Manga Thoughts: The Promised Neverland 20

There was something grudging and unfortunate to my starting to watch the Promised Neverland anime, acknowledging how well its “grade school Great Escape” story worked for me, and winding up calling it a “personal standout” title for a year I hadn’t seen quite as many titles from compared to years just previous at the time. My perpetual petty resentment towards Aniplex of America’s home video pricing strategy (and the “they wouldn’t keep selling anime over here if they weren’t at least making a profit from those fans who will pay their prices, so deal with it” counterargument) keeps getting in the way of watching their shows streaming (as opposed to series licensed for streaming but not released on home video over here at all). However, I could at least start buying the original manga. That’s my usual fallback and fig leaf when dealing with “anime I don’t want to pay that price for” (although, as ever, I can’t imagine it doing any good for the people who worked on the anime to get my attention in the first place.) I read as far into the manga as the anime had adapted, taking my time between volumes, perhaps not getting the same sense of “impending menace” without the anime’s shadows and what would happen now clear in my mind, and wondering whether Posuka Demizu’s artwork for Kaiu Shirai’s story had “character” beyond the smoothed-over animation designs to the point of looking a bit odd. As the escape concluded with the characters standing on the edge of wide-open possibility all over again, I stuck a bookmark in the volume I’d only got a bit into and left it on a stack with its follow-ups, supposing I hadn’t picked up too much of a sense of what might happen next from their cover art. There would, after all, be another instalment of the anime coming.
( Many things unexpected )