Masayuki Takano

After the somewhat promising volume 4, the series has gone back to being mediocre. Each chapter is basically a separate story, which is, I think, how I'll tackle my review.

Chapter 1 wrapped up the enormous flashback that was volume 4. I was very disappointed with how all of this ended. I had expected that it would go on long enough to show the moment when Misaki was turned into a vampire, but apparently volume 4's big, bad vampire was not the one responsible for turning her. In fact, a later chapter revealed that her maker is still out there somewhere, and that he could use her against Kuroe. I sense enormous angst in this series' future.

Chapter 2 was a cutesy little story about Misaki being afraid of thunder. Kuroe was planning on leaving to get some work done, and Misaki wanted him to stay but was reluctant to tell him why. This was disgustingly cute and would probably have worked better for me if it hadn't contributed to this series' general problem of not knowing what it wants to be. The entire previous volume was a darker vampire story, and yet this chapter was very much slice-of-life cuteness. Misaki really is the most useless vampire ever.

My other issue with the second chapter was that I couldn't erase the first three volumes and Misaki's enormous crush on Kuroe from my mind. This volume made little-to-no mention of Misaki's crush on Kuroe, and Kuroe's treatment of Misaki was primarily fatherly. Still, I couldn't help but think of how Misaki was probably taking Kuroe's efforts to calm her down (sitting her on his lap and telling her to listen to his heartbeat instead of the thunder). Those first three volumes ruined my ability to see Kuroe and Misaki as a cute adoptive father and daughter pair.

In Chapter 3, Misaki stumbled across a mysterious antique shop that appeared to have a magical mirror. The shopkeeper let her take it home, telling her that it was the “Mirror of Returned Love” and would only show a person's reflection when they peered into it with their one true love by their side. Misaki, of course, wanted to try it out with Kuroe. This one was just weird. Again, Misaki is the worst vampire ever, and I'm amazed that her maker hasn't managed to find her and capture her yet. The owner of that antique store was incredibly shady. This chapter, like chapter 2, was more cutesy fluff than anything. It also once again reminded readers of Misaki's crush on Kuroe, since the ending basically boiled down to “Misaki doesn't need someone else to tell her that Kuroe is her one true love, because she knows it in her heart.”

In Chapter 4, Misaki felt melancholy after drinking her monthly glass of blood, but Kuroe's presence was able to cheer her up again. This story was basically pointless, beyond telling me that Misaki does fine with just a single glass of blood a month. Throughout most of the series so far, the only evidence of Misaki's vampiric nature have been this bit of blood-drinking, her inability to go outside during the day, her occasional vampire fangs, and the one moment at the beginning of the series when her Straruda (vampiric power, which manifests as a separate personality) took over. Other than those things, she's mostly been an ordinary little girl.

In Chapter 5, a mysterious man kept hitting on Misaki, setting off all of Kuroe's “stranger danger” warning bells. Misaki thought he was worrying too much, right up until the moment when she was kidnapped. Another pointless story. True, Kuroe got a chance to demonstrate a few of his abilities, which I now know came directly from his teacher, but all danger evaporated the instant things started to get serious.

This is the last of the volumes I recently got via interlibrary loan. I suppose I could request volume 6 in order to read everything that was translated into English, but I don't know that I'm interested enough. Five volumes in, and Blood Alone still feels unfocused.

Extras:

- A 5-page illustrated story, character, and terminology guide. While I thought the inclusion of this info was a good idea, especially since I had to check Takano's vampire terminology several times while reading the last chapter, I wish that the terminology section hadn't included illustrations. The clutter made it that much harder to find the info I needed.

- Three full-page illustrations, which I assume were originally in color (one of them is the cover illustration). Unfortunately, here they're in black-and-white, and a lot of detail is lost.

- An 8-page preview of Dracula Everlasting.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (mer)

In this volume, Blood Alone morphs into an action and cleavage filled vampire manga. It begins with Misaki watching out for some random kid while Kuroe is off searching for the kid's mother. No explanation is given for this case, and the volume never returns to it, because it's primarily intended to lead to the volume's true focus, Kuroe and Misaki's past. Misaki complains about the kid's behavior, Kuroe jokingly says that Misaki used to be worse, and suddenly we have a flashback to several years in the past, when Misaki was still human and Kuroe was a vampire hunter.

I had thought Kuroe worked alone, but he actually had a well-endowed partner named Jessie, who provided maybe 80% of the volume's cleavage. Jessie was Misaki's caretaker when Misaki's father was away, so after Jessie was injured during a hunt she sent Kuroe to temporarily take care of Misaki. They had a rough start, but Kuroe soon won Misaki over. Unfortunately, Kuroe was at a point in his life when he was resistant to using the powers that the vampire who took his sister left him with, and his hesitation meant trouble for both him and Misaki.

I can't say that this volume had anything fresh and new, but it was definitely more interesting that most of the previous three volumes. I had been wanting to see how Misaki and Kuroe got to where they were in the present, and Takano delivered.

Although this volume was refreshingly free of the usual “Misaki loves Kuroe” stuff, it was easy to see how she ended up fixated on him. He was her knight in shining armor, there when she needed him, even if his issues resulted in her becoming a vampire (I'm assuming, since it hasn't happened yet). I just wish that, in the earlier volumes, Takano hadn't depicted that fixation as a sweet romance readers were supposed to root for.

The introduction of Jessie in this volume was a little confusing, because it seemed like she was important to both Misaki and Kuroe and yet she was never mentioned in the previous three volumes. The way Misaki acted, you'd think Jessie had never existed and that Kuroe had always been her caretaker while her father was away. Jessie was, like I said, the source of most of the volume's cleavage shots. She sometimes used her sex appeal to her advantage when dealing with men, but there were a few panels that were 100% reader titillation. That's really the only explanation for the scene with her talking to Kuroe on the phone while dressed in a nightie - I'm still not sure where it fit in the volume's timeline, since I had thought she was talking to the Scotland Yard guy at that time, dressed in an outfit that opened clear to her navel.

This volume also introduced Chloe, the magician who had been Kuroe's teacher. I was a little confused when she said that she and Kuroe had the same name, and then I remembered that this was originally in Japanese and that the pronunciation of their names would have been the same. Chloe was...not what I expected. When I flipped through the volume after first getting it via ILL, I assumed that she was both a vampire and Kuroe's enemy, what with her floor-length cloak and the hat that hid her eyes. And also her habit of mercilessly smacking Kuroe around. She was not amused by his resistance towards using his powers.

Story-wise, this was more like what I was hoping for when I first began the series – vampire politics, clashes between vampires and vampire hunters, and Misaki caught in the middle. It's too bad that it took this long for the series to start to become more interesting, and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable return of Misaki's romantic feelings for (or, more accurately, fixation on) Kuroe.

Extras:

- A glossary of vampire-related terminology used in the series. I only just now noticed that it's in not-quite-alphabetical order. It bothers me that "Adevaraht Kurai" is listed after "Aruta" and not "Absorbire" and that "Sinacolda" is listed after "Straruda."

- A 14-page preview of Amazing Agent Jennifer.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (mer)

I reread this so that I could read the next volume in the series and have a fresher memory of what had already happened. I'm rereviewing it because 1) my reviewing style has changed since I first reviewed this back in 2011 and 2) I'm even less impressed with it now than I was back then.

Blood Alone is an odd mix of vampire, crime, and sweet slice-of-life manga. The main characters in the omnibus are Misaki and Kuroe. Misaki is a young vampire - I don't think her age was stated, but I've seen guesses that range anywhere from 10 to 12, which is kind of horrifying when you consider how much of this omnibus focuses on Misaki's crush on Kuroe. Kuroe is a young man (maybe in his mid-to-late 20s?) who used to hunt vampires after one kidnapped his sister and possibly turned her. Now, though, he spends most of his time taking care of Misaki, writing, and doing occasional work as a private investigator. He seems to do everything from finding missing pet cats to tracking down serial killers, and his eyes are magically immune to trickery.

Misaki and Kuroe are aided by Sainome, Higure, and several others. Sainome was the daughter of the doctor who took care of Kuroe's sister, and she has the ability to see the last few minutes of a deceased person's life when she touches them. She often encourages Misaki's crush on Kuroe, while also being attracted to him herself. Higure looks to be about the same age as Misaki, but he's actually a much older and more powerful vampire. He acts as a sort of vampire mentor for Misaki.

I'll start with the good. The artwork was nice, although a bit bland, and Takano did an excellent job of creating a softer, gentler mood during the slice-of-life/romantic chapters. I was also intrigued by the characters' histories and by the bits and pieces of information about the vampire world that Kuroe seemed to have mostly shielded Misaki from.

Now for the bad. This omnibus volume was incredibly boring. As I said in my first review, it was not encouraging that it took Takano three volumes to accomplish so little. Part of me wishes Takano had cut out most of the cutesie slice-of-life/romantic stuff and spent more time focusing on the darker drama involving Kuroe's past, his sister's disappearance, and the events that led to Misaki becoming a vampire and being made Kuroe's responsibility. However, I suspect this would just have drawn attention to Takano's inability to draw truly exciting and dynamic action scenes.

An enormous amount of time was spent on scenes and stories intended to make Misaki and Kuroe look like a cute, bumbling young couple. Misaki was the adorable little princess who couldn't cook, agonized over Valentine's Day chocolates for Kuroe, worried about him if he wasn't there when she woke up, and lovingly stored the dress she wore on her and Kuroe's first “date.” Kuroe was laid-back, oblivious (he was supposedly unaware that both Sainome and Misaki liked him), and devoted enough to Misaki that he'd apparently put his goal of finding his sister again on a back burner for her, if not abandoned it entirely.

I was more tolerant of this during my first reading of this omnibus volume. Now, though, I look at this and all I can see is just how much time (maybe two thirds of the volume?) Takano spent establishing Misaki and Kuroe as very nearly a romantic couple, one that readers were supposed to root for and that even Sainome was sort of supporting. Kuroe was supposedly oblivious, and yet I don't see how he could have missed what was going on, especially after Misaki did things like try to use her vampiric powers to get him to give her a kiss. I don't know if it's that I'm a few years older, but this aspect of the series was so much more off-putting this time around.

In my first review, I said something to the effect that this series wasn't Dance in the Vampire Bund level of ick, and I still mostly agree with that. Misaki wasn't sexualized the way Mina was (Higure, on the other hand...). Blood Alone's brand of ick has more in common with, say, something likeBunny Drop – a sweet slice-of-life series about a man who suddenly has to raise a little girl...a girl who, as she grows up, falls in love with him, and who he eventually marries despite his insistence that he has always seen her as his daughter (I know all of this from spoilers, and it's one of the primary reasons why I'll probably never read the manga, despite having enjoyed the anime).

I'll read the next couple volumes since they've come in on interlibrary loan, but rereading this has made me more confident about my decision to finally offload it. That, and I noticed that even Seven Seas abandoned this series, releasing only the first six volumes.

Extras:

- A 1-page glossary of vampire-related terminology used throughout the volume.

- A page of translator's notes.

- 4 pages of artwork that might have been cover art. Unfortunately, all of it is in black-and-white, so details are hard to make out.

- 8 pages of introductory information (characters, premise) for Vampire Cheerleaders.

- A 12-page preview of Gunslinger Girl.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (mer)