Mikura Amelia’s hard work has paid off: she finds the titular Wandering Island (also called Electric Island in the story) within the first few pages and the rest of the volume is devoted to her time spent on the island. Her plane is in need of repairs before she can fly home (and possibly more gas, since the island travels at a tremendous speed and she is already very far from home) but the few, mostly aged residents of the island that she comes across are hostile to her presence. Mikura doesn’t seem to be any closer to delivering her package than she was when she started this quest, so is this really going to be how it ends?
I enjoyed the first volume when it was released in English in 2016 and it’s a shame that, while this second volume was available in Japan in 2017, that we had to wait an additional few years to get it available in English (in fact, it’s been long enough that it’s getting harder to find brand-new copies of volume 1). However, this volume is much weaker than the first one and I’m not sure it was worth the wait. While the first volume had a great balance of atmosphere and “things happen” this volume is almost entirely atmosphere — a listless, stagnant atmosphere.
Editor Carl Horn has a 6 and a half page long editor’s note at the back of the volume where, among other things, they talk about how this series has been serialized sporadically and that the chapters that make up this volume were originally published in October, November, and December 2012 issues, the June, August, October and December 2014 issues, the April 2015 issue, the November and December 2016 issues, and the January, February, April, November, and December 2017 issues. “That’s 15 separate parts, and it may explain why vol. 2 is, even more than vol. 1, told visually—it might have seemed less disruptive than a sporadic dialogue readers would return to every few months.”
Well, that set-up may have worked for magazine readers but as a bound-volume reader, I was constantly wondering if I had missed a page, if I was falling asleep while reading, or if there was just something to explain why the story suddenly just felt so different. The first chapter still feels rather sequential and much like I remember the first volume being like, but the rest of the volume feels more and more disconnected the farther you get, like the reader is slowly falling into a state of half-consciousness.
Kenji Tsuruta’s art also didn’t help with this. Yes his pen and ink drawings are pretty and often stunning but feel like individual illustrations, not a comic. Reading Wandering Island volume 2 reminded of when I read the first volume of Land of the Lustrous by Haruko Ichikawa recently since I had a similar reaction; in both series the individual panels all feel like beautiful drawings but they’re missing the connective tissue that shows action, cause and effect, and what is needed to generally lead the reader through a story rather than just an idea. In the case of Wandering Island, I started feeling like I needed a whole minute or two to examine each panel before moving on, which I’m sure some readers are fine with but it just didn’t work for me. Perhaps the series would actually read better in a different fashion, like as a long, single-scroll comic that has become popular with apps like Webtoons and Tapas encouraging their creators to make comics that can be enjoyed on mobile devices. I wonder if placing each panel individually like, so that the viewer did have the time to look at each one and the scrolling motion would naturally move their eye to the next panel, would work better than the more traditional format that Wandering Island was conceived, created, and printed twice over in.
Overall this volume was a disappointment for me. Barely anything happened in Mikura’s story, barely anything happened in her world, and it feels like Tsurata wasted the five years he spent intermittently working on this manga. Tsurata has apparently worked on at least three other manga since he began publishing Wandering Island, two completed one-shots and an adaptation of a novel called Emamon which Carl Horn mentions in his editor’s note that Dark Horse will soon be publishing as well. While the premise of Emamon and the promise of Tsurata’s art is intriguing, after watching this story practically disintegrate as I read it, I’m a bit leery to pick up anything else that he has been involved in.