With biblical and mythological stories, some writers research deeply into the original sources to create a cerebral and carefully footnoted piece of art. The best example of this style is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which came from his own internal concordances across dozens, or maybe hundreds, of mythologies.
Kaori Yuki is on the other side of this coin. She’s grabbing the core and most evocative imagery from every mythology she sees, and shoving it into her internal blender. Yggdrasil is a tree entirely in Hades, which is really the Christian Hell, and guarded by emotional-vampire-gouls? Sounds good. The output is a piece of art closer to pure Freudian id than anything resembling scholarly research. It’s frenetic and chaotic and beautiful.
By Kaori YukiDespite Setsuna’s efforts to deny his love for his sister, he can’t allow her to leave the country without letting her know how he feels, but how can she feel about love that borders on incest? She may never live to find out, because an angel has been sent down from heaven just for her—just to make sure that she dies! The two demons from hell, Kurai and Arachne, are still trying to bring out the avenging angel in Setsuna, but first they must deal with the mysterious, seemingly immortal Kira. Even if a way is found to bring the angel Alexiel out of Setsuna, can Tokyo survive the transformation?
Setsuna Mudo is a mixed-up high school student who had gotten up on the wrong side of God. He is the reincarnation of an angel who has rebelled against heaven. Now the Angels want him dead, the demons want him to lead the revolution, and he just wants a clue to how the world works.
Sara, Setsuna’s beloved sister, is dead, and Tokyo is a moment away from being utterly destroyed—and this chapter of Setsuna’s life is just beginning. Meanwhile, the worst angel in the nine spheres is about to make a power grab and take control of heaven!
Volume 3 and 4 of Angel Sanctuary is increasingly melodramatic. The time for character introductions is past, and now everyone is either deepening their own emotional crisis or narrating some piece of history. It’s still a fast-paced comic, and anything awkward or slows down the plot is done and wrapped up in a page or two. Relying on speed to smooth out narrative flow is a solution I wish more decompressed-inspired authors would take.
The art is sometimes crowded and dynamic, and sometimes light and poetic. I like it a lot better than when this manga started. There’s an especially nice piece in volume 4 where the panels slowly fall and crumble to show a delightful dream ending.
Angel Sanctuary is a 90’s-era book, and some those tropes on are on full display here. In volume 3 we learn that the Angel-possessed Kira tried to make his father hate him, because he knew he had to die young and didn’t want the father to mourn. But he did this by acting as a rather low-grade rebellious teenager: being rude, carrying firecrackers, sleeping with women, and standing around dramatically. He’s Bart Simpson crossed with Tuxedo Mask. This is what rebellion looked like in the 90s. A middle-class parent’s worst case scenario wasn’t death or drugs, those were the distant problems for other types of people. For a 90’s dad, the worst possible thing was rudeness and light-weight rebellion.
(Side note: when Human Kiran died in an accident, the angel asked for permission before inhabiting his body. It’s nice to see consent for possession.)
Hades is introduced in volume 4, along with Yggdrasil, marking the first real appearance of non-Christian/Judea mythology. But it’s not the scariest aspect in Angel Sanctuary’s mythology. No, that would be the fact that all of creation being ruled over by a celestial bureaucracy with think tanks and meetings and summits and promotion tracks and an absent CEO (God). This whole heaven is one customized Jira board away from being my personal hell.
The role of God in Angel Sanctuary is, in some ways, bog-standard: missing. God is an absentee watchmaker, potentially playing a long, 4-D chess game that these types of stories often devolve into. God is also very fickle, a feature that is both very biblical but also missing in most biblically-inspired stories. The angel Rosiel is said to have had God’s love until she was sealed away after a battle.
The incestuous Setsuna and Sara are lovers for a small time, then Tokyo explodes. (God enacting great destruction to punish sin is also quite traditional.) There’s a couple pages talking about what would have to happen for these two to be together, “the farthest place from heaven… to a place no one has seen.” This has echos of Paradise Lost, where Satan fell through the chaos until he stopped in the furthest place from heaven, and hell formed there. But I don’t think this is the same concept as this mythology’s Hades, where Setsuna journeys through to find Sara’s soul.
Angel Sanctuary has a lot in common with Romeo and Juliet. It’s the story of a couple kids who ruin a lot of lives by falling in love. But instead of bringing an end to two warring houses, they end the world.
