The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Noblesse

What's It About? 

When Cadis Etrama Di Raizel or Rai, as he is known, awakens after 820 years, he discovers a modern world he simply doesn't understand. Once an extremely powerful member of the Nobles, a race of nearly immortal and powerful creatures, Rai decides to start again as a high school student at Ye Ran High School, founded by his former servant Frankenstein, who is somehow still alive after all these centuries. Frankenstein's goal―to help his powerful, vampire-like master learn about human life and culture as he protects him from the modern forces Rai cannot fathom.

Rai's somewhat peaceful new life is about to be disturbed by The Union, a secret organization interested in using his powers to further their own malicious goals.

When past clashes with present in this innovative take on familiar dark fantasy tropes, Rai must do everything in his power to ensure the Union doesn't control his destiny, and that he can continue to integrate himself into this new, confusing modern world . . .

Noblesse has a story by Jeho Son and art by Kwangsu Lee. Published by WEBTOON Unscrolled (October 31, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Supposedly standing out so much in the influential Webtoon institution that it received an anime adaptation from Production I.G a few years back, this print release allows us to take stock of Noblesse in its original form. And this…sure as hell feels like a just-starting-out webcomic that might come into its own later! There's no getting around this one, peeps. Noblesse's initial structure is rough, and its issues are only exacerbated by this printed format hop. Trying to take the scroll-based Webtoon structure into the page-turning realm would always be a dicey proposition, but the sparse, scattered layouts we've wound up with make me think there must have been some slightly better methodology.

That's only part of the problem, though. While the printed layout does Noblesse no favors, it could have made a better case for itself to begin with. An attempt is made in terms of the internal paneling and compositions, but it still comes off amateurish at best. Tons of the images render the humans at a squint-worthy zoomed-out view that might have worked better read on a computer monitor or a phone screen. However, readers would then get a clearer view of the characters pasted into comically composited CGI backgrounds that look like the static equivalent of a GoHands anime. Characters display wildly varying anatomy and proportions or are copy-pasted across multiple panels for pacing out of comic beats that appear awkward or simple exposition swaths. You wouldn't think the wonders of the Webtoon visual medium would necessitate people explaining things every few pages, yet here it is, delivered through incredibly stilted, repetitious dialogue.

The irony is that the few times the action gets going in Noblesse, it noticeably steps up. It still suffers from odd panel layouts and an amateurish indulgence in constantly changing camera angles, but the combat choreography itself is pretty decent, and it's overall dynamic and readable. Jeho Son and Kwangsu Lee may have been most engaged in making cool fight scenes and somehow felt like they had to pad these out with meandering exposition. We hardly get any interesting insight into our alleged main character, Rai, as he mainly exists to be a stoic enigma that the other characters can exposit. After we've circled his listless school adventures and bumbled into a few vampire fights, the most compelling question we're left with is why it had to take 280 pages to get this far into nowhere. If you're morbidly curious about Noblesse, give it a look in its original online format. Paying money to read it like this would be a wasted effort.