Rave Master - Page 2

Turns out this seemingly idyllic island setting is so removed from the world at large that neither Haru nor Cattleya know of the war that is on the horizon. But when our boy takes his catch into town to show his catch to Gemma, the snickery owner of Cafe Tsubomi, an elderly figure appears to bring us up to date. It's the young boy we saw in the opening pages, now aged into your standard issue geezer with a long beard and a single pointed thatch of hair in the middle of his head. His appearance is promptly followed by the entrance of a menacing type dressed in black ("There are a lot of out-of-towners around today," Haru observes), who attacks the old man. "You need to respect your elders," Haru states stoutly. "My sister taught me that!" And he knocks the thug out in righteous retaliation. "I've been training every day," he explains to Shiba once they've left the unconscious baddie. "I need to protect my sister."

Which, of course, establishes (as if there was any doubt) that Haru is gonna be the fightin' hero of this series. Shiba quickly fills him in on the back story, telling him and us of the war that occurred between "mysterious stones of light and dark": a demon stone called Dark Bring and "the only thing which can oppose it," the sacred stone Rave. Fifty years earlier, Shiba used a sword infused with the power of Rave to destroy what he thought was the last Dark Bring. But his efforts resulted in that massive explosion (or "Overdrive") which destroyed a "tenth of the world" and allowed the last Dark Bring to escape. Now the followers of Dark Bring, an organization known as Demon Card, are planning on bringing further death 'n' destruction to the world.

Okay. Standard fantasy hero babble, right? We also learn that in the aftermath of the Hiroshima-type Overdrive that the Rave Stone separated into pieces and flew off in different directions. Only one who knows the whereabouts of the myriad stones is the little creature Haru fished from the ocean: Plue, who is "Rave's bearer."

By now we're fifty pages into the first volume, and I should be losing patience with this second-hand nonsense. Yet Mashima's clear-cut pen and ink style has a cartoony dynamism and attractiveness that keeps me reading. His dialog is concise and pushes the story along speedily (abetted by James Lucas Jackson's unobtrusively colloquial English adaptation). Without shying away from the darker elements of his storyline (we learn, for instance, that bro & sis have apparently been abandoned by their father Gale, who disappeared fifteen years ago), the writer/artist also keeps things accessible for a young reader. Yet he doesn't bother to over-explain his story either (though I know my curiosity has been piqued re: the "mysterious lifeform" Nakajima).

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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