Murder Princess, Vol. 1

By Sekihiko Inui
Broccoli Books, 194 pp.

OK, PopCultureShock readers, it’s time for a quiz! Take out your number 2 pencils and put away your notes. Let’s see how much you know about Murder Princess. Haven’t read it yet? No worries! The default answer is C (for carnage).

1. Given the series’ title and premise—Alita, a girly-girl princess, swaps bodies with Falis, a badass female bounty hunter, forcing Falis to impersonate the regent until the spell can be reversed—which of the following scenes is most likely to appear in this manga:

(a) Falis gets an etiquette lesson
(b) Falis fights with ditzy but lethal female robots
(c) Falis making a shocking discovery: corsets are really, really uncomfortable
(d) Falis puzzles Alita’s subjects with butt-kicking displays of princess power
(e) All of the above

2. What causes Alita’s soul to be transferred to Falis’ body (and vice versa)?

(a) An ancient gypsy curse
(b) Kotodama
(c) A bump on the head
(d) A scientific experiment gone awry
(e) You mean you haven’t seen Freaky Friday?

3. Why does Alita want Falis to assume the throne in her place?

(a) A coup d’etat has displaced the ruler of Forland, Alita’s kingdom
(b) Alita wants to go slumming among her subjects
(c) Alita just wants to become an actress, dammit!
(d) Alita wants to play a practical joke on her uptight manservant Jodo
(e) It’s hard out here for a princess

4. How many chapters does it take Alita to convince Falis that the princess gig is a desirable one?

(a) One
(b) Two
(c) Three
(d) Four
(e) Um, does this manga actually have four chapters?

ANSWER KEY: 1–e; 2–c; 3–a; 4–a

My sneaking suspicion is that most readers aced this quiz. I say this because Murder Princess is, as my fellow reviewer Erin F. so aptly put it, the Snakes on a Plane of manga-dom. In other words, the entire concept is perfectly summarized by the title. You want a sword-wielding princess who kills people? You got it! You want complex characters, intricate backstories, or surprising plot twists? Read Lone Wolf and Cub.

Don’t get me wrong—I like mindless fun, and cheerfully cop to enjoying Vin Diesel movies and TV shows with car chases. But for such a flimsy premise to sustain my interest, I need a bit more than an angelic-looking princess who slices, dices, and belches on cue. Yes, there’s a villain named Professor Akamashi—a mad scientist, no less—but he’s as two-dimensional as paper. (The one and only fun fact about the Professor: he killed Alita’s father because the king had the good sense to deny funding for Akamashi’s “Deathpuke Madness” weapon.) Alita, too, is more a conceit than a character; after switching bodies with the more colorful Falis, she’s reduced to impersonating Jodo’s daughter while Falis runs the kingdom. Alita dons a maid’s costume, looks cute, expresses her gratitude that Falis is defending Forland with surprising skill and… well, that’s about all there is to Alita’s character. She’s polite and deferential, and quickly pushed to the margins of the story so that Falis can strut her stuff.

If Falis’ fight scenes were funnier or scarier, I wouldn’t cavil about character development. The action sequences are pretty pedestrian, however, undermining the shock value/humor of a Disney-esque princess going mano a bloody mano with killer bees, shinigamis, and mecha maids. I was bored by the end of the third chapter.

I concede that Broccoli Books has given Murder Princess the royal treatment with a smart-looking cover, fluid translation, and generous preview of volume two. The paper stock is first rate, making the grayscale color palette more vivid. And the sound effects have been translated so that all of us wotakus can appreciate the pows! and splats! without reaching for a Japanese dictionary. Yet the terrific production values, meticulous editing, and appealingly simple hook can’t disguise something that Snakes on a Plane audiences discovered last summer: even a movie with a brazenly straightforward concept needs a few tricks up its sleeve—or at least a semblance of a story—to hold our interest.