Leviathan vol. 1

Three looters come across a derelict spaceship in the far future and decide to see what’s inside.  They immediately come across a journal from a young student named Kazuma.  He was one member of a class that was going on a field trip until their ship was struck by an outside force and damaged beyond repair.  While there’s initially some hope that the students and their teachers will be able to hold out until help arrives, two things put a stop to that:  Dwindling oxygen reserves and the revelation that there’s one cryopod onboard the ship.  So it’s possible for one person to survive all this, it’s just a question of who’s it going to be.

“Leviathan” is the first title to come from Kana, the new imprint dedicated to manga from book publisher Abrams.  That they’re publishing a seinen sci-fi story as their debut series warms my heart to no end, even if this feels a little standard-issue so far.  Kazuma immediately has to deal with the schemes of fellow classmate Futaba, who is as ruthless and murderous as he is unassuming and bland.  Most of the characters are also one-note, with the barest effort made to distinguish them before the “Battle Royale” shenanigans kick off in full for the next volume.

The fact that this is all told in flashback, with the question of who (if anyone) made it into the cryopod, does add some intrigue to this first volume.  Still, it’s questionable whether or not this will pay off in any meaningful way by the end of the third volume.  Mangaka Shiro Kuroi’s detailed and very crosshatched art does contribute appropriately to this first volume’s grim tone, but it doesn’t do much to set this title apart from other stories of its kind.

And yet…

There was something about “Leviathan” that struck me from the start.  I’ve been reading manga for a very long time.  Long enough to remember the early days of scanlation on the internet when you’d find some random website where someone had posted chapters of some random-ass series that they or someone else had scanned and translated.  They could be about anything, but I usually gravitated to anything vaguely sci-fi as that’s my genre of choice.

So I’d download a chapter of something, open it up in good ol’ IRFanview, see that it was scanned in “good enough” quality and featured a translation that was “good enough” to enjoy.  I realize this is a specifically vague description here, but that’s how I found certain series – like “BLAME!” – to enjoy back in the day before and after the manga revolution.  Not so much these days as keeping up with all of the comics and manga being published legitimately leaves me with little time to keep up with the scanlation scene.

What I’m getting at here is the vibe I got from reading this first volume of “Leviathan” took me back to those days of decades ago (yes, I am old).  I don’t mean to say that the publication quality of the art or the translation is lacking on Abrams’ part, but it’s not up to the standards you’d expect from Dark Horse.  However, the way they managed to produce it for vol. 1 wound up hitting a specific brand of nostalgia for me.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that the vibes of this volume hit me right in my nostalgia gland and made its very familiar story elements feel more comforting than aggravating.  For me, at least.  Everyone else should consider this with a healthy dose of skepticism, unless you’re in your late teens/early 20’s or coming into manga for the very first time.