angel sanctuary 11 feature Reviews 

“Angel Sanctuary 11 & 12”

By | October 18th, 2020
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

At just over the half-way mark, we’ve finished our journey through Hell and leave Lucifer to begin the Book of Heaven.

The half-way mark of a manga marathon is difficult to review. The basic structure is set, the characters introduced and defined, but the exciting conclusion to the tangled web of plots is still a long ways off. So this review will be a list of things I’m noting and loving.

By Kaori Yuki

The angel Alexiel loved God, but she rebelled against Heaven when she saw how disgracefully the other angels were behaving. She was finally captured, and as punishment sent to Earth to live an endless series of tragic lives. She now inhabits the body of Setsuna Mudo, a troubled teen in love with his sister Sara. Setsuna’s misery mirrors the chaos among the angels, and their combined passions threaten to destroy both Heaven and Earth.

Deep in Hell, Setsuna has finally found Kurai. But Hell and everyone in it will be destroyed if Kurai doesn’t agree to go through with the marriage to Lucifer–who sacrifices his wives to stabilize his power!

And in Heaven, the angel Raphael is trying to revive Setsuna’s human body, with poor results. A mysterious power is preventing the resurrection spell from working, but Sara is not willing to give up. But when she uses the angel Jibril’s powers to assist Raphael’s efforts, they are both flung into another dimension!

I’ll start by taking a moment to identifying some smart artistic tricks that Yuki has been using:

  • Shade the background behind a character with a repeating pattern representing the character’s emotions. For example, if they’re in love, use a flower motif.
  • To double down on the realness of a disaster, make a panel of the trouble look like a grainy, newspaper photograph.
  • When a character is beyond out of their mind and processing information that changes their entire world, simply fade them out for a panel. It’s a way to show how they’ve taken a mental hit and have to rebuild themselves.

Although the art remains strong, the writing dips a bit in these two books. Some characters are starting to simply state their characterization metaphors out loud. “I am merely a marionette who is fighting to cut off her own strings,” says one particularly emo angel. “At my feet is a hill covered in skeletons.”

Japanese writers love using a one-winged angel to indicate a half breed angel. It’s a very simple and smart metaphor for biblical stories, and more authors should adopt it.

Many writers and artists hide their inspiration, or use some generic nonsense like, ‘it came to me in a dream,” or cite some boring, western classic. Yuki is as blatant with her art thefts as Quentin Tarantino. “I like the variety show Downtown,” she says in one of her side journals.

Yuki has a definite career path writing horror manga. She found the innate horror in the classic little cupids, and we spend a couple pages being afraid of a mass of those tiny evil angels. It’s a one-and-done scene, but I love how quickly she identified the horror in an every day (albeit supernatural) being. I’m going to dive in to her catalog and find out if she’s ever written raw horror.

In the story, we’ve now know that the God of Angel Sanctuary has banned all emotions, which, as we know from Star Wars and the Catholic church, is a largely ineffective method of controlling powerful people. This story note, combined with a density of world building I normally associate with JMS’s Babylon 5, makes me wish Kaori Yuki would rewrite Star Wars.

God is shown as a splash of light emanating from the top of a human heart.

At this point, who isn’t a reincarnated angel?

One of our original heroes, Sara, names a Grigori: she names it Moonlil. Grigori don’t typically have names in this universe. It’s a small action. It shows her essential goodness. But by naming Moonlil she accidentally gives it a purpose and the capability of independent action. This small act reminds me of Genesis 2:20, when Adam names all the animals. I read an interpretation of this passage that said the naming of the animals is a function that only Adam can do, and only because they were created in the image of God. That’s what “image of god” meant, to have God’s demiurgic power. When Sara does it here, practically granting a soul to this poor being, it shows her godly nature.

I previously wrote that the heaven of Angel Sanctuary is one of horrible mundanity. I would like to amend that description to add an litany of evils: rape, mind control, government coverups, sanctioned genocide, vehicles powered by fossil fuels, and general nazi ideology. There simply isn’t a good place in the entirely of the universe. The only goodness that exists is solely in the actions of a handful of angels, a few of demons, and two humans.


Justin McGuire

The most important comics in my life were, in order: assorted Archies bought from yard sales, Wolverine #43 - Under The Skin, various DP7, Death of Superman, Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, Sandman volume 1, Animal Man #5 - The Coyote Gospel, Spent.

EMAIL | ARTICLES