Basilisk by Futaro Yamada and Masaki Segawa (amazon)

Basilisk is one of Del Rey’s manga for mature readers. It is printed at a larger size than the typical manga volume and costs $13.95. When I first heard about it, people were saying the plot was like “Romeo and Juliet with warring ninja clans” and that was enough to make me want to check out the first volume.

The Iga and Kouga ninja clans have fought for years, but hostilities have been kept in check due to a truce arranged by Hattori Hanzo. The clans are about to be brought even closer together, as Oboro (Iga) and Gennosuke (Kouga) have fallen in love and are engaged to be married. The young lovers are not going to have an easy time getting together, because the Tokugawa Shogun has decided to dissolve the truce and pit the ninja clans against each other to determine who will become the next Shogun.

The leaders of both clans are happy to dissolve the truce, and they are both issued a scroll that serves as a hit list of 10 clan members and documentation of the contest. They promptly destroy each other, and other clan members try to grab the scrolls and head back to home base to preserve the chance that they might keep the opposing clan unaware of the contest. Oboro and Gennosuke are unaware of the forces that are going to tear them apart, as Gennosuke visits his fiance’s Iga clan household.

The art in Basilisk is interesting, Segawa uses a lot of tone and grey shading. Sometimes characters will be outlined in white, making them pop against the dark forest backgrounds where most of the fighting takes place. Many panels of the manga looked like black and white animation cells, and the fight scenes were very dynamic. Both clans have members whose ninja abilites have deformed and warped their bodies. I haven’t seen a fight scene where a person’s tongue served as a deadly weapon before.

My only complaint about the manga is that Oboro and Gennosuke seemed bland. Oboro is sweet, but a little clumsy. I kept hoping that as a hereditary leader of her clan, she’d be able to unleash some sort of awesome ninja power but I haven’t seen any sign of it yet. I’m hoping that they’ll be able to display a little more personality in later volumes as they become aware of the ninja contest raging around them.

As I was reading Basilisk, I started adding up the casulties in my head - 10 members of each clan are on the kill lists, and the first volume had an impressive body count. I figured that the series couldn’t be very long, and I was right. It looks like Basilisk is a 5 volume series. Some of the ninja battles seemed fairly typical of what you’d expect from a fighting manga. The art is interesting, and I’m hoping that the second volume makes me care a little bit more about the fate of Oboro and Gennosuke. Del Rey’s production work on the manga is great, although there were a few pages where some of the details of the art got lost in the binding.

Oh! Welcome Back, Love Manga!!!