#DRCL: Midnight Children
Remember how Arthur, Quincey, and Joe were all at the mercy of a monstrous version of Lucy at the end of vol. ? Well, forget about all that. None of them are in this volume. This time we’re focusing on young Jonathan Harker as he travels through the Transylvanian countryside as a favor to the headmaster of Whitby School to secure Count Dracula’s approval in a business matter. This is in spite of the fact that the boy lost the use of his legs due to a cruel prank and can only get about by use of a wooden wheelchair. Still, he’s a smart and clever lad, so this should be no harder than it looks. Especially when the Count also turns out to be a long-haired boy about the same age as he is with the cutest and fluffiest animal ears.
The artistic side of “#DRCL” remains as strong as ever here, with Shin’ichi Sakamoto throwing out the visual pyrotechnics like they were no big deal. A haunted ride to Dracula’s Castle? Done. Jonathan’s hallucinogenic entry into said castle? A real trip. Storybook flashbacks depicting Dracula’s history? Stylish. A woman with her head on fire wandering through the countryside looking for her baby? Shocking. Three lascivious and scantily dressed vampire women preparing to ravish a young and very naked Jonathan? …Yeah. That’s a thing here.
If you were already concerned by the sexual aspect of this series and how it frequently involves young kids, then this volume will set your hackles further on edge. However, if you’re able to realize that drawings on a page are not the same as what they depict in real life, then no worries. I’ve never read the original “Dracula,” so I can’t say if this is meant to reference a specific scene from that novel. In the form that it takes here, it only serves to introduce Drac’s vampire harem and in a way that feels more salacious than necessary to the narrative. The scene may have come off as less objectionable if Jonathan was (and was drawn) ten years older than he looks, except he wasn’t and that’s another problem.
We’re not told exactly how old Jonathan is in this volume and, at best, he’s a young teenager like Mina and the other protagonists at Whitby School. That said, he’s drawn to look like he’s all of twelve, and the fact that he was even considered to go on this trip to Castle Dracula boggles the mind in the first place. While it’s shown to be Jonathan’s desire to do so, having a wheelchair-bound child travel through the backroads of Eastern Europe circa the late 1800’s really stretches the bounds of credibility here. It’s a lot easier to believe in Dracula’s supernatural powers than it is to do so for a child as young as Jonathan to handle all of the adulting tasks set before him.
At least Dracula is accommodating in trying to make it as easy as possible for the young boy. What with the comfortable (coffin-shaped) room he provides, filling meals at dinnertime along with stories, and appearing before him most often in the cutest guise he can imagine. I think it’s the animal ears that keep me from taking it seriously at all. They feel like Sakamoto is taking an obvious bit of Japanese cuteness and trying to make it work in a gothic horror setting. It doesn’t. It just seems so silly in a way that breaks my immersion right down to the high-pitched squeak of a voice I imagine Dracula to have when he’s in this form.
All of this is a mix of uncomfortable and ridiculous that distract from any attempt at meaningful storytelling in this volume. Worse still is the fact that as I’m being annoyed by everything, I’m reminded of the fact that I’m STILL paying a premium to read it all. Even with the hardcover format, I’m paying $27 for just over 200 pages of manga. Perhaps it’s because Viz anticipated that the audience for this series would be limited and priced it accordingly. That still doesn’t account for the fact that Dark Horse’s omnibus editions of Sakamoto’s “Innocent” are a much better value and whose own twelve-year-old doing adult things in an adult world now seems a lot less problematic compared to what we’re seeing in “#DRCL.”