 The Guin Saga Manga Vol. 3: The Seven Magi story by Kaoru Kurimoto, illustrated by Kazuaki Yanagisawa
Vertical, $12.95, 200pp, tp, 9781934287088. Graphic Novel / Manga-Sci-Fi.
(See our review of Volume 2.)
This is a satisfying conclusion to this three-volume series. The story is properly wrapped up: we discover the cause of the big bad, who the true villain of the piece is, and why. Problems are solved, relationships are changed, and some people are revealed to be not at all who we thought they were.
I was surprised that so many seemingly important characters die. If so many deaths are a hallmark of the larger Guin series (which is well beyond 100 books), I wonder where the author keeps finding new characters to populate this large and interesting world.
Of course, in true serial fashion, not all the storylines are tightly wrapped up: there's still ample room to see that these characters are going to go on, and that their lives have been changed, but this is definitely the final volume of this brief story arc. As I've raved before, the black-and-white art is stunning. And while I complained that volume 2 suffered from middle-book-itis, volume 3 seems to almost rush to get the story concluded in the allotted number of pages. But for this book, that's not a complaint.
If you're still fairly new to Japanese manga, as I am, these three books will make a good introduction for you. They've been translated into English, but kept their original shape (reading right to left), so that the pictorial story flows naturally as it was originally created.
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