Rating: 3 1/2 stars
Albert, a Parisian teenager, has come to Luna for the Carnival for the first time. His first time outside the walled cities of Europe, he is fascinated and, as a first-time interplanetary traveler, he is hopelessly naive and blindly wanders into several potentially dangerous situations. His ingenuous nature also finds himself a quick friendship with a strange noble none of the other nobility seems to know anything about -- the Count of Monte Cristo.
Following Albert's return home, he receives a letter that the Count of Monte Cristo will be coming to Paris. Once there, the Count strikes a fast friendship with the nobility and, in particular, the honorable war hero Fernand de Morcerf, the powerful banker Baron Danglars and the esteemed judge, Crown Posecutor Villefort. But what do these four men have to do with Edmond Dantes, a young man who was arrested on his wedding night years ago and imprisoned on false charges, and how will this event in the past shape their actions in the future?
Okay, point blank, I hate the classics. With the exception of Catcher in the Rye, I've never enjoyed any of those "great American novels" they force on you in high school. So it comes as a surprise to me that I enjoyed Gankutsuou. Maybe I could lie and say that it was the added sci-fi elements and space travel, or maybe the brutal torture scenes, or say it was the fact that it was created by the head of one of the greatest anime studios of all time. But the truth is, it was the story itself that drew me in. Volume 1 of Gankutsuou only sets up characters and hints at the events to come, but there's a wonderful undercurrent of anger and suspicion and revenge flowing through the book, especially the last couple of chapters, that I cannot wait to see what unfolds.
Also, Del Rey gets bonus points for maintaining the original Japanese right-to-left reading of manga; most companies tend to do this nowadays, but it's still always worth noting the attempts to preserve the artist's original intent. For you new manga readers out there, it might be a little disconcerting at first, but you'll get the hang of it fast. Helpful translation notes are also provided to further enrich the story.
On a somewhat related note, I downloaded the Gankutsuou anime series to watch so I could see both perspectives of the story. Whereas the anime uses the clear cel, CGI-rendered fabric pattern animation I find distracting on all the characters, the copious amounts of detail in the manga are restricted to events and items that relate directly to the Count. I prefer the latter in that it insinuates something big will be occurring because of the Count and his actions and everybody else is more or less just a piece of the background. It's a nice, subtle technique to get the point across and works very well in the manga. All in all, another great release from Del Rey.
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Del Rey (November 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345505204
ISBN-13: 978-0345505200