Comics / Manga

Wild Adapter Vol. 1


By Josh Hechinger
February 11, 2007 - 13:44

Translation: Alexis Kirsch
English Adaptation: Christine Boylan

WildAdapter01.jpg
Makoto Kubota knows how to glare and play Mahjong, and we're not in a Mahjong parlor.
Wild Adapter comes in a plastic wrapper. So you can’t read it beforehand and see the so-called Mature Content within.

And as I’m buying it, I’m thinking “Really? Is that necessary?” Cause I remembered reading a chapter or two back in high school, and there wasn’t anything that jumped out at me as particularly shocking.

I remembered it as a morally and sexually ambiguous tale of unnaturally pretty Yakuza boys. There was some angst involved, and some yaoi overtones…but this is a comic by Kazuya Minekura, and those things are in pretty much every story I’ve ever seen from her.

You might know her as the creator of Gensomaden Saiyuki and Saiyuki Reload. Both of which have those themes cranked to eleven alongside lots of bloody fighting.

Anyway. My memory hadn’t failed me. Ambiguous, pretty boys, angst; check, check, check. This isn’t a bad thing…even though those themes aren’t usually what I look for in my comics from either side of the Pacific, Minekura has always been the exception.

Wild Adapter isn’t an exception to the exception (right? I think that’s what I’m trying to say). It’s the story of charismatic-but-kind-of-sociopathic Mahjong player/youth gang leader Makoto Kubota, and his quest to simply not be bored. Which involves gang wars and Mahjong and assassinations, because lanky and lazy Kubota turns out to be very good at handling all three.

And then the bizarre new drug Wild Adapter leads to the death of someone close to him, and he decides to just walks away from it all.

I guess it stopped being fun.

However…even though Kubota ends up walking out of the frying pan with a calm little smile, he almost trips over the fire in the street.

The fire being a “stray cat” (by which the story means “young guy who’s a bit tattered and has a claw for a hand”): Tokito, who has some sort of connection to Wild Adapter and is sure to bring nothing but trouble in future volumes.

Minekura says in the endnotes that this volume is pretty much all prologue; a way of setting the board so she can get on with the proper story in future volumes. Maybe, but it’s an engaging, slightly sordid, occasionally witty prologue, so I forgive her for taking a whole volume to do it in.


Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12

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