The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Suzume

What's It About? 

High school junior Suzume has no idea why the beautiful stranger she meets is looking for ruins, for a certain door. Soon after pointing the stranger, Souta, in the direction of an abandoned resort, she thinks better of it and goes to try and stop him. But before she can find Souta, Suzume unknowingly opens a decrepit door to a world beyond time and place—and stumbles into an adventure of seismic proportions.

Suzume has a story by Makoto Shinkai and art by Denki Amashima. It is adapted from a movie of the same name by Makoto Shinkai, with English translation by JM Iitomi Crandall. Published by Vertical Comics (September 24, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

From the creator of supernatural romances starring teenagers, comes another supernatural romance starring teenagers! Only this time, the guy turned into a chair, Morty! He's Chair-Souta!

Snark aside: Suzume as a manga has an advantage over the film in that it can take time to get into the mindscape of its characters. We still have plenty of lavishly drawn sequences where Suzume has to help Chair-Souta seal doors to prevent the spooky supernatural worm thing from doing some evil thing or other. The story can take the time to stew in the emotions of its cast. Suzume is a young teen still making heads or tails of the world, mourning her mother and worrying about her aunt potentially sacrificing her happiness for her and Suzume's aunt frets over Suzume growing older and potentially taking off into the world. Suzumee meeting the people she does on her chase after Daijin helps her learn more about herself. Suzume having to channel the memories of the people that used to patronize the ruins where she finds the magic doors or encountering helpful adults helps her learn the important lesson all teenagers must reckon with: these feelings inside you are shared by everyone, and what makes life wonderful is that we're able to share in them and help each other when they become too much to bear.

It's also nice that the aunt gets a bit extra limelight here. It isn't much, but we get to see that she's more than just an adult-shaped object who exists as a theoretical thing Suzume has to come back to once she's done gallivanting with her boyfriend-chair. While this first volume doesn't give us much insight into Souta's wooden mind (at least, not anything that isn't filtered through Suzume's viewpoint), future volumes hint at more emotional development.

As an adaptation of an existing film, I prefer Suzume in manga format to the film. I don't know if that'll hold true for everyone else, but for now, I strongly recommend Suzume.

I sometimes wonder what the point of movie-to-book adaptations is. Occasionally, especially with novelizations, they add useful backstories or alternative points of view that can enrich the combined reading-and-viewing experience. However, when faced with such a bare-bones adaptation as this, it's hard to recommend the manga version of Suzume to either seasoned Makoto Shinkai movie-watchers or complete newbies. I've read every single one of Shinkai's movies' novel or manga adaptations, and some are excellent (such as The Garden of Words novel), while many others, mostly the manga, are extremely missable. While Suzume may now be my favorite Shinkai film, unfortunately, this manga is but a pale reflection of a beautiful, intense, color-drenched movie.

Artist Denki Amashima does nothing particularly wrong here, their art is perfectly serviceable, though their character designs are markedly different from the movie's, with an overall rather loose, sketchy aesthetic. This version of Suzume and Souta doesn't resemble their movie counterparts that well, which seems odd in something marketed as an adaptation. In terms of story, it's essentially an edited highlight reel with little extra material. Shinkai's grand landscapes and luminescent skies can't hope to be evoked with such simplistic use of limited materials like black ink and screentone, meaning this is an extremely drab version of the story. Amashima's art, while serviceable, lacks detail, especially when depicting scenes of supernatural destruction. What should be an awe-inspiring spectacle falls flat with murky, simplistic layouts.

Shinkai's flair for melodrama and empathetic characters manage to shine through despite the underwhelming visuals – Suzume herself is still a defiant, motivated, empathic girl who is easy to cheer for. Chair-Souta even gets to emote a little more than he was permitted to in the film. Mischievous Daijin remains a cute agent of chaos, and once the main road trip story gets underway, the manga finds its stride as a fun adventure comprised of a collection of loosely associated vignettes. As this is only the first of three volumes, we barely cover the meat of Suzume's story. Still, I can't recommend this version.