Translated by Taylor Engel
191 pages
Published 2017 (English translation published 2018)
Read August 24
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
A long reading hiatus as my teen’s summer wound down. I’ve been reading a big anthology of short stories, but I likely won’t finish it for a while, and nothing else sounded interesting to read in the meantime — except more Dungeon Meshi.
This volume begins the long Red Dragon arc, which was a bit of a surprise; the first ten episodes of the anime were so iconic that I had forgotten how quickly the story reaches the town of the golden castle.
The artwork and pacing of these chapters is phenomenal. The shading work on the red dragon somehow feels more menacing on the printed page than it does animated in full color. The shifting, deserted passageways of the city feel eerier here than they do in the anime. Even knowing what would happen, I found myself flipping through the pages of the confrontation with the dragon, on the proverbial edge of my proverbial seat. Excellent stuff.
As in Volume 3, I feel that the pacing works better here in the manga. Character beats have time to linger when, say, you can appreciate a silent panel, rather than get carried along by the linearity of the anime. The revelation about Marcille’s magic speciality, in particular, landed better in the manga.
Spoilers: I also appreciate how defeating the dragon, the triumph you might expect from a fantasy narrative, is only the beginning of the characters' problems.
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