Warning! This title contains graphic violence, gore and blood.
My first impression of this title goes like this: "Whoa! Suicide Virus! Lethal Pandemic! This is awesome!" If you've read my past posts, I really like dark themes. I'm not making fun of it, I'm just really interested in the psychological aspect of it all. My psych teacher once told me that people who have killed a person in their life had a change in their brain. That, to me, is interesting so I'm sorry if this is too morbid for you. Anyway, let's move on to the review shall we?
Alive: The Final Evolution Volume 1: (story by Tadashi Kawashima, art by Adachitoka) A story about a strange virus, spreading around the whole world, causing it's victims to commit suicide. Only 100,000 or so were claimed to have been dead because of this. A week later, the world has come back to it's normal state.. or does it? To die is to be free. (Not my opinion, just making sense of the story.)
Jealous of what? Wait, is that blood on your face?!
I don't want to spoil the story, sorry for the really short summary. I still want to tell you about the title though. The title says Alive: The Final Evolution but is it really a story about evolution? Yes it is. You get hints of it in this volume, and even more in the second one. It's pretty obvious to know who evolves right?
Art: It's very simplistic, not much detail was put into it but that does not lessen the intensity of the story. It's very bloody and graphic but because of the target audience, they didn't go Gantz all over the gory scenes. They did a very good job keeping the gore hidden. Speech bubbles are the way to censor stuff without getting yelled at.
Again, this is not Bakuman so you should be fine without any finer details drawn in.
Story: I think the story is not as original as it sounds. You'll find out. I find it interesting because it's an evolution story of humans. We haven't been evolving since what? Like 50,000 years ago? We haven't been evolving since then. We can't ask for more than this. So how can we evolve into a better specie? It also gets you thinking, why did the suicides stop after one week?
Remember this B-movie? "It's the trees man! The trees!" - Mark Wahlberg
It's very good in showing Yuichi's side of the story while staying true to Taisuke's side. It doesn't say anything that can spoil the plot. It gets you ready when there's some dramatic or dark stuff ahead.
The story gets serious after the first chapter. It doesn't waste time on fillers and tells the story straight.
Bottomline: Give it a try. You might not like it because it dwells on sadness and despair most of the time (like I said, after the first chapter, you are pretty much done with the comical ideas). Don't get me wrong, I like this series (I have the first two volumes) and I will continue to read it.
If you want to read a dark manga that has a (somewhat) sci-fi element to it, read this. I recommend that you make time to read this, it might bore you a little. Anyway, that's all I have to say, hope you enjoyed this lengthy one.
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