The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Leviathan

What's It About? 

When looters break into the enormous, abandoned Leviathan ship as it floats lifelessly in space, they find a journal recounting the last days of the children left to fend for themselves without adult supervision, as air and resources run out. The journal's story is not a happy one...

Leviathan is written and drawn by Shiro Kuroi. English translation by Montana Kane. Published by Abrams Books, Oct 29th, 2024.

Is It Worth Reading?

Leviathan is not the sort of manga you want to read if you're already feeling low, or cynical about human nature. It's essentially Battle Royale in space, drawn in an extremely realistic, dark, claustrophobic style. In tone and content, it resembles French SF comics – serious, existential, nihilistic. I'd hesitate to call the incredibly atmospheric artwork “beautiful” when most often it's used to portray ugly characters behaving despicably or to depict gruesome, bloody violence. If an artist were to adapt something like Dead Space to manga form, Shiro Kuroi would be the man for the job.

The nominal protagonist Kazuma is a flawed, often cowardly teenage boy, easily manipulated by the (probably) sociopathic Futaba. Their passenger ship, the Leviathan, is struck by meteors, killing most of the adults and damaging the ship's life support technology. With no help coming and time rapidly running out, with only a single cryogenic sleep chamber available, the surviving school pupils fight to the death amongst themselves for the slim chance of saving their own lives. Alliances form and crumble, lies and deceit are rampant. Kazuma records every event he witnesses in his journal, but we learn of its contents through the eyes of looters who board the ship perhaps many years after the tragedy.

Kazuma and his classmates' fates are the central mystery of Leviathan, and the timeline alternates between the looters' fraught exploration of the trap-filled ship's wreckage, and extended flashbacks to the teenagers as order begins to cede control to chaos. It's a difficult read sometimes, as hope is gradually extinguished, and characters die in increasingly unpleasant ways. At times I found it hard to tell characters apart, which made empathising with them even more difficult, especially as some are deeply unpleasant people. It's a compelling story, but unrelentingly bleak. I am intrigued to know what happens next but wonder if I can stomach the darkness in the deepest, blackest corner of space.

Here's a curious take on the old Lord of the Flies formula. Leviathan's structure is interesting, with its framing device of three looters rummaging through a ruined space cruiser as one of them reads the journal of one of its doomed inhabitants. It's obvious from the gritty artwork that this will be a tense story about relationships breaking down and students turning on each other, long before we see anyone die. Nevertheless, the story is tense, and even as conditions continuously break down and these teenagers turn on each other, the question remains: Who will survive ?

Leviathan's gritty setting manages to find tension in all kinds of effective ways. Some students are bullied, some know that even if they make it to Earth they'll only be subject to a dictatorship that denigrates exoplanet citizens, and some are rotten to the core. The uncanny artwork adds to this, making smiles into creepy grimaces that hide ulterior motives. Overall, Leviathan has an effective introduction that has me anxious for more, even if this feels a little like Drifting Classroom in space. Recommended.