Nephylym might just be the manga that proves once and for all that all the good shonen manga powers are already taken.
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Rei Kusakabe
Translation: Stephen Paul
Adaptation: Gayle Tan
What They Say
Shun has a unique power to electrically charge metal materials. A mysterious winged angel-like being named Air picks up on his powers and chooses him to become her partner, thus enhancing Shun's powers. Shun soon finds out that his classmate Sanari, who he has a crush on, also has a winged angel partner of her own, named Blissful. She explains to Shun that these beings are called Nephylym, and they chose suitable humans to be their "Answerers" to help them purify evil elements (Noirs). Together with Sanari and Tsukasa (Shun's rival in love and an Answerer as well), they battle alongside their nephylym against Noirs that possess human beings.
The Review!
Packaging:
DrMaster has put together another nicely packaged release with Nephylym. The book features a sharp-looking glossy color cover with French flaps; the cover artwork, featuring Shun restraining Air for some reason, is attractive and richly colored (and, sadly, probably by far the best thing this release has to offer artistically). Inside the covers, there's one page of full-color artwork and a color table-of-contents, with respectably printed oversized black-and-white artwork for the rest.
A two-page omake chapter is included as an extra.
Artwork:
Nephylym's artwork is generic at best, and amateurish at worst. There's something horribly off about the way Kusakabe poses characters and draws them in relation to each other; at more than one point, it looked like Air and Sanari were suffering from dislocated shoulders. Different layers of artwork are clumsily smashed together without much regard for proper perspective: the Nephylym especially seemed to change size so often that I gave up trying to figure out how big they were actually supposed to be.
On top of everything, the character designs are hopelessly generic, so not even the competently drawn parts look all that good. The most positive thing I can say about the way Nephylym is drawn is that parts are passable.
Text/SFX:
The English translation reads fine, at least in terms of grammar and overall flow. Japanese SFX are translated inline, sometimes by replacing the existing lettering and other times by putting English lettering alongside the Japanese FX.
Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Nyphylym's hero Shun has three basic things in common with almost every other high school male lead in the action manga universe. First, he's embarrasingly inept at handling his crush on a female classmate. Second, he's got a special power that, when fined honed, can be used to ward off attackers and inevitably take on some Unspeakable Evil Force. Except in Shun's case, his superpower is even more unassuming that of most of his peers: his incredible skill, the one thing that he can do better than anyone else in the world, is zapping his enemies with static electricity.
No, really. Static electricity. The English script uses those exact words, in case you think I'm kidding.
The third trope that Nephylym shamelessly plays with is that Shun's full potential is unlocked only after a chance encounter with his new sidekick: in his case, a pint-sized angel named Air that tracks him down during the middle of school. (The very first thing that Shun notices about Air is that she's, in his own words, "a g-g-girl", which I think says a lot about our protagonist's personality.) Within a few more pages, the two conveniently run into a man being attacked by, umm, something -- the characters later call it a type of black crystal called Noir, but it doesn't look much like that on the page -- which Shun takes care of with his now-amplified zapping power.
Sanari, the target of Shun's awkward teenage crush, confronts him the next day at school with an explanation for what's happening to him. Basically, both she and Shun have been chosen to act as "Answerers" for the angelic Nephylym, making them glorified antennas for the Nephylyms' Noir-purifying powers. Sanari, Shun, Air, and Sanari's own Nephylym Bliss then spend the rest of the volume "purifying" people infested by the Noir; eventually, they're joined by a third Nephylym named Soleil and her Answerer Tsukasa Aoyagi, who's another of Shun's classmate and (groan) a rival for Shun's creepy affections for Sanari.
Comments:
Volume 1 of Nephylym seems to do very little right. On top of the poor artwork, the entire story so far is mind-numbingly derivative. I can overlook unoriginal plots up to a point, but I can't ignore it when not a single one of the characters involved in said plot is the least bit interesting -- especially not the Nephylym, who're completely disposable as plot devices and only seem to be there to be nauseatingly cute. It's never a good sign when it takes only a single chapter for me to completely lose interest in a brand new series.
And I'll keep my comments short, because that's basically all I need to say about this release. It has the style of writing where you can predict exactly where it's going whole chapters before the story gets there, which makes actually reading the whole thing an exercise in tedium. There are simply far better titles to put your hard-earned time and money into. Even for readers who're OK with manga that exist mainly to appeal to their sense of familiarity, the weak artwork makes this a tough recommendation.
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