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What does Sherlock Holmes have in common with a certain blind man's poetry? Put simply, timelessness. Every era takes its chance to birth a new cultural pillar, a genre of media that goes on to achieve immortality in our collective conscience. Such popular mainstays never truly buckle to the flow of time; rather, they are reinvented and rediscovered by each era, keeping their cultural impact and rich histories alive and expanding.
One such flagbearer, particularly of Western media, is the Wild West genre. Having never truly lost its popular image over time, early cinema reinvigorated the image of cowboys, guns, and plucky vendettas. Even now that image is nearly inseparable from the late nineteenth century, just as the associated flicks are forever associated with classic cinema.
So, what would you expect when the medium of Japanese manga intersected with this absolute monolith of classic Western media cultures? A question that Masasumi Kakizaki's Green Blood ventures to answer.
A paintin' o' the Ol' West
While we might have grown accustomed to RPG otherworlds, sprawling fantasies, and historical rendering of Japan in manga, the Wild West is—by my experience—a surprisingly untouched domain in the medium, making for an entertainingly fresh choice of setting. Flowing more like an early Hollywood movie than a Japanese manga, Green Blood depicts the untamed savagery of late ninteenth century America while leaning into its inspirations and seinen label.
At its surface, the manga seems like a typical cowboy revenge story, rife with mindless violence and excessive gore. While this is ultimately undeniable, Green Blood manages to play these tropes straight through its willingness to delve into actual history—such as the crime infestation of Manhattan's Five Points, or the reality of Native American purges—and the sheer intensity of its presentation.
If you'll have any takeaway from this manga, it'll be Kakizaki's jaw-dropping art work. Excelling especially in the depiction of rich backgrounds and gritty violence, your immersion in settings, characters, and individual scenes will be thoroughly carried by the illustration's calibre. The aforementioned violence particularly shines through in the series' fights, which are neither realistic nor choreographed, instead choosing to be eye-popping displays of brutality and character expression.
It's here that I would like to take a moment to appreciate and dissect Masasumi Kakizaki's artwork: while stunning on its own, what really stood out to me was the shading and linework. The unique approach taken with these two brought background depth to the panelling without retaining clear outlines for the characters.
There's an artistic messiness at play here, as the dynamically sketched character models can easily be lost to the shading of the backgrounds. This is used to play into high tension, hectic scenarios, where they capture the mental and physical disorientation of characters. At the same time, it isn't necessarily a very kinesthetic style.
Rather than communicating motion, Kakizaki chooses to present the transgression of events by capturing the cumulative details in each panel and harmoniously tying them together. Expressions, clothes, dirt, body language; all of these are individually evident in the panelling, but at the same time, there's an excess of inking, introducing unnecessary lines and spots for emphasis on the character models themselves, all while the outlines blend together into one image, creating epic character stills (that I'd mount on my wall if I could).
Reconciling classic and contemporary
Beyond its garishly gorgeous art and the authenticity of its setting, this manga shouldn't have too much going for it, in principle. After all, it very much leans into the stereotypes of its plot line, so it doesn't feel like it's telling a new story. Because it isn't.
At its core, Green Blood is a tried and tested adventure with a fresh layer of paint (the manga medium, in this case). At a comfortable length of five volumes, it even seems to have the duration of a gunslinging feature film, meaning it doesn't wear its welcome thin either.
The whole cast feel like different Wild West archetypes, but it works in manga because these tropes were so extra to begin with. Take our protagonist, Brad Burns, an underground assassin seeking vengeance on his own father; a gunslinger so badass he might as well be an anime character... Oh, wait.
Then there's his younger brother, Luke, an innocent young boy with a soft heart, misled to believe his brother is just a bum. Unfortunately, Luke's näivete and sense of morality are unlikely to last in such a cruel world, no matter how far Brad is willing to go to protect them.
If the characters tell you anything, you might be able to see how Kakizaki builds on the story's core with a dose of sentamentality, highlighting character relationships, conflicts of conscience, and a need for closure, all elements we're used to seeing in anime and manga.
I will say that towards the end, the storyline ends up going out exactly the way you thought it would. There's nothing wrong with a predictable ending though, it's just a case of a story following through on what it told us to expect. After all, a happy conclusion at journey's end is a trope even older than the Wild West genre...
Closing thoughts
At times self-aware and at times fully embracing its gunslinging origins, the only thing I can't deny Green Blood is props for its function as seinen manga: it utilises the demographic's rights to violent subject matter and mature tones—𠅅perfectly married by incredible artwork—to tell an immersive, concise story, simple though it might seem in retrospect.
Better yet, it manages to make the stereotypes of the manga medium work for it instead of against it. And I have to say, given how well it handles the Wild West setting, I find it almost criminal how rarely I get to see other manga like this.
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