Recent reads

Bizenghast, Vol. 1 and 2, by Alice LeGrow. This rather frilly little piece of Goth-manga first attracted my attention because of its title, which sounds like an allusion to the towering literary edifice of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and the attractively surreal cover art.

The storyline is okay. Dinah, an orphaned girl with a fondness for elaborate dresses replete with a mixture of Victorian and modern ornamentation, is troubled by dreams of ghosts which bring on "fits" of near-insanity. She lives with her aunt in a dilapidated former asylum and home for "troubled children" in the mysterious New England town of Bizenghast. Occasional news clippings inserted into the story suggest that Bizenghast is the locus of many weird happenings. Most notably, its local records indicate far more deaths than its cemetaries account for. Dinah's best and, apparently, only friend is a teenage boy, Vincent, who seems to live a curiously unsupervised life.

While exploring in the woods near town, Dinah and Vincent find a strange structure and graveyard. For reasons not clearly understood by me, it seems that Dinah is been drafted, somewhat unwillingly, into becoming the human agent assigned to help troubled spirits trapped in this Mausoleum find their way -- willingly or unwillingly -- to their final fate.

There's a good deal of visual creativity on display here, not only in the arrestingly odd creatures that Our Heroes meet in fulfilling their tasks, but in the perpetually-changing clothes and hairstyles of the two principals. Indeed, it sometimes seems that displaying these is the whole point of the exercise. The tasks assigned to the principals, and the rules governing the Mausoleum and their interactions with it, seem to be, in typical anime/manga style, rather contrived intellectual constructs that exist mainly to give the characters something to do while looking attractive.

Fortunately, most of the plot contrivances are worked out in clever or humorous ways, and the artwork, and, yes, even the costume designs, are consistently appealing. An appendix to the second volume confirms that the author is, indeed, a cosplayer and an accomplished seamstress whose graphic art and seamstress work frequently cross-fertilize each other. Her webpage at DeviantArt contains examples of both, as well as a clue that the Gormenghastly allusion in her title is no coincidence. (It troubles me only slightly that some of the artwork on offer is rather cute-ishly morbid, and that certain commenters on Wikipedia have dubbed her main female character's style of clothing as "Gothic Lolita", or Loli-Goth for short.)