Tokyopop was one of the first manga publishers to find success in BL manga, first with their release of FAKE and Gravitation and later on through their Blu imprint with like Junjo Romantica. Sadly, nothing everything out of Blu was a winner.
INNOCENT BIRD (Na Mo Naki Tori No Tobu Yaoke), by Hirotaka Kisaragi. First published in 2002 and first published in North America in 2007.
PLOT:
While the endless war between angels and devils rages on, Shirigasi strives to become a holy man. Once he had been Satan's favorite concubine, but now he wants to become human. To do this, he must not only forsake his demonic nature but must find something precious enough to trade with God himself to achieve his dream. Along the way, he meets with Karasu. He's an angelic investigator who finds himself increasingly charmed by Shirigasi. As the two of them fall in love, they must fight back against the forces of both Heaven and Hell who seek to punish them for disobeying the natural order of their world.
STORY:
Innocent Bird sounds positively epic for a BL manga. I mean, it's a romance literally set in the middle of a divine war! Yet those same qualities are the biggest problem of Innocent Bird. Kisaragi focuses so hard on the relationship between a delicate demon and the angel who falls for his new nice-guy act that she's missing out on the bigger picture.
I do have to give this book credit for finding an original take on the 'angel/demon rebels against holy war' story. Shirigasi doesn't want to become an iconoclast, he just wants to find some purpose in life beyond being Satan's favorite fuckboy. Yes, it's terribly convenient that there just so happens to be a heavenly clause that allows him to become human and that it's vague enough to allow for some mystery, but I was willing to roll with it for the sake of the story. I just wish the romance was quite that compelling.
As far as I can tell, the only reason that Shirigasi and Karasu get together is simply because Shirigasi is nice. There's nothing wrong with that being the impetus for a romantic relationship, but it's hard to believe that Karasu would go from "gee, what a swell guy" to "I will fight the forces of Hell and defy my own angelic masters to be with this man" for the sake of niceness alone.
The conflict also gets formulaic pretty quickly. When the story isn't about demons trying to convince (or force) Shirigasi to become a demon again and failing, it's about Karasu getting chewed out by his supervisor for falling for a demon and not toeing the heavenly party line. In the hands of a more ambitious mangaka, this blend of action and politics could be crafted into something interesting. At the very least, it could be compelling melodrama in the vein of Angel Sanctuary. Instead it mostly devolves into talking heads and kinky torture. There's no passion to be found here, be it literal or metaphorical.
ART:
Innocent Bird's art is equally middling. Kisaragi's character designs are your stock standard BL bishonen, drawn no better or worse than any other similar series of the time. Her linework is dark and rich, but the designs do nothing to capitalize on that. The most she adds to them is making the angels' hair long and swirly or plunking a pair of horns and a few odd scales on the demons. Swirling seems to be the only thing that excites Kisaragi as an artist. Everything swirls in unexplained winds: hair, fabric, coats, wings, loose feathers, etc.
No one does even so much as kiss, so I can't say how well the artist handles sensuality. What I can say with certainty is that she's no good at action. She abuses speedlines and ink splatters with abandon to suggest the illusion of speed, power, and blood, but all that does is obscure the action. It gets so bad at points that it's sincerely hard to tell at time who's getting hurt or what's happening beyond two figures rushing towards one another. Even the backgrounds are vague, with Hell looking more like an industrial district drowning in screentone. The worst part is that as I'll discuss in the next part, Kisaragi is capable of being a better, more interesting artist, so where was that talent when she was working on this?
PRESENTATION:
There's an unrelated short story here about two kids meeting their step-brother after their mother's death. The focus is on the eldest boy, who struggles not only with his attraction to his half-brother but also the lingering anger he holds towards his mother for leaving them. It's not a particularly deep story (especially since the eldest brother mostly comes off as an asshole), but it's a complete arc with some comprehensible emotion behind it and some intriguingly sparse art and page layouts.
RATING:
This series was published by Tokyopop. This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available. All 3 volumes were released and are currently out of print.
No comments:
Post a Comment