Seraphim: 2-oku 6661-man 3336 no Tsubasa
Seraphim: 266613336 Wings

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Seraphim is for a niche audience. If you are not a huge fan of Mamoru Oshii or Satoshi Kon, this manga is not for you. This is a short-lived collaboration between the two anime director from 1994-95, and because of Satoshi Kon's passing in 2010, it will remain unfinished indefinitely.

The work itself is politically dense. The characters travel across a quarantined China, searching for a cure to a deadly disease. It's unbearably information-heavy at the front of the book, but thankfully slows down towards to a simpler action-packed race against time towards the end. Unfortunately, it leaves the reader on an indefinite cliffhanger as ... soon as they become invested.

Again, one should only read this out of pure curiosity. It was a "lost" work for a decade and a half before being collected into a single volume. The end of Dark Horse's publication includes a thirty or so page essay about the history and analysis of the work, although at the time of this review, I have only skimmed through it.










(I think it is hilariously fitting to end this review without a strong closing, just as the manga.)

Originally commissioned by its publishing magazine as a replacement for Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga (ending at the time) to try to reproduce its sensational success, Seraphim is very much in line with the limitations of being a Nausicaa clone, however calling it derivative of Nausicaa would go too far. A great deal of effort clearly went into Oshii's initial conception of this story and its world.

Nonetheless, due to the series being abandoned all the potential it has for where it could've gone is lost. reduced to nothing but the incomplete reality of what was published and so my low rating reflects that.

The art is fine, I'm ... not a fan of giant foreheads, but whatever.

The girl is a mute Jesus figure with psychic abilities, about the only changes they made to this Nausicaa clone were for the worse, since now she doesn't really do anything but exist as an escort mission macguffin for her guardians. Take that inspiring badass pacifist Nausicaa protagonist and remove all her agency and even her voice and turn her into a helpless damsel-in-distress plot device, why don't you?...

The dog is a silly character that doesn't belong here and is merely Oshii inserting his pet basset hound into his works as usual.

The dialogue mostly exposition dumps for name dropping of biblical and Asian cultural references and empty political idealism lip-service by vague handwaving at black-and-white notions of genocide/scarcity/mortality/etc in a dying life-or-death world of solely grays where none of them have the luxury to be worrying about such nonviable self-righteous/holier-than-thou idealizations in the first place if they don't want everyone to starve and die.

The plot is a macguffin hunt in the context of political struggles between various political entities/warlord gangs, replete with boring shootouts and traitors/spies and such. It's not interesting. I don't have to worry about spoilers I suppose since the plot doesn't move past its premise, so there's no plot to spoil.

A significant portion of the narrative takes excessively unsubtle (name dropping) reference from the Bible: the three wise men Magi (and King Harod analog who would kill the Messiah), Jacob (with Jacob's ladder), Hakka-Jews, Sera the Holy mother of immaculate conception Masu (Holy Mary), and her divine angel child who must be born to save mankind (Jesus Christ), and on and on so much so that it is easy to predict potential endings the story could've had (as a 2nd coming of Christ story).
Trivia: The number in the title (266613336 Wings) refers to the number of angels that remained loyal to God during the rebellion where 1/3 of angels (133,306,668) were cast out of heaven as fallen angels (this number apparently from one headcannon or another from the middle ages). However, since each angel here has 2 wings, it's actually referring to the 133,306,668 fallen angels (demons) cast down to Earth instead of the 266,613,336 loyal angels (a subtle inversion of angelic good with evil). The seraphim being the subgroup of angels meaning "burning/poisonous serpents" (much like Lucifer the "shining one", and the snake in the garden of Eden) they can have negative connotations as a punishment towards humanity despite their use as messengers of God. (The Rod of Asclepius is effectively the symbol of a seraph(im) on a rod as a ward against snake venom as mentioned in Numbers 21:8, it is a common medical symbol used by WHO in this manga and in reality).

Personally, I further like to note the obvious comparisons to Angel's Egg (also by Oshii a decade earlier) of a similarly biblical and post-apocalyptic narrative in which most every narrative element between the two stories would coincide (so spoilers for Angel's Egg which I'd recommend you watch): a nameless nearly mute ageless young girl mother figure with (otherwise inexplicable) maternal instincts towards a divine egg and a human-bird-angel hybrid Messiah (here dead), tree of evolution, a floating eye of god vehicle motif...
and imagine from one of those potential endings that this manga could've been a spiritual prequel to Angel's Egg in which the potential ending would be the 2nd coming of Christ in which Mary's angelic child, Jesus, is killed for causing mass spread of the Angel disease, obstructing the Rapture to Heaven and causing God to abandon the world with another flood and leaving ageless Mary mourning her child until she eventually accepts his death and joins god as the last to be raptured at the end of Angel's Egg...
Thinking of them this way improves each work as they both compensate well for each other's narrative gaps (and I almost like and recommend it for that alone). Nonetheless I doubt it would've actually been the case if Seraphim had continued to completion even if Oshii had used such a useful shortcut for the initial story/world of Seraphim as Kon had his own influence and such initial plans rarely go unchanged in the process of creating a longform series.

2/10 (where 5/10 is average)

Poor quality. Meandering plot, showered with technicalities and history forgetting to ever present a character. MacGuffin doll that stays silent because the author couldn't stomach adding personality to this world, and just as the story, semi-sentient. Impossible to care for. A draft that never had an editor. Embarrassing this was published. Akira derivative. An exercise to move the hand. The only value this provides is names, trivia. A stain in their careers. You, like me, didn't read this because someone thought this had standalone literary value. You saw the names. And because you value their work and artistic identity, it will all be better if, ... just like I will, you forget this ever existed, a bad dream that never had to happen. Sometimes not all ideas are worth expressing. Nothing in this story works. Nothing is cohesive. No character knows more than history. The author's idea of world building is name dropping religious sounding names. Amateur quality