Sorry it's been a bit. Things have been heavy here.
I am absolutely loving this series. The art, the story, everything is just great. Turm Garten is a terrifying character. The attention to character development in the series is really great. Ostensible foe Kaieda is revealed as a multi-faceted individual, as are Mai, her dad, her protectors and friends, and even some of the henchfolk (just finished A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix. Henchfolk.). The immersion into the setting that this accomplishes is utterly brilliant, giving us the sense of a world that is far less black and white than the usual super-powered narratives of North American comics. Though Turm is evil as fuck, no two ways about it.
I was mentioning to Tara the other day the amazing amount of visual background detail in the series, as compared to the relatively-stylized depictions of the characters. McCloud's iconic abstraction, and other theorizations of that, hold up here. We identify with a detailed and realistic setting, since that's literally what we live in. And although the characters are all visually distinct, they're not drawn photorealistically like the backgrounds, so we are more able to layer ourselves over top of them.
I find myself in a situation that has happened a couple of times during the project where I'll finish reading an issue and I know I have the whole series in the collection, so I just want to devour it because it's so compelling. The fact that I haven't is really a testament to my newfound powers of patience. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. But if you want to read an excellent tale of psychic young women and the men who fool themselves into thinking they have control, check out this story. Not sure if it's been collected, but it was pretty easy, and cheap, to find all 28 issues.
"If you obey me, we will surely become good friends!"
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