Books: Guin Saga Vol. 2 [Manga] (Hajime Sawada)

I had a soupçon of such terror nibbling at the back of my mind after reading the first volume of the Guin Saga manga. I could nitpick — Guin’s face was about as expressive as a bas-relief, for one; and what was a breathless rush in prose wasn’t always as breathtaking in images, oddly enough — but the more I read it and re-read it, the more I felt they were on the right track. And now that volume 2 has landed in my lap, it comes perilously close to obliterating just about every objection I had. Surely they can’t be getting it this right — but come on, since when is it the function of a fan to wait forever for the other shoe to drop?

Volumes 1 and 2 cover roughly four-fifths of the first novel, with the bulk of the goings-on this time around being Action. The capital A is quite intentional: more limbs, heads and dead bodies fly around in this one volume than in most of Gantz. For those familiar with the book, this is “the fall of Stafolos Keep”, where an army of the Sem come boiling out of the wasteland just beyond the River Kes and slaughter everything that moves or swings a weapon. It’s a face-melter of a battle, as they say in online gaming circles, although most of the sense of how Guin fights gets front-loaded into the start of the story.

As you can imagine, that first section’s a continuation of where the last manga volume ended. There, Guin was pitted against a slavering great ape in a gladiatorial battle, courtesy of Count Vanon, the despotic leader of Stafolos Keep. This fight’s shown in all of its furious details, from the way Guin uses a potsherd to get the upper hand to the twist climax where Guin almost takes Vanon hostage but is stopped when he sees … something … behind the Count’s mask.

The way this last part is handled in both the novel and in the comic serves as a perfect example of the concessions that have been made to translate something from prose to pictures. In both cases, we’re given initial hints as to what Guin sees, but it’s not spelled out in detail, just insinuated. The manga does this by giving us a closeup of © Kaoru Kurimoto/Hajime Sawada/JIVE Ltd.
Guin sees something he can’t unsee.

" href="/img/2009/486176422X-3.jpg">Guin’s stupefied expression — a powerful way to do it, although his full-blown explanation of what he saw appears to have been saved for a later volume. By the way, this incident alone would have gone a long way towards demolishing my standing criticism of Guin’s expressionlessness (especially compared to Guin’s other manga incarnation). But it’s not the only time Guin’s face is shown being suffused with real, palpable emotion: in this volume he rages, he winces, he comes within inches of weeping, and it all works. Maybe artist Hajime Sawada was just saving his strength for when it really mattered most.

I mentioned how the manga not only follows the original storyline religiously but bops back and forth through the saga’s timeline to insert material that doesn’t actually appear in the novel until much later (or is only hinted at). Hearing that the twins Rinda and Remus escaped capture through the use of what amounts to a magical teleportation device is one thing; seeing it depicted is another entirely. These additions are not as distracting as they might have been — for one, fans of the novel might welcome the fact that they’re brought in to give the whole thing a little textural variety. A lockstep incident-for-incident rendering of the book would have been boring, but too much freedom with the timeline would probably have had fans screaming “Spoiler!”

Something else that surfaces a good deal more vividly in this installment — again, if only because we see it in front of us and don’t just read it — is how Rinda and Remus have, for lack of any better way to put it, a closeness that borders on the incestuous. The two of them have never known a life where the other wasn’t constantly there, and they’re going to have to very quickly get used to not having the other around … although, fortunately, they now have Guin to help them do that. They cling close to each other whenever they can, and there’s even a flashback shot of them sharing the same bed — the sort of thing that makes you wonder what kind of a life these two would have had were it not for the disaster that’s now tempering both of their spirits.

And now the bad news — the other shoe that I was muttering about, as it were. After this, there’s only one more volume in print before we all have to wait for Sawada to go back to the drafting table. How long can you hold your breath?