Saturday Splash Page #153

 

"Sacrificial Soul," in Soul Eater, ch. 2, vol. 4, by Atsushi Ohkubo

Hope this isn't the start of a trend. I don't actually own all of Soul Eater. Not the manga, anyway. I have the anime on DVD. But there's at least 15 volumes of the "Perfect Edition" Square Enix released, each of which I think is 1.5 volumes of the manga as it was originally collected. I own 3 of the 15. But I really don't know if I'm ever going to get the rest of it, so I might as well hit it now.

There are Meisters and Weapons. The latter are people who can turn into weapons for some reason. Meisters and Weapons work as teams to hunt down killers (who Atsushi bases on a variety of beings, both real and fake, ranging from Jason Voorhees to Rasputin) before they can become Kishin, which are some kind of immensely powerful demon-thing, or witches. If a Weapon eats the souls of 99 humans and 1 witch, they become a Death Scythe, which means really powerful and fit to be wielded by Lord Death.

But the main cast are still students at the academy. Maka and Soul came close to making Soul a Death Scythe, but the witch's soul he ate was just a cat(girl) with strong magical abilities. And because cats have 9 lives, Blair Witch, sticks around as a fan service character. There's some weirdo teachers, a witch posing as the school doctor who is secretly experimenting on Soul, and Maka's dad, who is Lord Death's Death Scythe, but also a horndog who can't understand why Maka has no time for a guy who cheated on her mother.

The main thing I notice about Atsushi's art, besides the excessive fan service, is that his art style is pretty different from most manga artists. His linework is much thinner, and he tends to stick with solid black for shading rather then gradations. He also tends to a lot of minimalist white backgrounds and surroundings, which I assume is also to keep the character linework from being overwhelmed or lost against the background. Not always; he has some nicely exaggerated and strange designs for buildings when he wants to establish setting, but he saves that for when he thinks he needs it.