Comic Review: Emanon Vol. 2: Emanon Wanderer (Dark Horse Comics)

Emanon, The Wanderer Part One, Volume Two, is about wandering.

This manga volume is by Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsuruta, with translation into English by Dana Lewis. It’s printed by Dark Horse.

Emanon, it turns out, for new readers like me, is a young woman who has full memory of every woman in her family line who preceded her. So, she remembers ‘being’ her own mother, her grandmother, and so on, back in time for countless generations.

The story unfolds that she wanders around, quite literally, remembering and in a sense, reliving old memories. Being present today and her own yesterdays, simultaneously.

It’s quite an imaginative concept for a story, and unfortunately for my tastes, not entirely successful. This book, a collection of eight chapters of Emanon Wanderer plus seven chapters of Emanon Wanderer ’67, hovers over Emanon while she smokes, walks, has naked baths in lakes, walks, gets naked again, sits down, and so on. It’s a slow journey, with lots of pictures. There is a lot of smoking and nudity, and one wishes for a bit more drama. Even when the story takes an unexpected turn in revealing the existence of Emanon’s male twin, we wish for more intensity and connection.

The illustrations are beautiful, the concept fascinating, but it’s a 220-page quick read, with many many pages being illustrations of the vistas that Emanon sees during her walks.

Dark Horse, Emanon, The Wanderer Part One, Volume 2. $14.99 for 220 pages. Rated 16: Full Nudity, Full Smoking