Apple Black - You Need This

It's 3:38 am on Sunday morning and I'm eating pineapples from a can reading over the first few chapters of Apple Black again. This is good, really good. Odunze tells the story of fruits called blacks that allowed humans to become sorcerers. I'll admit, this isn't my usual reading, but I actually enjoyed it a lot.



Apple Black tells the story of Sano, also known as Trinity. For the first time he's free from his homeschooling and let loose in school. Sano's initial goal is to make friends, which he does ins Symon, a book worm, and Ryuzaki, a fiery red head. However we soon learn that Sano is much more powerful than he appears and his true goal is to create peace. I usually don't read a lot of comics or manga that feature comedy but I'll admit I got a few chuckles from Apple Black mainly from anything Mikael says or does.

The art in Apple Black may look simplistic at first glance but once you look again you'll realize it's actually pretty awesome. None of the backgrounds are reused. I need to point that out because they're incredibly detailed. In the backgrounds alone you can see the cracks on aging buildings, even the litter on the streets is heavily detailed. The art makes Apple Black just as fun to look at as it is to read. The cool thing about Apple Black is that it's drawn in a manga style, but reads left to right like a comic book. Negative space is used incredibly well. Each character also features a great amount of detail. The small details really make Apple Black stand out, especially when you consider this all done with no assistants on a biweekly schedule for Saturday AM.

My favorite part of Apple Black is it takes time to develop side characters. We're not going to have to wait on a death to learn more about a character. While we slowly learn more about Sano each chapter, we get larger doses of other characters. This is important to create some attachment to each character weather it's love or hate early on. My least favorite part is that it sometimes falls into the Naruto trap of too much talking before an action scene. The action will be rising and then all of a sudden we get pages of dialogue before the action continues. That can sometimes take you out of the moment but it's not too distracting.

If you want more Apple Black, I know you do, you can find the first 2 chapters easily by googling it. But everything after that, you're going to have to pick up a subscription to Saturday AM. That's going to cost you five dollars for the entire year with an issue every other week. 5 dollars for 26 issues sounds pretty good. It's also got some other cool stuff like Comatose and Bully Eater.


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