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Reviewed by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane A week ago I was at an anime convention, staring at the list of manga I wanted to try out, and decided that in lieu of just choosing a few titles I'd hand the list around to friends who buy more manga than I do and see what they thought. Shoulder-A-Coffin Kuro got an immediate strong vote, so it came home with me, and now I get to pass the recommendation along. Kuro feels a bit like the adorable lovechild of Kino's Journey and xxxHOLiC, although its plot is only superficially similar to Kino (in that the protagonist is a boyish-looking young girl on a journey) and bears very little resemblance at all to xxxHOLiC beyond a shared sense of the otherworldly lurking just beyond the edges of the ordinary world. That ordinary world is somewhat different from our own, though; it's very much a fairy-tale setting, made up of small towns and a sporadic mix of technology and what may or may not be magic. Told in four-panel style, Kuro follows a coffin-carrying girl and her companion, a snarky bat named Sen, as they travel on foot from town to town. The girl begins calling herself "Kuro" ("black") during the book, when she meets a pair of young twin catgirls who demand to know her name, and chooses not to give them her real one. The twins begin to accompany Kuro and Sen on their journey, making this a very unlikely traveling party indeed. Kuro herself attracts the majority of the suspicious attention as they go, though: her coffin, pointed ears, and all-black clothes confuse people and cause them to mistake her for (at different times) a boy, a mortician, and a vampire. Kuro appears to be largely unfazed by any of this, and simply helps people where she can, before moving on to the next town to continue looking for information for her quest. The artwork is very cute, but doesn't distract from the dark undertones of the plot: something is clearly very wrong with Kuro, which may or may not be connected with her ongoing search for a particular witch. As she explains to more than one person during the course of this first volume, she's carrying a coffin with her because she expects to need it herself; it's a small glimpse at the underlying plot connecting the episodic-feeling chapters. This volume includes a page of translation notes and multiple color pages throughout the book. Interested in writing for MangaLife? We're always looking for talented reviewers and columnists, so drop us a line! Charles Webb Editor-in-Chief, MangaLife.com |
1 September 2010
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