I saw a break down of episode 3 and decided to take a look at the manga. Before I know it I’m four volumes in already. I didn’t expect this work to be so…thoughtful? Samura seems to give so much care to the bodies and faces of his characters, it gives the reader an impression of fragility and humanity.

From what I have seen of the new anime, I don’t feel that Samura’s sketchy, hand-shaded pencil style translates to animation particularly well. The characters lose their delicate faces and fleshy, realistic feeling.

P.S. I was confused, because I had a hard time understanding what happened on some pages. Apparently, for the Dark Horse Comics English release, the panels were cut and rearranged so that the manga could be read from left to right. What a mess!

I’ve put this in my watchlist for AP, so I will definitely check it out.

Also, about the English version of the manga…yes, it was re-arranged to read left-to-right in English, but that was at the request of Samura himself. It wasn’t some evil decision made by Dark Horse. The manga was originally translated by Studio Proteus, the translation company founded by the late Toren Smith, and since one of the primary goals of SP was to honor the wishes of the original artists while translating their works into English, they honored this request by Samura. Granted, it did lead to discrepancies, but that couldn’t be helped.

Hope this clears things up–I’m old enough to remember when manga were originally published in English flipped from left to right, instead of how they are published now, in the original right-to-left orientation.