Manga Notes: Emanon 4: Emanon Wanderer 3
Dec. 3rd, 2023 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLooking back at my records, I see that I read the second and third volumes of the Emanon manga (subtitled “Emanon Wanderer,” parts one and two) not that long after experiencing the first, self-contained introduction to the enigmatic Emanon herself. The afterword at the end of the third volume talked about a fourth to follow, but the elusiveness of that follow-up was one reason why I was half-inclined to believe negative comments about Dark Horse’s willingness to keep translating and releasing manga for very long when it couldn’t meet presumably considerable sales targets.
When the fifth volume of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (the first of which had prompted the negative comments) had a house ad at the back mentioning a fourth volume of Emanon, though, that got my attention. When that fourth volume was actually in my hands, that was something in itself. Beginning to read it, I was a bit conscious that I could remember the science fiction concept of Emanon inheriting three billion years of memories but not much of what had happened in the manga after that concept had been established. It proved easy enough, though, to get caught up with a further iteration of Emanon encountering other people peculiarly other than ordinary in their own ways, even if I noted certain “later on...” comments closing each part of the story. I suppose I had some suspicions everything since the first volume had been more a product of the manga artist Kenji Tsuruta than of the original author Shinji Kajio.
After things closed with something of a cliffhanger coda, all of a sudden Carl Gustav Horn’s afterword was explaining the long gap between volumes had been more a matter of the manga magazine Emanon had been serialized in going out of business than anything else. That could mean there’s not going to be anything else to follow up on the comments and cliffhangers, but there were some explanations the manga continued to draw on other stories by the original author. Thoughts of going back to the beginning might have sprung from the “please read the other way” page inside the back cover using part of the first volume and showing Emanon’s character design has perhaps become a little more stylized since then.
When the fifth volume of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (the first of which had prompted the negative comments) had a house ad at the back mentioning a fourth volume of Emanon, though, that got my attention. When that fourth volume was actually in my hands, that was something in itself. Beginning to read it, I was a bit conscious that I could remember the science fiction concept of Emanon inheriting three billion years of memories but not much of what had happened in the manga after that concept had been established. It proved easy enough, though, to get caught up with a further iteration of Emanon encountering other people peculiarly other than ordinary in their own ways, even if I noted certain “later on...” comments closing each part of the story. I suppose I had some suspicions everything since the first volume had been more a product of the manga artist Kenji Tsuruta than of the original author Shinji Kajio.
After things closed with something of a cliffhanger coda, all of a sudden Carl Gustav Horn’s afterword was explaining the long gap between volumes had been more a matter of the manga magazine Emanon had been serialized in going out of business than anything else. That could mean there’s not going to be anything else to follow up on the comments and cliffhangers, but there were some explanations the manga continued to draw on other stories by the original author. Thoughts of going back to the beginning might have sprung from the “please read the other way” page inside the back cover using part of the first volume and showing Emanon’s character design has perhaps become a little more stylized since then.