Well, That Was Cheerful...
To my great joy, volume 7 of Shadow Star finally dropped through my letterbox today.
The series itself is essentially a very black satire on the Pokemon/Monster Rancher kids-with-pet-monsters genre, aiming to show a rather more plausible take on what might happen if angry and depressed teenagers suddenly found themselves in possession of nearly limitless powers.
Yeah, it's at least as bad as you might imagine.
By the end of the first two volumes we've had two suicide attempts, several brutal murders, and a little openly-expressed admiration for Pol Pot. It only gets perkier from there on out... In this instalment two friends of the protagonist, one abused by her parents and the other viciously bullied (to put it mildly...) by her classmates, finally snap, with results which are both deeply disturbing and unnervingly sympathetic.
As his later work on Bokurano continues to show, Mohiro Kitoh can brutalise his characters like nobody else, yet somehow keeps them believably human as he does so. Sadly, despite being extremely good, this particular series was always going to be tricky to sell (and, given some of the content, to get on bookshop shelves in the first place), and it seems that Dark Horse gave up on it shortly after this volume. There does appear to be a scanlation project picking up where they left off, however, so perhaps the remainder will still see the light of day eventually. I certainly hope so.
The series itself is essentially a very black satire on the Pokemon/Monster Rancher kids-with-pet-monsters genre, aiming to show a rather more plausible take on what might happen if angry and depressed teenagers suddenly found themselves in possession of nearly limitless powers.
Yeah, it's at least as bad as you might imagine.
By the end of the first two volumes we've had two suicide attempts, several brutal murders, and a little openly-expressed admiration for Pol Pot. It only gets perkier from there on out... In this instalment two friends of the protagonist, one abused by her parents and the other viciously bullied (to put it mildly...) by her classmates, finally snap, with results which are both deeply disturbing and unnervingly sympathetic.
As his later work on Bokurano continues to show, Mohiro Kitoh can brutalise his characters like nobody else, yet somehow keeps them believably human as he does so. Sadly, despite being extremely good, this particular series was always going to be tricky to sell (and, given some of the content, to get on bookshop shelves in the first place), and it seems that Dark Horse gave up on it shortly after this volume. There does appear to be a scanlation project picking up where they left off, however, so perhaps the remainder will still see the light of day eventually. I certainly hope so.