I intended to not buy new manga series until I finished the ones I had, but I couldn’t resist volume 1 of Kaoru Mori’s Emma. Not only did Mely’s description make it sound utterly charming, but it gave me the impression that I’d better buy it while it was on the shelf, or I might have trouble finding it thereafter.
This was the perfect palate-cleanser after Planetes, and also very enjoyable in its own right. It’s late-19th century London. William is a merchant whose family wishes to keep moving in aristocratic circles. Emma is a maid for William’s former governess. As Mely says, “they fall in love, which shockingly fails to eradicate class differences.”
This is a very quiet, subtle volume, with lovely characters and art. Not just of Emma and William, either: Emma’s employer has a backstory and a personality; William’s father shows signs of being important; and William’s school friend Hakim, a prince from India, shows up with a large entourage and a number of elephants. Speaking of elephants, I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the art, but I’ve uploaded two pages’ worth of scans (from the original Japanese); choose between small versions of Emma agreeing to walk a little ways with William (read left-to-right) and an elephant on the London streets (roughly 50KB) and large ones (roughly 250KB). As these suggest, the panel layout is very simple and unobtrusive.
Really, that’s not a bad way to describe this first volume: simple and unobtrusive, but in a good way. Despite the lousy quality of the U.S. version’s paper, I recommend it highly. Volume 2 is also out; I’m waiting to need a pick-me-up to read it, or maybe I’ll wait until all seven volumes are out and gulp it down. I’m not sure, but either way, I look forward to more of this series.