Attack on Titan, vol 1, by Hajime Isayama

Posted by: Redhead on: March 23, 2014

• In: Hajime Isayama | Manga
• 12 Comments

Attack on Titan, volume 1, by Hajime Isayama

published in 2012

where I got it: purchased new

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It’s been ages since I reviewed a Manga.  Been watching plenty of anime lately (or to be honest, half-watching. Other than Eccentric Family and Silver Spoon, much of what my household watches doesn’t interest me. But that’s a totally different blog post), but I haven’t read much new manga.

One of the animes that caught my eye recently was Attack on Titan. I had some issues with the pacing of the anime, but because I like the overall storyline I decided to give the Manga a try. One of the major reasons the anime didn’t work so well for me was the uneven pacing. Scenes that felt important to me were quickly over, and overdramatic scenes were drawn out too long.  By reading the manga, I can set my own pace. I can spend as much (or as little) time as I want studying each page and conversation.  The scripts of the manga and anime are pretty much identical, but I did much better with the manga because I controlled the pacing.

Attack on Titan takes place on what can be described as a post-apocalyptic Earth, but this isn’t an apocalypse caused by nuclear war, or smog, or an asteroid hitting. This is a monster apocalypse.  About a hundred years ago, humanity started being attacked by giant humanoid creatures, called Titans. The size of a small  building, the Titans destroy homes and cities, and often eat any humans they come across.  Humanity came up with plans to survive, which mostly included retreating behind tall stone walls.   The designs of the walled cities lure the Titans into attacking the more outlying parts of the walled complex, so they won’t be interested in the less defended areas. Pretty shitty deal for the people living in those outlying areas.

Eren and his adopted sister Mikasa live with their parents in one of those outlying areas.  The family believes they are safe.  There are some hints that Eren’s father was involved in secret research (which I imagine will become very important later), but in the first volume of the manga this is only touched on a little bit.  The town can typically repel most Titans, thanks to defenses on the top of their wall, but one day a giant Titan barrels through the wall, allowing a small army of titans to ravage the city. Eren’s mother is killed by a Titan, and he feels responsible for her death, he wants to know what he could have done differently so that she would have lived. Eren joins up with the military with the hopes of joining the Survey Corps, and Mikasa and their friend Armin join up too.

A few quick words on Eren, Mikasa, and Shonen tropes, because I can’t help myself.  Eren is a Shonen trope-tastic “angry young man”, meaning he is  impulsive to the point of being over the top, he makes rash decisions and life altering promises without thinking through what he’s saying, and no matter how unrealistic the vow, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep it, even risking himself and his friends. It often falls to Mikasa to stop him from doing something really stupid, and Armin often becomes the physical manifestation of the consequences of Eren’s rash actions.   Usually these characters have every right to be very, very angry, and it’s not their anger that bothers me, it’s their over-dramatic (and brain bashingly repetitive) methods of communicating it.  The “angry young man”  trope is so often done poorly, but it’s also the main plot of my all time favorite manga, Fullmetal Alchemist, so there’s that.

Okay, sorry for the tangent, back to Attack on Titan.

There are a few chapters spent on their military training, and many, many pages spent on the brilliant pneumatic flying machinery the recruits must learn to use. Gas powered pneumatica   propel the soldier forward or upward, and an extendable knife blade helps them grab onto things, and ultimately stab a Titan in the back of the neck, killing it. And it was this, the creative engineering, that really got me hooked on Attack on Titan.  The characters really aren’t anything special, nor are the politics or the post apocalyptic situation.  But these gizmos that strap onto your body and let you leap over and across buildings?  I’ve never seen anything quite like it. You can get a good idea of what they look like from the cover of the manga, and the author gives a few pages trying to explain exactly how it works.  Necessity is the mother of invention after all, and to kill a 50 meter tall monster, you need to get your soldier and your weaponry 50 meters into the air.

As the story progresses in this first volume, Mikasa gets Eren out of plenty of scrapes, we learn Armin makes a pretty shitty soldier, and other minor characters are introduced. When a massive, and seemingly intelligent Titan attacks the city everyone is now living in, Eren sacrifices his life to save Armin’s.

To be continued!

Eren and Mikasa are main characters, so Eren can’t be like, dead dead, right?