The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Hen Kai Pan

What's It About? 

Dismayed by the havoc wreaked on the Earth by humans, its five guardian spirits decide to act. But as they argue amongst themselves on what the judgement should be, one enraged spirit, Nila, becomes determined to take matters into her own hands, forcing the remaining four to unite in a desperate final battle to prevent her from wiping not just humankind, but all life from the face of the planet. (from Titan Comics)

Hen Kai Pan has story and art by Eldo Yoshimizu and Titan Comics has released this single-volume story both digitally and physically for $14.24 and $14.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Hen Kai Pan wastes little time introducing you to the characters or plot, and even fewer in getting you into the thick of the story. You will have to accept that this is a story where a young woman is possessed by the spirit of Asura, led by the deity Nila to exterminate all life on Earth. Asura is confronted by four other spirits, all possessing various creatures and people, in an attempt at impressing upon her the importance of life—if not human life, then life itself.

The Earth's ecosystem is just as much a character and fulcrum of the story as Asura's pursuit of purpose. Eldo Yoshimizu's brushtrokes capture the vast mountains of India and the rocky deserts of the American Southwest, while chaotic lines incarnate the wild brush of South Asian jungles. In a very bold push, all of the main characters are people of color. Just as the beauty of Earth's ecosystems is brought to life by Yoshimizu's brushtrokes, his inks emphasize the beauty of humanity through the faces of Honga, Xu Fu and Ombiasa. The art can be sparce in some scenes, almost too much so, yet when Yoshimizu decides to fill a page there isn't a single wasted inch.

Hen Kai Pan can nevertheless feel a bit rushed, and much like Asura feels dragged kicking and screaming in this cosmic battle between deities, readers might feel as though they're dragged to a sudden conclusion. But Hen Kai Pen isn't a story to simply be completed, it is a story to be contemplated. Asura's powerful birth and the fate of the Earth isn't a mere end goal, it is something to reflect on. Some might find it unsatisfying—and in a way, it is. Asura's ultimate fate feels quite out of her hands. But then again, much of life is about making the best of what's given to you. Even if the end isn't what you wanted, it's getting there that matters. And with how big the world is, nothing really ends.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

Oooooohhh no. So to hear Eldo Yoshimizu tell it in his foreword in this one, Hen Kai Pan started out as a general rumination on environmentalism, before observations early on in pandemic-times led him to the same "Nature is healing, we are the virus" kind of conclusion we were all mocking on Twitter around the same time. Thus we get the story as presented here: A sweeping screed of end-times theorizing which supposedly wants to argue for and against benevolence towards humanity as nature hits the reset button on Earth. The trouble is that Yoshimizu can scarcely find the words or the presentation to successfully articulate anything encompassing these positions, so Hen Kai Pan comes off more like the late-night experimental-thought ramblings of a misanthropic philosophy student who just watched FernGully for the first time.

The fundamental problem here is that, despite the central conflict being supposedly in main character Asura feeling like humans deserve mercy while the spirits of the Earth claim their evil is too all-encompassing, Yoshimizu doesn't really give examples of either. We barely even get any interactions with humans apart from some bystander reactions to destruction caused by Asura at behest of her initial boss Nila, or anonymous Americans and their pointedly-unnamed 'President' standing around gawking as the commander-in-chief is 'punished' by being suddenly teleported onto the Mexican side of the border wall. That self-indulgent, ripped-from-the-headlines moment was the point where I had to put the book down for a minute and go outside, by the way. The writing can't even summon the fortitude to comment on the wall as a monument to humanity's cruelty towards its own; no, turns out it's mainly bad because it disrupts animal habitats.

But even that's the most I can give as far as commenting on Hen Kai Pan's theorizing because that's the most it gives us. Beyond that there's no interaction with the humans that Asura's allegedly learned compassion for, and there are hardly any remarks on the supposed power and beauty of nature beyond a temporary death trip to check out the aurora borealis. Instead the final conflict devolves into the lead spirits making (very petty, human-sounding) declarations of being more powerful and demonstrating that at each other in bids to argue over what kind of fireworks show to destroy the world with. There's little commentary on ecological issues beyond "Humanity Bad", with no real counter-argument from Asura besides "But killing humanity would be sad, I think", before it just dissolves into yet another finisher we can throw onto the growing pile of "The Devilman ending, but stupider".

Maybe all this would be at least tolerable if the conceptual spectacle this was built around came off as impressive, but that's another miss. Yoshimizu's style is characterized by sculpted human designs in major moments (such as when Asura awakens to her true power), but the rest of the presentation is communicated with looser character models awkwardly pasted onto often murky, messy backgrounds. This is 'carried' by an incredibly rough, near-amateurish English adaptation, which somehow manages to render dialogue feeling both stiff and unnaturally loose in equal measure. It features oddly-placed exclamations and swearing the likes of which I haven't seen since old Hong-Kong-styled subtitles. That, plus the general ineptness of the story on display, means readers might be able to find some entertainment value in the overall train-wreck aspect of the thing, but I can't in good faith, for any reason, actually recommend spending money on this release.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

Hen Kai Pan can best be described as an experience. This self-contained book draws upon philosophy and spirituality in an attempt to convey a lot of the pain that has been inflicted on our world. Who gets to decide what aspects of life persevere and which should be sacrificed? Should it be the humans who make those decisions, or is it the gods' responsibility to get involved and pass out retribution? This is an incredibly simple story with larger implications and a lot of it is portrayed through gorgeous artwork. Not only does it feature a wide variety of different body types and ethnicities to make it feel truly inclusive, but its surreal imagery leaves an impressive impact that I think needs to be experienced at least once.