Review: DESCENDANTS OF DARKNESS

Let's continue with an old favorite for manga-boom-era fujoshi.  But does this one still hold up?

DESCENDANTS OF DARKNESS (Yami no Matsuei), by Yoko Matsushita.  First published in 1996 and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Between heaven and hell, there is the Ministry of Hades.  Here lost souls are gathered and judgement is rendered upon them by shinigami such as Asato Tsuzuki.  He and his partner, Hisato Kurosaki, are called upon to solve cases such as a suicide victim whose spirit is stuck in the mortal world or an idol singer under the spell of a vicious vampire.

PLOT:

On the surface, Descendants of Darkness would appear to be a monster/mystery-of-the-week sort of story, where our shinigami detectives investigate a case and resolve it.  You'd only be half-right, though.  

The real focus of Descendants of Darkness are not the cases, but the shinigami investigating them as they fight, glower, and occasionally save one another.  Personally I think that this is a bit of a shame as the cases themselves are not poorly written and the vampire story in particular is proof that giving them a little more of the spotlight can only benefit them.  Normally I wouldn't mind such a heavy focus on our leads, but to be frank neither of them are all that interesting.

Asato's not bad, as he alternates between being no-nonsense and kind of silly.  In that way, he reminds me a bit of Shigure in the early chapters of Fruits Basket.  On the other hand, Hisato is a moody little git.  He gets a little better as the volume progresses but not enough to make me like him as a character.  The rest of the cast....sure is there, doing very little to make much of an impression at this point.  There's also a random side story afterwards about fairies which is both rather random and totally rush.  I can't imagine why it's here beyond the need to pad the volume out.

ART:

My god, does Matsushita want to be CLAMP.  In fairness, this was true for a lot of shojo artists in the 1990s, but this is the worst case of it I've seen since the last time I reviewed a Tamayo Akiyama manga.  Sadly, she's not quite in their league as far as art goes.  Her characters are basically dollar-store version of their men: shoulders wide as a linebacker's, hips like a 13 year old boy, all arms, legs, and eyes, but the proportions are just slightly off.  She's also taking some cues from BL art conventions of the time.  This is most obvious with Hisato, who is tiny, blonde, and prone to getting captured in compromising positions.  Her page layouts are awfully busy too, with panels stacked and packed against one another haphazardly.

RATING:

There's manga out there for undead detectives.  There's manga out there about gay detectives.  Sadly, Descendants of Darkness can't quite seem to combine them in a way that makes them compelling, and the derivative art doesn't help things.

This series was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 13 volumes available.  11 volumes were published and are currently out of print.