Ryu’s Musings – Taimashin: The Red Spider Exorcist Vol 01&2

Language: English
Direction: Right to Left
By: Hideyuki Kikuchi (Story), Shin Yong-Gwan (art)
Publisher: Digital Manga Publishing
Type: Series
Genre: Seinen, Horror, Action

Synopsis:

Traveling in-between the world of the living and the twilight world of the dead, Akamushi, the shaman is known as the Red Spider Exorcist. With the powers of a giant spider, he combats the demons of the netherworld. When career woman Megumi is suddenly pursued and attacked by unholy demons, she seeks Akamushi’s help. But as it seems, the minions of the underworld may also be too much for Akamushi to handle. But why are these creatures of twilight after her? What truths will unravel about her true self and everyone around her? And what of Akamushi—can he use his unique shamanic spider-like powers to cast out and purify himself from the demon scourge? From acclaimed Japanese horror writer, Hideyuki Kikuchi, Taimashin – The Red Spider Exorcist—vol.1 of an ongoing series—takes you to a world of monsters and demons that’ll twist your senses and blur your mind, in and out of reality.

I was very disappointed with this, mainly because i was miss lead. I purchased these on the Amazon Kindle site, they were listed as novels, so imagine my surprise when they were revealed as manga. For me this was wasted money since i had the paper versions of these already. Miss labelling releases is a big mistake that needs to be rectified straight away so as to limit miss representing the books.

Right, onto the series itself. Taimashin is a Kikuchi release to the max, slightly adult, graphic, and riveting. Though hard to judge the story, due to so little of it being revealed over the two volumes. The little we get is interesting, due to it conflicting nature, one minute portraying the lead as the hero and the next as a villain of sorts.

The first volume is dedicated to a single story, of a woman not knowing she’s dead and being hunted by other demons. This sets the stage for introducing Akamushi along with his unique abilities. It does a good job of laying out what his abilities may be, without actually revealing anything.

The second volume concludes the story, again without revealing much about Akamushi. The few things it does reveal lead you to more questions. The second story left me wondering about whether Akamushi was a ‘good’ guy in the usual sense of the word. We start off with him causing the death of an entire family, and being unconcerned, and then his actions over the young girl he then saves. The story is again interesting, with a few minor developments, but nothing earth shattering. The ending is a cliff-hanger that leaves you eager for more, and wondering about the conclusion.

The art sadly isn’t all that great. At times it’s rather cluttered, with so much going on it’s hard to follow. The character designs are well done, for the most part. However Akamushi’s design is rather lacking, he doesn’t have the sense of presence or personality that the story attributes to him.

Also in the second volume the second story is supposed to have a very intimidating set of scenes, with the grandfather and mother. Yet i never once felt intimidated or scared, one of the only times Kikuchi has failed to freak me out. This is rather disappointing,since it’s clear from the story that Kikuchi was wanting to scare his readers, and make them feel the emotions being portrayed in the volumes.

With the sole exception of the miss representation, DMP did a good job with this release. I’m not sure why but a number of formatting bugs that are in their emanga releases are not in this release. The pages are turned left to right, but are read right to left. EManga releases are both turned and read right to left. Also it doesn’t have the narrow pinched look most EManga releases have. The translation and editing were done well, without anything to complain about.

In fact there is only one thing of note to complain about, and that is DMP not continuing the series. All told there are eleven volumes in the series, but they stopped releasing after volume two.

As a result, and because of the cliff-hanger ending of volume two, i can not recommend this series. However if they should ever resume publishing that could be different. The art apparently does get better at portraying things, and Akamushi comes into his own as a lead. however we’ll never know for sure unless DMP resume publishing

Edit: Digital Manga Publishing responds

So, after my recent Taimashin post i received a email from Digital Manga regarding the elements i posted about. Since they were important responses, and they requested it, i decided to both update the original post and  make this post.

When you mentioned that the books were mislabelled we quickly investigated our Amazon Bookshelf and saw that they were properly categorized. We are not sure why you found the books under novels, however we doubled and triple checked to make sure they were correctly labelled. We’ve added “(manga)” to both titles so this confusion doesn’t happen again in the future.

I myself have just doubled checked on Amazon, and i don’t see the changes mentioned above. I think it’s most likely due to the fact i purchased from Amazon UK not Amazon US. However i did notice that the ‘mislabel’ i spoke of wasn’t strictly true. The books are listed under the Kindle Novel Page, but under the manga category.

The reason i got it confused with the novel was the way Amazon listed them. At the top of the page was the Kikuchi Manga, then we got a load of novels (VampD, Maohden, Yashakiden) and then Taimashin, so i just assumed it was the novel version, since it was listed in amongst the novels. The lesson here folks is to double check your purchases straight away. Remember that Amazon does allow you to return Kindle books for a few days after you bought it, just make the same booboo as me and wait 2 weeks to check it >.< That said once the (manga) label is added to the titles that will become a non-issue

As for the format, since you bought the titles using Amazon Kindle, all titles will come in the left to right format (though read right to left) and will not have the special features that the eManga files have. It has been that way since we began releasing books on Amazon. If you own a Kindle Fire we highly suggest downloading the MOBI file on eManga.com (which you can do right from your Kindle Fire).

Not sure what these special features are that the eManga files come with, since none of the files I’ve gotten had anything special about them. Except of course they come in right to left format. I guess it’s one of things that only comes out when you using the Kindle Fire/iPad/Android variants. I only have a standard Kindle.

And lastly, we have some very good news for you! We will begin releasing the rest of the volumes shortly! Volume 3 should be available on eManga.com in a few months! We hope you’ll enjoy the rest of the series! Thank you very much for your time!

Best Wishes,
Digital Manga, Inc

OH HELL YES!!! Taimashin is one of the series I’ve come to love and the fact that they’re finally carrying on with the series makes me SOOOOOOO happy. Now they just need to release Maohden vol03 and then i can die a happy man

Thanks a lot to DMP for contacting me and pointing out the mistakes in my original post. Now go forth and buy loads of Kikuchi goodness!!