Le Chevalier d’Eon 1

Hm.  I picked this series up after hearing everyone rave about the anime.  I didn’t realize it was novel to manga, as I tend to dislike manga adaptations of a lot of things… unless it happens to be a very popular interpretation of Journey to the West (but only the first, like, 16 volumes or so).  This one suffers a bit from being too action-heavy, but it’s not nearly as abstract as many novel-to-manga series are.  Actually, I would say that it has the opposite problem of most similar series… there’s not enough plot going on in this first volume, where normally I would expect a lot of plot details to be crammed in and not explained sufficiently.

I do like the art.  The artist mentions that this is their first series, which kind of surprises me because the art’s quite good.  They use a lot of thick lines and high contrast.  There’s lots of black, which is nice to see.  I also like the way some of the period costumes are drawn, particularly the Chevalier Sphinx, whose costume tends to fill the entire page and looks awesome during the action scenes.  The character designs are okay, and the faces and hairstyles aren’t used to the point where you can’t tell the characters apart, but they’re nothing fantastic.  The art reminds me a lot of Hellsing, except I do like Kohta Hirano’s style a lot better.

The plot so far is that these poets are killing virgins and using their blood to write poetry and are turning into snake-people.  The Chevalier Sphinx stops them.  The Chevalier Sphinx is actually the spirit of Chevalier d’Eon’s sister, who possesses d’Eon when there’s a job to do.  When one poet is killed, another appears.  It’s not clear why this is happening, and my biggest problem with this volume is that nothing but preliminary details are given.  There are a few poets who are taken out of commission, but other than a shadowy figure introduced at the very end who could be possessing these men and causing them to murder, there’s no indication that these possessions are going to be stopped eventually, or that the plot is going to go anywhere as of yet.   There’s no side romances or character stuff other than with tertiary characters, and while I like the element of the Princess being the indicator of when things are going on, not enough is done with her, either.

Well, we’ll see.  It’s a little mindless at this point, but it could go interesting places.  I liked it all right.