Sherlock - Pink Iro no Kenkyuu - Jay

An adaptation of the BBC re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, Sherlock, which aired in 2010 (season 1) and 2012 (season 2), with season 3 currently in the works.

In this series:

V.1 – Pink Iro no Kenkyuu

(from Baka-Updates Manga)

John Watson has been recently invalided home from the war in Afghanistan – where he was a doctor and a soldier – and now lives in a tiny bedsit in London. He’s got a limp, a hand tremor, and a therapist and he is bored. One day he runs across an old friend who introduces him to the most interesting man John has ever met: the world’s only consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock is strange, brilliant, and probably a bit mad; but he’s got two things to offer John right off the bat: a new flat and excitement.

Sherlock correctly deduces John’s military career and injuries just by looking at him; then invites him to come look at his flat on Baker Street. John arrives on Baker Street to check out the flat and ends up getting completely involved in Sherlock’s latest case. He spends the night visiting a crime scene, getting ‘kidnapped’ by Sherlock’s arch enemy, waiting for and then chasing down a suspect, and then chasing down a lead to find the actual serial killer.

By the time the night is over John has shot one man to save the life of a man he’s just met. He no longer has the limp, but he has a new flat and a new flatmate to go with it. He’s also certain to never be bored again with a friend and flatmate like Sherlock Holmes.

BBC’s Sherlock is a modern retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories. The first episode, A Study in Pink, is based on the first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet. If you’ve seen the episode of ASiP you already know what happens in the manga version.

Pink Iro no Kenkyuu is basically a scene-by-scene retelling of the episode, so if you enjoyed the episode you’ll most likely enjoy the manga as well. There are, of course, little differences here and there but nothing major.

The art is gorgeous, and also slightly different from the ‘traditional’ manga style. This is especially obvious in the characters’ faces. The characters were drawn to look like the actors in the show, and the designs are pretty spot-on. The artist even included Benedict’s eye freckle in Sherlock’s design.

There isn’t too much of a focus on backgrounds, but there are a few that are drawn that are brilliant and basically look exactly the same as they are in the show. There’s even a two-panel spread of the living room inside 221B that is very detailed, right down to the wallpaper. There’s also a nice panel of the park where John runs into Mike, and Roland-Kerr Further Education College (where Sherlock and the killer have their final showdown).

The physical volume also includes some colour pages, which are beautifully done and reflect the colour scheme of the TV episode.

I can’t say much about the dialogue, though I’m assuming it’s basically the same as in the show (with an extra line added here and there, usually from John thinking to himself). The manga hasn’t been picked up by any English publishers and the copy I have is in the original Japanese. There are scanlations out there, but no official translations. Though considering the show’s popularity (and the fact that the manga series got a second volume for the show’s second episode, The Blind Banker) there’s a good chance of it being brought over.

So if you’re a fan of BBC’s Sherlock definitely check out the manga; though since it more or less re-tells the episode scene-by-scene you won’t be missing any new material if you don’t read it. It’s also worth checking out for the art alone just to see the actors in the show in manga-style form.

Sherlock – Pink Iro no Kenkyuu is published by Kadokawa Comics and is not available for purchase in English at the time of this writing.

The Vision of Escaflowne Volume 1 - Katsu Aki

Hitomi Hoshino likes to dabble with tarot cards but one day, her hobby somehow leads her to a world called Gaea. She soon meets up with Van Fanel, prince of the kingdom of Fanelia. However, no sooner does he return home than the forces of Zaibach destroy his kingdom. Hitomi must choose between searching for a way home or staying to save the world with her newfound powers. (from Goodreads)

This review contains spoilers

This book was so not what I was expecting.

Hitomi Hoshino is a fairly normal high school girl (I’d like to say she’s 15 or 16, but I don’t really remember) who likes to predict the future with tarot cards. She hangs around with her best friend (whose name I’ve forgotten) and has a crush on cute upperclassman Amano.

Everything in Hitomi’s life is pretty normal until the day she suddenly gets transported to the kingdom of Fanelia on a world called Gaea, where she can see the Earth in the sky. The first people she meets in this strange world are Van Fanel, the prince of Fanelia, and Balgus, Van’s mentor. They tell Hitomi that she is the legendary Energist that is needed to power up the also legendary God figure of Fanelia, Escaflowne.

Hitomi isn’t there for very long before the kingdom is attacked by enemy forces and Prince Van has to pilot the Escaflowne, which ends up being some sort of fighting robot/suit (something vaguely similar to a GUNDAM) called a guymelef, to try and fight them off. Things go spectacularly badly and Fanelia is destroyed, a large number of citizens – including Balgus – are killed, and Van’s mother is kidnapped by Dilandau, one of the enemy leaders.

Van and Hitomi escape with the Escaflowne to the nearby kingdom of Asturia, where they come across Allen Schezar, a knight, and are taken in as prisoners. Van manages to convince Allen that he is the prince of Fanelia and, after seeing what’s left of the Fanelian kingdom, Allen agrees to help them track down Dilandau.

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Alright, so I imagine that anyone who has been an anime fan for any length of time (and/or grew up in the late 90s) has at least heard of the anime Vision of Escaflowne. I certainly have and I pretty much love it. It’s a very good fantasy series with a good plot and strong characters. I count it as one of my favourite anime series; and that’s the main reason as to why I just hate this manga adaptation.

I haven’t read beyond the first volume, and I don’t plan to, so I might be wrong here, but this manga has basically nothing to do with the original anime beyond the characters’ names and the bare plot (and even that’s fairly generic). To add to my frustration it takes really good characters and plot and dumbs them down. Severely.

Hitomi Hoshino (Kanzaki in the anime, but that’s really just nitpicking I suppose) is a girl who uses tarot cards to tell love fortunes for fun. The manga makes it seem like it’s just a hobby she’s just picked up on a whim, while in the anime she has a deeper connection with her ability to use her tarot cards and to predict the future in general. In the anime Hitomi’s psychic abilities are ultimately what get her tangled up with Van and Gaea; while in the manga she’s summoned to Gaea by Van and Balgus to help power the Escaflowne. Hitomi now has to be in the Escaflowne with Van in order to power it, and this could’ve been an interesting new element were it not just a reason to have Hitomi transform into a nude, blonde, large-breasted battle goddess thing for every fight scene (on that note, Katsu Aki is also the mangaka for Futari Ecchi, and I really shouldn’t have been surprised at the sudden naked woman).

While Hitomi is in this transformed state she’s either possessed or changed into (I can’t remember which, though it still confused me when I did remember) the goddess-thing that is part of the prophecy that told Van and Balgus to get her to power the Escaflowne. So Hitomi isn’t even a strong character in her own right in the manga, she’s just a vessel for someone who is. That is a massive slap in the face to the original Hitomi from the anime, who does a lot more than serve as a power source for the Escaflowne (which she doesn’t do in the anime).

Van Fanel is the prince of Fanelia and his most prominent trait in the manga is that he’s short, and he’s got a bit of a complex about it. Imagine Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist, only not funny and with little to no personality. In the anime he’s a bit of a brat and he’s starting to take on responsibilities he may not yet be mature enough to handle. In the manga he’s reduced to one unfunny short joke with a bad attitude and he’s not really mature enough to handle much of anything. The impression I got from him was that he was kind of like an annoying-younger-sibling-to-a-main-character character; and not even an entertaining one.

We don’t see much of Dilandau in this volume, so I can’t tell exactly how much has been changed with his character. Although he does seem to be less insane in the manga; overall not leaving much of an impression. His character design is also a lot different; the thing readers will immediately notice about him is his now darker skin tone, which leads me to suspect that Dilandau and Allen won’t have the same connection in the manga that they do in the anime.

Another change is that Van’s mother is alive in the manga. I’m not sure why as she certainly doesn’t add anything to the story other than providing someone for Dilandau to kidnap (which he does). She doesn’t seem to have much of a personality beyond being a stereotypical benign queen type.

Allen wasn’t in this volume for long, but from what I saw of him he’s more or less the same as his anime counterpart.

The story so far is, as I said earlier, more or less the same as the anime. There are a few small changes here and there but the main points are pretty much the same:

Hitomi gets transported to Gaea > she meets Van > Dilandau and his soldiers attack Fanelia > Fanelia is destroyed > Hitomi and Van escape in Escaflowne > they wind up in Asturia and are discovered by Allen

The art in the manga is completely different than the art in the anime. It’s not just that the manga is drawn in a different art style, but the character designs are completely different as well. The only thing that makes these characters recognizable to fans of the anime is their names (that, and I suppose that Allen’s design hasn’t changed too much, he still has the long blond hair).

Also, and I’m not quite sure if this has more to do with the art than the story, this volume was very confusing to read. It seems like everything happens really fast and we don’t get any explanations for most of it. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember the art not helping at all with the confusion. The action scenes were cluttered and if they contained more than one guymelef it was hard to figure out who was who because the enemies all looked the same and the only different one was the Escaflowne (piloted by Van and Hitomi).

I can’t recommend this manga to anyone who is a fan of the original series or movie. If you aren’t a fan I’ve heard that it’s a good series if you like fantasy and adventure stories, but even then I’d just recommend the anime (or a different manga altogether).

The Vision of Escaflowne was published by Tokyopop and is out of print.

SOCKS

Got my socks from The Sock Drawer in the mail today. These socks are awesome! And they fit brilliantly. Most of them are knee socks and I've not always had a good experience with them before (they never seemed to fit right, but they were cheap socks from Ardenes, so there you go), but these socks fit great.

Also the Batman ones have a little cape on them.