Black Butler 4

Yana Toboso – Yen Press – 2011 – 10+ volumes

I’m still rather torn on this series. I love Ciel and Sebastian. They’re both pretty great, and Ciel gets to shine in all his gloomy glory in this volume. A cheery Indian prince comes and irritates him for the better part of the volume, and when things go wrong for the prince, Sebastian gets to rub his face in it, then Ciel tells him that giving up will never get you anywhere in life. Then we get to see most of how it was that Sebastian and Ciel met. Both of them are perfect bearers of bad news, and this volume only cemented that role for both of them. They were the perfect opposites of the cheery prince and his “butler,” a man with powers that rivaled Sebastian’s.

I also liked the mystery. Someone is hanging British Indian returnees upside-down as a kind of prank, and Ciel has to find out why. He winds up tangling with Prince Soma, who insists on “helping” Ciel, sure that the culprit of the pranks is the same man who kidnapped a beloved servant of his. The unwinds and more or less concludes by the end of the volume, and we have most of our answers. It’s not straightforward at all, and the showdown for next volume is so unusual that I was laughing at how straight-faced everyone was taking the news.

But this joke was one of the unintended ones, I think. Well, it was certainly intentional, but it wasn’t set up like a joke. Many, many other jokes make an appearance, though. I hate this series’ sense of humor, and it tries very hard to be funny. The jokes fall flat, since they are mostly gags and are completely out of place in such a dark series. The back-and-forth between Ciel and Sebastian is fairly light and enjoyable, and I love how the gloomy Earl Phantomhive reacts to most of the other characters. But the other characters in this volume, especially Prince Soma, just aren’t funny. Prince Soma spends the better part of an entire chapter simply annoying Ciel, and it’s just… too much. The Phantomhive staff are still hanging around, though. Prince Soma’s butler, Agni, gets the most interesting scene I’ve seen the three staff members in so far, where Agni brings out the most useful qualities in them all, but otherwise… they’re simply there to make silly jokes that are too tired to be funny.

I like this series a lot. I really do. I want to see how the bizarre finale to this prank situation will play out next volume. But reading it is just… so annoying. At least the staff members have fallen further and further into the background. That gives me hope that the sense of humor may be downplayed later. But Prince Soma does not.