The spooky season is upon us again, and The Manga Test Drive is not immune to its charms! We'll be looking at all sorts of supernatural manga, starting with a vampire manga that is most assuredly not like other vampire manga.
THE VAMPIRE AND HIS PLEASANT COMPANIONS (Kyuuketsuki to Yokai and na Nakama-tachi), based on an original story by Narise Konohara with art by Marimo Ragawa. First published in 2016 and first published in North America in 2021.
PLOT:
For Albert, becoming a vampire has been nothing but a struggle. He has little to no understanding of his powers and barely gets by as homeless drifter feeding of the scraps of the local slaughterhouse. Then he accidentally gets flash-frozen in his bat form and shipped to Japan. Now he's more adrift than ever, and the only way for him to stay out of jail is to convince a police detective and his embalmer friend Akira that he is in fact a real vampire.
STORY:
If you're tired of the same old vampire melodrama, then The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions might just be what you're looking for. Instead of the usual Byronic tragedy or romance, this story is basically a comedy of errors that in part seems to be made to punch holes in the glamourous, Gothic image of your typical fictional vampire.
By just about every metric, Albert is a failure of a vampire. He was accidentally turned by a stranger, so he received little to no guidance and his transformation was incomplete. He lives off of blood, but cannot grow fangs. He can turn into a bat, but it's an involuntary process that happens every night. Instead of swaning about in the night in fabulous clothes and living off of hereditary wealth, he's basically a blood-sucking hobo in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska.
Things don't get any less comical when he ends up in Japan. Albert has no identification, no clothes, and can neither speak nor understand Japanese. Most of the second half is him explaining himself and his situation to Akira and Detective Nukariya, who are understandably skeptical about the whole thing. Admittedly it makes for a story that's not very action-packed and whose humor never really rises beyond a sensible, genre-aware chuckle, but it does show that Konohara and Ragawa gave some thought to the premise and were ready to counter equally skeptical readers. It should also be noted that while Albert is frequently the butt of the joke here, the tone never crosses into outright cruelty.
Considering the background of the creators involved, you would expect this to be a BL manga. If that is the direction it's heading, then it's certainly taking its sweet time getting there. There's definitely some tsundere-esque tension between Akira and Albert, but it's largely stymied by Albert's language deficit. The most action Albert gets is when Akira pokes and prods at him as a bat. I don't have a problem with that because the comedy and the character writing is strong, which will make the inevitable romance all the more satisfying.
ART:
Ragawa's art is skillful and attractive. The men are handsome and well-proportioned, and she even takes care to draw Albert's bat form with a shocking degree of accuracy (even if she simplifies his face for the sake of comedy). The backgrounds and paneling fit with the story's mundane tone, although she makes good use of the manga equivalent of jump cuts and the occasional silly face to punctuate the sillier moments.
PRESENTATION:
Included is a short story from Konohara detailing a pre-vampirism Albert's encounter with Akira during a trip to California. It's a fine, decently written bit of fluff that adds a little more to the reader's understanding of Albert as a person, but not of any great consequence.
RATING:
The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions is a pleasant and ever-so-slightly spooky comedy that survives on the strength of its characters and its awareness of its own genre conventions. Those seeking a vampire manga that isn't drowning in romance or woe will find much to enjoy here.
This series is published by Yen Press. This series is currently on hiatus in Japan with 4 volumes available. All 4 have been published and are currently in print.
