Manga Notes: Made In Abyss 4-8
May. 18th, 2020 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs I’ve worked my way down through stacks of unread manga volumes for several months now, I’ve delved from “waiting to have the whole series available after not quite managing to read the first volume right after purchase” to “sacrificing an anime-first, manga-second mentality given watching anime remains time-consuming” to “getting to the titles eventually supposed to have their anime adaptation continue.” There is, of course, an unfortunate “let’s not wait for tomorrow” sense there.
On reaching five unseen volumes of Made In Abyss, though, I confronted a different sort of apprehension. Its own anime adaptation had attracted a lot of attention, enough to raise my own interest after the initial fact, but there’d been a constant undercurrent of uneasiness too. Beyond the increasing gruesomeness of its “descent into the threatening unknown” story, there were a good many uncomfortable comments about just how the original manga art of Akihito Tsukushi treated and presented the young protagonists, with “if you don’t find a problem with it, maybe there’s a problem with you” warnings. It could be, too, that a comics reader having a somewhat more active role than an animation watcher (an idea I’ve been aware of since reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics) makes content more troubling stuck on pages that have to be turned than flashing past on the screen.
While the fourth volume did have a bit of material included at the end of the anime, it was on to new material from there, which indeed could be unsettling but which I managed to get through. After the protagonists won through to passing the point of no return established a long way back in the story, though, I was conscious the grey tones of the manga’s artwork was turning any possibility of “fantastic new vistas” into goulash, and the body horror was only increasing. That it was drawn rather than live-action makeup might have made it a little less hard to bear, but being stuck on another cliffhanger on running out of volumes. These days I can wonder whether, when a “story of the fantastic” doesn’t appeal at once for whatever reason, the arbitrariness of its creator’s choices for rules can get to me as much as anything. While real-world stories of exploration can pack their own wallops when it comes to the wider world overpowering the bodies that have to carry forward mere wills, it’s still not quite the same thing.
On reaching five unseen volumes of Made In Abyss, though, I confronted a different sort of apprehension. Its own anime adaptation had attracted a lot of attention, enough to raise my own interest after the initial fact, but there’d been a constant undercurrent of uneasiness too. Beyond the increasing gruesomeness of its “descent into the threatening unknown” story, there were a good many uncomfortable comments about just how the original manga art of Akihito Tsukushi treated and presented the young protagonists, with “if you don’t find a problem with it, maybe there’s a problem with you” warnings. It could be, too, that a comics reader having a somewhat more active role than an animation watcher (an idea I’ve been aware of since reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics) makes content more troubling stuck on pages that have to be turned than flashing past on the screen.
While the fourth volume did have a bit of material included at the end of the anime, it was on to new material from there, which indeed could be unsettling but which I managed to get through. After the protagonists won through to passing the point of no return established a long way back in the story, though, I was conscious the grey tones of the manga’s artwork was turning any possibility of “fantastic new vistas” into goulash, and the body horror was only increasing. That it was drawn rather than live-action makeup might have made it a little less hard to bear, but being stuck on another cliffhanger on running out of volumes. These days I can wonder whether, when a “story of the fantastic” doesn’t appeal at once for whatever reason, the arbitrariness of its creator’s choices for rules can get to me as much as anything. While real-world stories of exploration can pack their own wallops when it comes to the wider world overpowering the bodies that have to carry forward mere wills, it’s still not quite the same thing.