It’s a tense weekend here on the east coast, but an impending storm provides a great excuse to stay inside and read manga, or at least read about manga, as long as the electricity holds. For my part, stormy seas put me in mind of Daisuke Igarashi’s melancholy beauty, Children of the Sea, published here in English on Viz’s SigIKKI imprint.
I’m a big fan of Children of the Sea, my first impressions of which can be found here, but my favorite discussion of the series’ first volume came from our own Kate Dacey, whose review is consistently the first thing to spring to my mind whenever I think of this title.
From her review:
The ocean occupies a special place in the artistic imagination, inspiring a mixture of awe, terror, and fascination. Watson and the Shark, for example, depicts the ocean as the mouth of Hell, a dark void filled with demons and tormented souls, while The Birth of Venus offers a more benign vision of the ocean as a life-giving force. In Children of the Sea, Daisuke Igarashi imagines the ocean as a giant portal between the terrestrial world and deep space, as is suggested by a refrain that echoes throughout volume one:
From the star.
From the stars.
The sea is the mother.
The people are the breasts
Heaven is the playground.
If you happened to miss this the first time around, do yourself a favor and check out this week’s Saturday Spotlight: Children of the Sea, Vol. 1 at The Manga Critic!
Sara K. says
August 27, 2011 at 10:09 pmYou know, it’s funny. I grew up by the ocean, so while I enjoyed looking at it, it was not necessarily a special experience. But now that I live in an inland city, whenever I do get to see the ocean (and there has been a 6-month stretch when I didn’t see the ocean at all, which to me is astonishing) my mind goes ‘!!!!!!!!!!’