The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: The Reckless Journey

What's It About? 

Orphen is a down-and-out young adult just trying to make a living as a loan shark. He's not unique in that regard. He might just be mistaken for your average person. That is, if he were not one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world, having once been a member of the prestigious Tower of FANGS. For this reason, his name is not unknown to everyone, especially to a young policewoman who wants his help in tracking down two criminals (two dwarves who just happen to owe Orphen a lot of money). Fine, expect that Constance Maggy is horrible at her job. She has never been able to catch a criminal, and oftentimes injures innocent people in the process of chasing down a perp. Orphen is in for a world of frustration and pain as his life has just spiraled out of control, and he's going to have to spend a lot more time cleaning up the messes of failed law enforcement than making the money he needs to pay his innkeeper.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: The Reckless Journey is an adaptation of the spin-off light novel series of the same name (a part of the broader Sorcerous Stabber Orphen narrative). The original novels were written by Yoshinobu Akita and the manga adaptation was drawn by Yu Yagami. It is available for $8.99 as a digital purchase from J-Novel Club. The original Light Novels are also available from J-Novel Club. A host of other Orphen media also exists, such as a recent anime adaptation streaming on Funimation and a PS2 game.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating: Time is a recursive loop an Ouroboros gnawing at its tail what age am I what day is it

I feel like it was just yesterday when I last sat down to write a review of a Sorcerous Stabber Orphen manga. That was not a day I particularly enjoyed. I was depressed. I was exhausted. I was dysphoric. Those same things are true of today, although the lines between today and yesterday are thin and pliable. I sit in my room as I have sat in my room since March, isolated for my own safety and the safety of others, as time and my conception of it slips away like water through a grasping hand. Which Orphen is this? Is it the prequel or the adaptation? Is it 2019 or is it 2020? Wednesday or Tuesday?

It is understandable why that Orphen and this Orphen feel so indistinct. The body is different, but the heart is the same. Orphen is a mean-spirited jack-off who is especially horrible to women (in particular a ditzy policewoman…or was it another mage?). He has a rivalry (or is it a tenuous friendship?) with a pair of dwarves. Try as he might, he can never succeed as a loan shark (and yet, the skill of his magic-use is incomparable, yes?). Am I supposed to be laughing? Am I supposed to be rapt by the reality of this fantasy world? I do not know. All I see is a funhouse mirror-image. An echo of time that leaves me unable to know where I am.

Time is but a car cycling around a racetrack. An endless road stretching into infinity. At the end of all things, when the sun expands and humanity is but particles in a vacuum, when void and black reach out like an insatiable beast to devour all that remains, will the hypercompetent wizard with the bandana and the snide smile still be there? Will Light Novel adaptations of ancient properties no one I know cares about still be churned out, indexed and filed on the factory line by artists who want to be doing something, anything else until entropy cuts their dreams down as wheat in a field? Will me or someone like me still be clacking, clacking away at my keyboard as the world burns and my mind dies and all I can do is spew out unceasing incoherent word salad about comics that phase through me as if I were a ghost? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It may be that things will be different. That things will be better. That Orphen will fade as the day turns to night, and we will be able to go outside and see time for what it really is. But history is the confluence of eternal trends. The same stitches unite the whole of the tapestry. The body may be different. But the heart is the same.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I guess I just missed the boat on Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, because I've never been able to get into it. That goes for the original anime, light novels, manga, new anime, and now this spin-off manga series, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: Reckless Journey. It's not that there's anything that can be pointed to and directly blamed for the franchise's mediocrity – it just simply doesn't work for me. That's especially a shame here, because this series is drawn by Yu Yagami of Those Who Hunt Elves and Dokkoida?! fame, both of which are really very funny. His brand of humor can be seen shining through in places, mostly in the interactions between Orphen and Coggy's boss, Dion, which go between escalating estimations of her stupidity and incompetence and just basking in their mutual antipathy for her.

It should be noted that they are in no way exaggerating Coggy's incompetence, because it is staggering. That's part of the issue here – as a character, she has no redeeming features and that makes her lack of skill as a police officer read more as “annoying” than the “funny” it's clearly meant to be. That goes for the dwarf brothers as well, although that is perhaps less of a surprise, given how irritating they are in the main series as well. They're present here as the perpetually on the run crooks Coggy desperately wants to catch, and despite her (well, Orphen's) success in the first chapter, they keep popping up in other chapters as either the targets or tangential thugs. This does keep them on the less obnoxious side, which is good, because with Coggy's presence the story really couldn't handle any more.

On the plus side, Yagami's art style, which at times looks like it was drawn with a fine-tip pen in a moving vehicle, really works for the frenetic nature of the narrative, and he does a great job with squiggly background characters and busy panels. It's also nice to have a more relaxed variation of the story where Orphen isn't bound to a great quest; there's a lightness that works for the characters and the world. If the cops don't look like they quite belong in their modern suits, that works well enough because there's very little worldbuilding in this version, either because of an assumption about franchise familiarity or because the focus is the good cop/dumb cop dynamic of Orphen and Coggy's partnership. I'm not sure I can really recommend this book overall, but it has enough fun with its premise that if you're a fan of the franchise, it could be worthwhile. Otherwise, finding used copies of other Yu Yagami series may be a better bet for enjoying his brand of humor.