SERAPHIC FEATHER

— by Eric "Scanner" Luce

Action, mystery, violence, family problems, alien invasions, E.S.P., extremely confusing time lines, beautiful girls, young male heroes, villains, and heroes again - That is what this story has. Its appeal on the surface is definitely flash and imagery. Especially female imagery. Then again, one should not be surprised at that with artist Utatane Hiroyuki participating in the work.
Luckily for us there is enough story buried in this manga to keep us reading after the initial flash has sunk in. Since this story is only collected in its volumes in a nearly perennial cycle, it needed some serious story to keep us waiting for the next installment!
The story appears to start out simple enough. However, with only one flashback that occurs at the beginning of the first volume, we are already confused about who is whom and what occurs when by the first time the main characters meet. Something really strange is going on with characters aging rates or time, something we come to accept early on.

It starts out simply enough: a young girl (Kei Heidmann) and a younger boy (Ohmi Sunao) are gazing up at the stars on some grassy knoll. Kei explains how the light from a star took 18,000 years to reach where they were sitting. Sunao exclaims how he wants to become a pilot and travel to such far away stars.
The next page shows Sunao entering Kei's empty home. All that is left is a small video recording that Kei left for Sunao saying that her father has to move to the moon for his job and that she is going with him. She says that she is told many people live on the moon and that Sunao will need to visit them. Since Sunao is going to be a pilot he can go there and she will be waiting for him. Kei says that she will write him. She remembers that today is Sunao's birthday and she makes a wish for him. Sunao, broken-hearted, shouts "Liar!" and as he does the glass patio window across from him cracks violently. As he slumps, shattered, Kei's voice in the recording breaks and she begins crying, saying that she is sorry, so sorry. This lets Sunao pull himself together a little bit, and he makes a vow that he will get to the moon.
Sometime later, on the space needle that extends itself up from the moon's surface, a mechanic drops a bolt into an opening and, despite the weak gravity, it rapidly falls out of his reach. He calls for Sunao's help, asking if Sunao can do anything. Sunao uses his small amount of telekinetic powers to levitate the bolt back up. The foreman is impressed at Sunao's ability, but Sunao tries to make little of it. The foreman continues on that Sunao is 17 and wonders what he is up on the moon doing part-time jobs for. Sunao more or less evades the question, saying that it has to do with a childhood friend.
Elsewhere on the moon we see a burst lunar dome in the center of a crater. However, the dome still seems to be active and inhabited. We shift to a view of someone repeating a video segment showing a very large explosion on the moon's surface. A rather well-endowed female enters saying "Ah, here you are, Apep." Fan, the female, talks to Apep about his search for "emblem seeds" and the event surrounding an alien ship. With the data disc that Fan brings, Apep calls up an image of the alien ship, and alien it certainly is. Fan wonders at how organic it looks.

Such is the very initial setting for this story. Things soon get very interesting as the rest of the main characters, Attim Mazak and a not old-enough Kei Heidmann (compared to Sunao), are introduced. The story is at once entertaining, enjoyable to look at and maddeningly frustrating as you wonder what directions it will travel in. With the change of one of the creators (Takeda Toshiya for Morimoto Yo) the story seems to have achieved a more stable plot. (Although perhaps the story was going to go in this direction anyways.) We are given salient plot details significant amounts at a time with curious spans of character development placed between them. The art goes from simple to breathtaking in its range. The lines are very fine and very detailed. Utatane retains tight control over how to draw the characters with unfortunately a bit too much attention paid to rather exaggerated female anatomy that he loves to show off.
The backgrounds are a rather curious mix. They range from stunning and scene-setting to entirely absent for a whole range of panels. The choice of when a background occurs and the strength with which it occurs seems to be very carefully calculated based on how much you are supposed to concentrate on the foreground.
The story has many points which are slowly coming together and this tightening of story and action is forcing us to read each volume as it comes out. There is the fear though, that the story may peak soon and leave us with a sense of many things unfinished. We can only hope for the best. If you have a hankering for this sort of science fiction story you may wish to pick it up and decide for yourself if you want to wait a year for the next installment.