Godchild: Volume One

By: Nadia Oxford
Review Date: Thursday, October 05, 2006

Our earliest contact with language often comes in the reading and reciting of Nursery Rhymes, many of which are hundreds of years old and have been handed down from generation to generation. Nursery Rhymes, with their simple words and patterns, may be favoured by children, but within the rhyme there's often recollection if disaster, disease and dark history. The power of such early wordplay stays with authors and forms the foundations for classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Artist and writer Kaori Yuki uses similar children's stories and rhymes to tell the stories within Godchild, a manga published by Viz Media. Cain, a young nobleman, leads a slightly twisted life as an earl in London. Surrounding him is a world of aristocratic murder and intrigue, where killers wear White Rabbit masks and Crooked Houses on Crooked Lanes house Crooked inhabitants indeed. Cain usually gets tangled up unwillingly in the business, unraveling the murder plots to protect his friends, his half-sister, and his very reputation.

Volume one of Godchild contains four "chapters", each one based on a children's story or rhyme. The stories are self-contained, but at the same time offer threads of a mystery that's overall bigger and more tangled, including "Black Sheep," a "flashback" chapter revealing bits of Cain's mysterious past.

The stories offered in volume one are interesting, if not occasionally a little cliché (Lewis Carroll's stories are a prime breeding ground for literary madmen and serial murder--and they've been visited often). The art is very pretty, with gothic architecture and costumes abound. The characters, particularly Cain, can use some humanity, however. "Bishounen"--pretty boys--are a staple of shojo manga, but while character art might subscribe to certain stereotypes, characters themselves don't necessarily have to. Cain has the odd-coloured eyes that are typical for manga boys of his breed. He's a heart-breaker who makes ladies swoon with one-liners that would send real girls into fits of laughter. He can solve mysteries as easily as herons flip fish out of a lake. He has an evil father who may or may not be dead, an evil half-brother whom he's conflicted about, and a cloud of pain and gloom surround him--when no-one else is looking, of course.

It's not to say Cain doesn't have interesting character traits as well. His obsession with drugs and poisons is not something a "good" protagonist has often, and he's not afraid to put his knowledge to use. He's fiercely protective of his younger half-sister, Mary Weather, and his obsessive nature is reflected back upon him in the story of "The Little Crooked House," arguably the manga's most interesting chapters.


It would just be nice of these kinds of heroes realised they didn't have to be so goshdarn suave every second of the day. Regardless, if dark storytelling and gothic art appeals to you, or if you're a fan of Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary, take a look at Godchild.