The first two volumes of The Promised Neverland were a wild ride of tension and suspense as the children at Grace Field House realized they were not orphans but products being raised for a non-human society beyond the walls of their “home.” Sometimes swiftly paced, more often much more deliberate and methodical, the intensity of the situation was always present and it carried the volumes easily.
While the pacing felt pitch-perfect in these first two volumes, it began to drag halfway through this third volume. I really feel like there’s no more set-up necessary, it’s do or die for the kids and they need to get out. In the time since the second volume’s English-language release, an anime has also been announced to air in January on the NoitaminA block. As I was reading this volume I was thinking about how this pacing will be adapted for the small screen. It’s very likely that the adaptation will be only one cour (this has not been confirmed yet but looking at past NoitaminA trends it seems likely) and at this rate, it will take them at least half of the anime’s runtime just for the kids to break out of Grace Field House! It’s clear that whenever the kids do escape it will be the end of an arc, but not the end of the series, and, while some people might say I should leave this worrying to the anime’s staff, I can’t help but wonder how this slow burn will translate into a format with a very strict time frame.
Also, I’m just excited to see what happens next! We get confirmation in The Promised Neverland volume 3 that there are some humans who live with the demons (as co-conspirators it seems, although their exact status in this brave new world is unknown), that the Grace Field House complex is probably quite large and contains several farms, that even the Mothers are hugely controlled in what they can do (even they can’t leave the farm), and that the cast must be even farther into the future than they first suspected (based on the birthdates of some of the adults). Compared to the first two volumes where the core cast had to reason out and discover these details on their own, this volume has been straight-forward exposition dumps in the form of cat and mouse games played between the children and the adults. The tension is still there, but if Kaiu Shirai has to put the kids in situations like this to keep moving the plot along I think that’s as good a sign as any that a real shake-up is needed and soon.
This isn’t to say that volume three is a bad volume. It feels like a small step-down from the first two but it hasn’t stumbled yet, it’s just hard to have a series that’s both high tension and not also super fast paced. I was also a bit bummed out that Emma had less of a focus in this volume, partially since the story shifted to look at some of the side characters a bit more. But I was struck by how many of the important authority figures we’ve seen so far have been women (the Mothers, “Grandmother,” and possibly the head demon from the end of the very first volume) and yet overall the cast is significantly more male than female.
Hopefully the gender ratio will become a bit more balanced, or even tipped in the favor of female characters as the story progresses. The Promised Neverland is already unusual enough for being a shounen manga with arguably a female lead, as the only other series I can think of at this moment in WSJ with that set-up is Act-Age which is not currently being simulpubbed in English. I also found myself wishing that Demizu was a little more daring with her paneling for this series. I like the art style for the series, again it’s in a style that’s unusual to see in WSJ titles, and the layout of the pages is easy enough to follow, but I am a firm believer that the layout of a page should influence/be influenced by the story it is telling, the same way that cuts should interact with the story of a motion picture.
The strong focus on Emma is part of the reason that I enjoyed the first two volumes of The Promised Neverland so I hope that future installments of the series bring us more Emma, even more mysteries, and a look at what is going on in the outside world!