Kagerou is an ongoing web comic. (That
posts intermittently depending on how the muse strikes the creator. At the time
of this review, we are in a lull.) It takes a large number of fantasy tropes,
dumps them into a blender and sets the blender on disintegrate.
Our Hero is Kano Jurgen, a young
man with strange psychic powers he is generally unaware of because he is not
the most mentally healthy person in the world. (And a great deal of why he is
not mentally healthy is because of aforementioned psychic powers.) As often
happens in fantasy stories, Our Hero is chosen to be the Champion of a princess
and drawn into the Grey World so he can Defeat the Evil Overlord.
Unfortunately, he is not Genre Savvy and very stupidly gets himself killed by
one of the villains. (This is not a permanent condition.)
As the story develops, we
learn more about the Grey World and about the princess, who it turns out, is
the avatar and chosen vessel of Tcaolin. Tcaolin is a formerly human Goddess
who is extremely insane and actually kind of evil. She is responsible for
causing a zombie apocalypse that happened centuries previous to the story. What
starts out as a “save the princess from the Evil Overlord” becomes “save the
princess from getting absorbed by the evil goddess while also saving the world
from the Evil Overlord.”
We also learn that Kano’s
mental landscape is a very scary place to be. One of Kano’s psychic powers is
apparently to draw in souls. His skullmates are Red, a serial killer, many of
Red’s victims, princess Tonbo’s soul Fuuka, and his sister Nadia. He also has
multiple personalities. There is Kid, who is a very cute, very hyperactive kid
with a highly active imagination. Kid’s job is to keep all of Kano’s memories
safely stored in boxes. The other personality is Dark who at one point was
there to protect Kid. That is...no longer the case. Both alternate
personalities have more control over Kano’s powers than Kano does.
Unfortunately, Red also has control of Kano’s powers and seems to live for
getting Kano in as much trouble as possible.
The art is fantastic, the writing is excellent
and the characters are extremely engaging. (Of course, many of them are also
nightmarishly creepy, but this is not a bad thing by any means.) As a general
warning, there is often a lot of gore and disturbing imagery. (And by
disturbing, I actually mean “nightmarish.”) There are also great comedic
moments and a lot of snappy dialog.
The plot is a twisty thing
that will pull you right along if you are not careful. This is one of those web
comics where I ended up going “okay, just one more page and then I’ll go do something
useful with my time,” and the next thing I know it is several hours later and I
still have not done the useful thing I was supposed to have been doing.
