Short Review- Blank Slate, volume 1
Rating: 
In a sidebar, Aya Kanno, the mangaka of Blank Slate, admits that she hated the original first chapter of her story. She hated it so much, in fact, that when the manga was being converted to graphic novel form, she removed the first chapter and replaced it with a side story. Oddly enough, it works: the side story is a quick vignette that shows us everything we need to know about our main character as the manga opens.
In a country under totalitarian rule, the bounty hunter Russo is after the biggest prize of all: notorious criminal Zen, whose list of victims gets longer every day. But when Russo finally finds Zen, he discovers the killer is a handsome young man with a magnetic personality. His chance to kill Zen eventually comes, but Russo hesitates, and finds out just how brutal Zen can be.
The story skips ahead to Zen, orchestrating a one-man bank robbery. He randomly chooses a getaway car from the street. But the car contains Rian, the blind daughter of the country’s military leader, and her bodyguard Maka. The sheltered Rian is more excited than afraid to meet a famous criminal, and at her suggestion the trio goes to her family’s summer house to hide out. While there, Maka reveals herself to be a resistance fighter who was using Rian to get close to her father. Wounded in the resulting gunfight, Zen goes to Maka’s brother-in-law, a shotgun doctor for the rebels, for help.
The doctor’s village is a hotbed of resistance against the oppressive government. When Zen’s presence brings the army to town, he gets Zen to help him protect the rebels. But Zen’s methods make the doctor wonder is any means to an end is really acceptable, no matter how good the intention.
The first volume of Blank Slate is scattershot; Zen hops from Russo to Rian to Dr Hakka in the space of a few chapters. While it’s interesting to how Zen reacts to each of these different people, we don’t get much time to learn about Rian, except for the fact that she is improbably helpless (she tells Zen she has never so much as dressed herself). Because of her prominence in this first volume, she’ll undoubtedly end up being a major character. So far, though, we don’t get much of a sense of who she is.
Zen is, of course, the psychopathic killer with no regard for human life. That’s the sort of character I can get into- except Kanno makes sure we know that Zen’s homicidal personality isn’t his fault. He just woke up one morning with no memory of who he was and an anarchic urge to destroy society. We’ll find out the whole story eventually, since by the end of volume one Zen has enlisted Dr. Hakka in a quest to discover his part. It feels like a cop-out; making a real psychopath sympathetic is just too difficult, so the author makes him an accidental psychopath. But since Blank Slate is a shoujo manga (it runs in Shojo Beat), you have to expect the bad boy with a tortured past and a wounded heart.
Kanno’s art is skillfully rendered in a style similar to Tite Kubo’s Bleach. The men are all sharp chins and flashing eyes, and the women are angular. Only Rian really stands out, mostly because of her bizarre lion’s mane of blonde hair.
Blank Slate’s concept is interesting, but unfortunately it’s ruined by shoujo sensibility. Unless someone tells me the second volume is something spectacular, I won’t be continuing the series.
Details
Publisher: Viz
Author: Aya Kanno
Pages: 192
Format: Manga
MSRP: $8.99
Date of Publication:10/07/2008
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