Patience is not one of my virtues. So when I finished watching Season One of the anime series Call of the Night and realized that the second season still wasn’t available three years later (although it is under production), I decided to order all of the manga issues so that I could finish the story.

It’s not often that I do so. I used to be a huge comic book fan when I was a kid, and used to go to comic book conventions. But I got away from reading comics in my late teens and never really went back, although sometimes I check in on the ‘Ol Canucklehead to see what he’s up to.

I understand that western comics and manga are not really the same thing. Manga in Japan is read by, and written for, people of all ages. But I still don’t read much of it. Most of my knowledge of these stories comes from their anime adaptations. I do have a few manga series, including one of the entire Dragon Ball Z library, but not many.

So it goes to show how much I liked the original story that I went out of my way to read the rest of it in manga form. Or at least, am reading the rest of it.

It’s long. It’s eighteen volumes, each with around 150 pages. They take about forty-five minutes to an hour to read.

My original intention was to just do one blog post of the rest of the series, but I quickly realized there would be too much to talk about and I would forget a lot of the points I wanted to make by the time I got done. The story is fairly dense. Trying to condense my impression of about 2500 pages or so of story into a single blog post would end up being kind of uninteresting I think.

So this post is only going to be about volumes 6-10 of the series. Volumes 1-5 were basically the first season-it turns out they just shot the manga. So I assume that the second season will be volumes 6-10, and if you read them it would make sense for that to be the case because volume 10 ends at a natural stopping point-it’s the end of the story arc these volumes are concerned with.

This story arc I am tentatively going to call “The Hunter Arc” because it’s centered around the vampire hunter we met at the end of season one of the anime.

But because I don’t want to give too many things away or spoil anything, I’ll be a little vague and just give you my impressions of these volumes in a general sense. So, without further ado….

Ko and Nazuna have to delve into Nazuna’s human past so that they can defend her from the vampire hunter. All of the vampires have to do so with their own human pasts. Won’t tell you why, but they do.

I think from a story telling perspective, this is pretty brilliant, because we would need at this point to learn more about who these characters are. Especially Nazuna. I mean, this is a romantic comedy, and at some point, Ko is going to need to know about Nazuna’s past, where she came from, what was she like when she was human, why did she become a vampire, etc. That’s just part of natural courtship; it would be an odd love story if Ko wasn’t interested in that stuff. And the audience certainly is. But by tying it into the Hunter Arc, it makes this investigation a lot more interesting and gives it some suspense.

And it’s an investigation because evidently vampires lose a lot of the memories that they had of when they were human. That’s part of the transformation, I guess. So Nazuna can’t just come out and tell Ko about it. She doesn’t remember. None of the vampires do.

And the story does tie this investigative aspect into the Hunter Arc in surprising ways. Can’t say how without ruining the story, but everything sort of folds in on itself in layers. Meaning, the motif of the investigator, or the detective-meaning the storytelling motif that we are all aware of from fiction-is used alongside the genre convention of the vampire slayer that we are also aware of, and these come together surprisingly. That might be getting close to spoiling some things, so I’ll just leave it at that.

But it works. The reveal moments land as intended. You’ll know what I mean if you read it.

So it’s kind of a mystery genre mashup in that way.

But it’s still funny.

There is definitely less emphasis in these volumes on the romance aspect between Nazuna and Ko, although romance is at the forefront of the story at basically all times. Just not between those two, or maybe just tangentially. And Ko’s human friends do not feature as much as Nazuna’s vampire “clan”.

Anyway, I feel like this is a little oblique, but I don’t want to spoil anything. Just give impressions.

As far as the translation is concerned, at points the manga and the anime translations diverge (I read volumes 1-5 too of course). Sometimes I prefer the anime translation and sometimes I prefer the manga. Clearly different translators or localization teams were used. But I do think they both capture the same feeling that I liked so much in the anime.

And the artwork looks the same. You can tell the animators went to great trouble to capture the essence of the manga panels when they animated them. Hopefully, it’s the same people who do the second season of the anime.

If there was one thing I would give some constructive criticism on, it’s the attributions in some of the panels. At times there will be a conversation going on with several characters, and then the next panel will shift to a still image of the setting, like the street below or something, with a bunch of dialogue bubbles in the panel continuing the conversation. It’s not always clear whose those bubbles should be attributed to. Even after going back and trying to piece it together, I still just had to make an educated guess. This doesn’t happen very often, but it would be something that if I were the editor I would have made some changes to. But that’s it. And maybe that’s just the nature of the beast. Like I said, I haven’t been reading comics for a long time, so maybe that’s more common than I remember, and can’t be helped.

As a curiosity, if you read my post about the anime where I said that Nazuna reminded me of Hotaru from Dagashi Kashi, it turns out that the same mangaka (manga artist) created both. He goes by a single name, Kotoyama, and evidently he is a big deal. Like I said, I don’t really read manga that much (maybe I should start). I didn’t even know Dagashi Kashi came from a manga. But I kind of feel like a dunce for not knowing about this fact when I made that comment. But on the other hand, I was right. She does look like Hotaru. She was even drawn by the same guy.

I’ll happily give volumes 6-10 of The Call of the Night manga series five Pellegrinos.

Will be back with another post or two about the rest of the series.

Take care!