Age Rating: 15+

Genre: Horror

Price: $9.95

Series description: Kurou Takagi transfers to the private school where his father is headmaster after the death of his mother. The #1 rule at the school is to never be on campus after sunset. When Takagi and some of his friends fail to make it off campus in time one night, they discover just how important the rule is and that there's something very wrong going on at the school.

Publisher’s description of Volume 8: Among the students who have survived the nocturnal rampages at Yotsuji Academy, Tetsuzo has not been infected with the evil genes and has, instead, turned into a carrier with the ability to kill the undead race Nosferatu! But, tonight he is going to change that. Entering the school, he seeks the vampire, Nosferatu Sato-sensei, with an offer - turn himself into one of them in order to save his sister from leukemia!

Publisher’s description of Volume 9: Death falls upon Yotsuji High School daily with each visit of nightfall! Kurou Takagi carries the Nosferatu seed that allows him to become the King of the Nosferatu and control the Evil Gene-carrying Nosferatu race. Now he's the target of the Nosferatu teachers!

Note: This is yet another attempt to jump into a series several volumes after it’s begun. The verdict so far? Good and bad… Does that make Dark Edge the ugly? My wife used to watch the tv show Lost with me, but at a certain point, some time near the beginning of season three, she wasn’t able to keep up. So, recently I’ve been talking about how great this past season was, and she asks me what’s going on. I make references to Juliette, time travel, and the Oceanic Six, and she looks at me like I’m from the moon. Similarly, years ago I finished an issue of Love & Rockets, one from the mid-nineties, and Beto’s Palomar story in there was so good I nearly wept. The only thing I wanted to do was call somebody and talk about it, but I realized there was no one I knew that I could discuss it with (this was back before the tjc.com messageboard, or nearly any comics or manga message board, for that matter). The story was just too involved, and developed its rich and stunning nature from the complexities of many years of characters and plot.

What’s this got to do with Yu Aikawa's vampire manga Dark Edge? Well, I’ve read two volumes of this series, somewhere just shy of 400 pages, and I still have only the broadest notion of the characters, the plot, and the ins and outs of this story. I feel like I’ve stepped right into the middle of a deeply complicated world with rules all its own, rules and jargon I have no map to, no way of figuring out what it all means.

Let me back up—it’s not as if the books are incoherent. They have lots going for them—the art is clean and slick, all the characters are attractive and sexy in that lanky, late nineties/early aughts yaoi-y kind of way. Not that it is yaoi, just that it’s got the dangerous vibe of an omni-sexual beast, as well it should, given the subject matter. And ah, yes, the subject matter: Vampires. Or at least vampires, and zombies, and werewolves oh my! I mean, they’re everywhere in here. Along with a strange, half-desiccated marble-statue looking creature and lots and lots of discussion of the “evil gene” and the “nosferatu seed.”

Here's what I can make out of what's going on: there’s a group of students that are trying to kill all the vampires, who become dangerous at night, only some of the students are infected with the evil gene (does that mean they’ve been bitten? I don’t know…), and the teachers are (for the most part) zombies, which means that by day they act normal, only less and less so over time, and at night they hunt for humans. I think? Only some of the teachers are vampires, and not all nosferatu are vampires, some are from some strain with names like lupe garou, which in my mind means werewolves, but I never saw those.

And now I sound like a crazy person. Honestly—honestly, I’m talking out my rear because, despite the cool, moody art and atmosphere, Dark Edge never explained itself one bit. There were character summaries between chapters, but, 1)they came after each chapter rather than before it, 2)the characters discussed didn’t seem to have any direct connection to the characters in either the chapter preceding or following these summaries, and 3)there’s at least two dozen characters or so, each with their own plot thread.

Obviously from my review I found this frustrating, but the books were compelling enough that I read both of them cover to cover. The interesting thing, from my standpoint at least, was how I ended up settling into my reading experience: if I let go completely from trying to follow what was going on from a larger plot perspective, over half the chapters had clear, discreet stories in which characters were developed, put through the wringer, and otherwise explored. I'm sure the whole thing would make sense if I began at the beginning, read it as it developed--you know, did what you're expected to do. But that's not always how these things work, right? Somebody says "check out this series!" and the library or bookstore only has some random later volume. It's entirely possible that, had I read volumes 1-7, the subtleties of plot and character that develop in these volumes would be exciting, even invigorating.

But I didn't, and there's nothing--no summary, no charts, no context clues--to help me put together what seem like some really cool pieces. Several years ago, when the TV show Angel was in its final episodes, I was visiting some friends who watched the show religiously. They were just raving about this final season. I asked them about it, and they said that, frankly, the show hadn’t been very good, but by the end the writers and producers knew that the jig was up, and they were really going gonzo, pulling out all the stops, simply because they had nothing to lose. And this quality alone made for some riveting television.

So, Dark Edge? I couldn’t tell you if I just read season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or season 5 of Angel. Like I wrote above: it’s filled with atmospherics, it’s got a seemingly good mix of a little humor, some pathos, some horror and gore, some dangerous sexy... You get the idea. I just couldn’t tell you what any of this adds up to.

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