Deadman Wonderland - 52

The gore, the horror, the insanity; what a welcome return it is.

I don't think it's possible to express how much I like this manga without sounding like a psychopath, and I'm sure anyone who reads it probably feels the same way. To be brutally honest, this is my desensitization series; before Deadman Wonderland, I had a hard time stomaching gore in anime (even though the original Fullmetal Alchemist was my first series, it was just hard for me to get used to). After being introduced to this manga when the first chapter came out in 2007, I couldn't bring myself to stop reading and I was officially ruined for violence. Part of my personal draw was that I knew the mangaka behind the series; Kondou Kazuma and Jinsei Kataoka are the team that adapted the Eureka Seven manga, and even there, their penchant for gore and insanity was blatantly evident. As it is, DW blows everything else they ever wrote out of the water, and it's arguably one of the best shounen manga in recent memory, albeit a very dark and very messed up take on the genre.

The fact that this series went on such a long hiatus has nothing to do with popularity; Jinsei Kataoka went on maternity leave just as the series was entering its final arc, leaving us, the fans, craving more bloody goodness. Thankfully, the long wait is over, and we can finally see the series conclude on Ganta Igarashi and Shiro's story.

And what a story it is.

In order to enjoy this series, there has to be a huge suspension of disbelief; everything in this manga is over the top insane. There is no mercy, no middle ground, no boundary too great to cross. The only innocence to be found rests in the hands of the protagonist Ganta, a seemingly normal boy whose entire school gets butchered by a "Red Man" and who is sent to a privatized jail known as Deadman Wonderland when he's framed as the murderer. It's while in jail that Ganta meets Shiro, a ditzy albino girl who runs around the prison like it's her playground, and who claims to be Ganta's childhood friend. After discovering that he's a Deadman, someone with the power to control his own blood, Ganta is forced to participate in underground fighting matches known as Carnival (or Cannibal) Corpse or risk execution. While there, he makes unlikely friends and allies amongst the prisoners, and slowly falls in love with Shiro, only to discover that Shiro herself has a split personality and that she's the Red Man who not only killed Ganta's friends, but also destroyed Tokyo single-handedly ten years prior to the beginning of the story. Even worse, it was Ganta's own mother and her boss who tortured Shiro to insanity when using her as a test subject for a pharmaceutical company, genetically altering her so as to make her into the nearly immortal "Wretched Egg". With the objective of destroying Shiro, the now liberated prisoners return to the shut-down prison to find and stop her.

It's in this context that Ganta and his friends come across Hagire Rinichiro, the man behind the creation of the Wretched Egg, who's switched bodies numerous times for the sake of staying alive and "freeing" Shiro from her docile personality. His determination to do so leads him to return to the battleground despite a mutilated body, and his powers as Mockingbird (or Toto, as he was known before he was "killed") are formidable. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the battle between Deadmen as well as to the affirmation that Rinichiro is more psychotic than we thought possible (his deranged love of destruction and cutting people up comes to mind), though one huge development does occur, and it's infuriating that we're not told outright what it is.

Clearly the development is some new revelation about Shiro, and whatever it is, it's enough to shock Ganta despite what he already knows about her. Is she his sister, perhaps? Or did what Igarashi Sorae (Ganta's mother) do to her go far beyond what Ganta imagined? There's really no way to know right now, and since the series doesn't really have a limit to what it wants to torture its characters with (I'm reminded of the flashback where Shiro's arm falls off), it could really be anything. We're definitely in for more battle chapters however, as the protagonists insist they won't give up in the battle against Mockingbird and the Wretched Egg.