Dark Walker

Dark Walker
By Kisaragi Hirotaka and Yura Hikaru

Scanslated by Boku-Tachi
IRC Channel: #boku-tachi @ irc.irchighway.net

Topic: Action, Fantasy, Present-Day

Sumamry:
Natsumi Orihara is a regular student who has been having trouble sleeping as of late. When she falls asleep, she dreams of an arrow though she cannot tell what it means. A few days after these dreams began ofccuring, a transfer student named Ryuuto Tenkawa shows up in her class. As he walks to his assigned seat, he twlls her that her "energy is overflowing."

Later that day, she falls alseep in her homeroom and dreams of watchign the water in the pool rise, engulfing her friend. Whe she waawkens, she finds Ryuuto looking intently at her, and learns that her friend (who was swimmign at the time) has disappeared. Ryuuto explains that there are two worlds, the real world and the dream world. A water demon from the dream world has crossed the boundary and taken her friend. To get her back, Natsumi and Ryuuto enter the dream world and defeat the water demon.

It turns out that both Natsumi and Ryuuto are "Dark Walkers", people capable of entering both worlds. But since female dark walkers are very rare, the demons of the dream world often enter the real world to target them. As a result, Ryuuto has been sent to protect her and train her to defend herself. Can Natsumi learn to weild her latent abilities in Time? Or will she be be consumed like almost all the dark walkers before her?

Commentary:
So far this manga follows a fairly generic pattern, wherein the main character is unaware of her powers and she learns to master her abilities via a combination of trainnig and trials by fire. Even the concept of two worlds is very familiar to manga readers. That said, the plot is lively enough and the action varied enough to make up for the use of the tired formulas.

The art style is very detailed (with plenty of attention paid to facial features, clothes, and hair) and the backgrounds are nicely filled out with details (rather than leaving them black or white). Despite this, I disliked the art as it failed to flow nicely. Often manga is read from right to left and top to bottom, with a few variations to this rule based on frame size. But there are some pages I had to try reading multiple times to understand how the text and art fit together, and to determine in what order events occured. Having to reread pages to determine the passage of events causes constant breaks in the flow of the story.

There hasn't been enough scnaslated for me to render a sounder verdict on this series but so far the story is sufficiently interesting to warrant continued reading. Hopefully the art will begin to take on a more logical flow.

Rating: 6.0/10.0