Kansen Rettou

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Upon seeing a few sample pages, I was really looking forward to reading this manga. After all, the art looked brilliant, the genres all fit my tastes and I love a quick read.

Unfortunately, in hindsight, the art turned out to be the only enjoyable thing about 'Kansen Rettou'. The detail adds impact to both the gruesome and the beautiful frames, but not quite enough to keep the mere seven chapters from seeming like dozens.

To be fair, the story isn't bad at all, it simply is what it is. If you've ever seen or read a single movie, anime, manga or book about a sudden ... unknown virus outbreak, then you know this whole story. There are a few small scenes that have a bit of emotional impact, but overall it feels like it's only going through the motions and following a familiar equation. Patient Zero --> Unknown Virus --> Uh oh! No Cure --> Lots of people die, etcetera and so on.


If you have nothing better to do and you don't expect anything spectacular going in, then give it a try, but if you're looking for interesting characters or something that grabs you and keeps you interested, I would look somewhere else.

Story:
Characterization is, more or less, thrown right out the window. This is very event based, and the first page makes that very clear. This is a 'what if' scenario of what may take place when a country is plagued with a new disease. Very lightly, it takes into account the struggles people will face and what surrounds them. However, the biggest issue is that the events that take place are incredibly limited by the scope of the antagonistic power. The only scale we get in respect to the world in Kansen Rettou is numbers telling us how much of the population carries this unknown virus. ... Beyond that, we don't learn the political conflicts, social struggles, or even the bare essentials to know what impact this has other than death.

Credit where credit is due, we do get a taste of some socio-economic shut-down in response to the disease, but it's very simple and doesn't get expanded on. The majority of this narrative is spent within the emergency room with screaming doctors left and right. Then there's a pause for 2 seconds for characters to say something with weight or value (met with a single or double page spread) and it really gets tiring.

The minor character arc that's within the narrative felt pretty cool, but like everything else, it's weighed down by emergency room horrors. Had this been 2 volumes to expand on some of the characterization, I think it's likely we would have found a real gem that pursues the conflict of an overwhelming death plague and the weight of carrying lives on your shoulders in the medical profession. Instead, what we get is a grotesque, borderline exploitation of a modern bubonic plague.


Art:
Masasumi has a signature fantasm to his work. It's gorgeous in all the right places, disgusting in the others. I never go used to seeing the sickly patients which was a surprise because of how much emergency room stuff is thrown in this. Since the narrative is limited to a hospital, the scenes get drawl and uninspiring and since there's so many single-double page spreads they start to lose their impact.

A lot of the worlds expansion, or impact of the disease, is limited to text overlaying a few panels of the ER, but what would have been great to see is a booming metropolis in the first few chapters and then a desolate artificial jungle in the last few chapters. Expanding the artistic paneling beyond the Hospital would have added a lot more realism. There's only one or two times this takes place, and I have to say I was a little disappointed by it.


Character:
Good enough. They play their parts and that's all they needed to do. Nobody 'jumps the shark' to save anyone, and nobody breaks character. There really isn't a lot here to discuss. There's a bit of characterisation but it's very minor and, man I can't stress this enough, suppressed by the ER sequences.


Enjoyment:
Boring but interesting. If anyone really wants to experience a strong narrative based on a realistic vision of a pervasive new disease, I'd direct you to Contagion. It's a movie that came out a few years ago that features an all-star cast and has everything that I hoped this would be. It's virtually the same narrative but with socio-economic conflicts, compelling character drama, and the unbelievable suffering of an incurable disease. Had I not seen that before, it's likely I would have enjoyed this narrative a little more. That said, I'm not disappointed in reading this. The artwork alone is quite enjoyable, and since it's only one volume I don't feel like I wasted my time.


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Within 24 hours of examining a patient presenting influenza symptoms, the patient dies from multiple-organ failure, followed by several others who have shown the same symptoms. Soon after, the mysterious virus quickly spreads across the country, and as the death toll rises, even the highly trained medical experts in Japan with all the most advanced medical technology available to them are at a loss over how what this virus is and how it spreads. Soon, the whole country goes into lock down trying to contain the virus as it continues to spread all over the world, doing whatever they can to further prevent it's spread ... within their own country.

Unfortunately as I was reading through this manga, it felt like the highlight reel or an edited down version of a much longer story, as it goes from scene to scene without much of a proper transition, making the pacing of the whole thing feel very rushed as it quickly takes the reader from situation to situation without stopping to give them some breathing room.

I'm assuming that the manga was trying to go for a breakneck speed to make you feel as tired as the scientists, politicians, as well as the population at large in the manga as they have to go through trying to find a cure for the virus as well as try to prevent it from spreading and have to watch the world around them suffer from something so awful, but it just feels like it still needed a few scenes to allow the manga to breath and give the reader a much needed break every so often as well as give a few of the characters a scene or two for the reader to get to know them better, even briefly, which could easily help reinforce just how much the characters have to hurry to prevent the spread of the virus.

At only one volume in length, the story might have been just too limited by it's short length, and probably should have been given another volume or at least another few chapters for it to not feel so rushed.

But the highlight of the manga is the art, done by Masasumi Kakizaki, who was also the author of the manga, as it really shines through, as it gives the manga some much needed weight to the situation that it's presenting. Masasumi Kakizaki's art is very visceral and detailed, and it really added some impact to seeing the effects of a large scale virus killing millions of people, as uncomfortable as it might be.

Kansen Rettou isn't my favorite out of Masasumi Kakizaki's work that I have read of his, and that's probably because it tried to bite off a bit more than it can chew with it's scale, especially since it ended up being so short, but with Masasumi Kakizaki's recognizable confronting art style, it does give what little there is some impact.