Grudges carry a deep weight and a deeper price. What would you be willing to pay to have yours carried out?
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Miyuki Eto
Translation/Adaptation: Gemma Collinge
What They Say:
This last collection reveals how Hone Onna was betrayed in love and follows the travails of Takuma, a boy accused of being a Devil Kid. Then the detective helping Takuma suddenly goes missing. Can Ai Enma, the Hell Girl, save them before it’s too late?
Also includes a special comic about Wanyuudou!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The power of the Hell Girl is striking in that she can make the object of your negative obsession vanish, though the price is astronomically high. In this latest volume a school girl learns a new way of using Hell Girl- when a hated teacher vanishes in the middle of class the girl claims credit and suddenly finds herself the center of attention as people fear her power. The problem is that when that power goes to her head she makes her own enemies-and each person can only pay Hell Girl’s price once but by that point everyone knows how to get in touch with Ai if they chose to.
The thing is that as more people use her the more the urban legend of Hell Girls grows. The stories will then invite in people looking for something other than just vengeance as her legend will also attract thrill seekers, including one who attempts to capture Ai. As the stories continue the number of people Ai’s service has touched will be shown. Some of those people will discover that their lives haven’t changed despite their deal but they can use their experience to try to save others. The more people who get involved however the more the legend increases and the greater the disaster when events spin out of control as people call on her.
Finally it will grow to a point where it is like a plague of madness infecting one city as the people there decide that they have come across a scapegoat who can take the blame for the disappearances they create using Ai’s power. The thing is that this young man is one who knows all about the Hell Girl website but he has been trying to avoid the temptation as he was taught bearing a grudge solves nothing. The problem for him though is that the townsfolk have come to a point where the only way they can deal with their guilt is to place it all on him and hunt him down to “end” the rampant disappearances the townsfolk themselves have been causing. Normally this might just result in a tremendous workload increase for Ai, but this young boy’s problems touch at the very heart of Ai’s past. Now Ai may do something unlike anything she has done in her 400 years of resolving grudges-and her actions may lead to the very end of Hell Girl herself.
Hell Girl is a title that has a bit of difficulty when it comes to reviewing as each story is largely standalone and the only reoccurring characters play a role almost like a Deus ex Machina-or perhaps more like Mephistopheles in Faust- in that they can solve any problem with a single individual but only at the cost of the user’s soul. This narrative has the side effect that it is completely up to the stories unique characters to carry events and so it is pressing to get right to the heart of why a person feels so grieved that they would be willing to suffer the pain of Hell just to be rid of a problem in their life. To that end the stories can wind up being hit or miss as they often feel like the ending is known from the first page and it is just a matter of how many terrible things must happen to get the character to that point.
The end of this collection takes a different track though with its main character in fact resisting the urge to use Hell Girl as the whole town falls to madness around him. This helps set off what makes the Hell Girl franchise shine-the study it makes of human psychology, the depths to which humanity will sink and how far they will be pushed until they are certain that they are right up against a wall they can’t escape on their own. When this happens Hell Girl appears and then the character has to decide if they are willing to seek any relief, even if it means more pain in their future. This is the element of Hell Girl that attracts me to the series and the arc where the town goes mad is a wonderful look at just how mob mentality can drag in people who otherwise would seem to be rational. That these events finally cause a change in Ai and how she operates is just a fantastic bonus to the entire arc. There is an additional bonus as there are two stories that examine two of her companions and the path they took that brought them to Ai’s side.
In Summary
Hell Girl is probably one of the more formulaic stories around as many of the stories end in roughly the same fashion. This collection helps to change things slightly as the knowledge of Ai’s existence creates a new ripple in the formula that will cause disturbances to an entire town and even more remarkably may signal the end of Hell Girl herself. People looking for tales of humans pushed to their breaking point or those who love Hell Girl but may have given up due to the nature of previous stories may find themselves richly rewarded for giving this collection a look.
Content Grade: B-
Art Grade: C+
Packaging Grade: B-
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Del Rey Manga
Release Date: October 26th, 2010
MSRP: $21.99
