King of Thorn, vol. 1
By Yuji Iwahara
Rated OT, Older Teen (16+)
Tokyopop, $9.99
I’m one of those tiresome people who goes on and on about how great Chikyu Misaki is, so naturally when I heard that Tokyopop was publishing another manga by the same author, I was filled with gleeful anticipation.
Unfortunately, King of Thorn is not only disappointing in comparison with Chikyu Misaki, it’s disappointing even when taken on its own merits. Iwahara takes the basic horror formula of a group of people stranded in a perilous situation and does absolutely nothing interesting with it, at least not in this first volume. (And I should issue the caveat that a lot of volume 2s are better than volume 1s, so all may not be lost.)
The story starts out with a promising if not exactly novel concept: A mysterious illness, dubbed the Medusa disease, is spreading throughout Japan, turning its victims to stone. There is no cure, but there is one slender hope: The government has chosen a handful of disease victims to be deep-frozen until a cure is developed. Our heroine, Kasumi, is one of the chosen few, but her twin sister, Shizuku, is not. With regrets and doubts, Kasumi steps into her cryogenic capsule, puts on a bracelet that indicates the progress of the disease, and goes to sleep.
When she wakes up, everything has gone wrong. Instead of white-coated doctors with vials of medicine, Kasumi is greeted by thorny vines that snake through the capsules. A few other disease victims stumble out, and it quickly becomes clear that they are the only ones there. Almost immediately, the perils begin. Giant lizards keep attacking them, and those damn thorns pop out from every nook and cranny, so our heroes are so busy fighting them that they don’t have much of a chance to advance the plot. By the end of the first volume, Kasumi and co. have prevailed through several hair-raising situations but still have no idea of what is really going on. And neither does the reader.
Of course, much of the dramatic interest in a story like this comes from the interplay of different personalities. Again, nothing new here. Kasumi is sweet and determined. Her companions include a selfish, pushy middle-aged guy; a woman and child who quickly fall into a mother-son relationship; and a couple of generic but sensible males. The most interesting character is the dark, simmering, tattooed stranger who is sorta good and sorta bad, which is not exactly breaking the mold. In other words, we have the standard horror story with the standard cast of characters.
Iwahara’s art, which worked so beautifully in the country setting of Chikyu Misaki, is one of the high points of this book. He uses straight pen and ink, with very little toning but lots of hatching and fine detail, but the art never comes across as stiff or fussy. His fluid style is actually well suited to this sort of subject matter. The characters are well defined, each with a different look and personality, and the winged lizards and flowing thorns are just as believable. On the first reading, though, I had trouble figuring out the geography of the story. Iwahara has put everyone into a fortress on an island, but again, there’s so much going on that it’s initially hard to figure out exactly how the space is configured and how they are moving through it.
Tokyopop obviously knew they were on to something with this book; the cover is well designed, with a matte finish and a restrained palette, making the book feel a bit more sophisticated than it actually is. They include four color pages in the front and two black and white bonus pages in the back. On the downside, the large areas of black that Iwahara uses so effectively don’t stand up well on the industry-standard paper, so the dark areas aren’t as dark as they should be, and there are light streaks on some pages.
If you liked The Drifting Classroom and Dragon Head, you may enjoy King of Thorn. Then again, you may just find it frustrating, as I did. By the end of the volume, I still had no idea how this group of people had gotten into this situation, who (if anyone) put them there, and what the title refers to. In short: Too much suspense, not enough plot. It’s a good setup, and I’m willing to give volume 2 a try; if I’m still lost after that, though, I’ll give the rest of the series a pass.
This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.
