Leviathan Volume 1 by Shiro Kuroi
Abrams Comic Arts (October 29, 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Shiro Kuroi is a rising star manga author who lives in Toyko, Japan. Leviathan is his first international serialized work, which has been published simultaneously in France and Japan. Highly praised for his character writing and illustration, Leviathan went on to become one of the top 10 bestselling new manga titles in France, and he has already received international attention online from manga fans hoping for an English release of his work. Fortunately, the wait is over, as Leviathan, Volume 1 has finally arrived.
Leviathan opens with three raiders breaking into an abandoned shipwreck. They discover the journal of young Kazuma Ichinoze, which details the events of an onboard disaster and the resulting chaos. The journal begins when part of the ship is destroyed and the remaining humans, most of them children, have less than fifty hours to survive. What results is a struggle for survival wherein children and teenagers battle for the last remnants of oxygen and supplies. Parallels to Battle Royale, Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and similar books are not undeserved, but the added element of space survival advances Shiro Kuroi’s graphic novel beyond these other books.
What makes Leviathan such a standout is the graphic format. Kuroi pulls no punches with his illustrations, and this graphic novel is as brutal and violent as any other survival story. Blood and corpses abound in this text, with added elements of horror contributed by the weightless atmosphere. Furthermore, once readers come to terms with the fact that these are children trying to survive, the story and its underlying tensions just accelerates, dragging the reader’s adrenaline along with it.
This is a great graphic novel from a unique voice that’s clearly making waves in manga. All praise for Shiro Kuroi is well deserved, as Leviathan is a standout graphic novel of scifi horror and survival. This is a violent, bloody novel packed with an adrenaline-pounding storyline and brutal scenarios for the poor students trying to survive. Shiro Kuroi loves putting his characters in uncomfortable, life-threatening situations and watching to see if they can squirm out of them. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t. Readers who are fans of survival horror, especially set in the vast expanse of outer space, will thoroughly enjoy this graphic novel, but fans of horror graphic novels in general will thrill to read Leviathan Volume 1 by Shiro Kuroi.
