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July 03, 2009
by: Serdar Yegulalp
Go back in time with Saya & Co. to the eve of the Russian Revolution!
Manga Description: On the eve of the Russian Revolution, our favorite Chiropteran-hunting duo masquerades as members of Tsar Nicholas Romanov's royal chamber orchestra. Saya begins to uncover some of the strange secrets of the Romanov royal family and - of course - finds some hideous Chiropteran beasts that are doing a little masquerading of their own. Manga Review: Content: (This section may contain spoilers.) I once theorized that the difference between Japanese and American comics is that the former are about characters and stories while the latter are about franchises. I’m in the process of being proven wrong about this—or maybe it’s just the scope of the theory’s in need of revision. Case in point: the Blood: the Last Vampire continuity. It started with a short animated film, and then was rebooted into the Blood+ continuity: a long animated TV series (two seasons), a set of novels based on the TV series, a manga based rather loosely on the TV series, and now a new prequel manga series. And yet, through all of these variations and offshoots, certain things remain consistent—much as they do, I suppose, in American franchise comics. The Hulk is always green and angry, Tony Stark is a genius playboy alcoholic, and Saya of Blood+ is always a mixture of girlish naďveté and deadly precision. Case in point once again: Blood+ Adagio, the newest installment in the franchise. It’s a prequel series, set in the early years of the Russian revolution, and purports to fill in backstory as to what happened to Saya and her compatriots during that time. I say “purports” because the end result is more like an alternate-timeline or (here comes a word you might hate) fan-fiction recasting of events and situations. But don’t let that scare you off if you were fond of the original. You won’t ever mistake its use of history for the real thing, but the way it’s been hijacked and adapted into the Blood+ continuity is pretty clever. Adagio also sports a lot of the cutesier touches that were infused into Blood+ to make it more palatable to a broader audience—the first forty or so pages look like they could be from any shojo manga. Then you go past that and things get a bit rougher. The setup: Saya, Haji and the rest of the Red Shield crew are doing their Chiropteran-hunting duties back in 1916 Petrograd. For a cover story, they’ve been pretending to be players in Tsar Nicholas’s orchestra—something that comes naturally to the cello virtuoso Haji, as we’ve seen in the series at large, but which Saya still has trouble with. (“You SUCK!” one of the other players tells her gleefully.) What Saya does manage to do is make friends with a girl, Claudia, who’s being “treated” at the same resort where the orchestra is performing. This turns out to be a bad idea, since Claudia appears to be one of the very Chiropterans they were sent to hunt down. Even worse: Saya discovers, all too late, that Claudia is still quite human. That’s just the beginning of the complications. The royal family is housing more than a few secrets of its own—some of which are derived directly from real life, e.g., Prince Alexei’s hemophilia. The real shocker is when Saya discovers who the Chiropterans in the family are, and who is protecting them, and to what end. Among the key players is none other than Grigori Rasputin, depicted here as willowy and blond instead of hirsute and coarse-bearded (i.e., definitely not historically accurate). His role as doctor to the family encompasses more than one set of duties; he’s medic, spiritual advisor, and behind-the-throne puppet-master—and we see him reveal each one of those faces in turn before we’re even halfway through. He is also one of the very beasts they are out to hunt—actually, he’s a bit more than that, but that would be telling—and when he leaves Haji for dead, Saya has to step up and assume a great deal more responsibility than she’s been ready for. Even worse is the possibility that Rasputin may seduce Haji into betraying the Red Shield, allegedly for Saya’s sake … which conveniently provides us with the cliffhanger note on which the first book ends. Never let it be said that manga creators have no sense of drama. Art: Creating a manga based on an existing property is in some ways tougher than making an original, if only from the POV of the artist. A good deal of the time the artist has to subordinate their own approach and hew as closely as possible to a look and feel laid down by someone else. Sometimes you get unexpectedly excellent results: Ikku Masa’s work for the manga adaptation of Sakura Wars is so uncannily like Kosuke Fujishima’s original design work I thought the names had been switched around. (The fact that the manga itself was pretty mediocre is, sadly, beside the point.) To that end, it’s high praise to say that the artist for Adagio, Kumiko Suekane, does a remarkable job of mimicking the work of the other Blood+ manga-ka, Asuka Katsura. Close enough, in fact, that I wasn’t even aware they were different artists until I was well into the volume and stopped to check the names. It’s precise, economical work, with good use of tone and strong lines all throughout. It also strikes a balance—sometimes an uneasy one—between the goofy, bubbly side of this story and its darker and more blood-drenched side. Whether the story should try and inhabit both of those territories at once is something best saved for its own essay, I think. Translation: Right on the credits page I saw two things to convince me this was going to be a good-to-excellent translation. The first was the Dark Horse logo; I don’t think I’ve come across a translation under their label that has been anything less than polished and a model to follow. The other thing was the name Camellia Nieh. Constant readers will remember her as the translator who’s done consistently excellent work on so many other titles—Vertical’s Black Jack, mainly—but in a nice piece of continuity, she also translated Mamoru Oshii’s Blood: the Last Vampire novel Night of the Beasts. (I didn’t like the novel, although her translation work was solid.) Adagio’s localization is another feather in her hat: it never screams “Translation!” and doesn’t have the stop-and-start quality to the text that a lot of lesser Japanese translations often have. The Bottom Line: I opened Adagio preparing to hate it or at least be indifferent to it—mostly because of my own prejudices against multiple spin-offs, sequels and prequels for the same source material. I ended up being amused by the way they took the Blood+ mythology and wove in the history of the Romanovs and the history of the period. It’s likely to appeal most to existing Blood+ fans, but those who’ve developed a taste for manga period stories or Russian history (maybe via Hetalia: Axis Powers) should take a peek.
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