Story by Otsuichi, Art by Kendi Oiwa
Tokyopop, 232 pp.
Rating: Mature (18+)

For those of you who just couldn’t get enough of the adventures of Goth’s two outcast teens with a serial killer fetish, the manga adaption of Otsuichi’s may just be what you need. The manga adaption brings some new twists and turns to the tales that readers of the novel are already familiar with, helping to keep the content fresh and new.

If you’ve read my earlier review of the novel, then you already know the the premise: two teens, strange, cut off from their peers, but able to bond with each other due their rather morbid interests repeatedly stumble across and into the paths of bizarre serial killers. The basic plot remains the same in the manga, but Otsuichi and Oiwa alter several of the stories, tossing in some new twists and turns that weren’t present in the original tales, while at the same time excising several passages from the novel. Some of those edits were things I really enjoyed, but they probably wouldn’t translate well to the visual medium so it was to be expected. The story order has also been rearranged, with the events depicted in a more chronological manner, starting with the first meeting between the two main characters and moving from there.

At first, I felt that Kendi Oiwa’s artwork was ill-suited to the material, but as the book progresses it started to come together for me and I thought that the book looked much better by the end. In the afterword, the authors acknowledge that Goth is Oiwa’s first work, so I suppose a little unevenness was to be expected. Oiwa’s artwork does a good job of heightening the strangeness and foreboding atmosphere for the different situations, but it fails to depict actions and movements in a clear manner. Indeed, I got the feeling that his artwork focused more on the emotional aspects of the actions and events rather than the actions themselves. He does a fantastic job at depicting the state of mind for the characters, often times through close-ups on their eyes. While Goth isn’t necessarily a gore fest, when the time came to depict dismembered corpses with entrails laid bare for all, Oiwa was able to deliver in a highly detailed fashion, one page in particular rivals just about anything I’ve seen from MPD Psycho so far.

Ultimately I felt that the manga was an OK take on the material, though it did fall a little short of the bar set by the novel. It’s not as full of plot twists, and a few sequences come off as awkward and hard to follow. Still, I think it does a great job as serving as a stepping stone and hope that people who pick up the manga will be tempted to check out the original prose work.

Goth is available now.