Title: Heretic Monk (Gedoubou)
Genre: Action, Supernatural
Publisher: Nihonbungeisha (JP), Digital Manga (US)
Artist: Shinji Hiramatsu
Translation: Himawari Natsuno
Original Release Date: September 24, 2013
There’s nothing more depressing than reading about a badass character who’s the most perfect thing in the world. What this means is the badass character will not have any weaknesses and will be the literal savior of all. Considering we have a monk as the lead, the irony is very real. This then means everything else has to be good enough to allow the monk to not seem so boring and bland. Aside from one chapter where a good theme was explored, Heretic Monk is the classic middle of the road manga: it’s not particularly bad, but in its first volume, it’s not particularly good, and it only has its lack of depth in its story and one note characters to blame for that.
There are 5 different stories in Vol 1, each revolving around a man who only goes by Heretic Monk. His task is to calm the souls of those who have been cheated or tricked by people relatively close to them, while then administering poetic justice to those who committed the evil deed. The moral of each story is a classic idea of “you do wrong, you’ll get paid back eventually,” and those stories generally end with the Monk seeing into the past life of the ones doing wrong, their evil deeds in those times, how they end up dying, and him killing them similarly in the present. This definitely is a case of being holy here.
I’ll get this out of the way: this manga is ugly. Ok, not the “it looks intentionally crappy” ugly, but the ugly in what it’s trying to do. It has a broken Monk, who sometimes gets drawn weirdly, characters drawn in a style that’s oddly shaped and lacking in emotion, crude sex scenes, and lots of merciless, bloody deaths. If I could feel any emotion from said bloody deaths and sex scenes maybe they would be acceptable, but it’s mostly just done for style, and nothing else. Unfortunately that style doesn’t hold up when all of its other elements aren’t good. If you’re going to recycle most things, it helps to have interesting characters, and yet none of them are really interesting enough to make me give a crap about their plight.
Let me take an example of a story I liked out of the 5. It involves a man who lost his wife and unborn child to a druggie. After living as a recluse for seven years, he learns that the one who killed his family has been released from prison, and desires to get revenge. In reading this chapter, it had some dumb things: it had the druggie’s workers (they were at a construction site) beat up the man while trying to convince him he has changed — this after the killer agreed to let the man beat him up for what he did, as an apology. My only reaction was to laugh, since it wasn’t a good look for the killer. It was also weird of them to mention they were convicts who have changed. Yeah, you beat up someone to prove you have changed. Good point you’re proving.
But the theme made me think about it. It involved someone who had killed, who had been taking drugs, and was trying to turn his life around. It made me think about those criminals who want to try to return to society, with what they did still in the back of their mind. How would the one who lost a loved one to that someone respond? For me, it was excellent thought-fodder, and made it overall a refreshing chapter. It could have been better if they explored this angle. But instead he was exposed to be exactly as evil as he was back then, and that kind of upset me, since it could have been an excellent piece of commentary right there. But after the monk strangled him to death with beads, I was reminded that’s not what this manga’s about.
This might be the best part of Heretic Monk. Right here.
What Heretic Monk’s trying to be about is being super bloody and super manly. It’s trying to just show how super powerful this monk happens to be, while doing whatever it wants to everyone else. And oh, it wants to leave a message by the end…after killing someone who did a misdeed in as brutal (for this manga’s) fashion as possible. And for the most part, it leaves no real memory. That’s kind of hard to do. There’s a chance that you’ll find a story you’ll understand and like. There’s also a chance of everything completely missing its mark. I can only hope Vol 2 steps it up in almost every area for it to maintain my interest.
