rmthunter's Full Review: Satoru Ishihara - God of Dogs
Satoru Ishihara's God of Dogs is a continuation of the story of Archer Rogue, begun in Ishihara's four-volume Charisma, which doesn't yet seem to be available in English (and, based my reaction to God of Dogs, that's a disastrous oversight). The present volume is quite obviously going to be continued, so what we have here is a slice of Rogue's -- one hesitates to call them "adventures," although they certainly are, but that just doesn't seem to have the weight necessary.
So, to the story: The Tsai family is a clan of assassins with a tradition going back two thousand years. They have spread world-wide through intermarriage with foreigners, but still revere the "pure" Chinese bloodline as the core of the family. The last pure-blooded heir blows his brains out, throwing the family into chaos. There is, however, one more rumored pure-blood, Tien Ling, who happens to be, as the story opens, en route to juvenile detention with Archer Rogue, who killed his father during a fight with Zigger, a shadowy figure who is generally recognized as someone to be feared. (Our few glimpses of Zigger are not reassuring.) Somehow, a rescue attempt gets mixed up with a hit (and after reading it a few times, I've figured out who is the target of each), and both Ling and Archer make their escape -- Archer into another captivity of the gilded sort: he's been swept up in the rescue of Ling, and has caught the interest of Wanglong, the seventh son of another branch of the family. (And given Wanglong's proclivities, you have to wonder if the pun in his name was intentional.)
OK -- the story is twisty enough to keep us interested, and there are a lot of interesting characters running around, but there's something more about this one that keeps me coming back to it. Partly it is that the story is quite complex, with lots of subplots, and takes a while to get a good handle on, which is good -- no boredom here. It's like watching one of those ensemble TV cop shows, smaller story lines working within an overarching arc, except that we don't know the beginning of the arc.
A big part of the appeal for me is Ishihara's graphic style. It's in perfect keeping with the story and the characters, marked by a fast, definite line that has substance and weight. Character designs center on strong-featured, craggy faces on big, blocky bodies, all strongly individual. It's hard to describe the impact of the graphics in this one -- it's sort of a combination of rough and smooth, arresting and deceptive all at the same time.
And the characters, as I noted, are interesting. I've been favorably impressed by the depth of characterization in many of the BL manga I've gone through in the past few months, but God of Dogs is close to being in a class by itself, although I can't say that the characterizations are as subtle as those in Isaku Natsume's Dash! It's more, I think, that the characters themselves are deeper and more complex.
I can't get over the feeling that I'm not doing this one justice -- in addition to everything I've said above, there's something to this one that I can't quite put my finger on that makes it pretty compelling. I almost want to say "magical," but it's a rough, hard kind of magic. At the very least, I want to see more of Ishihara's work, because I think it's going to be terrific.
The heir of the Chinese mafia commits suicide. Now the mission of the Caijia clan is to protect the purity of the dog king bloodline, which boasts a 2...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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