Hidden at the Edge of the World: Seizon - Life

Eleven years ago, a manga (manga = Japanese comic and the source of 80% or so of anime (to make a somewhat accurate statistic up off the top of my head)) called Seizon - Life was created, and things that people would consider important happened too, but for today I'm paying attention to Seizon no matter how much my spell checker hates Japanese words.  When I first started to read this three volume series, I was expecting that it would take me three days to do so between getting distracted with the interwebs, eating, and various other activities which a psychologist would probably diagnose as some sort of silly disorder like anatidaephobia (for the curious, that's actually the fear that you are being watched by a duck, and not something I made up for once).  Instead, I found myself having slipped ninety minutes forward in time due to the mystic eastern art of reading three volumes of manga in one sitting.  Seizon was not just an entertaining read, but also stands as a good example to anyone who wishes to write for any type of graphical media of what to do in order to make your work at least 80% more goodererer.

As far as story is concerned, Seizon is a mystery seinen manga with psychological elements, and most of what I just said will need to be explained to some of yous peoples:

With the wordy explanations out of the way, let's talk about something Seizon does well: the telling of a story through a graphical media.  A common saying among those edumacated style writers is "Show, don't tell", and Seizon is one of the best examples of how to do this I have seen in comics or manga, which is all the more impressive since it isn't an action style story; though even a lot of action stories tend mess that up with dialog vomiting pages of exposition.  In the first ten pages no dialog bubble exceeds three words, and throughout the whole manga dialog boxes are one to two sentences in length at most, even in the more exposition heavy areas of the plot(and by that I mean short sentences and not four or five line near-rant run on sentences full of commas, semi-colons, colons, parentheses, and fully written out numbers, and usually all of these two or three times over, that may or mayn't be used in an appropriate manner, not that I would know anything about crafting such letter avalanches).  This gives the story a constant flow of sentences to go with the art in each of the panels without inserting the all too common word bomb style speech/thought bubbles.  Furthermore, no panel is a repeat, of the previous; even if it is just one person talking, the angle and posture will change between each frame helping convey the emotions and attitudes of the character speaking.  This method is very engaging and beats the hell out of the normal approach that mystery and psychological authors and artists tend to take of either making a one page portrait and filling it with several paragraphs of dialog, or copy and pasting the same picture into several panels, with small changes between them if the artist feels particularly creative, and filling those with large amounts of dialog, both of which makes for some fairly tedious reading if it's not well crafted.

The art of the series is by no means the best that I've ever seen in a comic or manga, but it does the job it needs to do and the style works quite well for Seizon's story and tone of writing.  To talk about it further:

The one issue I initially had with this manga was the use of the statue of limitations, which created a decent tension, but no sane country in the civilized world has a statute of limitations on murder.... or so I thought, but upon further research it turns out that Japan actually had one until May of this year (this year being 2011 for readers those readers looking at this as a past article, and time travelers) when it was abolished by the Japanese political types in what for all elected officials can only be seen as an exceedingly rare act of sanity and common sense.  With this new web granted knowledge, I now see this element of the plot as a good, topical, argument for why you shouldn't have a statute of limitations on murder; though that isn't something that should normally need to be argued among the sane, normal peoples of the world, of which Japan sometimes qualifies(very sometimes).

Since I've avoided using their proper names this whole time, here's a brief, and fairly useless, "About the":

If you're more interested in these two, I suggest you try using the Internets, if you somehow have access to it in this modern like era that still doesn't have hover boards (damned lying Back to the Future).

If you're the particularly observant kind of reader, you've probably noticed that I haven't talked about the extreme details of plot of Seizon yet, and I won't be doing that in this paragraph either.  The reason for this isn't the quality of the plot, as it's as well crafted as the rest of the book, or that it's particularly complex, as it's not that either, but because there isn't much else to say about the plot but the bit I mentioned about the statute of limitations above, and that it's a murder mystery with psychological elements set in year 2000ish Japan.  No other details would really serve any purpose other than to be word filler or pointless spoilers(it's a sled).

Seizon - Life, like most manga, was never licensed to be published in the United States, but American style language translations exist somewhere; though I certainly wouldn't know where to find it.