365 Days of Manga, Day 40: Purgatory Kabuki

PURGATORY KABUKI • Yasushi Suzuki • DrMaster (2007) • 1 volume, canceled • Occult Samurai Action • 15+ (language, graphic violence)
A disappointment. Imanotsurugi, a dead samurai, wanders the plains of hell, a wasteland of twisted trees and rocks where headless corpses and vicious killers roam. To escape the afterlife, he must defeat 1,000 opponents and gather their swords, a geas placed on him by the mysterious, childlike demon Enishi. Created for the American market by video game character designer Yasushi Suzuki, this manga has beautiful character artwork but shows a fundamental unfamiliarity with comics and the print format. The artwork is clearly designed for color, not B&W, and the result is a dark blur of tonal values. The plot is essentially a beat-’em-up; ill-defined characters fight one another while structures collapse around them, vague gray shapes swirl about, and the storytelling is so confusing it must often resort to captions to explain what’s going on (”The very earth beneath his feet erupts to reveal the Well of Gluttony”). The individual panels are often powerful, and Suzuki’s artistic ability is never in doubt, but as a comic it’s a mess. In color or with better chosen screentone it might work as a plotless feast for the eyes, but instead it’s merely a tangle. Only the first volume was ever published.
* 1/2 (one and a half stars)
I wish I could like Yasushi Suzuki’s comics more, particularly since DrMaster tried so hard to make them a success, but Purgatory Kabuk (and Goth’s Cage, which I’ll be reviewing later) just fail at being comics. He’s a good artist, but in comics, he’s a dabbler who simply can’t tell a coherent story in the medium. This is often a problem when art designers, illustrators, etc. experiment with comics. (Although some of them are excellent — to step away from manga, David Small’s “Stitches” is a great comic, and Small worked for decades as a children’s book illustrator, not a comic artist.)
Today’s winner is William W. of New York! Congratulations, William! Very soon, manga will be rocketing towards you, carried by the U.S. Postal Service’s Media Mail system! Imagine it shooting towards you with tons of speedlines!