Judas Vol. #01

By Jarred Pine     October 11, 2006
Release Date: October 01, 2006



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Suu Minazuki
Translated by:Nan Rymer
Adapted by:Jay Antani

What They Say
Judas, cursed for his sins, is the spirit of Death--he is without form, and has enslaved young Eve to carry out the most heinous of acts. Together in spirit and body, they must slay 666 people so that Judas can regain his humanity.

Using Eve as his vessel of destruction, the dark, blood-soaked journey will leave a trail of sin, death, and--hopefully for Judas--redemption.

Salvation may be at hand, but now is the time for prayer...

The Review
Who knew that blasphemous seinen manga could be so utterly boring?

Packaging:
Not surprisingly, TOKYOPOP creates their own cover for this release, as I imagine the very racy Japanese original was too much for US bookstores. It doesn't speak much about the title and I think tries to force it into the "Horror" genre label that this book is placed under. For those wondering, the original cover is not included inside the book. The printing is okay, usually too dark and features a lot of muddiness that I noticed with some of TOKYOPOP's releases these days. There is also a slightly noticeable cropping issue on a few pages.

Art:
Artwork to me just feels like it was pulled straight out of a bishoujo/moe "How To" book with the standard action hero men thrown in for kicks. The action sequences are not very clean at all and most of the panels are headshots, with a spattering of background art. The last sequence in the book, however, is well put together in a cinematic fashion.

Text/SFX:
Once again, SFX are not translated in a TOKYOPOP release. The English script does a good job with the material it was given, keeping the Latin version of Kryie Elesion in tact with English subs and using margin notes to point out biblical quotes. Signs are also for the most part translated.

Contents (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Call it a guilty pleasure, but I always get a kick out of seeing manga/manwha make use of Western religious symbols, artifacts, and stories mixed into their own works to create a certain mood or aesthetic. In Suu Minazuki's Judas, the titular character is the spirit of Death who inhabits the body of a young boy, who Judas requires to dress up like a little girl and calls him Eve. (Only in manga, right? Keep reading, there's more to come.) Judas can't interact with the world unless it's through Eve, until Eve suffers a wound deep enough to draw blood and then appears to use Eve as a tool for Judas's execution of death. Judas's goal is to slay 666 people so that he can once again become human. It's quite the blasphemous setup for a blood-filled seinen title, but it's just too bad that the story writing is plagued with awkward transitions, plot devices galore, and fetish pandering.

Along the way, Judas and Eve meet up with two sixteen-year-old girls; one a big-breasted genius and the other a moe-licious loli. It doesn't take long before Minazuki has these two either taking their clothes off or trying on cosplay outfits, randomly inserted between scenes of bloodletting. The genius is used as a way to progress the story, using her supposedly infinite bag of tricks to figure things out. She can read medical journals and instantly "heal" people, hack into the DoD mainframes, or unleash a computer virus that will destroy the world.

The story plods along at a real uneven pace as well. One minute, Judas and Eve are sending some poor soul to the next world with some mystery about finding a paradise called "Eden", and the next they are sitting around in slapstick, pandering comedy bits that focus around some sort of perversion. The transitions can be quite jolting, with new information just thrown in ad-hoc to get the story moving. For example, our genius suddenly decides to investigate something called the "Holy Council", which up until that point hadn't been mentioned once. It all just makes for a very uneven and frustrating read by book's end.

Comments
To put it gently, this first volume of Judas is a bit of a mess. There's a lack of focus, too much time wasted pandering, and the uneven story writing makes for a discombobulating experience. The amount of plot devices to move the uninteresting story along is staggering as well. Who knew that blasphemous seinen manga could be so utterly boring?