Commissioner Puosu (Hugo Hytönen) and the journalist Harni (Hannes Häyrinen) become reluctant partners as they try to solve the murder case of Nelly, a smuggler found dead in the Helsinki apartment where Harni had been the last… or presumably second-to-last person to see her alive. Their investigations plunge them into the middle of a menagerie of black-market spivs and shysters, many of whom might have had a motive or opportunity for offing their sometime supplier of contraband goods.
Puoso thinks he has uncovered the murderer – the shopkeeper Herttamo (Eino Jurkka), whose kerchief matches a thread found on the victim, but Herttamo is himself murdered on a train. It transpires that Nelly’s murder is the latest iteration of a decade-long drama unfurling from a bank robbery ten years earlier, as its survivors seek to cover their tracks and preserve their identities in hiding. Of particular note here is Irma Seikkula, star of Juurakon Hulda (1937), in the role of Ane, a seemingly unimportant secretary who turns out to be the daughter of a cashier killed in the robbery, whose subsequent life has been steered by a series of anonymous donations from the criminals.
Well, that escalated quickly. After years of shonky adaptations of repertory theatre-plays, unfunny sitcoms and musty old children’s books, Suomi-Filmi suddenly explode into the 1940s with an up-to-date thriller, drawing on H. R. Halli’s novel And the Murders Continued (1939, Yhä murhat jatkuivat). The original was set in Finland’s post-WW1 Prohibition era, but had a subject matter that lent itself well to being upgraded to a contemporary thriller in the wake of the Winter War.
And the critics went wild for it. Only a few days after they had been eviscerating The Solemn Hornblower for wasting literally everybody’s time and money, the Finnish press piled on with unbridled enthusiasm to welcome the dawning of a new and noirish age.
Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was fulsome in praise for “Finland’s first home-made detective film,” thrilling to its shadowy lighting and the “pleasant surprise” of its thriller narrative. Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosialidemokraati called it “exciting and fast-paced” and dared to suggest that it gave Hollywood a run for its money. The final level boss of any Finnish film’s critical response, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat, was delighted by its impressive photography and naturalistic dialogue, and if she had any objections, it was to a somewhat muddled plot that came apart at the seams as the film went on, for which she was happy to lay the blame at the feet of the source novel, and not the film company that adapted it.
Posterity is not quite so kind – something that is repeatedly noticeable about Talaskivi’s reviews is how accurately they can predict the long view of a film. She is rarely caught up in the moment, but has a concision of appreciation and a frankly prophetic sense of how something like The Last Guest would be viewed not merely years, but decades after its premiere.
It’s worth mentioning that despite the enthusiasm of the critics of 1941, Finnish audiences were plainly not ready for such a kick up the creative arse. Box office receipts were below average for the film, which took two years to recoup its production costs. Co-director Arvi Tuome would not helm another film again, although his collaborator Ville Salminen, who also designed the sets and appeared in the role of the suspicious wholesaler Rajapalo, would be back in front of the camera before long, and behind it once more in the 1950s. I also find it interesting that none of the press stills preserved in the archives really showcase the film’s best and most creative camerawork. Suomi-Filmi’s photographers came up with the usual shots of men sitting in rooms and women about to be snogged, whereas Tuome and Salminen’s much-praised framing was not documented by their own studio. To get that shot of the man on the staircase that adorns this review, I had to do a screen grab from the film itself – an interesting aside in terms of the materials available for the discussion of historical media.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
For several days now, Jonathan the director and I have been trying to get a straight answer out of the Chinese about why we aren’t filming on Mount Tai. It is, after all, the most sacred mountain in China, and the site of the ancient ritual in which the First Emperor climbed to heaven and announced to the gods that he had created China. So if one were, say, writing a documentary about Shandong, it might be nice to begin with a nice aerial around the peak soaring above the clouds, with a few stories about how it was the place where China itself was born.
In more recent times, it was the site of a fateful visit by a young-ish Jiang Zemin, who was told by a local soothsayer that he would become an “Emperor”. Since he went on to become the president of China, it has been the site of many a middle-management boondoggle, by politicians hoping to get a similar nod. This has given the municipality of Tai’an, where Mount Tai can be found, ideas above its station, and when our production company came calling to set up a documentary to promote Shandong, the Tai’an government told them to get lost.
Tai’an refused to cooperate, claiming that they needed no further tourists nor foreign patronage, and although we could easily nab some archive footage, our production company has ruled that it would be unfair on the counties that are paying if we included materials from a county that was not. So now we will not even mention them in the documentary.
This is, as Jonathan observes, something of an own goal, since Shandong means “East of the Mountains”, and at least half the time, the Chinese assume that it means East of that Mountain. Take out Mount Tai, and you take out the Shan, leaving only a dong… if that makes sense. “Mount Tai crumbles,” as Confucius once lamented. We have to pretend it isn’t there.
Today we are in Qufu, once the capital of the ancient state of Lu, and the birthplace of Confucius. Here, the main attractions are the Temple of Confucius, the mansion of Confucius’s descendants, and the grave of Confucius himself. It seems to be full of people whose idea of a pilgrimage to the home of China’s most famous philosopher seemingly involves turning up at the front gate, buying a fan and a plastic crossbow, tramping pointlessly around the courtyard for a while taking selfies, then buying some tat in the inner sanctum.
I am quite livid at the sight of hawkers in the very holy of holies trying to push Confucius comics, simplified versions of the Analects, and a bunch of “History of Your Surname” posters at passers-by. Could they really not find a better quality of souvenir?
I find the Lu Wall, and round up the crew to do a piece to camera about the workmen in 154 BC who found copies of the Confucian classics bricked into a wall on that spot. The books found therein are the oldest and most complete version of The Analects, and the ancestors of all modern versions. They had been hidden there in 213 BC by Confucius’s 9th generation descendant, during the First Emperor’s Burning of the Books.
The graves of the Kong family are situated in parkland a mile away. Among the many little hummocks of grass, there is the larger grave mound of Zisi, the grandson of Confucius, and of Top Fish, the son of Confucius. And then there is the grave of Confucius himself, its forward-facing stele a patchwork of fragments held together with steel pins, after the Red Guards tried to destroy it in the Cultural Revolution. There is a scrum of tourists around it, and I sneak into their midst, turning to the camera amid the clamour to say: “People come from all around the world to see the last resting place of Confucius. But guess what, he isn’t here…”
“Anime: A History remains an essential text for anyone searching for a deeper understanding of why anime is the way it is, historically and commercially, and the latest edition does far more than simply updating the material; the changes constitute multiple novel areas of study. “
First review up online of my 2nd edition Anime: A History, from Zoe Crombie at Lancaster University.
“Masataka Taketsuru… ended up in late 1918 at the University of Glasgow, where he studied organic chemistry under Thomas Stewart Patterson, before seeking work experience at distilleries in Campbeltown, Strathspey and Bo’ness. He also fell in love with Jessie “Rita” Cowan, a doctor’s daughter from Kirkintilloch, who he met after she asked him to teach her younger brother judo. The couple were married in 1920, shortly before they left for Japan, where Rita had promised to help her new husband make ‘real whisky.'”
Over All the Anime, I investigate Japan’s relationship with whisky, in relation to the new anime film Komada: A Whisky Family, showing at Scotland Loves Anime in November.
The crew have plenty of stories to tell about the hotel. Frances the producer spent most of the night in a stand-off with a giant spider. The director found two rats in his room. I merely had to contend with a blocked plughole, which hardly compares.
The new drone operator is very keen to tell everybody that he is ex-military, that he has studied at the People’s Liberation Army College, and that he did time in the army. He keeps mentioning this to everybody he meets, even though it is plain to see that he is a drone operator, so probably not a future general in the making.
Little Fish the sound guy is also oddly performative, claiming to have once been a pop star, a hairdresser and a wedding planner, and yet also very keen to tell everybody how much he likes girls with big tits. I just write this down. The director thinks he is trying too hard.
For the first time in a week, I wake up before my alarm. But the morning call is still 0630, ready to film on the very edge of the coast, at a little lighthouse on the cliffs above the island. Here, I have to do the speech that will close the whole programme, somehow summing everything out without making any mistakes, tying up the producers’ desires and the directors’ imagery, without mis-stating any facts or making any mistakes.
It’s a good reminder to me of what I am being paid for – having a Confucius quote ready to hand, remembering to qualify those elements that are somewhat questionable historically, and trying to keep a programme that has been veering rather a lot towards the spiritual, rooted in the prosaic and the material. And then remembering it all and yelling it into a camera on a clifftop, while gawping tourists file pass and point their phones at me from behind the camera.
“Confucius, the man from Shandong, once said: ‘I hope that the old have a life free of cares, that my friends have faith in me, and that the young remember me when I am gone.’ And he’s got his wish. Here, in the place the modern Chinese call the Isles of the Immortals, there are figures who have achieved some form of immortality. Like Mazu and Laozi, Confucius is still celebrated hundreds of years after his death. And through him, for the last two and a half millennia, his homeland of Shandong has come to shape the history and culture of all of China.”
Bosh. Done. And our new military drone pilot wrestles his machine against the strong sea winds, straining to keep it in place while Jiuqing the producer operates the remote camera onboard, filming me as I stand at the cliff edge, looking out to a seascape dotted with tiny islands, fading into the haze.
He’s good. Any drone pilot I had previously worked with would have crashed three times before we got the shot, but I think it helps that the camera is not his problem, merely holding the drone steady.
Back to the mainland ferry, with a new van driver. It’s Li Tao, who I haven’t seen since the first day, seconded from the Ghost Crew, which has a new role as a sump of spare talent to bring in when people brain themselves on shop signs. Only partly in jest, the grips have set about the restaurant sign with gaffer tape and pennies, rendering it ostentatiously safe should anyone else be quite so clumsy.
Seven hours follow on the road, beginning with the customary silence as the occupants of the bus phub with their phones. One by one, their power runs out, and they take to staring at their fingernails. I watch The Shadow Line until my laptop gives out, and then wade through some podcasts, but eventually a conversation breaks out.
Jiuqing the producer is trying to explain what her name means. Unfortunately for her, jiu means “Long Time”.
Qing means “celery”.
“It’s a kind of grass, you see,” she explains. “I was born in the Year of the Snake, so they wanted to give me a name for the kind of places where my zodiac animal was most likely to live.”
“Thank God,” I observe, “you weren’t born in the Year of the Pig.”
“Although the manga creator Osamu Tezuka is best remembered for Astro Boy, and is celebrated at this festival for his early Metropolis, his true life’s work was the sprawling and unfinished Phoenix saga.”
Over at All the Anime, I discuss the latest movie version of Tezuka’s Phoenix.
It’s the moment of truth for the under-dog basketball team from Shonan North High School – a stand-off against the highest rated school team in Japan, the fearsome Sannoh Industrial. The most visible Shonan players are the seniors (soon due to graduate), and the red-haired wild-man Hanamichi Sakuragi, but instead we are drawn into the backstory of the team’s “speedster”, the short-statured point guard Ryota Miyagi. How did he get here…?
By May 2023, The First Slam Dunk had been playing in Japanese cinemas for half a year. In that time, it had steadily climbed into the top ten all-time anime at the Japanese box office, just a shade behind Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You, but gaining on it fast. It was a triumphant return to the media for a much-loved sports franchise, one of the tent-pole manga titles of the 1990s, and a 101-episode anime series. But as its name implies, The First Slam Dunk was no tardy cash-in on an old show, but a deft reimagining of the same material, a film designed to be accessible to newcomers, without alienating the fans.
The opening shot of the movie immediately wrong-foots old-time fans by swooping down on a coastal town that isn’t the basketball players’ Kanagawa seafront. Instead, we find ourselves at a distant port in Okinawa, home to Ryota, the boy who is fated to grow up to be the team’s point guard. A supporting cast member in the original manga and anime, Ryota is upgraded to central status, announcing to fans that this is the story they already know, but not as they know it – the tale of how a small-town kid from Japan’s southernmost islands ended up in a Kanagawa high-school team, scrabbling against the nation’s best. A lesser anime might have started with Ryota as the clichéd transfer student, but although he does indeed become the new kid in town, the film takes 23 minutes to get him there. Long-time fans already know who he is. By the time he arrives in Shonan North (“Shohoku”) to join the high-school team, even complete newcomers do, too.
For a story that places so much value on stances and angles, there are plenty of wonderful touches off the court, starting with Ryota’s bereaved mother in the pre-credits sequence, slumped in silent grief in front of the family altar, not kneeling in the traditional poise. The glowing sunsets remain, but Shonan is an unforgiving concrete jungle for the island boy, berated by his high-rise neighbours for playing with a ball in the street.
SCORE BIG
This is and isn’t the Slam Dunk story. The original manga in Shonen Jump magazine in the 1990s concentrated on the rapid rise of Hanamichi Sakuragi, the hulking beanpole with the dyed-red hair, who only joined the team in the first place to impress a girl, but slowly developed a greater love for the sport itself. Sakuragi is still there, still bullying Coach Anzai, still fluking his way into the “genius” shots that made his fame on the school court, but he is very much a supporting character now for Ryota’s story – Ryota’s struggles with bullying and ostracism; Ryota’s adoration for Ayako the team manager, and the way he finds a place for himself as the smallest but fastest member of a team of giants.
But Slam Dunk was also a manga that evolved over six years, along with its young artist Takehiko Inoue, starting off with one foot still in the recently-ended 1980s, with high-school beefs and sudden shifts into cartoonish comedy. The First Slam Dunk is a far more solemn retelling, focussing on the artists’ style in the later issues of the story, as he came to concentrate increasingly on the serious drama of the basketball court.
The former captain of his high-school basketball team, Inoue dropped out of college when he got a chance to become a manga artist. He started out as an assistant to Tsukasa Hojo on the 1980s classic Cityhunter, quitting when he was offered a serial contract for Chameleon Jail, drawing the artwork for Kazuhiko Watanabe’s script about high-level trouble-shooters in espionage and law enforcement. That, however, was cancelled after just twelve weeks, causing the deflated Inoue to put his all into a grand idea for Shonen Jump: a story about a bad boy who is reformed by his love of basketball.
Many of the tropes and traditions of sporting manga were established before Inoue was even born, in the game-changing Star of The Giants, which also ran in Shonen Jump magazine. Focussing on the drama on and off the pitch of a high-school baseball team, the manga was outrun by its own anime adaptation, causing screenwriters of the 1968-71 cartoon series to come up with ever-more innovative means of stretching out the action to play for time. One legendary episode was devoted to the throwing of a single ball, its first half tracking the progress of the ball from pitcher to batter, its second half following the ball from bat to fielder to base. Meanwhile, the action was leavened with slow motion and freeze-frames, cutaways and flashbacks. Five decades on, The First Slam Dunk riffs on many of Star of the Giants’ most successful tricks, including a career-threatening injury and a high-stakes match, but conspicuously luxuriates in the ability of 3D computer graphics not to deform reality, but to capture it. The imaginary camera whirls around the players as they duel, while Inoue’s script delves into the past of Ryota – the double bereavement that dominates his childhood, even as the ghost of his elder brother seems to haunt a school basketball match.
HUSTLE TO THE TOP
Inoue drew the Slam Dunk manga throughout his mid-to-late twenties, bringing it to an end on a high note in 1996. “Ending the story in the way I did was what I’d planned,” he said in an interview in the Slam Dunk ‘making of’ book, “That much is true. But for various reasons, as far as the readers were concerned, that final episode just came out of the blue, without any warning, with a final page that just said ‘End of Part One’. So, naturally they were, like: ‘we want to know what happens next’ and ‘there’s going to be more, right?’”
In 2004, feeling that, in some way, he’d let his readers down, Inoue staged a public event when the manga reached total sales of 100 million volumes. He published a celebratory announcement in six national newspapers, and drew the epilogue Slam Dunk: Ten Days After, not on paper, but on the blackboards of Kanagawa’s Misaki High School. “At the Misaki High event,” he remembered, “I was standing back, watching as the readers came up close to the manga I’d drawn in chalk. Seeing their enthusiasm, I felt once more what a huge presence they were within me.”
Inoue also set up a Slam Dunk fund – a basketball scholarship that would send a Japanese player to an American college for a year to learn English while preparing for the professional try-outs. To hear Inoue talk in interviews about America, where he lived for a while spending his Slam Dunk royalties, it could sound like an alien world – something he allegorised in his online comic Buzzer Beater, about an Earthling team that competes on a galactic level with opponents from other planets. In the Slam Dunk heyday, Inoue also worked on the two-part manga Hang Time, based on Bob Green’s The Michael Jordan Story.
Repeatedly in the years since the Slam Dunk manga and its anime adaptation came to an end, Inoue was approached about resurrecting the franchise, but refused. Instead, he threw himself into two acclaimed follow-ups. The first, Vagabond, was as far from Slam Dunk as he could get, a manga retelling of the life of the samurai Miyamoto Musashi. He sneaked back into the basketball world with Real, serialised in Young Jump, a magazine for older readers, to which many of the teens who read Slam Dunk had migrated. Its story, of a wheelchair-bound athlete determined to play basketball from his chair, might well have been inspired by events in Slam Dunk, but was an altogether different tale.
GO HARD OR GO HOME
Toshiyuki Matsui, the producer who would eventually scoop up the Grand Prize at the Fujimoto Awards for The First Slam Dunk, first approached Inoue in 2003, with a proposal to continue his storyline in movie form. “I was not up for it at the beginning,” confessed Inoue. “I didn’t think it would be possible. More than anything else, I didn’t think it would be possible to convey the reality of a basketball game.”
It took six years for Inoue to concede he might be interested in hearing more, leading Matsui to start assembling test footage to deal with the elephant in the room – how to properly evoke in animation the bustle and darting of basketball. Unsurprisingly, the timeline of Slam Dunk’s movie development is tied directly to technology, as increasing computer power and falling computer costs made digital animation a more attractive proposition. By 2014, with the dogged Matsui’s third set of pilot footage, Inoue saw something he had not seen before.
“The pilot version included draft shots,” he said. “Among them was the face of Hanamichi, who stared out of the screen, just the way I drew him in the final chapter [of the manga]. The moment I saw it, I felt the power of the drawing… I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t get involved.”
The First Slam Dunk was simply impossible to make with the animation tools of 2003. Today, it is state-of-the-art. We also get to see the full effect of two decades of ever-improving CG backgrounds – luscious sub-tropical beaches lapped by waves; schoolyards in the sunset and anime’s ever-present surfeit of hyper-real skies, here dotted with scudding and drifting clouds.
It is also very much an auteurist work, with the original creator onboard not only as the screenwriter, but as the director. Inoue’s agreement to return to Slam Dunk is also tied to his own sense of time passing – he has lived a whole life again since he was the 23-year-old artist who started work on Slam Dunk in 1990, and as shown in his work on Real, was now more interested in sporting terms in how players pushed through pain and adversity. There was, he thought, a new angle on the old story, but how to tell it.
“Looking back on my artwork, I was simply running uphill because I was so young back then. My focus was just on pushing ever forward, with a simple set of values like winning versus losing. It meant that I’d missed other viewpoints within the work. I realised there were many areas where the light had not been shone, and I strongly felt that those were what I wanted to show now. [The original manga] came out when I had yet to experience adversity. This time, I wanted the weak and the hurt to come through, in spite of their experience. They move on by overcoming their pain. I decided that would be the theme of this film.”
LEAVE IT ALL ON THE COURT
Inoue chose to spare Slam Dunk fans the misery of a straight reboot or a chapter-by-chapter retelling. Instead, he zeroed in on a story that would be familiar enough to old-time fans to entertain them, but could also lure in new audiences with no experience of the anime or manga. He drew on a pre-existing manga story, the 1998 one-off “Pierce”, in which he had experimented with telling Ryota’s story as if he were the protagonist.
Ryota had originally been inspired by a 1980s media storm, when teenagers from Okinawa’s Hentona High School made it to third place in the national inter-school championships, despite their relatively short stature. Inoue resolved to include a short Okinawan player on his team, but Ryota Miyagi had always been literally dwarfed by his team-mates. Now, Inoue placed him front and centre.
“I combined a single basketball match with his 17 years of life. I would use an already depicted match, so in the draft I put together Ryota’s life drama from his birth to that point.” Provocatively, as if resetting everybody’s expectations back to zero, he called it The First Slam Dunk, but focussed on the storyline that closed the original manga – the Shohoku team’s showdown with Sannoh, the best school team in Japan.
And you thought a basketball match only lasted for 40 minutes! The Shohoku team’s match against Sannoh, from their nervous previewing of match tapes, through the nerve-wracking four quarters and time-outs, to the final buzzer, originally took over a year to play out in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump – a full quarter of the total page-count. For its animated incarnation, as the Sannoh and Shohoku teams charge around the court in the film’s opening reel, the viewer entertains the prospect that we might really be watching an entire animated basketball match in real time. But already Inoue is compressing and finessing, dropping out of the action to comments (and Easter eggs) from the courtside crowd, as well as back in time to explain how one player in particular got where he is today.
The movement on screen is seamlessly motion-captured, crunching huge numbers of data-points to create a dozen figures jostling for control of the ball. It’s almost as if writer-director Inoue seems obliged to remind the viewer that this is all based on drawn artwork, with an opening sequence that celebrates the materiality of its creation by drawing each main character in turn, in pencil, before they are made to move. On the court, Inoue gleefully switches between the realist and “dragonfly-eye” filming modes, sometimes placing his camera in impossible locations, sometimes getting so close to the action that the lens is shunted aside by one of the players. Blink and you’ll miss them, but all around the edge of the court are figures with cameras of their own, the onscreen analogues of the animators themselves. Among the characters, only the portly coach Mitsuyoshi Anzai retains any of the cartoonish qualities of the early chapters of the original manga. Everybody else is as real as they can be.
The slingshot ending catapults us beyond the end of the original (in which Ryota became the captain of the school team), into a new realm, and an old rivalry, with the promise of a new story…
“A pair of sloths are comparing handbags; a raccoon is trying perfume; a pig is buying lipstick; a lion is thinking about getting some aftershave. On Akino’s first day at work, she is rebuffed by a rabbit who doesn’t want her help, and then accidentally steps on a duck. We’ve all been there.”
Over at All the Anime, I discuss Yoshimi Itazu’s The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store, which has its UK premiere at Scotland Loves Anime in November.
The Chinese director seems oddly solicitous with me today. I think he has worked out that although I appear to be lurking, silently like an idiot, at the edge of all negotiations, when my time comes, I am ready to go. It makes a huge difference to him, when his crew take two hours to set up a shot, that I can get it done in five minutes.
We end the day down on the rocky coast at Qingdao, catching the sunset behind the old colonial buildings from the days of the German concession, and across the shining buildings of the modern city. The film-makers are somewhat demob-happy after thirteen hours at work (in fact, the day starts at 0530 and I do not get to type this in a hotel until 2345), and we giggle at the sight of the sound crew trying to lug their hostess trolley across three hundred yards of boulders.
Jiuqing the producer dips her hands into a rock pool and shows me what she has caught.
“I have a shrimp,” she says, before carefully returning the small creature to its home.
The A-crew and the B-crew both have their respective cameras pointed in different directions. The C-crew with the drone lurk in the van, secure in the knowledge that it is too windy for them to fly their machine, particularly after its sojourn in a temple tree-top for two hours.
Our American producer, Mitch, is very impressed with Jiuqing, a lithe girl whose job as assistant director extends to keeping everybody on schedule, fixing and refixing our hotels and breakfasts and routes to location, and chivvying everybody along. During the long drive to the Qingdao beach, when he isn’t trying to teach Ruby the Interpreter how to sing Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, he discusses with Jiuqing the various options for the days ahead, and tells me that he suspects she will be managing a film company sooner rather than later. He is particularly impressed when he asks a question about a particular location, and she has a picture of the beach there in live time, within minutes.
“We have a D-crew,” she confesses. “They’re the clean-up men. They tail behind or go up ahead and snatch the sunsets and time-lapses we don’t have time for, or the magic-hour dawn material we can’t get to. They’re the ghost crew. We’re not supposed to admit they exist, but they are shooting everything we only remember to do after we’ve got back on the bus.”
And so we perch on the rocks in the wind as the sun sets over Qingdao. Someone has the bright idea of positioning a couple of marine items in the foreground on the rocks, as the sun sets behind them, and Jiuqing dashes off excitedly, returning with her hands gently cupped over two critters.
Spirits and magic are everywhere in the streets of Edinburgh – if only you dare to see it! Dive into this heartfelt manga about a witch and her apprentice as they try to find their place in a world that hates their very existence.
The last in a long line of Witches of the Black Wood, Marie Blackwood lives a quiet life in Edinburgh – away from the scrutiny of the Church. But when the Church thrusts 13-year-old Theo into her hands for safekeeping, Marie suddenly gains the responsibility not just of taking care of a teenager – but protecting the world, and Theo himself, from the amazing power that lives inside of him.
Out now from Titan Manga, John Tarachine’s Witch of Thistle Castle, with an English script translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me. Over at All the Anime, a Scottish-based blog, there’s already much love for it’s magical Edinburgh. Although not for the landscape-format front cover to the first volume, which even I find annoying.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 