Yes, gentle reader, I read the next volume.  The story picks up three years after the last volume.  During the interim, things have been pretty quiet.  The doctor Jack continues to live with his adopted child-aged father and the bird men tribe.  However, the shaman River has disappeared and one of the tribe members, Horn, has become increasingly sick and has disturbing visions about the Day of Destruction.

This is, hands down, the most confusing manga I have ever read.  Well, OK, maybe not quite as confusing as Angel Sanctuary and it’s multi-personality no glossary messiness, but close.

Here are some notes that I took while reading.

Man=child

Hello=boy

Another River is not a man

Cherry=soldier

There’s a desperately needed, somewhat helpful cast of characters, but it’s not enough.  Man, for instance, is included there under the name No Man.  If you have someone staring at a big scary thing, saying “Man,” is your first thought that this is someone’s name?  The name of a baby at that?  Because it wasn’t mine.

Which brings us to the other big problem.  Most of this volume takes place in the past, which means that everyone looks different.  They’re also often addressed by their relative nicknames like sis, my older cousin, my nephew.  Which would maybe be OK, but the relative in question is often dead in the present.  And then there’s the character who is addressed by more than one gender pronoun.  The character glossary has this amusing sentence: He has no gender.  Um, yeah.

Did I mention that there seem to be two completely different Days of Destruction?

So why struggle through it?  The art is lovely and the story is quite interesting.  There’s a lot of cool plot going on under all the bizarre name problems, with interesting interpersonal politics and ideas about destiny (can it be changed?) and what honor means and the power of war.

I hesitate to explain the major plot points, because the twists are quite fun, but I think I can add that there is a nice backstory of the chief Fair Cave retelling the story of the clan’s destruction to Jack.   The story, such as it is, that happens during the modern day is primarily about the soldier Cherry, a young officer who is wounded in battle.  He makes an interesting contrast to the young Hello nee Nuts Peck, who was rescued in a similar way in the previous volume.

I’ll probably succumb and get the next volume, despite the massive translation/confusion problems.  I wish they would do something like bold or capitalize the first letter of the names.  It’s so puzzling and detracts from an otherwise very fun comic.

Song of the Hanging Sky, volume 1

by Toriko Gin

Note: This review contains spoilers for the whole manga.  FYI.

This is a strange but rather interesting manga.  The story is about Jack, a doctor who was a soldier in a war, but now lives in a cabin in the snow with his trusty German Shepherd dog Gustav.  While they’re tromping around, lonely, they find an injured boy.

Since this is a manga, the boy has wings.

He’s also Native American: some vague tribe that pulls from the Plains hunting traditions but also includes some farmers.

This could all end in horrible no good very bad stereotypes and awfulness, but oddly, I rather enjoyed it.  For one thing, the Indians are drawn as normal and the doctor is portrayed as white (and different).  The othering going on isn’t the standard Indians heap big weird.

Certainly, there are aspects that are troubling.  The gun is referred to as making thunder: it might as well be the Thunder Sticks of the awful Spaghetti Westerns of my Sunday afternoon childhood.  But other parts are turned on their head.  Eventually, the doctor is adopted into the tribe (much like the Brady Bunch episode, actually) but, instead of getting a dopey Indian name, it turns out the doctor is now the son of the boy he helped.  That’s right, the little boy is now his father.  Unlike a more traditional Western, both the Indians and the doctor seem to suffer PTSD from the wars they’ve been in.  Again, unlike the traditional Westerns, this is not set in a Wild West of the 1800s.  A plane with parachuters appears eventually.

Now we get to a nifty part of the manga that I enjoyed, but that slammed quite unfortunately into a nasty technical translation problem: The names of the tribe members are indicative of what they do or like, names like Bear or Wolf, as per usual.  But, most unfortunately, the manga lettering does not indicate that these are names.  A figure sitting in darkness with wings unfurled, another character says, ” CAVE …?”  Would you guess that’s the guy’s name?  I didn’t.  Nor did I figure out that Cave was the chief until much later.  “HOW IS NUTS?” was another howler.

Nuts Peck turned out to be the name of the little boy.  Until his contact with the human.  Then the human changed the boy’s soul and destiny and Nuts Peck became “Hello”.  Which is great!  It really made for an interesting philosophical change, but do you have any idea how baffling it is to run through people saying Hello with no indication if it’s the name or the regular meaning?  And then there’s the fact that the bird people speak one language (bird songs and noises), the doctor speaks his own language (which is where Hello comes from, I think), and then there’s the local language of the humans–which the doctor speaks and which the birdmen shaman speaks.  Baffling.  Baffling I tell you.

In any case.  The story has its stock components, but it also has its charm.  I’m easily charmed by plucky German Shepherds, but still.  There’s good stuff here.  Introspection, the meaning of communication, destiny, magic, and the line between childhood and adulthood in various ways and who leads whom.  The art is quite beautiful.  Lots of lovely line work, great contrast, and an interesting style.