The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

Angels of Death

What's It About? 

Thirteen-year-old Rachel Gardner awakes to find herself not in the psychiatric ward she remembers her parents sending her to, but in the basement of a gargantuan industrial complex that serves as the stage for a cat-and-mouse game between “sacrifices” and “angels.” Floor by floor she ascends, hounded by an expanding roster of serial killers like the eye-obsessed doctor Danny. Among their numbers are Zack, a scythe-wielding and bandaged lunatic who begins chasing her only to end up serving her after he glimpses something of her true, diabolical nature. Now the duo advances onward, haunted not just by a legion of lunatics but by their own inner demons.

Adapted by artist Kudan Naduka from a videogame by Makoto Sanada, the first volume of Angels of Death will be available December 19th from Yen Press for $13.00

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Is It Worth Reading?

Austin Price

Rating:

For all their grim and grit and complicating rule sets, cat-and-mouse contests like ur-example The Most Dangerous Game are at heart just an elaborate variation of hide-and-seek. With good reason: there's little more frightening than a situation where one's only options before a murderous opponent are purely reactive.

Such is the core appeal of Angels of Death, a psychological horror story that takes as many of its stylistic and narrative cues from similarly schlocky, exploitative series like Deadman Wonderland and Future Diary as from the kind of media you'd expect to see in a Hot Topic. Mummy-bandaged Zack has the wild bug-eyes and the maniacally homicidal disposition of a Johnon Vasquez character; Rachel's dead-eyed stare and yandere mood swings make her a kind of goth kewpie doll. Characters are wont to spout off grungy fare like Your mom and dad are waiting for you in Hell” atop backgrounds either of pitch black or dotted with splotches and blurs and inks that suggest splurting blood and looming slaughter.

It's all absurd, from the dialogue to the art to the page composition, but if scenario writer Makoto Sanada is aware of how this might read he lets nothing slip. “I wanted to make a horror title where people provoke…fear...and this tale is the result” reads an author's left at the end of one chapter, but while Sanada has figured out the proper scenario and partner to elicit the fear he seeks -- artist Kudan Naduka renderings of abandoned industrial spaces takes advantage of the horror in their emptiness and inorganic, unnatural geometry to build real menace -- he hasn't figured out how to use that scenario to coax out those latent emotions.

For one, Sanada doesn't seem to understand how important spacing and rules are to tension in games where inches determine the winner and loser. The floors of the massive warehouse Rachel runs around don't seem to have any defined geography: in one panel Zack is chasing Rachel down a dead-end alley only to find himself in a nondescript room the very next with no hint made before to indicate that a room was nearby, let alone that Rachel would be able to outrun him when he was only feet away from her. And though killers are supposedly confined to their floors, Zack – and Danny, it's hinted – move between areas unchallenged. Space and time and rules all seem to be bending for Rachel's sake with little offered to explain how, which in turn ruins any chance at suspense.

More pressingly, Sanada simply hasn't figured out why people are scary. Zack and Dave might glower and strike lunatic poses and talk of their love of murder, but their characterization is pure cartoon. They feel like no serial killer you've read about or might meet in the real world, and so the danger they present feels utterly fantastic. Perhaps it worked better in its original form as a videogame, where rules are easier to implement and the stage-like design lent itself to the staggered pace and exaggerated style, but as a manga, Angels of Death is a muddled production that needs to reconsider what its strengths are to prevent turning them into weaknesses.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2.5

Horror can be trickier than you'd think, especially if the author is trying to combine both terror and horror elements in their work in order to make it hit home on both emotional and visceral levels. Angels of Death is making an effort to do just that, but right now it isn't particularly adept at either – the horror isn't gross or creepy enough and the terror is hampered by the fact that Rachel very quickly shuts down emotionally, making her a tough sell as a reader stand-in.

I can see where this is going to change going forward, however. After Rachel's encounter with Dr. Danny, her former counselor (which I'm going to take as meaning “psychologist”), she seems to have some sort of memory resurface, possibly pertaining to why she was in counselling to begin with. While Danny may have been just toying with her when he says that her parents are waiting for her in hell, it also feels possible that, when combined with Rachel's earlier memory of having seen someone die, she could have had a hand in her own parents’ deaths. Given that everyone else we've met thus far (which, okay, is just Zack) is a killer or a psycho of some kind, it would make a certain amount of sense if Rachel was also not quite as she seems.

We get a hint of that in the scene where she sews the dead bird back together. It's not that odd for a thirteen-year-old to have a sewing kit handy, but to use it to reattach the two halves of a dead bird is definitely outside the realm of “normal,” no matter how into your Goth phase you are. Rachel's demeanor suggests that this is something she's done before, which not only puts her into the unreliable point-of-view character category, but also reminds us that she may be in this place for a very specific reason. Maybe she isn't a killer, but she's clearly done some things that bear watching.

It's easy to see how this story started life as a game. There's a very logical feel to each progressive step Rachel takes, and you can even see where puzzles for the player were originally inserted. If you don't play many games, this isn't likely to be a problem, but if you're more used to the game format, it could become one of those cases where you feel like you'd rather just find the game and experience the story that way – a thought which occurred to me a few times as I was reading this.

Angels of Death isn't a bad first volume. It offers just enough intrigue to make you wonder where things are going, and I do want to know what happened to land Rachel here in the first place. I'm not sure that this is the best format to find those pieces of the puzzle out, but this is different enough from other recent horror manga to come out in English that it's worth checking out if that's your genre. I might wait until volume two is out as well, however, because this book doesn't do a great job of setting us up for what's to come.

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Amy McNulty

Rating:

Angels of Death presents a survival horror tale that relies on mood and mystery to carry it for the first volume and does an adequate job of presenting a high-stakes death game. It's fast-paced, and though it's been limited to featuring three characters so far, there's enough that's intriguing about this manga to make most want to keep reading. Nonetheless, the characters are shallow. One villain appears, does his schlocky over-the-top shtick, and is out of the picture, but Rachel and Zack are in this game for the long-haul. Zack is one step away from being a generic slasher himself, but by volume's end, his quirks have led him to an uneasy truce with Rachel that thankfully provides him with more depth than he initially seems to have. Rachel masks hidden depths herself and the mystery behind where she is and why she's there haven't begun to be revealed. Still, her transition from someone eager to escape a killer to someone who embraces death feels unnatural and practically comes out of left field.

Naduka's art is average and not entirely well-suited to the horror tale, though Zack's initial appearance does convey some degree of terror. The character designs are cartoonish, though, which makes the proceedings harder to take seriously, though I recognize they're based on an existing game's designs. Much is made about eyes and the “life” or “lack of life” within a person's eyes during one part of this volume and Rachel isn't sufficiently expressive enough to convey the “attractiveness” of her eyes to a killer obsessed with them. The background art is heavy on the black screentone, but it suits the dark vibe of the series better than the character designs do.

Angels of Death volume 1 is a run-of-the-mill entry in the death game genre, though it has some potential. As of the first volume, it's neither outrageously bad—and thus entertaining in that way—nor extremely suspenseful and compelling. However, at least thus far, it's also less graphic than many similar stories in the genre. The first volume of Angels of Death serves as an okay introduction to the death game genre; however, its decision to pair a mysterious main character with one of the killers who was initially her opponent could lead to some truly intriguing storylines in the future.