I’ve had this manga for a couple of years now and I picked it up once before, but ended up putting it back down again. I decided to pick it up now because I had some time between books and I thought, it’s finally time. With this one, I actually watched the movie adaptation of the book and I loved it so much and that’s what led me to get the manga version. You may be thinking, why the manga and not the book? Well what’s weird is, that although I enjoyed the movie tremendously, I felt like the story itself could of just been a standalone and so I had no intention of reading the whole series. Therefore, I thought that the manga would be a great, quick and easy way to essentially ‘experience’ the film again. But unfortunately, I was heavily disappointed.
This manga just didn’t work for me at all, I felt really bored throughout and not even the artwork added much to the story. I just couldn’t get into it properly as it was just so confusing in this manga form. I think that there was simply too much to this story to be able to translate it that well into a manga. Things felt very choppy, and chapters and scenes in general, seemed to end rather abruptly, which heightened this disconnect I was feeling. I don’t think that this was necessarily bad, it just didn’t interest me and that’s why it got such a low rating. I know that there’s only so much that you can show in a manga, but everything felt like it happened way too fast and the relationship between the two main characters was victim of the insta-love trap. This is probably what disappointed me the most, because Ethan and Lena’s relationship was my favourite thing about the movie. Maybe the actors just did an outstanding job at playing them, because Ethan didn’t have a personality in this manga, but I still quite liked Lena.
Usually when a story isn’t holding its weight in a manga, the artwork will swoop in to save the day. However, in this case I wasn’t that crazy about the artwork either, from style to colour palette. I didn’t hate the artwork though, but with such a minimalistic colour scheme it didn’t do anything for me. What made this even more noticeable/frustrating was that for some reason the first 4 or so pages of the manga was in full colour and I liked it a lot. But after that it was just variations of black and white, I’m not entirely sure why this shift was done, as it seemed quite random, unless I’m missing something that this change was meant to symbolise.
Ultimately, I think that in this case the movie was far better than the written work. The manga didn’t allow for personalities to truly show and didn’t quite capture the magic and the darkness of the visual offering. I will say that perhaps if I’d not watched the film beforehand, I would of enjoyed this because I wouldn’t of had such high expectations. I’m actually a little sad that I didn’t like this more.