My First Manga Review

Since it is less than 20 days until that annual staple in the Midwest: Anime Detour. And to get into the manga and anime spirit, I've been reading more manga and watching more anime. Back in February, while the hubby and I were getting our taxes done, I had the chance to sneak away while he and his brother worked on their business' taxes. I sneaked on over to the library and looked around for a new book or two to read. Given that I have so many other books I needed to finish before I got any other book from any other source, I figured I should pick up the last 3 volumes of a manga I had picked up a few months before.

It's called Nightschool: The Weirn Books by Svetlana Chmakova. Wait... a manga written and drawn by someone of a non-Asian descent? Manga is not just kept to the Asian countries. There's a Spanish manga called Daemonium out there... I'm still waiting for any volume after one to be published... *ahem*... anyhoo. I did a bit of digging into this author, since her art looks very familiar. Well, I found out that Svetlana has another manga series out there, called Dramacon,  and she also does the art work for the manga adaptation of James Patterson's teen series Witch & Wizard. I like Svetlana's art style; it's very crisp, with clean lines and not a lot of extra lines, shadows, or scribbles that tend to clutter panels in other mangas.

 

Svetlana's two other series she illustrates.

In Nightschool, the artwork is beautiful, with flowing, delicate lines that add to the mystical feel of the story. This manga is a 4 volume story arc (from reading the back of the 4th volume, it feels like that there's more to this series, and I need to do a little digging to find it) and it's a nice departure from some of the other mangas I've read. Instead of being overly dramatic or relationship-based, this story is a good mix of horror and mystery, magic and humor, focusing on the relationship between two sisters and what lengths one would go to in order to save the other. And unlike other mangas (or even normal books) where the paranormal beings are just trying to live along side us and are love interests, these monsters, vampires and werewolves, would most likely eat you first before dating you.

Okay, back to Nightschool. 

The Nightschool is a school for the "night kind", vampires, werewolves, shifters, witches (known as weirns), and other mystical creatures go to school. Much like Vampire Knight, the night school is separate from the day school---where normal human children go to school---in order to keep the two worlds from colliding. We meet Alex, a young weirn who is currently homeschooled by her sister, and has a few secrets of her own. Alex's sister, Sarah, takes on a new position as the Nightschool's night hall monitor, which means she keeps the human world from colliding with the Nightschool world. One night, Sarah is led into a strange stairway in the school, and then vanishes. Alex tried desperately to figure out what happened to her sister, but no one at the school knows who Sarah was. Realizing that the answers lie in the Nightschool, Alex enrolls herself into the school in order to get closer to those who had last seen her sister.

Volumes 2-4 finds Alex struggling to get the answers she needs to find her sister, while finding out that not everyone at the school is what they seem. She finds some unlikely help in some of the student council members, who appear to remember who her sister was. Everyone seems to have some sort of secret they are trying hard to keep hidden from others. There is also another story line going on that seems to be unrelated to the tragedy of Alex and Sarah. A very powerful magic teacher, who teaches Hunters to control the fragile treaty between the different Night Kinds and humans, is out searching for a powerful being that hurt three of his students. That powerful being, we met in Volume 1... as Alex? Alex stumbles upon the Hunters training, and through a bit of misunderstanding, she "attacks" the Hunters with a level of power she never knew she had. The Hunters are searching for a powerful, ancient being... but it was just Alex... right? How are Alex and this being connected? But as the volumes continue on we see that the two story lines are really more intertwined than we thought. We also learn that there is more to Alex than we thought before. Through a lot of twists and turns and digging deeper in to the secrets of the school, we slowly learn what greater forces are at work, pulling sisters apart and threatening to spread out into the world beyond the Nightschool.

I thoroughly enjoyed this series. It was a quick and to the point, which is refreshing in the manga world. A lot of times mangas tend to drag on and on with extra side stories, or "filler" volumes that tend to detract from the main story at hand (Naruto, anyone? I think that series just went into the upper 50s for volume count! Oh, and One Piece just released volume seventy-one.). But this manga is concise and very short---only 4 volumes for this series (unless there's more out there hiding) which makes it a true pleasure to read. The artwork is beautiful, as mentioned before, and adds so much to the story. I highly recommend to picking up the first volume just to get a taste for the art and story telling.

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Nightschool by Svetlana a good solid 6. If you like manga's and want something that isn't overly dramatic and lovey-dovey, I would certainly give Nightschool a try.