RWBY Manga, RWBY Comics
Sep. 26th, 2020 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerViz keeps publishing “RWBY manga,” and that keeps getting my attention. Call them “anime-inspired” or “anime imitations” depending on your mood, but works of that type have been easy enough to find for a while; evidence one of them has attracted attention where the genuine article doesn’t need to be translated seems more unusual. With that said, however, my own reactions to the first five volumes of RWBY manga could amount to a sustained demonstration that while “official manga” of it is being drawn in Japan, it’s not being assigned to top artists.
Hope does keep springing eternal, though, and when I heard a third variety of RWBY manga was starting up with the bold subtitle “The Official Manga” (however necessary that might be to distinguish it from the one-shot initial manga) I did think about taking another chance. However, before I quite had the chance to read it I’d run across an Anime News Network review dismissive of both the volume and the franchise in general. I did manage to shrug that off anyway, telling myself that regardless of my own reactions to this latest manga I’d have the chance to follow it up with another “sequential art” interpretation in the franchise, and this one didn’t need to be translated.
When I started reading “The Official Manga,” however, I was almost surprised to think my reactions positive. A part of this did seem to have to do with Bunta Kinami’s artwork, which I wonder about using the word “wispy” to describe but which did have some character of its own (even if I did notice a comment at the end of the volume about how “he began his professional career with” this manga and thought “of course”). The dismissive review I’d already mentioned did say that in adapting the beginning of the animation the manga went to slight lengths to play up further the first character disagreements between Ruby and Weiss and their being flung together as teammates anyway, and that did add a bit more interest for me. I was a little conscious of “filling in the action scenes with memories of the animation” (the action scenes there being the apparent biggest first draw of the animation beyond “sheer novelty,” which made Monty Oum’s untimely early death that much more of a blow), but contrasted that to getting around to reading a manga adapting the Gundam Wing anime and “filling things in” there too. Perhaps this is one more case of “lowering my expectations to where they can’t help but be exceeded,” but I did finish the volume willing to see another.
After that, I went on to a trade paperback of “RWBY comics” from DC in an improved mood, where this other new work wouldn’t have to “make up for disappointment.” The comics were set further into the animated series’s story, around the time of “the fourth volume,” when the characters are trying to bounce back from the shocks and tragedies that had surprised me enough to keep following the series. That they’d done that in the course of the animation did keep me thinking of the perils of “side stories,” but despite things in the comics often being settled by talking and internal monologues the experience did appeal. The artwork might not have hewed as close to “anime style” as it could have, but it didn’t try to avoid that look either. One thing I did get to thinking was that the creative team looked to be female, with Marguerite Bennett the writer and Mirka Andolfo the artist; I then considered the main characters all having discussions with older women. Then, though, I grew uncomfortably conscious of certain online reactions to recent popular entertainment that might start with ostentatious “second opinions” but keep seeming to wind up as what I keep calling “performative offensiveness,” and it did bother me that I was aware of them, all too aware of warnings of “online radicalization.” In any case, Weiss’s discussions with her mother, as the animation had established, weren’t a matter of “finding wisdom in age.” While the comics didn’t have the same sense of the most recent manga as “opening up a to-be-continued series,” if more of them do show up I suppose I’d keep taking a look at them too.
Hope does keep springing eternal, though, and when I heard a third variety of RWBY manga was starting up with the bold subtitle “The Official Manga” (however necessary that might be to distinguish it from the one-shot initial manga) I did think about taking another chance. However, before I quite had the chance to read it I’d run across an Anime News Network review dismissive of both the volume and the franchise in general. I did manage to shrug that off anyway, telling myself that regardless of my own reactions to this latest manga I’d have the chance to follow it up with another “sequential art” interpretation in the franchise, and this one didn’t need to be translated.
When I started reading “The Official Manga,” however, I was almost surprised to think my reactions positive. A part of this did seem to have to do with Bunta Kinami’s artwork, which I wonder about using the word “wispy” to describe but which did have some character of its own (even if I did notice a comment at the end of the volume about how “he began his professional career with” this manga and thought “of course”). The dismissive review I’d already mentioned did say that in adapting the beginning of the animation the manga went to slight lengths to play up further the first character disagreements between Ruby and Weiss and their being flung together as teammates anyway, and that did add a bit more interest for me. I was a little conscious of “filling in the action scenes with memories of the animation” (the action scenes there being the apparent biggest first draw of the animation beyond “sheer novelty,” which made Monty Oum’s untimely early death that much more of a blow), but contrasted that to getting around to reading a manga adapting the Gundam Wing anime and “filling things in” there too. Perhaps this is one more case of “lowering my expectations to where they can’t help but be exceeded,” but I did finish the volume willing to see another.
After that, I went on to a trade paperback of “RWBY comics” from DC in an improved mood, where this other new work wouldn’t have to “make up for disappointment.” The comics were set further into the animated series’s story, around the time of “the fourth volume,” when the characters are trying to bounce back from the shocks and tragedies that had surprised me enough to keep following the series. That they’d done that in the course of the animation did keep me thinking of the perils of “side stories,” but despite things in the comics often being settled by talking and internal monologues the experience did appeal. The artwork might not have hewed as close to “anime style” as it could have, but it didn’t try to avoid that look either. One thing I did get to thinking was that the creative team looked to be female, with Marguerite Bennett the writer and Mirka Andolfo the artist; I then considered the main characters all having discussions with older women. Then, though, I grew uncomfortably conscious of certain online reactions to recent popular entertainment that might start with ostentatious “second opinions” but keep seeming to wind up as what I keep calling “performative offensiveness,” and it did bother me that I was aware of them, all too aware of warnings of “online radicalization.” In any case, Weiss’s discussions with her mother, as the animation had established, weren’t a matter of “finding wisdom in age.” While the comics didn’t have the same sense of the most recent manga as “opening up a to-be-continued series,” if more of them do show up I suppose I’d keep taking a look at them too.