![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Manga Thoughts: Vinland Saga 11
For the first few days of this new year I’ve been reading volumes of manga at a one-a-day pace. Sooner or later I’m sure I’ll take two days or more to get through another one (perhaps even because of putting that time towards more respectable prose fiction), but for the moment I’m reading with interest. One of those interesting manga is the eleventh translated-to-English, double-length volume of Makoto Yukimura’s Viking action series Vinland Saga.
It’s been a year and a half since I read the tenth volume, but it wasn’t that hard to start following the story again, and perhaps getting “two Japanese volumes” at once kept me from being from being left on a cliffhanger for nine months. Centring around a besieged fortress, the action did feel sort of confined, but that might have edged up that much farther the constant sense of threat to the characters. There was another good dose of “unreal realism” to some of the feats of valour, but also doses of dark humour surrounding the readiness of supporting and background characters to battle on (and a moment with still more impact than that). I did wonder a bit about the dialogue indulging in “anachronism,” and then the art itself seemed to play along with a reference even insular North American readers ought to get.
That the anime adaptation of Vinland Saga has shown up can get me thinking the manga’s won through to a place of relative “promoted” safety for the moment; maybe the “old worries” about it “not being sold the right way and therefore on the constant knife-edge of being cancelled on a cliffhanger” really have got old. At the same time, the English-subtitled streaming that should “promote” the manga is on Amazon Prime Video, which I don’t have a subscription to. People may complain about how the “Netflix exclusive anime” are made available in blocks to the point of dismissing those series outright, but speaking only for myself sometimes the Amazon prime anime series feel “lost in the distance” in their own way. In any case, the manga does seem to have moved on a long way from the anime; I noticed the latest volume’s table of contents mentioning “bonus anime art” at the back, if only two colour images as it turned out. As for where the manga might go in this time of relative confidence I’ll see it continue, I recalled an item on Anime News Network Makoto Yukimura had started “the final arc”; looking that up again, though, I noticed how long he intended it to go on for. At the end of the latest volume one character did scoff at Thorfinn’s hopes of somehow “escaping war,” saying what I’ll admit to worrying about myself; I also got to wondering about “a small moment might lead to bigger trouble” even after all the thud and blunder just before.
It’s been a year and a half since I read the tenth volume, but it wasn’t that hard to start following the story again, and perhaps getting “two Japanese volumes” at once kept me from being from being left on a cliffhanger for nine months. Centring around a besieged fortress, the action did feel sort of confined, but that might have edged up that much farther the constant sense of threat to the characters. There was another good dose of “unreal realism” to some of the feats of valour, but also doses of dark humour surrounding the readiness of supporting and background characters to battle on (and a moment with still more impact than that). I did wonder a bit about the dialogue indulging in “anachronism,” and then the art itself seemed to play along with a reference even insular North American readers ought to get.
That the anime adaptation of Vinland Saga has shown up can get me thinking the manga’s won through to a place of relative “promoted” safety for the moment; maybe the “old worries” about it “not being sold the right way and therefore on the constant knife-edge of being cancelled on a cliffhanger” really have got old. At the same time, the English-subtitled streaming that should “promote” the manga is on Amazon Prime Video, which I don’t have a subscription to. People may complain about how the “Netflix exclusive anime” are made available in blocks to the point of dismissing those series outright, but speaking only for myself sometimes the Amazon prime anime series feel “lost in the distance” in their own way. In any case, the manga does seem to have moved on a long way from the anime; I noticed the latest volume’s table of contents mentioning “bonus anime art” at the back, if only two colour images as it turned out. As for where the manga might go in this time of relative confidence I’ll see it continue, I recalled an item on Anime News Network Makoto Yukimura had started “the final arc”; looking that up again, though, I noticed how long he intended it to go on for. At the end of the latest volume one character did scoff at Thorfinn’s hopes of somehow “escaping war,” saying what I’ll admit to worrying about myself; I also got to wondering about “a small moment might lead to bigger trouble” even after all the thud and blunder just before.