In a strange world where people live on floating islands in the sky and the ground far below is nowhere to be seen, Nemeses are strange monsters that fall from the sky and terrorize normal people. No ordinary weapons are useful against these creatures, but only weapons that can manipulate fantasia will have any effect on them. This means only a tiny percentage of the population can use these weapons, and those are the only people who can come into contact with Nemeses and survive.
These survivors are called the infected, and these wizards are marked with an (often physical) abnormality, making them an easy target for deeply suspicious non-wizards (especially since we have yet to see a non-magical, disabled person in this world). Seth’s tiny horns mark him as an infected but, despite his boasts to the contrary, he doesn’t seem to be very good at doing anything related to hunting down nemeses, both because of his own skills and because of his brash, hot-headedness. He’s tired of the way the world works, unhappy with the prejudice thrown against the infected by ignorant non-wizards who see them only as bringers of calamity and has just made a plan to find out where Nemeses come from and to destroy this nest once and for all.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a professionally published comic of any sort that is in such dire need of an editor from page one. Since Radiant is actually a French comic, not a manga created in Japan (Tony Valente currently lives in Canada), I’m unsure what kind of editorial process the comic goes through compared to a more “traditional” manga title (he does have an editor, although he doesn’t use any assistants), but I would like to give the editor a hard shake and ask them why they aren’t doing their job. It’s common to see a first chapter that runs longer than usual so as to set up the story, but Radiant’s 100 page opener feels excessively long, messy, and like creator Valente was trying to cram in as many things as he could to show off what he could do as a writer. Radiant is not his first work but in Anime News Network’s NYCC 2018 interview with him, he talks about how different the pacing is in his more traditional French comics (which comes out only once a year with just 46, full-color pages, very bande-dessinée). You get the sense that he is just giddy with the opportunity to do long-form storytelling, but this first chapter was very much a turn-off for me.
A much simpler, more straightforward chapter would have worked better than Radiant’s actual first chapter, which is filled with too many characters who are written with the broadest of strokes. Radiant is attempting to show why ordinary people believe that they have reason to fear the infected and simultaneously that ordinary people are simply bigoted by fearing them. But the story tries to show this with a group of double-crossers, arrogant officials, and a-danger-to-everyone Seth. My thoughts of “gee, parts of this story seem like a barely-veiled metaphor for racism that doesn’t work well” are probably not far off given that Valente is the son of immigrants himself. It’s clear that Valente really wants to show multifaceted characters but again, the story is just too messy to work on any level for me. It’s true that real-life discriminations are often messy and irrational but, as I’ve written about before, fiction is not real-life, plenty of real-life current events would make for badly plotted fiction! Radiant feels messy but in an unrealistic way, as there’s too much going on without a chance for the story to breathe.
Main character Seth was also a major turn off for me in this first volume. He feels a heck of a lot like other shounen characters such as Naruto that talk big, yell a ton, and seem to be both lacking in common sense and not even that good at whatever skills they talk big about purporting to have! And, also a part of this trope, Seth bizarrely seems to have some secret, uber-special powers that allow him to manipulate fantasia without the use of magical tools, making him even more of a class shounen Gary Stu. You have to wonder if his teacher Arma was actually teaching him anything or was she just trying to keep Seth out of more trouble than he already gets into. In his interview with ANN, Valente says that he’s a reader of Weekly Shonen Jump and “[w]hen I think about making a manga, I don’t see a reason as to why I can’t do a Shonen Jump-like manga. I wanted to tell a similar type of story to please the type of reader that I am.” Radiant might be pleasing its creator, but even the current anime adaptation has tweaked some of these opening chapters. I’m told that Seth is less of a shout-y hot-head in them, and I’m curious what the reactions to both the anime and the manga have been amongst American, Japanese, and French fans.
If you want a new shounen story to start reading, don’t look here. There are plenty of other great ones available in English right now with far less annoying characters. Or if you’re really in need of a new character to scream at you every week, it really does sound like the anime is the better choice here.