Slightly Biased Manga

So this wraps up the first part of the Cain Saga, and the first major story arc.  It was… it was okay.  I think it works really well as a gothic horror story, and it does a good job with atmosphere, and it’s got all the elements to make a good story… but this segment of it somehow just failed for me.

I think the main problem is that there was too many characters (which apparently is the complaint of the day for me, apparently I prefer stories that happen to only one person).  There was the girl who Cain had fallen in love with, a girl who looked exactly like her, Jack the Ripper, who turned out to be a minor character we met at the beginning of the story, Dr. Disraeli and Cassian (I always forgot about Cassian until he appeared and I had to think very carefully about who he was), Cain’s fiancée and her two other suitors,  her brother, her parents… there was just a long list of people who got drawn into the plot.  They all needed to be there, I think, but the fact that the plot did involve every single one of them, and that this secret society was set up involving Cain’s father and Dr. Disraeli which will not really be discussed until Godchild… it was too much.  I really liked the fact that there was a Jack the Ripper element, and I liked the fact that somehow Dr. Disraeli was bringing people back from the dead and needed to kill people in order to sustain them, but there was just too much other stuff going on at the same time.

The art is good.  I know a lot of people love Kaori Yuki’s art.  The characters all look pretty good, and the compositions and flow are all okay, and the clothes the characters sport are wonderful, but I do have trouble telling some of the characters apart.  There was an unrelated Cain story in the back of the volume, and even with ample warning, I thought one of the characters was Riff almost all the way through.  Some of the females get to looking alike as well, though that was mostly Mary Weather, the fortune teller, and the fortune teller’s maid, who was supposed to look like the fortune teller.   There are also some scenes with both Cain and Gilford (I don’t have my volumes with me now to check, but I wasn’t sure if there was some noodley spelling, like Guilford, or if it was actually Gilbert, like the Viz site suggested) where I have trouble differentiating the two.