Glass Wings Vol.#01

By: Julie Rosato
Review Date: Saturday, February 04, 2006
Release Date: Tuesday, March 07, 2006



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Misuzu Asaoka
Translated by:Emi Onishi
Adapted by:

What They Say
Fragile souls and tragic fates collide in these haunting, gothic stories…

In this collection, a boy struggles with a dreaded affliction that comes between him and his true love; an orphan has the power to take on the sickness of others; a disfigured boy confronts the inner conflict between his need to survive and his desire to love.

In an uncompromising blend of magic and realism, Glass Wings reveals love’s capacity to overcome all obstacles and to replenish the human spirit in the direst of times.

The Review
This trio of tragic romances tries to illustrate the transcendent power of love but fails to deliver a truly emotional impact.

Packaging:
TOKYOPOP uses the original cover image of Hagane, but places it over a slightly altered background. The title logo has been redone using a sort of gothy-stylized lettering, mimicking the look of both glass and wings. The color schemes and accents compliment each other very well and make this a very attractive cover overall. The picture itself is fairly indicative of the art style found inside. There aren’t any freetalk sidebars or color plates in this book but there is a postscript section at the end. Ads for other TOKYOPOP properties close of the book.

Artwork:
The artwork features typical shoujo stylings with a goth-loli twist. There are lots of details in the clothes and a huge reliance on tones for shading, characters have cute faces with big eyes, and there’s plenty of long hair flowing every which way. There is a fair bit of violence and blood depicted here but it isn’t particularly gory. The action scenes are a little hard to follow, though this is in part due to layout, which is just all over the place. The pages are often very busy between the richly-detailed character art and the panels of all sizes crammed in everywhere, making things feel very rushed. There is very little room left for backgrounds though they are present when needed. Art reproduction is the typical standard for TOKYOPOP, but with such delicate line detail and the amount of tones used in every panel I think the work suffers a bit for it.


SFX/Text:
The translation reads pretty well overall. While I didn’t notice any text errors, there were occasionally some awkwardly-phrased narratives. There are a few curse words sprinkled throughout the book, but nothing generally inappropriate for the “teen” age-rating. The SFX have not been translated, other than the instances where they were already inside text bubbles. With so many of the sound effects integral to the artwork, overlaying would not have been a feasible option, but there are a number of scenes where a footnoted translation would have helped my understanding of the action a great deal.

Contents:(please note that the following may contain spoilers)
The book contains three short stories, with the titular work encompassing three chapters and the remainder only one chapter each.

Glass Wings is a bizarre tale of true love featuring a brother and sister with “Death Blood” – a poisoned blood that kills anyone who gets touched by it. The story opens over a grave where Hagane, unable to make sense of his cursed life after he accidentally kills a young girl, is about to commit suicide. He’s stopped by a woman named Tsubaki who claims to be in love with him. She brings Hagane to her home, but there he meets a young girl named Ruriha and they fall in love at first sight. This romantic triangle comes with a twist (or several) - not only is Ruriha his sister, but Tsubaki is his mother, and their lineage is cursed with loving only those of the same bloodline. What follows is Hagane and Ruriha’s (often near-fatal) struggle to break free from Tsubaki’s control in hopes of finding true love with each other. Together they fight their cursed instincts, face doubts and fears, and confront the demons of their pasts, all to preserve and protect the warmth of their love.

Firefly is about Yuinne, a sort of demon boy who must eat corpses to survive. He apparently feels great anguish at having to feed off the dead, and in particular, having to kill anything just so that he may live. He runs away from his tribe and ends up befriended by a Mia, village girl who finds him in the woods. Angst ensues as her sermons on unconditional love and acceptance remind him of the warmth he craves but is incapable of achieving. When it becomes apparent that he is being pursued by another demon, Yuinne knows he must leave to ensure the safety of Mia and her village. Before he can, however, the villagers find out his secret they turn on him. Mia intervenes to save him but ends up dead. Yuinne is dismayed but her parting words purify him, giving him the resolve to keep living, trying to reach the place in his heart where warmth and happiness reside.

Jion Princess is a story about two girls – a princess named Yura and Soyogi, an orphaned look-alike who serves as a vessel to capture the sickness and bad luck that would otherwise plague Yura. Soyogi absolutely lives for Yura, despite the horrid treatment and abuse she suffers for being something “less than human.” The two girls are separated for a while when Yura leaves for a monastery. Abused terribly in her absence, Soyogi eventually craves nothing more than to see Yura one last time and die peacefully. When Yura returns she is unnaturally kind to Soyogi. Unaccustomed to such treatment (and no doubt a little crazy), Soyogi withdraws violently from Yura and, while fleeing, ends up falling through a window to her death. Yura, as it turns out, had actually truly loved Soyogi and cries for her death. The remorse that Yura feels finally gives peace to Soyogi and brings their two hearts together.

Comments
Short stories, by their very nature, are both blessed and cursed with having to tell a lot of tale in few pages. Unfortunately, too much about this book moves too fast, and with too little emotional impact. The title work, which made up half the book, was the weakest of the three and by the end of the book I’d largely forgotten it – not a good sign. While each story managed to do some things alright, they all tried to do too much. Frankly, this book suffers the flaw found in so many of these quasi-goth, forbidden/tragic love types: More attention to the rich, lush art than the details of the story.

All three stories center on the theme of redemption through love and the intent is show how this can change a person. But rather than move me, these stories left me lukewarm at best. The fantastical-horror angle made them un-relatable and the tragic ends lost their affect without the time needed to develop concern for the characters. “Firefly” and “Jion Princess” actually read like good pilot episodes - both could have potential for a decent story if expanded to a length more fitting - but “Glass Wings” tried to tackle too many competing themes (freedom, revenge, redemption, fragility, purity, punishment, the list goes on) and as such mostly lost its narrative. It also would have been a lot stronger if it had moved forward on the themes explored in the second chapter, as the two faced their personal demons, rather than revisit the disjointed Tsubaki plotline again in the third.

Unimpressed by the content, I really wanted this book to redeem itself through artwork. For the most part it did, as on its own it’s really quite pretty with its haunting mix of the fanciful and violent (I found it somewhat reminiscent of styles found in Angel Sanctuary), but the crammed pages made it hard to enjoy the character detail and almost impossible to appreciate the various emotional dynamics. I’ll also admit to being largely distracted by the hands in this book; I’m not normally so picky about them, but for all the attention paid to everything else, they are really inconsistently (and sometimes quite poorly) drawn. It seems silly to say now, but they became really difficult for me to overlook while reading.

In general I laud the licensing of short story/anthology collections such as this one, as their market is woefully untapped. While this book failed to really deliver for me, I’m still glad to see these kinds of books published, and the subject matter may at least attract a few readers. Actually, I suspect that the teen audience this book is aimed at will probably find a lot to like in the pretty artwork and tragic symbolic romances, but readers looking for a strong story may wish to pass on this collection.