Witch Wizard, Vol. 1

Considering the things I have heard about James Patterson books I have never been interested enough to read any novel by him. Not even the original novel from which this manga is adapted from but from the moment I found out on Svetlana Chmakova's livejournal that she would be doing the artwork for the adaptation I was on board.

First of all to get my fangirling out of the way I will comment on the artwork. I loved it (points to cover). Svetlana does a great job of portraying different emotions through facial expressions and displaying action sequences without smothering the page in too much detail. And her character designs within a story are always unique enough that you won't mix anyone up or mistake a guy for a girl (I'm talking about you Japanese creators). However, if you compared a few characters in this book to characters in her other series you might be like me and go “hey _ looks like ___ from __” but that has been my experience with other mangakas as well so I wasn't bothered by this just making an observation.

The story, it has a lot of potential and I am still interested to find out what happens in volume two but honestly volume one was sort of a mess. Despite actually being around sixty-six pages longer than the standard manga volume Witch & Wizard: The Manga vol. 1 felt both rushed in story line and lacking in background information. The story starts off at some point in the future where the main characters along with their parents are on a platform in the middle of a packed stadium about to be executed, after this we jump to the past to find out how they all came to be in that situation. In the middle of the night while everyone is asleep both Wit and Whisty are taken from their home under the charge of being a witch and wizard and they are each allowed to take with them one item, their mother hands Whisty a drumstick while their dad gives Wit a blank book. Now from this moment it's obvious to the reader that the parents know more than they are letting on and that Wit and Whisty know absolutely nothing about being “special”. They aren't the only ones however to be charged for their “crimes” because when they get carted off to prison (which is an abandoned mental ward) they are surrounded by hundreds of other children their age.

Witch and Wizard was an action-centric story lead by two fairly interesting young characters, both Wit and Whisty despite being forcibly removed from their homes, imprisoned in a rundown building, forced to undergo testing, and over the top punishments under the supervision of cruel child-hating warden take all their hardships in stride. They rarely fail to crack a joke and never break out into hysterics, which would have been my reaction. I had first assumed since the new Government regime was so openly anti-magic and the public was jumping on board no hesitation that in the alternate universe, knowledge about magic was the norm and everyone was in the know but that really isn't the case, magic is as new to Wit and Whisty as it is to everyone else but everyone else' reaction wasn't what I was expecting. No one was questioning it, acting skeptical and there were a lot of knowledgeable people in this world which made me think background information on both the new government and the world of Witch and Wizard would have left me feeling less confused.

It would have also helped if the entire first novel hadn't been packed into this one volume because so much had happened that there was barely any time to take a break and digest all that was going on. There was barely any character development for anyone and so currently I don't really care what happens to anyone at this point. Hopefully this will change in volume two.