Ranked #2113

Blue Heaven (Manga)

This manga is a fast and easy read. At a slim 3 volumes, the story begins quickly and the pace never slackens. A cruise ship performs a rescue mission on a small abandoned boat and finds all but two of the crewmembers dead. Once these two crewmembers are brought onboard the cruise ship, all hell starts to break loose. The “how” and the “why” are best left unspoiled.

Stories that adhere to a single plot and stay on point are somewhat rare in manga, so this is very painful to say, but Blue Heaven feels somewhat rushed. So much happens in the span of these three volumes, and part of you will want to spend more time with these characters once it’s all over. However, if this were a 35 volume epic about a cruise ship that slowly succumbs to total depravity, you can bet that it would never be licensed, and scanlations would be stuck at around volume 26 or so. So at the end of the day, while this is a short piece, that fact works for it more than it works against it.

The art style if fantastic, which should come as no surprise if you're familiar with Tsutomu Takahashi's other work. The scruffy and sketchy characters that populate this story look cool, and fit into the grim milieu perfectly. If this were an American comic, the fantastic illustration would have been butchered with poor-quality digital coloring, or even worse, high-quality digital coloring that would undo the brooding atmosphere entirely.

If you're any kind of fan of seinen, check this out. It's a solid story, and if it disappoints at all, it’s because there isn’t more of it.
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