Angel Sanctuary is like a soap opera. Characters like to make sudden pronouncements of betrayals, and then monologue for pages and pages about what it meant. In any normal comic, this would the finale. In “Angel Sanctuary”, it’s a Tuesday.
By Kaori YukiSetsuna, in the form of Alexiel, must return to Earth to protect his human body. But Michael, the Angel of Fire, is hot on Setsuna’s heels and ready for a fight. Will the angel Raphael be able to keep things from getting deadly, or will he just make matters worse?
Meanwhile, Zaphikel’s spy discovers that Sevothtarte’s fair face hides foul intentions, and Metatron’s little rebellion upsets the balance of power in Heaven. And in Hell, the Mad Hatter offers Kurai a chance to save Setsuna’s human body…if she agrees to marry Lucifer.
“Angel Sanctuary” has been called a gothic love story, which means it’s just a regular soap opera plus the supernatural. For a brief time there was a page of character at the start of each book–it’s been gone now for a while, there’s just too many. And frankly, many of them are starting to look alike. There’s only so many attractive young adults Kaori Yuki can draw before she starts repeating herself, and she definitely likes ’em that way. The most elderly-looking fella in this comic is a father who is pushing a youthful forty.
She’s a fan of her characters. If Stephen King says, “kill your darlings,” Kaori Yuki may as say to fall in love with your characters and hook them up . In her side-panel journal she happily embraces the cute coupling and the hot men of her own work. If she wasn’t the author, she’d be the number-one fanfic writer. She not hates to kill her darlings, she brings back them back from death to have a second dramatic act.
Art is getting better with every book, and some panels are now positively surreal body horror. From last book’s introduction of the Mad Hatter as a greater demon of the lowest hell, Yuki has not let up on the strange possibilities of comics. I don’t look forward to “Angel Sanctuary” returning to Earth, I don’t want this comic to be grounded.
I believe every angel has a different endgame in mind. At least one of them has to be pro-humanity, but I haven’t discovered which one yet. They all want to correct god’s program.
I’m digging the use of the word “program” over “plan.” It implies a passive programmer, who set the plan in motion and stepped back to let it play out. A programmer doesn’t interrupt their algorithm before it finishes, mostly. They just adjust it depending on the results. God as a programmer is a not an absent watchmaker, but a passive viewer.
Scattered Notes
If you didn’t see the art of a comic at all, and all you knew was the story, you could still identify a comic as a Japanese manga as soon as the protagonist switches from a boy’s body to a girl’s body. Superhero comics are missing out.
Heaven, in Angel Sanctuary, is a mirror of the absolute worst parts of civilization: prisons, slums, and bureaucracy. And the existence of slums implies the existence of property rights and capitalism, which combined with prisons implies a whole legal system of contract law. Hell and its devils are traditionally known for writing contracts for souls, but those sound downright light-hearted compared to whatever mortgage an immortal angel would have to pay to compete for prime real estate. If that were me, I’d join Lucifer too.
