Black Rose Alice Volume 1 by Setona Mizushiro

I am always happy to read silly paranormal shoujo series, as evidenced by my affection for series like Midnight Secretary and Demon Love Spell. But it is also nice to read some supernatural shoujo that is genuinely creepy, so I’m excited to see the addition of Black Rose Alice to the Shojo Beat lineup. North American readers may already be familiar with Setona Mizushiro through the series After School Nightmare, which was a very surreal series I’ve always regretted not finishing. The first volume of Black Rose Alice shows a unique and visually arresting take on the vampire genre.

The manga starts off by telling the story of Dimitri, an up and coming tenor in 1900s Vienna. He’s been taken in by a wealthy family and given the benefits of education and training that allows him to live in upperclass circles, but he’s still held apart from his adopted family in many ways. Dimitri is in love with Agnieska, the fiancee of his Theodor. Seething with unexpressed emotions, Dimitri gets trampled by a horse and almost dies. A butterfly alights on his prone body. Shortly after he wakes up he sings in a rehearsal, and shortly thereafter all the other musicians start dying in a series of improbable incidents. Dimitri notices a strange rose mark appear on the back of his neck, and a strange man names Maximillian greets Dimitri, telling him “You don’t appear to have noticed…but you are a vampire.”

Vampires in the world of Black Rose Alice are a bit like plants, as the seed of a vampire master implants itself on the fresh corpse of a handsome young man. Maximillian warns Dimitri that he may start exhibiting the personality traits and attitudes of the previous vampire that is now using Dimiri as a vessel. Dimitri scoffs at Maximilian’s advice and later sings a few bars to one of his lovers, who promptly throws herself off a balcony. As Black Rose Alice progresses, the effects of vampirism become more visually arresting. Mizushiro has a great talent for portraying horrific scenes in a surreal and yet oddly delicate way. Dimitri’s transition soon starts to have a terrible impact on the people who surround him. The concluding half of the volume flashes forward to Japan in the year 2008, where a fully vampiric Dimitri entangled himself in the lives of a high school student and his teacher for his own evil vampire reasons.

Black Rose Alice does a great job setting up an intriguing mystery through the contrast between 1900s and 2000s Dimitri, he’s innocent and tormented at first and the cold and dispassionate personalty he exhibits later in the volume represents a stark change. Mizushiro’s art does a great job portraying Dimitri’s personality shift, as well as the elements of visual horror that make the feeding habits of vampires in the world of Black Rose Alice extremely disturbing. Vampires as plants is an unusual twist on the genre, and I would recommend this manga to anyone looking for a unique supernatural shoujo series.

Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign Volume 1 by Takaya Kagami, Yamato Yamamoto, and Daisuke Furuya

I highly enjoy vampire manga, so I was looking forward to checking out Seraph of the End. I think this series is a manga spin-off of a light novel series set in the same world. I was expecting more detailed world building from this manga, and I wasn’t disappointed. The series starts off by introducing a dystopian society where a virus has destroyed adults, leaving behind vampires and the young children they use as a blood bank. Yuchiro Hyakuya is the brash young hero who spends most of his time researching vampire lore and attempting to make himself stronger so he can fight back against his captors. His best friend and adoptive brother Mikeala is a bit sneakier, outwardly appeasing his vampire masters in order to gather useful intelligence. When Mikeala finds a map indicating a pathway to the surface, the orphans band together and try to make a break for the outside, only to find out that it was all a set-up. Yuchiro’s siblings are killed by vampires, and Mikeala is mortally wounded and urges his brother to continue the escape attempt. Yuchiro makes it up to the surface of the earth only to discover that it looks vastly different from what he was taught to expect.

Yuchiro is promptly picked up by the Japanese Imperial Demon Army, a vampire fighting paramilitary organization, and enrolled in a school. Several years later he’s older but still in the same mental space – eager to fight vampires, not following orders, and not yet finding his place in the world. Guren Ichinose, a Lieutenant Commander in the Army says that Yuchiro can’t progress and function as a vampire hunter until he is actually able to demonstrate that he gets along with his classmates. Towards the end of the volume Yuchiro has made some progress in his number of vampires killed, as well as beginning to form some bonds of friendship with his monitor Shinoa and his classmate Yoichi. Overall, I was impressed with the amount of ground Seraph of the End managed to cover in one volume. Yuchiro’s world and back story were set up, we see his character progress a bit both in terms of fighting demons and gaining a tiny bit more emotional maturity.

The art is clear and easy to follow, except I thought the character designs for Yuchiro and Yoichi were a bit too similar. Sometimes I had to doublecheck and read back a bit to remind myself who was who. While Yuchiro is very much the typical shonen hero, his back story is filled in here and there with flashbacks, which helped a lot in terms of explaining his motivations. I found the supporting cast interesting too. Guren Ichinose (the main character in the light novels) shows up and demonstrates his badass vampire fighting abilities at key points, and Shinoa as the main female character is both snarky and weird. I also enjoyed the power imbalance between her and Yuchiro, since serves as a bit of an instructor and is keeping track of his behavior improvements to report back on to command. Overall, I found this first volume enjoyable and am looking forward to the second. I can see this series easily appealing to fans of Blue Exorcist, or even (a bit of a stretch) Full Metal Alchemist, since there are some similar plot elements and themes shared by all three series. Definitely recommended if you’re looking for a solid shonen vampire series to try!

The Darkest Night Vol 1 by Earithen and Gena Showalter

available at: https://www.emanga.com/detail?itemid=1397

Usually when I read Harlequin manga, I haven’t read the books they’ve been adapted from, but in this case I have read a few volumes of Gena Showalter’s Lords of the Underworld series before trying out the manga adaptation. As you might expect from the title, this is a contemporary paranormal romance. Ashlyn is hanging out in Hungary, intrigued by local rumors that angels live in a mysterious castle in the woods. She’s tormented by her psychic abilities and is seeking peace. She’s been alone almost all her life due to her psychic powers, and was raised as a bit of a lab rat as opposed to growing up with a normal family. Alone in the woods, Ashiyn encounters a tall, dark, brooding, and handsome man who seems to enjoy lurking about while carrying a variety of weaponry. Ashlyn thinks that Maddox is extremely hot despite the blood he is splattered with, and she notices that the voices in her head go quiet when she’s near him. True love!!!!

Maddox takes Ashlyn back to his castle, only for her to discover that his large group of roommates are also equally hot and tormented. It turns out that they are suffering various eternal conditions due to a curse, and each embody a negative so Maddox has to be chained up and killed every night, only to be resurrected the following day. Even for someone familiar with the source material, there’s too much backstory to be contained in just one manga volume, and the explanations of the Hunters the Lords of the Underworld fight, the women that tempt them, and something about Pandora’s box sort of derail any forward momentum with the plot and make the motivations of the characters a bit opaque. I don’t remember this being quite as much of an issue in the novel, so I think it is just very difficult to shoehorn that much worldbuilding into the number of pages allowed by the manga format.

The adaptation by Earithen is good, with distinct character designs for all the Lords of the Underworld. Maddox looks appropriately tormented and Ashlyn is charming and innocent. I was amused by the number of panels where Maddox totes Ashlyn around by balancing her on one of his arms. There are a few panels here and there with awkward poses, but for the most part the art is better than usual for a Harlequin manga adaptation. I feel like generally historical or contemporary Harlequin manga get translated into English a bit more often than paranormals, so it is nice to see emanga branching out a bit more into various romance subgenres.