M.C. Escher, but the overall effect is slick and expressive. Takeya likes to pull in tight on characters’ faces, particularly at moments of revelation or emotion, and he composes the page in interesting ways, often just showing slices of faces and objects to unfurl the story. In most of the book he uses just two or three tones, which gives his figures an almost metallic smoothness. This would be monotonous in lesser hands, but Takeya is not afraid to experiment with hatching and stippling to add interest. The only place this doesn’t work is in Chapter 3, when he starts rendering Masahiko in a rougher, scratchier style. It doesn’t work very well, and he soon reverts to his smoother, more linear technique.

The characters are one of the best parts of this book. Tsuchiya’s writing and Takeya’s character designs produce a cast of unique characters, each one different and interesting in his or her own way: Masahiko’s plump call-girl friend, the ponytailed jazz expert, the crafty Zanpano. Admittedly, the main characters are manga stereotypes—the blank-faced, slightly bitter young man, the seductress, and the innocent young girl, but the rest of the cast is a rich and varied crew.

There are no extras, but the slightly larger trim size of this volume shows off the art to good effect, and at least partly justifies the higher price tag. Takeya’s art has a monumental quality—he often fills a panel with a single image of a head or a hand—and his nightscapes are breathtaking. It would be a shame to squeeze those down to standard tankoubon size.

This first volume sets up a supernatural mystery with an interesting puzzle, some intriguing characters, and a polished, occasionally edgy art style. I’m looking forward to seeing where the creators bring it from here.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)

Kasumi, vol. 1
Story by Surt Lim
Art by Hirofumi Sugimoto
Rated T, ages 13+
Del Rey, $10.95

Kasumi is an interesting hybrid, a global manga written in English by an American writer and illustrated in Japan by a Japanese artist. People often seem to be surprised to hear that it’s an OEL (original English language) manga, even after they have read it.

For one thing, it looks like it was translated. The book is printed right to left, and the speakers use honorifics as well as other Japanese terms—when was the last time you saw the word “hai” left untranslated in a Japanese manga? And it appears to take place in a Japanese high school, not an American one, judging from the elaborate uniforms and social structure. This is a selling point for some readers, but it is also the book’s Achilles heel, and it raises the question of how closely global manga should imitate Japanese manga.

At the outset, Kasumi is an ordinary girl (for shoujo manga, anyway), the cheerful, selfless daughter of a hard-working single father. Early in the book she has a mystical experience while out in the forest—she follows a glowing light up a tree, falls, and is caught up in some sort of magical fog that keeps her from being hurt. Kasumi wakes up with almost no memory of this, but the reader knows that Something Important has happened.

But that has to be set aside for the moment, because Kasumi is heading out for her first day at her new school! The experienced reader’s heart will begin to sink at this point, because we know what is coming, and indeed, Lim delivers all the cliches: The school is a snooty academy for rich kids in which a self-selected clique enforces a rigid code of behavior. There is apparently only one guy worth having, Ryuuki, and we meet him right away; he’s cool and aloof, and all access to him is controlled by his fan club. (One wonders how he feels about this, but Lim leaves that avenue unexplored).

Kasumi is clueless about all this. Her hobby is performing magic, and in a heartbreaking scene, she tries to impress her new classmates with some sleight-of-hand. They are not impressed, and when the teacher assigns her to a coveted seat near Ryuuki, the mean-girls clique is horrified and offended at her transgression (despite the fact that it was the teacher who assigned the seat).

The next plot angle is particularly contrived, even for a Japanese manga: The mean girls tell Kasumi she must put on a magic show for the school, and if Ryuuki is impressed, she can stay—otherwise, she has to leave. (How would that be enforced, pray tell?) Of course they sabotage Kasumi’s equipment, and the show is a disaster. In her distress, Kasumi unknowingly summons up the magical mist from the first chapter and manifests a previously unknown power: She turns invisible when she holds her breath. The mist causes panic, as students flee what they think is a fire, and her power to disappear saves her, as the students think it was a really impressive magic trick—although it’s hard to imagine that students who were pelting her with tomatoes a few minutes before would give her the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming she just got lost in the chaos.

Perhaps it’s not fair, but the device of the ruling clique bullying the new kid bothers me more in an American manga than a Japanese one. American high schools do have their own pecking order, but the students don’t refer to their classmates as “commoners” or feel the need to punish them for sitting in the wrong seat or sending a note to the wrong guy. In fact, it’s hard to imagine American teenagers tolerating a self-selected club that enforces such rigid rules.

True, Kasumi is apparently set in Japan, but it seems to me that the implicit understanding between the creators and the readers is different. The American reader who picks up, say, Boys Over Flowers knows that she is reading a foreign book, and that the customs and mores presented are normal for Japan if not for here. That foreign-ness may be attractive or it may be an obstacle to overcome in order to enjoy the other facets of the book, but it’s out of place in an American book. The art and paneling in global manga may be similar to Japanese manga, and the types of stories may be the same, but in picking up specific story points, Lim mimics Japanese comics too closely. Furthermore, by leaning on these cliches she misses the opportunity to bring more complex and realistic high-school drama into the plot.

It’s a shame, too, because Kasumi has a lot of good ingredients: The heroine is likeable, and she has an interesting power. What teenager hasn’t wished for the power to vanish from time to time? At the same time, the power is limited—Kasumi can only disappear for as long as she can hold her breath. I also liked her lovable-nerd sidekick, Otaku-Ken, who is a huge fan of superhero comics.

The art is professional and competent and shines in places, particularly in the scenes where Kasumi is interacting with the magic mist. The character designs are good, although the faces seem curiously noseless much of the time, and Sugimoto gives us enough background detail to establish a sense of place. However, his use of flat areas of screentone for areas like hair and clothing gives the art a cheap, hurried look. In short, the art is good but not great.

Kasumi is a good start but tries too hard to be Japanese, at the expense of the story. Shoujo manga fans may pick it up anyway—from what I’m hearing, many of them have. But by falling back on the standard plot, Lim misses the chance to tell a more authentic story. Nonetheless, this first volume is good enough that I want to see the second; the story shows promise, and perhaps Lim will take another cue from Japanese creators and move beyond the stereotypes in volume 2.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)

Song of the Hanging Sky, vol. 1
By Toriko Gin
Rated OT, Older Teen 16+
Go!Comi, $10.99

This is an odd little manga with lovely art and a story that goes beyond the usual genres. By the end of it I was not sure what to think, but I was definitely looking forward to the next volume.

The story is set in the mountains of some unspecified land, where Jack, a former field medic, has taken refuge from the wars that rage below. Gentle, bespectacled, skilled in medicine, Jack is a dreamy alternative to the usual sullen guys of shoujo manga. When we first meet him, he is hunkered down before the fire in his snow-covered cabin, writing a letter to his far-away sweetheart.

This cozy reverie is interrupted by frenzied barking from his dog Gustave, who senses something is not right outside. Sure enough, Gustave and Jack head out and soon find a strange child lying in the snow. By “strange,” I don’t just mean that Jack doesn’t know him; the child has feathers instead of hair and a huge set of wings growing out of his back. In fact, Gin explains in an excellent bit of pseudo-science, the child is one of the bird people, a living fossil whose ancestors branched off in some odd way from the evolutionary tree.

In this opening sequence, the child appears to be a wild animal. He speaks in screeches and tweets, not words, he reacts with fear to his first sight of Jack, and he refuses to eat the food Jack offers. Eventually, though, he does succumb a bit to Jack’s kindness and starts to settle in. Just as they start to get along, two mysterious figures appear from the night to claim the child, and Jack says goodbye.

Then the scene and point of view shift, and we see life from the child’s perspective. He and his companions speak in complete sentences, have complex customs and emotions, and generally act, well, civilized. Not like wild animals. The resemblance to Native Americans is obviously intentional; the Bird People wear feathers and beads and fringed capes, live in teepees, and are on the run from extinction. They eat pancakes. Suddenly the little boy (his name is Nuts) seems a lot less feral.

In addition to the feathers that grow on their heads, the Bird People are distinguished by their massive wings, which are feathered when they are children and lose their flesh and feathers as the characters grow to adulthood. Gin uses this as an indicator of age and shows different characters with their wings in various stages of health, but it also serves as a visual reminder of the tribe’s fate: The warriors look healthy and vigorous, but their creaking wing bones carry connotations of old age and weakness.

The Bird People are a closely-knit clan; most of them are related to each other in some way, and their relationships and tensions are revealed as the book goes on. Unfortunately, their names have a who’s-on-first quality that takes a bit of getting used to. The leader of the tribe is named Cave. Across the River is the tribe’s shaman and healer, and the warriors are Crazy Horn, Another Bear, and Fox. Nuts is eventually renamed Hello, at which point the dialogue started sounding quite odd in places.

One of the things that makes this book interesting is that the tribe is going through a time of transition. The Bird People are not timeless; they are evolving as they struggle on the edge of extinction. They have rituals and traditions, and they argue about the importance of keeping them. They do things they don’t like in order to conceal their existence from the rest of the world, and they debate whether that is necessary, too.

And when the point of view shifts from Jack to the Bird People, Jack becomes the threatening, unintelligible outsider. To me, this is one of the best parts of the book—the way it tells the story from both sides of the cultural divide. The reader knows that Jack is good-hearted, but the Bird People, across the linguistic and cultural divide, don’t get that. Jack is almost killed before Hello succeeds in bridging the gap and bringing him into the tribe. And when he does, Jack is in the subordinate position. It’s an interesting reversal of the usual Europeans-versus-native-peoples narrative, which this book is obviously set up to imitate.

There is one National Geographic moment, which probably serves to give the book its 16+ rating: The Bird People bathe topless, and Jack gets all flustered when he sees the lovely Fox doing her morning routine. It’s really more of an Adam and Eve moment, now that I think of it, because the Bird People are not ashamed of their bodies. The scene isn’t in the least bit salacious, and given the overall quality of this book, it would be a shame to keep it away from readers in their early teens.

Gin’s art is detailed and convincing. The characters’ wings look like they really could support them, the characters’ faces are expressive, and the backgrounds are just detailed enough to create a sense of place without being overwhelming. The one place where she overdoes it a bit is with hair and costumes, but that’s feature of manga in general, and it does give the book an interesting look.

This volume is a pretty minimal production by Go!Comi standards; the cover is lovely, but there are no color pages or translator’s notes, just a one-page omake by the artist. The paper is not high quality, but it is good enough to carry the art.

Song of the Hanging Sky goes far beyond standard shoujo manga, with an intriguing premise, complex characters, and a shifting point of view that not only entertains but also provides food for thought. If the quality stays this high in the next two volumes, it’s destined to be a classic.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Jyu-Oh-Sei, vol. 1
By Natsumi Itsuki
Rated T for Teen, 13+
Tokyopop, $14.99

Jyu-Oh-Sei is perfect summer reading. It’s sort of a manga version of 1950s sci-fi movies, with a bizarre setting, a plot that revolves around sexual attraction and power struggles, and interesting characters in sexy, semi-historical outfits. It’s good enough not to hurt your brain but light enough not to tax it, either. Tokyopop has thoughtfully packaged it as a double-thick manga, which is how it was originally printed in Japan, so this first volume brings the reader well into the story.

The book starts with a classic opening: Twin brothers Thor and Rai are the pampered children of a high official on a space colony somewhere far from Earth, the planet of their ancestors. Almost immediately, their parents are killed and the twins are shipped off to the planet Kimaera, a penal colony reserved for those who receive the death penalty.

Kimaera is harsh. It revolves slowly, so there is just one long day and one long night per year, and few people survive the night. Plants are at the top of the food chain, and the inhabitants must take extreme precautions to keep from being eaten. To survive, they have evolved a rigid social system that separates people according to gender and skin color, weeds out the weak, and gives women the upper hand in most situations, including the right to choose their mates.

Life on Kimaera is not only nasty and brutish, it’s short. Even on the twins’ home colony, few people live beyond 30 without life extension surgery; the harsh climate of space seems to age them faster than on earth. Of course, things are even worse on Kimaera. Rai disappears early in the book, and the betting is that Thor won’t last long. He probably wouldn’t have made it to page 150 if he hadn’t caught the eye of the lovely and skilled Tiz, a high official who tosses away her status to team up with him. It’s almost mandatory that a story like this includes a character who is skilled, attractive, and ambiguous, and that role is ably filled by Third (named after his leadership rank), who teams up with Tiz and Thor but may not entirely be on their side.

The story is episodic, but there is a driving motivation: Thor realizes that he is doomed if he doesn’t get away. The only person who can leave Kimaera is the supreme leader, the Beast King, so Thor must defeat all others and become the Beast King himself. It’s a bit far-fetched, but it gives structure to the story.

Jyu-Oh-Sei is the sort of sci-fi that you don’t have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy. All the characteristics of the alternate world are spelled out, so the reader never feels lost for long, and mechs are kept to a minimum. In fact, the setting looks vaguely like a 19th-century painting of a primitive society—no one has books or microwaves or plastered walls or telephones. They live in big stone buildings and eat at long tables. The only technology on view, aside from the spaceships that dump people there, is jet-bikes and machine guns.

Obviously, there is plenty of action, some of it crazy, as when folks have to battle the killer plants, some of it of the more ordinary quarrels-and-duels type. What makes Jyu-Oh-Sei work, though, is that the characters, while flawed, are solid. Despite the weirdness of their world, they are identifiably human, with human obsessions and reactions: fear, jealousy, impulsive behavior driven by sexual attraction. And they are capable of ambivalence, sometimes loving and hating at the same time. They are not the cardboard cutouts of pulp fiction.

The art really helps the story along without getting in the way. It’s clear, expressive, and easy to follow; in fact, this is a good book for readers who don’t usually like manga, as the art is not excessively stylized.

Tokyopop puts everything together in an attractive package. Some color pages would have made it a lot better, but there are a few extras—a map of the solar system, a timeline, and an author’s postscript. And really, for $14.99, Jyu-Oh-Sei delivers a lot of reading.

With its oddball setting and quirky cast, Jyu-Oh-Sei is solid escape reading that’s perfect for a lazy afternoon. It’s not great literature, but it is good enough to make the world go away for a few hours, and Tokyopop’s wise decision to publish double-size volumes just makes it that much more addictive.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)

Yen+, August 2008
Published by Yen Press
Senior Editor JuYoun Lee
Rated OT, for Older Teen
About 450 pages, $8.99

Yen+ is good. It’s beautifully produced, with attractive covers and plenty of extras. The manga look really good on the larger pages, and the Yen folks have picked a wide variety of very readable manga for this debut issue. I do think the lineup is flawed, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s get the inevitable comparisons to Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat over with right away. Yen+ has a slightly smaller trim size than the same trim size as those two, but it’s still big enough to make for a noticeably better read than the standard volume of manga. It’s thicker but also more expensive. It has no extra articles on fashion, music, or Japanese culture, as Shojo Beat does, but this first issue carries lots of pieces of congratulatory art by the manga creators.

Here is the big point of divergence, though: Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat carry manga with different storylines but a pretty consistent style and tone, and I have always imagined that Japanese manga magazines run along similar lines. Yen+ has a much wider variety of stories, and that is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, the reader gets to sample a wide range of stories, but the downside is that the magazine seems unfocused, not aimed at any particular reader.

This first issue starts with two global manga that are guaranteed crowd-pleasers, Maximum Ride, based on the novels of James Patterson, and Nightschool, by Svetlana Chmakova, of Dramacon fame. Both have lovely art and show a lot of promise, but to be honest, one chapter isn’t enough of either one. Maximum Ride starts out by introducing us to a slew of characters who have some obvious peculiarities and tosses in some action right away, but by the end of the chapter I still wasn’t too sure of what was going on. The story revolves around some teenagers with various special powers, and some bad guys who are their enemies, but its not at all clear how it all fits together. (I like it that Patterson chose a strong woman, Max, as his main character, but I wasn’t crazy about the moe-esque little girl Angel.)

With Nightschool the problem is not so much the basic premise, which is pretty clear, but the sheer number of characters who are introduced all at once. Again, it’s hard to tie it all together and see where the story is going. This is the biggest limitation of the anthology format—there isn’t enough space to lay the whole story out in a single chapter. Still, the bottom line is that I want to know more about each story, and after all, I think that’s the point.

Next come a couple of very standard-issue manhwa. Pig Bride is a supernatural love story with mythic overtones, Sarasah starts out like unrequited-love shoujo manga but takes an odd turn right at the end. Both are worth a look, and I might not have picked them up on their own. Well played, Yen Press!

One Fine Day is a slice-of-life manhwa about a guy doing ordinary things with his three companions, a cat, a dog, and a mouse, all of whom morph into little kids in animal costumes. It’s a little odd, but Yen+ is actually a very good showcase for it, as the bigger pages allow creator Sirial’s spare layouts to really breathe.

So, we’re cruising along with lots of pretty manga and manhwa, and I’m feeling pretty good about Yen+ at this point, and then I turn the page and suddenly the whole tone changes with Jack Frost, a splatter manhwa that features pages and pages of a girl’s decapitated head looking at her kneeling body, panties on full display, while some sort of fight goes on in her classroom. This manhwa is all kinds of bad. It mainly centers on some sort of fight, but we don’t really know who’s fighting or why. The girl has just been decapitated and the lower part of her body arranged in a sexually suggestive position (we get several tight shots of that so we won’t miss it) but her biggest concern is that she can’t see one guy’s face. (You would think that the artist, having made that a plot point, would conceal the face from the reader, but he doesn’t.) It’s a little hard to imagine the reader who picked up Yen+ for Nightschool or Maximum Ride enjoying this story. It seems like it’s pitched to an entirely different reader, and I think a lot of readers will find it off-putting—just as the reader who buys Yen+ for Jack Frost may very well find Pig Bride a turnoff.

At this point the magazine flips, and the four manga stories are read right-to-left. The Yen folks do a nice job of making this a smooth transition. Of the four manga, Soul Eater pretty much matches Jack Frost in terms of gore and fanservice, but the other three manga are all pretty readable. They are all action-oriented but not incongruous in this setting. I was all set to hate Higurashi When They Cry, but I ended up liking it a lot—think Kindaichi Case Files meets Aoi House, with an extra sprinkling of weird. Again, I ended up liking a manga I wouldn’t have picked up on my own.

I know that an anthology is supposed to have variety, but I think the editors of Yen+ have cast the net a bit too wide. The differences in tone as well as content are likely to turn off some prospective readers. On the upside, this is a great choice for people who like to read a lot of different genres. The stories are strong overall, and the design and production are top-notch. Yen+ feels like a quality magazine, and I’m looking forward to the second issue already.

(Full disclosure: This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher. The toner of Nightschool, Dee Dupuy, is a friend of mine, and I have socialized with Svet as well. They both collaborated on the Toning 101 primer I ran in MangaBlog recently. And I occasionally freelance for Shojo Beat.)

Dororo, vols. 1 and 2
By Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, Inc., $13.95

If Viz published Dororo, they would put the scrappy title character front and center, fists flying as he dispatches yet another evil spirit. But this edition is published by Vertical, purveyors of fine classic manga for adults, so the covers of these two volumes look like they were designed by Joseph Cornell—if Cornell had had access to neon inks and spot varnish.

At its heart, though, Dororo is a shonen manga. The two main characters are knit together in a grudging friendship. They travel through samurai-era Japan, encountering all sorts of enemies, from spirits of dead babies to wicked feudal lords, and dispatching them all with a combination of skill and ingenuity. And along the way they come to terms with the circumstances of their lives and find a purpose for their wanderings.

What lifts Dororo above the ranks of the humdrum, of course, is Tezuka’s storytelling and his art. I know we’re all supposed to like Tezuka because he’s the godfather of manga, but often I find his work awkward and overly stylized. Not this time. He stretches his panels out to accommodate a whistling wind or a swarm of snakes; he zeroes in on a figure, a face, an eyeball; he depicts sweeping landscapes and interior states of mind with the same attention to detail. This is a book worth buying for the art alone.

Hyakkimaru, the main character, has had a most unfortunate beginning. Before he was born, his father, an evil nobleman, cut a deal with 48 demons: He gives each of them a part of his unborn son, and in return, he becomes the ruler of the land. Indeed, Hyakkimaru is born blind, deaf, and limbless and at his father’s command, his mother sends him off down the river in a basket to die. In typical manga fashion, he is rescued by a wise old man who comes to love him as a son and who fashions prosthetics to replace his visible missing parts. Handily enough, the prosthetics all double as weapons—his arms are swords, his fake leg shoots out caustic powder, even his false nose contains an explosive. Hyakkimaru is blind and deaf but has strong intuition that not only replaces those senses but also allows him to sense the presence of spirits of the dead, who seem to follow him everywhere.

Hyakkimaru’s traveling companion is Dororo, a little kid whose most compelling characteristic is his ability to absorb horrific beatings and keep on going. Dororo is scrappy and selfish, which is not surprising once we learn his backstory, but he also has great compassion for those who are beaten down by life. Hyakkimaru is older, wiser, and more skilled, but still not sure of himself or where he is going, at least at first. His journey gains meaning as he proceeds, and each time he defeats a demon, he wins back one of his missing body parts, becoming whole literally as well as metaphorically.

Dororo is very episodic: The two characters meet their enemies one at a time, and each encounter is different from all the others. Hyakkimaru is a skilled swordsman who relies on his intuition as much as his bionic weapons. Dororo gets by on sheer grit and a complete lack of respect for any authority. Tezuka comes up with an imaginative array of foes: A god who steals his victims’ faces, a feudal lord who kills anyone who crosses his border, a moth-woman who kills to preserve her secret. The stories are different enough that the book never feels repetitive or formulaic, and as these two volumes progress, Tezuka reveals more and more about his characters, so Dororo is more than just a collection of adventures, it’s a real story.

What is rather jarring is the juxtaposition of brutality and cuteness. Dororo is rounded and adorable; he could have stepped out of a Betty Boop cartoon or a classic Disney movie. He acts like a cartoon character as well, all double-takes and exaggerated gestures. So he doesn’t look right next to a firing squad, and when he calls a nobleman who has just killed two children a “poop snake,” it doesn’t really sit well. There is a lot of graphic violence in this book, and the fact that most of the victims have cartoony features doesn’t mitigate it. This isn’t Wile E. Coyote getting hit on the head with a giant hammer; it’s parents being shot with arrows as they plead to see their children one last time, or innocent workmen being beheaded so they won’t betray the details of their project. Less unsettling is the revelation that Dororo, whose feistiness is played mostly for laughs, has a sad backstory; that does seem to fit with the character.

Dororo was first published in 1968, and the art does look a bit dated. Hyakkimaru’s wild hair, Dororo’s chubby features, and a cast of characters that look like Asterix extras in Japanese costumes take a bit of getting used to. Unlike many modern artists, though, Tezuka pays attention to detail, and the backgrounds and settings are often breathtakingly beautiful. His battle scenes are staged with attention to the psychological tension as well as physical action, and his depictions of supernatural creatures, even the repulsive ones, are fascinating. Undergirding all this is a panel structure that really serves to move the story along: huge panels setting the scene, quick actions or turns of mind chopped into small squares alongside a vertical panel that shows the context, horizontal panels stretching across the page to slow down the action at the end of a movement. This is a book well worth buying for the art alone.

Vertical, of course, gives this book the star treatment, with creamy, high-quality paper and covers that won’t make adults embarrassed to carry this book in public. There is one problem, although it’s obvious only on close examination: All the lines and even the lettering in the balloons have a slight stairstep effect, to them, as if they were shot through a screen. The early pages of vol. 1 are also marred by some moiré in the screen tones, but as Tezuka doesn’t use much toning, this only occurs in a small part of the book.

Although it probably will never sell in Naruto-like numbers, I’m glad Dororo isn’t printed on newsprint with a scrappy Dororo kicking someone on the cover. Tezuka’s art and storytelling skill make Dororo a delight to read, a good example of a classic that deserves to be a classic, and Vertical’s presentation only enhances that.

This review is based on complimentary copies provided by the publisher. Images copyright (c) 2008 by Tezuka Productions and taken from the Vertical website.

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