Muros: Within Magical Walls
The Case of the Cemetery Girl
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
An intrepid detective tracks a girl lost amidst Manila's many temptations. Can he crack the case and find the girl before the city erupts into violence?
Muros is an urban fantasy set in an alternate Manila which has been sealed off from the rest of the world for decades. In this fast-paced graphic novel the walled city of Manila, recently freed from a dictator's iron-fisted rule, is a magical metropolis where monsters flit and feed along neon-lit streets. The city, now governed by mysterious Societies, faces rising tensions between the human and nonhuman inhabitants that are nearing a breaking point.
The story's hero, Carlos "Caloy" Loyzaga, a "Taga-Sagot" (literally translated to Person Who Answers), is tasked with finding the runaway daughter of a small town Mayor. Caloy knows that there's more to the story — but in a world where magic and modernity make for uneasy bedfellows, there are some secrets you simply can't prepare for. Especially secrets that involve a cast of nonhuman characters, such as one-eyed Yomaws (hybrid human-canines), Asu-Gamis (half Aswang, half Inugami) and slinky Silat immortals—the hated weapons of the tyrant God.
Readers looking for a different take on magic, or those interested in seeing an alternative history set in the Philippines, will find plenty to sink their teeth into here. Fans of Tan & Baldisimo's Trese or Jim Butcher's Dresden Files will also find a heady mix of the familiar and the strange.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Manila is a city kept under the shadow of its demimonde in this fun supernatural noir scripted by Chikiamco (A Sparrow's Roar). Mysterious "Societies" control the streets, while magical beings terrorize the populace and human-animal hybrids called the Yomaw suffer discrimination and suspicion. Carlos Loyzaga is a hero to match the setting, with his cybernetic limbs and self-healing ability. Eschewing the title "detective," the gruff investigator calls himself a taga-sagot, Tagalog for "answerer," and his investigation into the disappearance of a powerful man's daughter becomes the perfect vehicle to cruise Manila's underworld. He searches through an expansive and luxurious red-light district, a hospital where a rifle-toting nun makes the rounds, an artificial island of international embassies, and a haunted forest. Sinaban's versatile art is appropriately moody, making effective use of solid black fills and silvery-gray shading, while rendering striking fantasy architecture, fast-paced action, and goofy antics. Carlos's prim-and-proper journalist sidekick and the characters' simple and effective manga-esque expressions add levity, though the number of bloody (and dismembered) bodies mark this as mature reading. Folks who fell under the spell of the Philippines comics scene with Trese will delight in this.
