The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

The Witch and the Beast

What's It About? 

Ashaf: a soft-spoken man with delicate features, a coffin strapped to his back, and an entourage of black crows. Guideau: a feral, violent girl with long fangs and the eyes of a beast. This ominous pair appear one day in a town in thrall to a witch — a ruler with magic coursing through her tattooed body, who has convinced the townsfolk she's their hero. But Ashaf and Guideau know better. They live by one creed: “Wherever a witch goes, only curses and disasters follow.” They have scores to settle, and they won't hesitate to remove anyone in their way, be it angry mob or army garrison.

The Witch and the Beast is drawn and scripted by Kōsuke Satake. Kodansha Comics has released the first volume of the manga in both print and digital versions, which are priced at $10.99 and $12.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I'm not entirely sold on Witch and the Beast, and that's in part because its first volume feels like it isn't quite sure what it wants to be. There are references to fairy tales in at least one of the ways that a witch's curse can be broken (true love's kiss), there's a definite sense that witches weren't always inherently bad but were made that way by persistent prejudice against them, and the main characters, Ashaf and Guideaux, are a mix of “standard cop buddies” and “guy and his poorly trained pet.” It's a jumble, and not one I'm sure is working, although it does have some potential.

Most of that is in the way that witches are viewed in the story's world. In the first story, a two-parter, we learn that in the past a witch saved a city from hellfire but was punished as the perpetrator of the whole thing, even though her actions very clearly sent a different message. Because of that, her granddaughter is looking to take revenge, but of course she's doing that in a way that strictly reinforces the idea that witches are all evil – even though she at first lulled the townsfolk into a false sense of security by setting herself up as the savior, which was really working. This in some ways suggests that the issue is not that witches ARE evil, but that people BELIEVE that they're evil, which now functions in a terrible cycle.

Not that the story does much with that idea after setting it up. Guideaux (pronounced “Guido”) is under a curse that may have separated them from their real body and very firmly believes that witches are the ultimate evil to the point where Ashaf can barely get anything done when they're around. Guideaux also has the social skills of a newt, which doesn't help to make the character any more likeable; presumably the fact that their real body looks like Berserker from Fate/stay night while their current form is of a teenage girl with teeth too big for her mouth is supposed to be funny, but mostly the character is just annoying.

Maybe that's what netted Guideaux the curse in the first place. If so, it would almost be a welcome answer, because otherwise witches don't seem to have a ton of motivation outside of the first story. We also don't have a good sense of what the world's magic system is or how it functions; text is clearly a major component of spell-casting, and there are magic beasts, but we don't know much beyond that, such as whether or not magic is used in everyday life or if anyone can use it. I suppose the way I feel about this book is that it isn't quite good enough to make me want to read any more – even with these unanswered questions, I'm more annoyed than intrigued, and while I like the art, it's too busy to be easy on the eyes. A good summary might simply be that the concept is interesting – but the execution is lacking.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

They say there are two ways to break a witch's curse: true love's kiss from a prince, or hope the witch has a change of heart and chooses to remove it on her own. Princes are in short supply these days, so Guideau is trying to find the witch who cursed him to, ahem, persuade her to lift the curse she laid on him years ago.

It's not an unusual setup for an urban fantasy story, and The Witch and the Beast is not an unusual manga. It is more or less a supernatural procedural, wherein Guideau and their partner Ashaf hunt down witches in hopes that they can find the one who laid a curse on Guideau. Although the first volume only has not-quite-two stories, it's easy to see how a formula may emerge: they track down a city with a witch problem, get to know some of the people affected, and confront the witch. To be fair, this is all projecting to the future, so maybe the series will surprise me.

Guideau and Ashaf have a standard “hotheaded fighter and coolheaded people person” dynamic that offers no surprises, but it can be fun to read them play off one another. Part of Guideau's curse appears to involve him being trapped in the body of a slim, pretty young woman, so there's some entertaining incongruity between his appearance and his vulgar, violent, foul-mouthed personality. The witches themselves are also quite typically presented as “are they a menace to society because they're evil or because they're so stigmatized.”

The most interesting part so far is the visual style. I wouldn't quite describe it as “pretty,” although I'm sure it'll be suited to some people's taste, with its kind of gothic look. The pseudo-European cities are quite detailed, and there's some playfulness in the use of magic, such as a two-mouthed shark the size of a zeppelin soaring through a town's square. The best part, really, is Guideau's expressions and body language.

Come to think of it, Guideau is the best part of this manga overall. He's the thing that saves it from just being, “pretty good,” though I still probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's not generally interested in gothic urban fantasy.