Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Shinobu Ohtaka
Translation & English Adaptation: John Werry
Touch-Up Art & Lettering: Stephen Dutro
Editor: Mike Montesa
What They Say:
Left behind by the new world created by Sinbad, the Kou Empire is now a fading shadow of its former glory. Alibaba journeys there, and promises his friend, the Empress Kogyoku, that he’ll do all he can to help. Restoring the land of Kou will take a big project and bold ambition, and the help of several old friends from around the world…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Alibaba has returned to Kou to visit his old friend Kogyoku. Only, she’s struggling under the weight of expectations and a lot of various other things after Sinbad kind of rebuilt the entire world and the way they interact with each other. She puts on a strong face for her people and direct reports, but she’s falling apart. She’s only 20-something years old, if that, and she’s expected to carry a legacy of great military rulers. She’s instead brought the country to near ruin; it’s on the edge of bankruptcy (if that concept even exists right now) and it’s people are bandits and looters.
Until Alibaba came back. He has some new powers—he can basically speed up his reflexes to an astounding level, which allows him to read moves in fights and…read really fast—and some new ideas for propping Kou up and making it an independent country.
This is truly why I love Magi. It started as a dungeon exploring adventure manga, slowly morphing into larger battles and fights all the while mixing in political underpinnings and socioeconomic statuses, like those of the slums of Balbadd and the Fanaris in general. In this volume, it goes full bore. The entire volume is comprised of a few pages of Alibaba showing off his new skills, then discussion of how Kou was built to fail from the beginning, perhaps on purpose by Sinbad.
Kou was a military nation, and as such a bunch of its resources went directly to the military. But when the fighting went to the minds of intellectuals and out of the swords and shields, Kou was ill prepared. It didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with this. There were farmers and manufacturers before, but I’m sure most of it came from conquest. The empire itself didn’t produce anything except military might. No longer given that option, they fall into ruin. They produce nothing so they can’t repay debts. Interest keeps compounding and eventually the country is about to collapse because they live in a new world.
But Kou is vast. It has the soil to grow crops. It has the minds to build machinery. It has the manpower to do anything, if given the right motivation. There was just no infrastructure supporting this transition for Kou. A country can’t just become something it wasn’t yesterday or a month ago or even a year ago. It takes time and effort to make everything happen. Alibaba provides that push.
Ohtaka is trying to say a lot with this, and I think she’s particularly frustrated with how education is structured. I’m not sure if she’s speaking directly of Japan. But the people of Kou were given no opportunity to learn. They were just given a new situation and expected to succeed, but that’s nigh on impossible. Kou started at the top of the food chain in a world centered around war, but was always at the bottom in trade. They didn’t trade, they conquered. And when the world begun to revolve around trade, they stayed at the bottom. And no one helped them. No on nurtured them to show them what they needed to succeed or even sustain. Kou was set up to fail.
Ohtaka, by the way, is also throwing in a little bit of her own philosophy on trade, dropping that Sinbad has set up a free trade market that seems to be working for now. I don’t know what the money structure is, but it seems it’s mostly goods for goods, at least for now. It’ll be interesting to see if Ohtaka has that system fall to the ground or if more structure will be put into place. I’m sure there already are some rules—no free trade is truly free trade—but they aren’t mentioned in detail nor would I really want them to be.
But anyway. With Alibaba’s planning, and a little help from Komei, as well as Kogyoku’s charisma, Kou may still have hope yet. Alibaba is planning magic transportation circles that will instantly transport anything from one circle to the next. Crops won’t go bad and people can move easily and cheaply between great distances. He has to get his old friends’ help to establish these magic circles in the other countries, but he’s got the chops. Balkirk in Balbadd, Yamraiha in Magnoshutatt, Sharrkan in Eliohapt, and Masrur and Titus in Leam all return to the pages of the manga after the time skip, and their faces are well received. They see something new in Alibaba, but some things just stay the same as well. He’s still the guy that can rally everyone to his side with his crazy ideas.
In Summary:
I love Magi, and I fall in love with it again every volume I read. From the epic fights just a few volumes ago to the politics to the economics, everything about what seemed like a simple shonen manga has slowly and surely catapulted itself to one of my favorite manga of all time, maybe.
This volume just shows Ohtaka’s strength as storyteller, as a fight choreographer, and as an economist I guess? She has this vast knowledge base and makes it accessible enough for a typical shonen audience while also leaving enough between the lines to make it even more interesting.
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: June 12, 2018
MSRP: $9.99