Afro Samurai Volume 1: Manga Review:

Afro Samurai Volume 1: Manga Review:

The anime was cool and this manga is an entertaining piece of violence that I recently began to compare with the book series The Dark Tower. One of those familiarity ideas you might find yourself thinking about when you look at the main character (Afro) who’s morally ambiguous throughout or the whole quest scenario—this isn’t direct comparison because each work is completely different, I’m just looking at what’s on the surface because of the whole “Quest and kickass morally ambiguous main character”.

From the beginning the manga doesn’t try to dress up the character because the tale is simply a son avenging the death of his father quest (completely different from Roland’s quest of The Dark Tower) and so along the way Afro is the holder of the Number 2 headband which allows him to fight the holder of the Number 1 headband—the holder being Justice, the killer of Afro’s father. This volume is pretty straight forwards in the plot being linear from start to end, so you might feel a bit empty at how we only see Afro as a ruthless killing machine rather than the potential human being he might have hiding (a sort of Roland type again), but I’m guessing this is how the manga has its hook being in the form the violence’s he can unleash to an army of fifty.

Artwork is beautiful with characters all recognisable from the moment they appear or how it conveys the poetic violence’s—a kind of storyboard in waiting style about it to be honest…so I see it as being cinematic in quality and style, because it has a sort of way to draw you in to sturdy the fight scene—that may just be me but it never felt repetitive when it came to each new fight sequence. So you get a few pages of coherent fight scenes before we’re given a dose of dialogue.

That’s actually another little point of the manga that carries a plot on minimal dialogue throughout….actually I didn’t mind that side of the manga because it helped carry the idea of Afro being someone who is consumed more by rage contained within his mind. Interesting in most of dialogue when it does appear is from Ninja Ninja or other characters to help carry over the theme of revenge and chaos it will bring.

The manga might feel empty along the way for some, but you might find yourself enjoying the cinematic manga—a manga with a simple doubled edge to it.

Thought of the Day: August 23rd:

I nearly found myself collapsing in depression from how little I can get myself to write considering how much I know of what I want to write.