A guy who likes expensive fish goes to work for a brother and sister, looking after their expensive fish – I’m already on the edge of my seat! The sister makes special custom-made jewellery that happens to possess magical properties – “power stones” - while the brother works as a sort of exorcist but for objects rather than people because that is so fascina… zzz.
Then a giant ball from far away threatens to harm a wealthy family and the brother goes to fight the giant ball. More nonsense you won’t care about follows! Then the book ends. Your brain re-awakens from the coma it just went in while reading this crap and tells you to choose better comics in future. You punish it for talking back to you by reaching for a New 52 book.
In my defence, Gen Manga is usually good. This one was a very weak merging of Japanese mythology (the fish is a trapped spirit or something) and fantasy (second-rate Japanese Constantine and magic bracelets fight demons in giant balls) that couldn’t have left less of an impression.
After the first half of the book, which follows the dreary adventures of a fish god who appears in the boring man who likes expensive fish’s dreams, the second half features a battle between spirit animals over a ball… or something. And what better way to explain away the confusion than several page of artless info dumps after the action?
The story is uninteresting, the characters impossibly less so, the art is generic manga-style, and there’s nothing in here that attempts anything different, which is the opposite of what I thought Gen Manga was about, ie. underground manga that takes risks. It’s the fluffiest of fluffball comics that’ll pass you by in a blur of tedium if you make the mistake of reading it.
For examples of better Gen Mangas, I recommend Sorako by Fujimura Takayuki and Alive by Hajime Taguchi – don’t bother with Isora Azumi’s exceedingly poor Stones of Power.
Stones of Power
No comments:
Post a Comment