The Demon Ororon: The Complete Collection

The Demon Ororon: The Complete Collection
by: Hakase Mizuki
Published by: Tokyopop
from the publisher: Relive the ill-fated romance between a devil with a bounty on his head and the Archangel Michael’s orphaned daughter–collected here in one complete volume. Chiaki is the orphaned daughter of a human woman and the Archangel Michael. Ororon is a demon with a bounty on his head. Sworn enemies, their lives change forever when their hatred is transformed into love–for one another. Bound together by passion but torn apart by the world around them, their love becomes a struggle for survival as the battle between demons and the angelic order rages around them.
my ramblings:  This series is strange. Not bad, but definitely strange. The art for one takes some getting used to. It’s lanky; somewhat like CLAMP’s Tsubasa or Clover, but also very different. At first I didn’t really like the art, and at some times it honestly makes it hard to understand what’s going on, but by the end of the series, I found myself at the very least not disliking it.

The story is also kind of odd. The main character is the daughter of the archangel Michael and a human, and God is suggested to be not the original creator, but another child of an angel and human. It’s a very strange use of Christianity (honestly one of the oddest Christian imagery that I’ve ever seen used in a manga or anime).

One of the only things I can think of to compare this to that I’ve read would be CLAMP’s Clover. It’s extremely different, but storytelling-wise it’s somewhat similar, with plenty of textless panels and seemingly lyrical or poetic exposition. This is not going to be to most people’s liking, as was the case with Clover, but it’s not awful and not quite so overused as in Clover.

I hate to stomp on graves, but it’s a little sad that Tokyopop didn’t bother to go back and edit this before slapping it into an omnibus collection to sell more copies. There are obvious differences in spellings of places and names between the different volumes (which are separated in the collection). It’s made even more obvious when you have the whole series right in front of you, as opposed to maybe having read the previous volume a few months prior.

Overall, I would suggest this title if you can find it cheap. I got my copy for around $9 on eBay, it retailed for $19.99, though the individual volumes were $9.99 each, so anything less than that is a good deal at this point, since all Tokyopop titles are now offically out of print. If you don’t get this title you’re not missing much, but if you get the chance to read it, I think it’s worth it. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for Mizuki’s other translated works (Baku, Asian Beat, and the incomplete Demon Flowers).

 

Sidenote: Hey! It’s been a while, I know… I’m not really saying that I’m back now, I just really felt the urge to write a review of this series while I was reading it and thus I actually managed to post something. Hopefully I’ll be more in the review writing mood, but who knows. I don’t go back to school until the first week of September, but I’ll be researching and writing my Independent Study from then to December on top of my other classes, so I probably won’t have much time. Hopefully my IS isn’t as stressful and I’m making it out to be… :]