Manga Classics: Les Misérables by Stacy KingMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Les Misérables… Manga style.
I am at a loss as to how I’m going to rate this, because with adaptations there sometimes come complications. I very much did not enjoy the story of Les Misérables. To me it was honestly boring. I wasn’t interested in their post-French Revolution world or problems. On the other hand, though I have never read the original (god forbid), I felt like this was a very well done adaptation. The art was nice, and what was happening all made sense to me. So I want to rate it good for being an adaptation, but then I didn’t actually enjoy it that much. Herein lies the dilemma. I’d probably rate the adaptation a three- or four-star rating, and the story a two-star rating. I’ll compromise this by giving it a three-star rating, but maybe it’s more of a 2.5-star rating. I can’t really rate my adaptation score too highly since I haven’t read the original, I’m just going by my view as an outsider.
Some specific points I didn’t like about the story (besides how completely uninteresting it was, which is the main thing) would be some of the characters. As a warning: This part is spoiler-y, I guess. I seriously question Fantine’s intelligence. Who, in their right mind, no matter how desperate they are, would leave their one and only child with people who are not only complete strangers, but who are also clearly greedy scumbags? Like, if they abduct her or kill her, or hurt her in anyway, then it was all counterproductive, wasn’t it? Even if you felt like you had no other choice, good job, now your kid is dead anyway. Fantine was just lucky her kid didn’t get shanked, but this decision still ended up completely screwing her over and leading to her early death. Good job Fantine, you genius you.
Javert’s logic was also questionable during at least one part of the book. He says, “One would have to be a terrible man to be able to do such a thing… To lift such a weight.” In reference to being able to lift a wagon that fell on a guy. And he’s all like, hurr durr, there’s only one man I know who’s sooooo terrible: Jean Vanjean. The guy who went to jail for NINETEEN YEARS for STEALING SOME BREAD. And also trying to break out that one time. But still. THE MAN ONLY STOLE SOME BREAD!!! Does that really make you the worst person on earth? Does Javert not know any, oh, I dunno, MURDERERS, or maybe RAPISTS, or even SOCIALISTS??? (I’m just kidding about that last one… Maybe…) Like really, Jean Vanjean, the guy who stole some bread, is the most terrible guy, and only he would be able to lift that wagon. Right. Gotcha. Logic checks out. So when someone actually does lift the wagon, it can’t POSSIBLY be ANYONE ELSE, but Jean Vanjean, right? Logic says Javert is a close-minded idiot, but plot convenience does not favor logic. Javert is just lucky that in the end it actually was Jean.
Okay, we get it, I didn’t like the story. Let’s talk more about this specific edition of Les Misérables. I’ve read two other manga classics by this publisher before, The Scarlet Letter and Pride and Prejudice, so I know they do good work. Something I’ve noticed about myself personally, is that I think almost every single one of their manga classic edition covers, are, to put it bluntly, horrendously ugly and unappealing. Les Misérables, sadly, not being the exception. I just find the art on these covers to be so… Ugh. Cringy, I guess. Like I said in my Pride and Prejudice review, it reminds me of the really ugly old manhwa style where everything is disproportioned and too sparkly and just gross looking. The kind of art that is precisely the reason why a lot of westerners have adverse opinions towards anime and manga in the first place. In my opinion the worst covers are actually those by Po Tse, the illustrator of Pride and Prejudice as well as Udon Entertainment’s manga classic editions of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. All of those are just sooooooooo unpleasant. But, on the contrary, I actually like Po Tse’s art a lot more than SunNeko Lee’s, who is the illustrator of Les Misérables (among others as well). On the inside. I don’t know what’s up with her covers, I think it might be the coloring, but her art is actually very nice on the inside of the book. SunNeko Lee’s art is just very generic. It’s not bad at all, but I guess it doesn’t have any unique flair or anything. So all in all, I probably wouldn’t want to pick up any of these books if I was just browsing covers in-store if I didn’t already know these guys do good work.
Another minor quibble about the art would be Marius’s design. It’s just kind of funny because he looks exactly like a generic harem lead.
I was specifically thinking that he looks like the guy from The Asterisk War (the guy on the far right of the image) the entire time. Sooooo yeah…. Probably not a good thing to make your love interest look like this.
An overall decent book. It’s just a shame that I was not a fan of the story. I’m sure that if you’re already a fan of the original that this would be a nice compliment to the story that you already love. Or if you do still want to know the story but don’t want to spend eons reading the original, I’d say that this is a pretty good alternative.
Downloaded from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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