I was hoping that this book could provide some summer fun in shojo manga form. What I got couldn't be more different.
WANTED, by Matsuri Hino. First published in 2003 and first published in North America in 2008.
PLOT:
When she was just a little girl in a troupe of musicians, Armeria was touched by the kindness of the young nobleman Luce. Then Luce was captured by pirates and Ameria spent the next eight years searching for him, posing as the cabin boy Arlo. She soon learns the terrible truth: her gentle Luce has become the ruthless pirate Captain Skulls. Can Armeria learn to love a pirate? Is Captain Skulls capable of telling his wayward admirer how he feels in return?
STORY:
Here I thought Wanted would be just a simple, frothy shojo romance with a bonus of swashbuckling pirate adventure. I should have paid more attention to who created it before starting. This may be one of Matsuri Hino's earliest works, but it's got a lot of the same faults I found in her later ones.
First of all, I had forgotten how much Matsuri Hino writers her leading men to be just the most patronizing douchebags possible. The way Skulls treats Armeria/Arlo is downright insufferable! He refuses to let her be a useful member of the crew, belittling her efforts to aid him without combat. Yet for all of his talk of wanting to protect her, he insists on having her on the ship instead of leaving her in the safe harbor where he and his crew are known and respected. Whenever Arlo tries to act out on her own or gets emotional, Skulls tries to shut her down by threatening her with sexual assault to prove how dangerous the world is. He never acts upon his threats, but this doesn't make him any less reprehensible. Of course, we are told that he is secretly this tragic, Robin Hood-esque figure who fights against corrupt nobility, but all we actually see on the page is a shitty control freak with a hero complex.
She also doesn't do Arlo any favors. First of all, for someone who has presumably been posing as a sailor for years and volunteered to join a pirate crew, she's shockingly naive about the fact that sometimes pirates have to fight and kill people. She's naive about a lot of things, honestly, and she's terrible at pushing back against Skulls when he starts getting aggressive or talks over her. She also has the distressing tendency to run off to enact hair-brained schemes of her own without telling anyone. I understand that her love interest is terrible and wouldn't listen even if she did try, but she needs to tell someone! Otherwise it just feels like Arlo is always being set up to fail, a damsel in perpetual need of rescue.
So the romance sucks, but what about the pirate-y parts of the plot? Sadly, there's not a lot of it to be found. This is only 3 chapters long, so we only get to see one proper treasure hunt. Hino tries to set up a rival for Skulls and his crew in the form of a childhood friend-turned-navy officer, but it's so half-assed that she might as well not have bothered. I know damn well what proper rivals should act like! The rest of the crew is an afterthought, so there's not much of a supporting cast for our leads to interact or react with. If Hino wasn't going to try to make this a fun romantic adventure, she might as well have not bothered.
ART:
Since this was made fairly early in Hino's career as a mangaka, she's still working out some of her amateur awkward in this book. There are things I like about her art here, such as the way she draws eyes. While they are ridiculously big, they are steady and sure in their gaze and do a lot of the heavy lifting on the emotional level. There are some good, well-drawn poses that are employed well at the most dramatic moments. Sadly, Hino has no knack for action, which is a problem in a setting that all but demands swordfights and gunplay. She also hasn't entirely worked out proportions either. It's most obvious on Captain Skulls, who often looks like a poorly dressed scarecrow with his gangling limbs, weirdly small head, and overly tussled mullet.
PRESENTATION:
Since this is only three chapters long, the rest is filled out by the short story "Spring Cherry Blossoms: A Small Incident at Sakuradaya, Meiji Era." That mouthful of a title is longer than the story itself, which is about a girl who wants to become a doctor but finds herself pushed by her family into an arranged marriage. The girl, Sho, meets a handsome bandit who turns out to be the wayward half-brother of her fiancee. Despite the fact that her fiancee is equally handsome, far more kind, and probably could be talked into allowing her to study medicine while the bandit guy is a moody, self-destructive asshole, she runs off with the bandit to elope.
Honestly, this is the story that should have gotten more than one chapter. There's so much more here that Hino could have explored. There's not only the conflict between Sho and the expectations put upon her by her family and the world by virtue of being a woman, but also some prime love-triangle material between two men who are attractive to her in different ways and themselves are in a complicated family relationship. There's no space to explore any of this in a satisfactory way, so it mostly comes off like Sho picked the fuck-up because one time he said she should be allowed to read books.
RATING:
This book was published by Viz. It is currently in print.
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