Review: FROM THE NEW WORLD

In their time, Vertical Comics had a passionate fanbase of readers who considered the company to have better-than-average taste in licenses.  This is one of the few critical duds they ever released. 

FROM THE NEW WORLD (Shin Sekai Yori), based on the light novel series by Yusuke Kishi with art by Toru Oikawa.  First published in 2012 and first published in North America in 2013.

PLOT:

In a Japan far removed from the one we know today, Saki and her six friends are enjoying their time together as they study to enter magic school.  Their friend Reiko struggles the hardest to get in, so much so that her friends secretly start practicing their magic with her after school in defiance of the rules.  She disappears one day, but Saki and pals have no time to linger on this.  They all decide to take a camping trip beyond the school's boundaries, where they discover both changing feelings and dark dangers they had not imagined.

STORY:

From the New World is one of the few shows from the early 2010s that is still remembered and recommended a decade later.  Notably, no one recommends the manga despite being put out by everyone's favorite niche publisher Vertical.  Having read it...yeah, now I understand why.

It starts off well enough.  Well...maybe not so much "well" as it is 'tedious'.  I suspect that the interactions between Saki and her friends is meant to be wistful and sweet, but they're too poorly sketched as personalities to make much of an impression.  Hell, half the time I couldn't distinguish her from Reiko, although there's other reasons for that.  Still, once Reiko gets her magic (in what is a none-too-subtle metaphor for puberty), things start to come into focus...until Reiko is no more.

Her sudden absence not just from the manga but seemingly from her friends' memories should be more of a creepy thing, but the story thus far never returns to that moment or even lingers on it for more than a moment before moving on the kids' big camping adventure.  Things certainly get more intense between the potentially deadly action and all the romantic drama between Saki, Shun, and Maria.  That's not even getting into the intensity of Maria's possessiveness and affection, which is treading dangerously close to yandere territory.  It's just hard to care that much when the characters involved are so slight and the story holds back so much information for the sake of suspense.  There is such as thing as keeping your reader too much in the dark.

ART:

This part, more than anything, seems to be what alienates fans of the show about this particular adaptation.  Toru Oikawa seems to mostly work in ecchi and ero-manga and BOY does it show.  The thing is that he's not completely untalented.  His take on the characters is fine, even if there are some questionable choices with the girls' outfits and he doesn't do enough to visually distinguish Saki and Reiko.  His backgrounds are surprisingly lush.  The magical creatures we see (which are mostly sentient, goblin-sized naked mole rats) are suitably strange.  

That being said, Oikawa still clearly had one foot in porn when he was making this manga.  There's a couple of times where everything stops so that the girls can take a long, leisurely bath (completely with copious, lovingly drawn boob fondling) or so that Saki and Maria can relieve their fear and tension with an extended lesbian sex scene that's only a few steps removed from out-and-out hentai.  It goes beyond mere indulgence - it outright ruins the tone of the whole manga.

RATING:

From the New World wants to be spooky and heartwarming in equal measure, but mostly it's cheesy and off-puttingly horny.  This is yet another case where it's best to stick only to the anime.

This series was published by Vertical.  This series is complete in Japan with 7 volumes available.  All 7 were published and are currently out of print.