The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions

What's It About? 

From veteran shoujo manga artist Marimo Ragawa and BL light novelist Narise Konohara comes a strange and sexy tale! When a vampire from Nebraska named Al gets frozen in bat form, he winds up in Japan under the care of a dark and mysterious man covered in a bloody scent!

The Vampire & His Pleasant Companions adapts Narise Konohara's novel series of the same name. The manga is illustrated by Marimo Ragawa. Both print and digital versions of the first volume will be released by Yen Press on December 15 for $13.99 and $6.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Marimo Ragawa may be best known in English as the creator of Baby & Me, but it's clear that she's not a one-trick pony. The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions is an adaptation of a novel by Narise Konohara and it's very clearly for a different demographic than Baby & Me – and to be honest, Ragawa's art seems more suited to beautiful adult men than it was to elementary schoolers and their baby brothers. But perhaps more importantly, this is one of those adaptations where if you didn't know that it was based on something else, you wouldn't realize that it wasn't Ragawa's own creation. The story flows well, doesn't feel like it's missing anything or skipping merrily from point to point, and genuinely makes you feel for the main character.

That would be Albert Irving, a man from Nebraska who had an unfortunate run-in with a vampire lady his junior year in college and was imperfectly turned. Now an eternal twenty-one, he can't control his shift from human to bat (which in this story's mythology vampires can), he has no fangs, and there's not a damn thing he can do about any of it. Even worse, he revived after two weeks of being dead and buried, so everyone believes him to be permanently dead, meaning he's lost all human connection. (Vampires, the story explains, don't socialize so that they aren't discovered when too many humans are fed upon.) Then, to make matters worse, his semi-cozy set up at a slaughterhouse leads to him being caught up when a carcass is frozen, and he finds himself in Japan when he defrosts, naked and unable to speak the language.

Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting pretty well cured me of the idea that immortality was a wonderful thing, and The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions definitely keeps that thought in its head. Al really hates what his life has become and at least twice in this volume laments that he let the wrong girl convince him to go for a hookup. But if the book has that sad edge, it also can be really funny at times. During daylight hours, Al is stuck in bat form, and Ragawa draws an awfully cute bat. The two nights in jail that Al undergoes for being caught twice trespassing in the nude are successfully played as funny, and when he finally does luck into two semi-understanding guys (the eponymous pleasant companions), tsundere Akira – that's Al's word, not mine – forces him to study Japanese even in bat form, which means a little brown bat is laying flat on a textbook screeching his tiny head off. There's a very nice balance here between light and dark, and given Akira's profession as an embalmer (not a popular practice in Japan), I think that the series will continue in that vein as equal parts musing on mortality and zany bat antics. Al's inability to die might also come in handy as we may be about to see in volume two – after all, his other companion is a cop and Al desperately needs a job. (Is professional victim a job?) In any event, with beautiful art and an interesting story that doesn't scream “adaptation!” at the top of its lungs, this is definitely worth picking up – perhaps even more so when you factor in that I don't usually like vampire stories.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

I very rarely care for vampire fiction, so I didn't expect to get much out of The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions. Twilight, Vampire Diaries, Vampire chronicles, True Blood… none of the huge vampire hits of the past couple decades have drawn me in; the sole exception I can think of off the top of my head is Bisco Hatori's Millennium Snow. Neither the power fantasy nor the tragedy that typically inform the genre appeal to me, but by doing something that at least seems to be different, The Vampire and His Pleasant Companions was pretty fun.

The thing is, Albert Irving is a really shitty vampire. His turning was totally botched, so he doesn't have the fangs necessary to bite living things and must subsist off raw meat drippings and is often starving. He can't control his transformation between human and bat forms. Since he's legally dead, he can't hang out with his old friends or go out and get a job. The idea of a vampire who is effectively disabled and a relatively recent convert is unusual and interesting, at least to me.

The duo behind the series, Narise Konohara and Marimo Ragawa, clearly put a lot of thought into the logical extensions of the consequences of becoming a vampire, which turns out to be Albert getting pushed to the margins of society. I was able to sympathize with him much more than I have with most vampiric characters I've encountered, who are usually wealthy but also just so terribly lonely and jaded, or struggling with bloodlust.

I have more doubts about Akira, the titular “pleasant companion.” Like so many BL and shoujo boyfriends (while there hasn't been any smooching yet, I have little doubt it'll turn into BL), he's rude and brusque and only meets Albert halfway with much grumbling and reluctance. I much prefer romances between two people who treat each other with kindness and respect, so while Akira is interesting as an embalmer living in Japan, it's hard for me to hope that maybe they'll smooch in a future volume.