Prophecy ends with a bang
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Tetsuya Tsutsui
Translation: Kumar Sivasubramanian
What They Say:
In this concluding volume, the members of Paperboy gather to prepare to carry out their next act of vengeance against a hypocritical politician. But the guilty conscience of one of the co-conspirators leads him to tip off the police, and the Anti Cyber Crimes Division is closing in on the terrorist group. After an embarrassing misstep, Paperboy’s ringleader sets his sights on the most dangerous target yet…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This final volume is the entirety of the Anti Cyber Crimes Division’s final push to capture the entity known as Paperboy. It is just as their ringleader, Hiroaki Okuda, planned from the start. Withholding information from the reader / viewer is a well-worn trope not just in anime and manga, but in all media. To make a mystery interesting, it peels away the layers. It lets you go from outside to inside very slowly and rips off the final dozen layers in its final moments in the grand reveal. Prophecy is no different and it is no less effective.
Just like the previous volumes, Prophecy shows the internet—and more importantly its people—at its worst. Just as easily as they lauded Paperboy for carrying out “justice” on those that deserve it, they turn on them and bemoan their final act of cowardice. The internet is truly just a place for people to divulge their weirdest fetishes under the guise of anonymity. The latest: Watching people they idolized kill themselves on a livestream. Meanwhile, the Anti Cyber Crimes Division sits back and waits because they can do nothing without a location.
They, of course, work toward it. And, once they find it, it is the most deflating feeling in the world. Okuda’s life—and a cumulative 15 from the co-conspirators Tomohiko Kasai, Shin’ichi Terahara, and Koichi Kimura—was not sacrificed for the sake of martyrdom. It was all for the friend they cared so much about, Nelsin Kato-Ricarte.
In Summary:
Prophecy is a story that goes too far and then reigns itself back in. It’s a story that captivates from page one of volume one to the final page of volume three. It’s a story that intrigues, that represents all that is terrible about people and all that is good about people in one fell swoop. Through three volumes, I could not put the books down and the only thing that stopped me was the fact that I had to wait for volume two to be released. Prophecy, and nothing really, has an answer to what is right and wrong, but it’s damn sure to make you think about it and hard.
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Vertical Comics
Release Date: March 31st, 2015
MSRP: $12.95
