|
|
|
HELL GIRL (c) 2005 Miyuki Eto / Jigoku Shoujo Project /KODANSHA LTD. All Rights reserved.
HELL GIRL (c) 2005 Miyuki Eto / Jigoku Shoujo Project /KODANSHA LTD. All Rights reserved.
HELL GIRL (c) 2005 Miyuki Eto / Jigoku Shoujo Project /KODANSHA LTD. All Rights reserved.
View all Media
|
|
|
January 31, 2008
by: Serdar Yegulalp
From the anime that takes you to hell and back comes the manga that promises to do that, too.
Manga Description: When you thirst for revenge, there’s a surefire way to get it: simply go to the strange website that appears only at midnight, and enter the name of your enemy. The Hell Girl will appear to drag your tormentor to eternal damnation. But you will have to pay a price... your soul!
Includes special extras after the story!
Manga Review:
Content: (This section may contain spoilers.)
Hell Girl, the manga, is (as you might have guessed) spun off from the original animated TV series. Actually, “spin-off” doesn’t seem like the right word: it’s more like, the TV show was the first incarnation they settled on for this concept, and now they’re making the rest of the Stations of the Cross with it: animated series, manga, live-action series, second animated series, cellphone novel, you fill in the blanks. And so now we have this manga adaptation, with art credited to Miyuki Eto but with “Original Story by the Jigoku Shojo Project”—the actual originators, a collective chaired by veteran director Hiroshi Watanabe. I’m not saying any of this is a bad thing—just that it’s the genesis for this particular project, and that whether or not the end result is good is totally apart from that. (Case in point: I thought Witchblade was going to stink, until I actually watched it.)
Odds are you know the story by now, but here’s a recap. Rumor has it that a secret web site exists, which only manifests at midnight. Punch in the name of someone who has given you grief, and you’ll be given the chance to send that person to hell straightaway. There’s just one catch: the price is your immortal soul, which will also be sent to hell after you die. Maybe not right now, but … someday. And so the infamous Hell Girl, Enma Ai, manifests for one aggrieved victim after another, giving them a chance to find vengeance at the low, low cost of one (1) eternity in agony. The stories in the first volume are also pretty much direct lifts from episodes in the show, and are designed to be exactly that. A girl wrongfully accused of shoplifting is bailed out by a “friend” who turns out to be a ruthless manipulator; a veterinary doctor who’s more interested in money and status than the pets that come into his care gets a vivisectionist’s comeuppance; and even a bit of self-reference that’s retrofitted from one of the TV episodes: a girl who stars in a TV production of the Hell Girl story (whoa, just like in real life!) and gets her dander up to call Hell Girl for real when a rival for the role drops a stage lighting fixture on her. But, as with the first disc of the show, too much of what we get is just running through the same basic plot mechanic over and over again, and after about the halfway mark the redundancy becomes downright chafing.
Art: Now for the other irksome thing about the book: the art style. According to the biographical notes in the back of the book Eto was a regular contributor to the shojo magazine Nakayoshi, which has also featured such titles as Mamotte! Lollipop and the venerable Sailor Moon in its pages. That’s the odd part: the fluffy shojo look that Eto gives Hell Girl is technically well-executed, but just seems spiritually wrong for the material. Or if not flat-out wrong, then it has the ultimate effect of dialing the core concept’s primal scream of fear down to a muted giggle. This stuff should be loaded with sweat, not just sweat-drops.
Translation: The translation I have no complaints about, and that’s mostly because Del Rey has some of the most consistent and consistently presented translation work in this whole industry right now. They keep the honorifics (and explain them in a bit of boilerplate text at the front of the book), they keep the right-to-left formatting, they do only minimal touch-up on special effects, and they have notes in the back to explain a few cultural references where needed. Also included is Del Rey’s customary untranslated sneak preview of the next volume, something they’ve habitually done with their manga releases.
The Bottom Line: The Hell Girl manga has been conceived and executed as an auxiliary to the main feature, not a substitute for it. It also tries to recast the goings-on of the show in a different and what seems to me a wholly uncomplementary visual style. It’s to the TV show what “Hello Cthulhu” was to H.P. Lovecraft. If you like that kind of thing, don’t let me stop you, but I reserve the right to feel a touch let down. There should and could be a lot more here. If the comic follows the path the TV show has cut, though, then maybe the next installments will pick things up a bit.
 (C) 2006 Miyuki Eto / The Jigoku Shojo Project.
Hell Girl manifests in a most unexpected manner for one who has called on her out of despair.
|
 cover.jpg)
