Review: GODCHILD

 It's once again time to look at some spooky manga, and it's been too long since we looked at a manga from the unofficial queen of spooky shojo manga: Kaori Yuki.

GODCHILD (Goddo Chairudo), by Kaori Yuki.  First published in 2001 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

Cain, the Earl of Hargroves, is a haunted man.  His ethereal good looks hide a back full of scars, a tragic past, a vast knowledge of poisons, and a keen mind.  He believes himself to be cursed, doomed to bring death to those around him and with good cause for such a belief.  All around him are poisonings, murders, psychopaths, blackmail, and many other sorts of crimes.  Only Cain can find the true culprits behind them, be they insane aristocrats, scheming servants, or strange men with ties to Cain's family and past.

PLOT:

Kaori Yuki was the only person in manga bold enough to ask the question: what if Sherlock Holmes was a rich goth bishonen living in a world of penny dreadfuls?  In many ways, Godchild feels like what Black Butler aspired to be: a over-the-top slice of Victorian Gothic horror, full of intrigue, blood, and and heightened emotions all around.  You'd never guess that this was technically a sequel to an entire series of shojo horror mysteries.

It's a shame that all of this glorious, ridiculous atmosphere comes at the expense of character.  Cain suffers the least for this, but that's mostly because he's prone to ruminating on his dark, melodramatic backstory on the regular.  He's clearly meant to be this brilliant detective who is always two steps ahead of the criminals but Yuki never lets us see how he works out his solutions and thus they never feel earned.  He likes to talk about poison and death and whatnot, but more and more it feels edgy in a juvenile way, like a goth teen trying to scare the normal kids.

That's more than you can say for his sister Mary, with whom he has a strange and quasi-incestuous relationship (a subject that has come up before in other Yuki works like Angel Sanctuary).  Sadly, Mary is more of a plot device than anything else, the bait that lures Cain into his next mystery.  Everyone else around them tends to be raving mad, unrepentantly evil, or just plain dead.  The culprits kill out of snobbery, loneliness, jealousy, or to protect terrible secrets, which makes for sensational drama but not for terribly deep or compelling mysteries.

It's only towards the end of the volume that Yuki begins to drop some proper story hooks that (presumably) tie in with her previous series.  We meet a relative of Cain's whose devotion to science is only matched by his hatred of Cain and his family.  Yuki drops all sorts of hints about the shared past of these two.  The only thing she likes to hint at more than that is the homoerotic tension between Cain, his valet Riff, and a villain with the ludicrous name of Dr. Jizabel Disraeli, who knows nothing of personal space and is a master of threatening violence towards Cain with his words and threatening to make out with him with his body language.

ART:

Aside from the historical element, not much changed about Kaoru Yuki's art between Angel Sanctuary and Godchild.  The art is still lushly detailed, and it's clear that Yuki loves drawing long, elaborate hairstyles and all the frou-frou details of Victorian fashion.  Sadly, she can't spare that detail for the backgrounds, which tend to melt into grayish limbos.  Her characters here have the same heavy, darkly inked eyes and diamond-shaped heads that look suitably dramatic from some angles and positively alien from others, which Yuki uses to make the men look leering and dangerous and the women innocent and doll-like.  It's no surprise that they tend to look their best when they are in the throes of agony or insanity, something that occurs with shocking frequency.  It's an artstyle that's not for everyone (and as we saw with Grand Guignol Orchestra, starts to fall apart after a while) but it's certainly a good match for the kind of story Yuki wants to tell.

RATING:

If you're looking for some crazy Gothic shojo, Godchild is a fine series to pick.  It's nowhere near as deep as it thinks it is, but the combination of Yuki's decadent art and lurid violence and plot twists makes this a grand guilty pleasure.

This series is published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 8 volumes available.  All 8 have been published and are currently in print.