Manga Friday: Flashing Swords
One of the great symbols of Japan to a Western audience – equal to pagodas, kimonos, and that exaggerated white makeup – is the katana. (Well, any vaguely Japanese sword, to be honest – it doesn’t have to be precisely a katana as long as the profile is right and it’s declared to be incredibly sharp.) I suspect it’s the same for the Japanese themselves – that their traditional swords are one of their internal cultural markers, and part of the standard mental furniture that makes up “Japanese-ness” – since there’s a blizzard of the things in their comics stories. For example…
Crimson-Shell
By Jun Mochizuki
Yen Press, November 2009, $10.99
Surprisingly, this is a single-volume story, not the first volume of anything longer. But it’s paced like the first volume of a longer work, and the ending certainly leaves lots of room for a continuation. (I actually went back to the cover and copyright page after finishing the book, to make sure that it wasn’t “volume one.”) I would not be at all surprised if this was meant as a try-out for something longer, though I have no idea if any more will ever appear.
But, in this book, there’s a young woman, Claudia (also called the Rose Witch), who is the mascot/powerhouse of the secret organization Red Rose – she’s part of its Crimson-Shell division, which I gather is the field operation. The usual mad scientist discovered something called a black rose, which has infected lots of people to different effect: some turn into thorn-tentacled monsters almost immediately, while others keep their intelligence and human appearance for much longer, the better to infiltrate and destroy organizations like the Red Rose – which, as you might have guessed, has a mission to stop the Black Roses at all costs. Claudia is the requisite one person infected with the Black Rose who didn’t turn infected and evil; she instead has unspecified and varying powers over Black Roses.
The guy with the sword is her mentor/friend/savior, Xeno, who is the usual laconic master of violence (with artfully disarranged duster, long hair, and facial scruff to signpost that’s what he is), and he’s accused of being a Black Rose early on in the book. There is also a bewildering array of other characters, many of whom either are or are accused of being Black Rose agents, and that adds to the confusion (as well as the feeling that this is only the beginning of a longer story).
Claudia muddles through the plot without doing much – she’s one of those standard teenage-girl manga heroines, who can’t be too assertive without seeming unfeminine to the audience – and then there’s an ending that leaves a number of major questions. Crimson-Shell would have been an intriguing, if confusing, first volume of a longer series – the reader could assume that all of the unclear details would be explained further along – but it doesn’t work well at all as a single volume. (more…)
Shortest Death of the Year: Kyle Rayner. Green Lantern Corps #42/43 (DC)
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