Title: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy
Publisher: Shogakukan (JP), Viz Media (US)
Original Creator: Shinobu Ohtaka
Serialized in: Weekly Shonen Sunday
Translation: John Werry
Original Release Date: August 13, 2013
My first experience with Shinobu Ohtaka’s Magi actually happened a few years ago, when I saw some pages out of a Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine I brought while attempting to learn Japanese. That was a few years ago. Cue the Fall 2012 Anime season when Magi made it’s anime debut. After watching 3 episodes, I put it on hold. But now I finally get to see what the fuss is about now that Viz has published the manga in the states.
I would say so far, so good/it has a chance to be pretty endearing.
Magi is set Arabian Nights style…or inspired by, with the character designs and its setting. That means tales of lore, the rich enjoying the high life, and mysterious dungeons dominate the world. We see this world through Aladdin, a seemingly innocent kid traveling around the land to find treasure with his friend, the Djinn Ugo, and along the way we see bandits being terrible, the existence of slaves, and people who lack any basic decency and only see the bottom line. But we also see friendships formed, chance encounters, and some interesting meetings take place. What type of adventures will Aladdin have? We’ll have to see.
…As you can probably tell, the story’s kind of bland at the moment. I say that because at this point, there’s no real goal set up (or at least one I can see taking over the manga), or one massive conflict, aside from individual motivations. Generally there’s some hook that makes you want to know what the end point is in most manga, but instead Magi seems it’s going to be dungeon of the week type of stuff, with the meeting of friends and enemies along the way. If it’s going to be something of a success in general, the dungeon adventures and the character interactions will have to be exceptionally good, unless it does eventually share a plot for me to sink my teeth into.
Characters, however, was mainly the strength of Vol. 1, and that leads me to believe it’s going to build up to something greater. It’s easy to either like, love, or hate a character in this volume. Aladdin is a kid with the mind of an old man, is innocently naive (and sometimes scary adorable), but can be reliable when it counts. He needs to get away from women though. Alibaba, the next character to be introduced, seems to be your usual too goody two shoes with ulterior motivations but then proves to be someone slightly more than that, in terms of his passion (he seems to really be giddy for certain things) and his righteousness. Other characters, like an obnoxious fat guy with big boobs, and a girl that’s a slave to a powerful Lord, also stand out to me as well.
But it’s obvious this volume mostly was intended to get some laughs. From the comedic art style (that shows up at the sight of Aladdin summoning Ugo), to every time Aladdin had his face in boobs (woman or man), to the overly dramatic panels where characters were downsized to a large degree, I think it’s clear Ohtaka wanted to start with comedy first, main reason to keep caring second. It works so far since I did end up laughing at some points and the one off stories (one where Aladdin meets two women after eating their watermelons, for example) were done well.
Magi does have a lot of picking up to do though. It first starts with what I mentioned before, in that so far I don’t see a real goal or objective, other than to go to dungeons and find treasure, but I think it’ll pick up. It also needs to add depth to the characters, specifically with Aladdin since the only thing I can gather is that he had a chance to wish for whatever he wanted, but didn’t. Now he’s apparently on a journey with Ugo, all alone. Exactly how is a kid like that able to go on an adventure like this without some sort of circumstances with his past? But aside from that, and some art issues (yeah, not all of the jokey designs worked), this was a fun first volume that I can see following for a while.
