Bleach
Author: Tite Kubo
Genre: Manga, Supernatural Adventure
Publisher: Viz
Cost: $7.95
Rating: ***• (3 1/2 out of 4)
Availability:Widely Available
Viz has taken to coding their pocket-sized manga with icons on the spine. Look for a girl standing on a crescent moon, and you’ve found “Shoujo” manga – fantastic storylines generally concerning true love and the importance of self esteem. If you’re looking at a guy standing on a ringed planet, that means the manga is “Action” and contains all that genre usually entails. A crown means “Editor’s Choice,” and is reserved for manga that pushes the boundaries of genre and the art form.
The colorful “SJ” logo on the spine of Bleach marks it as part of the “Shonen Jump” manga line, featuring stories that first saw the light of day in what is probably the world’s most popular manga magazine, Shonen Jump.
Bleach is the story of high school student Ichigo Kurosaki. With his slender build and orange-colored hair, Ichigo is your typical teenager with your typical teenage problems. His family runs a clinic to treat the sick and injured, he worries about his classes and grades, and his father keeps him to a strict curfew.
Ichigo can also see ghosts.
It’s no secret that Ichigo can see them. He’s seen them all his life, and has spent most of his life helping these ghosts to find peace. As a result, Ichigo gets very little peace, himself – as soon as he’s finished helping one ghost, another is quick to latch onto him. Ichigo’s father is without the talent and is jealous of his son’s gift, while his sister actually shares the talent, but is smart enough to ignore the ghosts and avoid constant entaglements.
But as much as Ichigo knows about spirits and the spirit world, he quickly finds out that he doesn’t know everything.
Rukia Kuchiki is a Soul Reaper – a creature that Ichigo has never before encountered or even heard of. Working for the Soul Society, Rukia’s job is to send the souls of the dead on to a place of peace. Which would be all well and good if that were her sole responsibility. Unfortunately, in additon to the generally benign spirits of the dead, Rukia has to deal with Hollows.
Hollows are evil spirits who swallow the innocent souls Rukia is sworn to protect and who prey off of humans who display high levels of psychic energy.
Humans like, say, Ichigo Kurosaki.
Through an unfortunate twist during a battle with a Hollow, Rukia is forced to give Ichigo a small amount of her Reaper’s powers to allow him to fight. But something goes wrong in the transfer, and Ichigo winds up taking every last drop of Rukia’s powers into himself – turning Ichigo into a full-fledged Soul Reaper and leaving Rukia nearly powerless to fulfill her obligations.
The character design for Bleach is sleek and stylish, similar in feel to Masashi Kishimoto’s long and lean ninjas of Naruto, with creature design paying homage to great freak-outs such as Takahashi’s Mermaid Saga and Matsuri Akino’s Pet Shop of Horrors. The storyline flows smoothly through silken action scenes that feel neither hurried nor drawn-out, while the comic relief shines as some of the best in young adult manga, never coming across as too heavy-handed or extreme.
Where Bleach shines, however, is in its treatment of the people who haunt Ichigo’s life – both the living and the dead. The family that constantly surrounds him, his friends and colleagues – even the Hollows, it turns out, are not completely devoid of emotion and character. At the heart and soul, Bleach is about action and magic – but along the way it never forgets that action can’t exist in a vacuum of character and plot.
