By Makoto Tateno
Digital Manga Publishing, 158 pp.
Rating: 16+

Sowil is unique in the area he lives in: he is a kind of magician, a valuable profession in a land prone to plague, barrenness, and cursed living in general. At the beginning of the story, Sowil sticks his neck out to save two young girls named Allueh and Erudite who were being buried alive in a small town as a kind of anti-curse measure. Sowil travels with the twins and finds that they only speak when they are channeling angels or demons; Allueh speaks for angels, and Erudite speaks for demons. Sowil frequently converses with the likes of Michael and Mammon through the little girls, and the demons and angels also speak to one another through the girls. Sowil is much more than a magician, though, and the higher powers take an interest in him since he uses runes for his magic, an ancient, forgotten technique unknown to even angels and demons. Sowil looks to be the only person in the world who can use it, but he travels in hopes of finding his father, who is mysteriously unknown but may also be able to use the magic.

I’m late to the Makoto Tateno party. She’s fairly popular for her BL work like Yellow and Hero Heel, and DMP has also published a number of her other series. I was honestly not looking forward to this and was expecting something vaguely yaoi-light, despite the DMP designation for the book, but I was surprised to find the book was completely divorced from the romance genre and was more of a fantasy/adventure story, and an excellent one at that.

The non-threatening guidance from angels and demons being channeled by little girls, while it sounds potentially terrible, is one of the book’s strongest points, and I loved how the advice was integrated into the story and shaped events, and how Sowil took into consideration and balanced the advice on both sides and came to his own conclusions about who to follow. Most of the advice is about direction, but the setups for the episodic chapters also tend to be riddles or puzzles posed by either the angels or demons. I also liked that both sides seem to have as much knowledge to gain from the journey as Sowil, since both want to find out more about his rune powers.

Sowil himself is a nice guy and an easy hero to follow, someone who is humble about his awesome but not overdone power, and yet not an underdog that miraculously pulls off feats that we are meant to admire. He is merely a man on a journey who periodically helps people out along the way.

The series’ biggest flaw at this point is its episodic nature. Each chapter is so far a monster-of-the-week-type situation, where the girls lead Sowil to a task that needs solving or a place that may need saving, and Sowil investigates and does his thing. I love the plot of the series, but was a little frustrated by these side trips by the end of the book. The plot does move forward with every chapter, if only a little bit, but I felt like a tremendous amount of time was being wasted on these side trips when Sowil could be catching hints about his father, or encountering more direct clues about what it is that he’s looking for. We even get a bland villain by the last chapter who promises to come back, something I’m not looking forward to.

There’s a strong plot and likable characters in this series, and while it’s definitely worth picking up for fans of fantasy, I do hope it sheds its monster-of-the-week pattern within the next volume or two.

Volume one of Angelic Runes is available now.