The Philippine Online Chronicles

Samurai Scribe is an indie komik created by Louie Lu (and affiliated with iNorth and illust-guild), with three issues as of this review.  It chronicles the adventures of Gino Santiago, a seventeen-year-old high school student, who is recruited to become part of a mysterious organization called “The Scribes” guarding the land against danger (or, rather, a special class of danger, as I doubt that the Scribes perform regular peacekeeping duties).

In the first issue, Gino is caught sleeping in class, and is assigned a “special project” to make up for his delinquency. In the second issue, Gino meets Sophia (the presumptive love interest) and the nature, origin and mission of the Scribes (in very broad strokes) is explained. The third issue involves a conflict that allows us to see the Scribes in action, and ends with Gino discovering his own special talent.

Samurai Scribe, even just from the title, is clearly a manga-style story, and as such the artwork is a natural fit. The art is serviceable, for the most part. At the very least, Lu makes an effort to portray scenes from different angles – strangely enough, it is the battle scene in the third issue which has the least variety in perspective, with the action usually viewed from straight ahead. Lu also uses the technique of showing a single scene by means of separate panels, giving an illusion of movement or momentum, forcing the eye of the reader to take in one part of a scene before another.

While the art shows some improvement from issue one to issue three, Lu’s work still has a way to go before acquiring a distinct style. While Japanese manga is in fact rendered in a wide variety of art styles – even a critic unfamiliar with manga and given to gross overgeneralization would be hard-pressed to put the works of Hiroaki Samura, the Fujiko Fujio partnership, Eichiiro Oda, and the late Hinako Sugiura in the same category – there is an art style which currently passes for a “generic” manga style, characterized by minimally detailed backgrounds, liberal use of tones and/or speed lines, those tell-tale big, liquid eyes, and graphical shorthands such as sweatdrops, super-deformation etc. Lu’s style approximates this generic manga style, and while it does match the tone of the story (and, for the manga fan, identifies the story as something he or she might enjoy), Lu will need to go beyond it if his comic is going to set itself apart from other manga-inspired indies. The backgrounds, in particular, could really use some more detail.

Of course, it is not uncommon for a comic or manga to achieve a level of individuality not from the art style of the artist, but from memorable character design, a unique setting, or a riveting plot. Unfortunately, at least at this stage of the series, Samurai Scribe has not yet distinguished itself in those areas.

The character design in Samurai Scribe takes a rather minimalist track, which results in some unfortunately bland character designs. This is a particular issue given that, so far, the characters are very much archetypes that would be familiar to most people with even a passing familiarity with anime/manga shonen-type stories. Sophia Marquez is Gino’s teammate, the beautiful foreigner (she’s Spanish) who is already a full member of the organization which is recruiting Gino. Principal Sta. Maria is the ageless, laid-back authority figure whose eccentricities hide extraordinary abilities (showcased in the first issue when he saves Gino’s life). Then there’s our hero, Gino, who takes on the age-old role of the  unremarkable teenage boy who, unbeknownst to him, actually possesses extraordinary abilities that will make him an important player in the battle of good versus evil.

These are classic character archetypes, and they are classics for a reason – it’s still very much possible to tell a great story with them, still possible to take these basic roles and flesh them out into unique characters. We are only three issues into Samurai Scribe and I hope that Lu can in fact take these archetypes and make them his own. That being the case, however,  these archetypes are common, and hence it would behoove creators to take steps from the get-go to make their versions distinct and memorable. In a comic or manga, visual design is usually the first aspect  of a character that a reader will encounter, and it’s a creator’s first shot at hooking the readers by showing them something interesting.

In Samurai Scribe, however, there is nothing in the character design that will hook the reader. Principal Sta. Maria wears a suit and has white hair, spectacles, and smiling eyes. Sophia has long hair, and wears a mid-thigh pleated skirt, and a sweater-vest over a collared shirt. Gino has short, semi-spiky black hair, and wears… a white t-shirt and dark pants. The lack of variety in the choice of clothing might have been more understandable (at least as far as Sophia and Gino are concerned) if what they’d been wearing had been school uniforms, but from the brief glimpses we have of the other students, it appears that Bonifacio High School has no prescribed uniform. Even when the Scribes activate their powers, all that happens is that they gain a scarf. Even if this is meant as, say, a subversion of the excessive transformation sequences frequently found in manga and anime, it’s just one more missed opportunity to make the characters truly stand out. I’d have at least like to see some sort of pattern on the scarves, maybe to keep with the theme of the Scribes being an ancient order that traces its roots back to Mindanao, but these scarves too, are blank and unassuming.

Mention of the pseudo-mythic origin of the Scribes brings me to the setting of the komik. Lu should be applauded for his effort to ground his supernatural organization in local mythology, even if Principal Sta. Maria may have been mistaken in linking a myth from Mindanao with Bathala, the principal deity of the Tagalogs in Luzon. (The myth itself is probably fictional, or at least I can find no trace of a Mindanao legend concerning Eskribos or a Mount Aeipoh--I’d love to be proven wrong.) I’m fairly sure that more will be revealed about this legend in future issues, but at this point my main issue with the portrayal of the setting in “Samurai Scribe” is how little it seems to impact the narrative.

In the second issue, it is revealed that the Philippines now has four seasons, apparently due to global warming. For there to have been such a drastic change by the year 2050 (the date of the story) there must have been something truly catastrophic that occurred. What was it? The second issue also reveals that the Philippines has become a cultural melting pot. I’d love to see what that version of the Philippines would look like, other than having more foreigners walking the streets.

The setting doesn’t seem fully developed, and it doesn’t seem to have any consequences for the characters. For instance, even if this takes place forty years in the future, the technology used seems identical to what we have now. Maybe more about the world will be revealed in the future, but it might have been better to have been given a taste of what Gino’s life was like before the Scribes arrived, so that we can share his sense of wonder at discovering this new world. The storyline so far has focused on the transition from Gino-as-ordinary-student to Gino-as-Scribe; but that transition has less of an impact since we have no idea what the life of Gino-as-student was all about.

Still, that’s in the past. Lu now has to look to the future, and find a way to move the series from ordinary to extraordinary.

[Image source: Louie Lu's deviantart gallery]