ABARA: “Has a Story,” and Other Thoughts

 . . . I think it would kind of spoil things for readers if I explain too much about the hows and whys of what happens in my stories. I think the most interesting science fiction stories have a certain degree of mystery to them, where they don't completely explain everything to the reader.

“Interview: Knights of Sidonia Mangaka Tsutomu Nihei” (26 Aug. 2016)

 

This piece contains full spoilers for Tsutomu Nihei’s graphic novel/manga series ABARA and will also contain quick, early-series spoilers for Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan. It contains some brief NSFW discussion but also discussion and images of grotesque violence.

When incorporating quotations from ABARA, I’ve had to make certain presentational changes. The original text is effectively in all caps, but I’ve tried to present it with “normal” capitalization to make it more readable in this format, which means I’ve also occasionally made personal calls about what words to leave capitalized in a couple of the quotes, making them differ from the source material.

I decided to leave the title “ABARA” in all caps whenever I mention it since I thought it looked coolest that way.

An additional note about translation: In writing this piece, I’m going to say things like “Nihei does this” or otherwise attribute specific bits of dialogue to him in one way or another. Obviously, I’m assuming that any translated material is accurate, and I have to do that because I don’t have the capability to double-check it.

 

I was already at least somewhat familiar with the work of manga artist-and-writer Tsutomu Nihei before I was aware of his mid-2000s series ABARA. What ended up drawing me so powerfully to ABARA, aside from the promise of more of Nihei’s simultaneously “sketchy” but also meticulous science fiction art, featuring massive dystopian buildings and landscapes alongside grotesque cyber- (and bio-) punk character and creature designs, was the inverse of the statement in the title of this piece: the argument I would see when I’d look ABARA up on Goodreads or Amazon or Reddit that it “doesn’t have a story” or “doesn’t have a good story” or “the story doesn’t make sense” or it “has no characters,” or something along those lines. What, I wondered, would such a thing look like?

The answer is that I still don’t know because ABARA isn’t that. I have some other thoughts on it, but they dovetail and intertwine with what’s going to be more or less my thesis for this piece: that ABARA does have a comprehensible story/plot and characters and that people who say otherwise are reading it wrong. I wouldn’t normally come out so gung-ho with a statement like that—my default state is one of, usually, qualification—but it was so apparent to me within even a few pages of starting ABARA when I first read it several years ago that people who say it “doesn’t make sense” were just outright wrong, that there’s not really qualification that I feel is suitable to attach here—excepting maybe (just “maybe”) the fact that, as I will discuss below, ABARA’s story and characters, while they clearly superficially exist (as in, They Are Literally On The Page), exist at the deeper level of what might casually be called simply, flat-out Existence—or, a meaningful and moving and well-developed state—only if you are willing to read between the lines somewhat and to vibe with what might be called “reference”: the way that ABARA deploys familiar tropes and scenarios to create pathos but might lack a certain amount of an identity of its own.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t still moving—or that it doesn’t have a story or characters or sense—but rather that it speaks in a sort of shorthand, which I’ve come to associate with Nihei’s work in one form or another. “Under-written?” Possibly. Perhaps “clipped.” As much as his landscapes could be seen as maximalist, characterization and world-building seem more suggestive, drawn from precious, fleeting moments of openness or expressiveness ultimately overshadowed by a world of fleshy metal and violence and scrawled splendorous ruin.

 

The version of ABARA that I own has the dubious distinction of probably being the most forward-facingly gory piece of media in my house. It can’t be said that the cover is dishonest about the content, though.

After a brief bit of text over a full-page image of a cityscape that hints at the nature of the plot-critical massive structures that will later be identified as “mausoleums,” the actual first scene of ABARA should be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a dramatic television series before. It’s not literally a “cold open” since there’s no title card or equivalent (at least not in this collected edition?), but it’s recognizably as good as one.

We see a man making his way amidst close-set enormous buildings that might be made of stone or of metal. Despite a certain ruinous look to the environment, the vibe is distinctly, immediately futuristic and dystopian, evoking impressions of similar scenes of urban over-growth. The man enters a clinic where the (presumed) sick line the stairs descending to the reception area and then encircle that area as well. They’re predominantly seated, it looks like, on the floor, which tells us a lot about the state of the humanitarian situation (which is to say, a certain lack thereof). It’s a logical next image following from the previous one. The man approaches the clinic’s reception desk and is asked for a “registration ticket.” He stammers out his reply: that he doesn’t have one but that this is an emergency. The woman at the desk placidly responds that the earliest they can see him is in two weeks and asks if he wants the ticket (“Shall I issue a ticket?”). The crowded clinic, the seeming inhumanity of the staff, the long wait times—dystopian, right? Or maybe just current, really…

But then—The big reveal: The man presents his rapidly shaking left hand to the receptionist, who now looks… mildly rattled. The hand begins spewing forth some sort of billowing, bulging matter as the sick man undergoes a hideous transformation that perforates the woman with numerous tentacles. Our last view of the clinic is of the previously seen reception area, but now visibly broken and damaged, crowded with the bloody remains of the other patients, and with an ominous black hole in the floor. And then there’s a panel of nothing but black before we get one where the point of view is looking straight up at a pool of white sky from the depths of what could from this perspective be a pit composed of more massive buildings, which is followed by an establishing shot of the exterior of the factory where, we’ll soon learn, one of ABARA’s protagonists works.

This opening of the first chapter of ABARA is masterfully presented. It hits all the emotional beats of the sort of monster-of-the-week cold opens you might associate with a series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, in a slightly less openly fantastical vein, maybe Law and Order: SVU. It suggests an intimate familiarity with how a story like this (seems to be) should start and what sort of emotional, narrative, and stylistic beats it needs to hit to make an impact. This new scene we’ve entered, at the factory, follows a similar tradition of recognizable storytelling: that of the weary specialist pulled back into a business he thought he’d left behind.

“Itou,” the factory boss calls this anonymous-looking guy in a mask and full-body protective equipment working some sort of manual labor job. All we can see are his eyes and a fringe of hair.

“Someone’s here to see you,” the boss says. And: “First time you’ve had a visitor here, huh?”

“Kudou,” the tired-eyed woman dressed all in black calls him instead after a beat of uncomfortable silence as they face each other in the (we can assume) boss’ office.

“The Observation Bureau promised to leave me alone. That was the deal.” Says this Itou/Kudou.

“Something very bad is happening,” says the woman, Tadohomi.

“Go to hell,” says Kudou.

“There’s been a Corporeal Manifestation in a populated area,” she says. “It’s a White Gauna.”

They argue; Kudou hints at something that “happened before,” some reason he’s been gone from… whatever all this is. Shortly thereafter, not so much persuaded as worn down, we get a close look at an ambiguous—maybe angry, maybe wary—expression on Kudou’s face, and then, from a perspective back on the factory floor outside the office, we see all the little windows that make up its glass front explode. Back inside the office again, Tadohomi is now alone. Kudou’s boss wants to know where he’s gone. Where he’s gone, we find out on the next page, is to a rooftop. In silence, he stands there as numerous black legs or tendrils emerge from his back and wrap around him, forming a heavy-looking armored shell topped by a featureless cracked faceplate over a not-exactly-grinning maw of enormous sharp teeth...

I’m not actually going to summarize the entirety of ABARA like this, but I’m continuing to do so for now to help drive home both how sensical and how familiar this all is. Obviously, we can infer that the “Corporeal Manifestation” refers to the incident at the clinic, and, whatever a White Gauna is, Kudou was once someone who dealt with such things and who is, after some time away, now getting dragged reluctantly back into that life. Apparently without friends or family to call on him at work, laboring anonymously in a place where no one would think to look for someone with the power to transform into some kind of monster, Kudou’s intentions to leave that “life” behind as thoroughly as possible are easy to understand. His anger at being disturbed and forced to resume work that he clearly distanced himself from for a reason resonates and thrills here just like it does with, say, retired, scarred FBI profiler Will Graham getting reluctantly back into the saddle once more in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon.

Again, Nihei hits all the beats you’d expect in a satisfying enough way. There are characters here, and there’s plot boiling, and it’s executed very competently, up to and including the anticipated “Go to hell” and the vague, tantalizing “It wasn’t your fault. . . .” ABARA does make good on all of these teased threads as well, most clearly and empathetically in the penultimate chapter, titled simply “Denji Kudou,” where we get to see Kudou and Tadohomi together at the Observation Bureau before things went bad, and then we also get to see how they went bad, with Kudou’s monstrous first transformation into a “Black Gauna” and his anger at Tadohomi for possibly feigning ignorance of such things during an earlier conversation where the two seemed to be friends.

By the time we witness this critical flashback, we’ve also seen the small, black insect or parasite that seems to be able to assimilate with flesh and reliably produce the distinctly spiky armored shell appearance. The Black Gauna (“False Gauna” they are also called at one point, and so are presumably man-made where the White Gauna, with their “Corporeal Manifestation,” almost seem otherworldly in their characterization) are the Observation Bureau’s elite agents deployed under extreme circumstances to destroy White Gauna before they can grow too powerful and attack one or more of the mausoleum-like structures, which will set off a sort of unnatural disaster of enormous tendrils that wrap the land. We see this happen in the present very late in ABARA, but, looking backward, back to when Tadohomi returns by train to the Observation Bureau headquarters across a sort of wilderness after re-activating Kudou, we can see the same sort of massive tendrils stretched across the empty, lifeless landscape, presumably a reminder of the same sort of cataclysm from some time in the long distant past, possibly in the time of the Fourth Aeon Guild, precursors to the Observation Bureau, who are mentioned almost in passing early on but whose select sort-of surviving (via transhumanist means) members we actually meet much later. I just don’t think there’s really all that much here that isn’t paid off or explained in at least some capacity.

There are certain elements of, shall we say, “flavor,” like why the Observation Bureau seems to be staffed by some sort of divergent humanoid line of mutants or why the Black Gauna named Nayuta is stored inside a sort of capsule crammed full of ambiguous flesh, that are not explicitly addressed to the best of my knowledge, but the only real narrative (potential) problem is the ending, or the lack of one. Tadohomi and Sakijima (of the Ministry of Martial Justice—basically the cops or military) are teleported away from the apocalyptic end-game of the world we’ve come to know from ABARA into either another dimension or maybe some sort of weird future as a last-ditch move by the final two members of the Fourth Aeon Guild to preserve some small measure of humanity. Meanwhile, Kudou and Nayuta, having also survived to be in what looks like a similar sort of weird void (maybe), face down still more White Gauna as the series just ends. It has the feel of a cancellation, whether that’s actually the case or not.

Either way (even if the awkward ending was intentional), this is one major trouble spot that likely leads to the previously mentioned arguments about the story being “bad” or there not being one, with the anticlimax reaching backward and rendering ineffective, for these critical (or un-critical?) readers, I assume, anything else that ABARA might have had before that point that clearly was a sensical story. I think it’s a case of an apparent lack of pay-off, perhaps on top of not really being receptive to this mode of “referential” storytelling and characterization I was describing before, that might lead to a missing the proverbial forest for the metaphorical trees-type scenario: where a perceived lack of conventional narrative wholeness or general execution leads to the perception That There Must Be Nothing There. When, in actuality, as I’ve been trying to prove with my overly-emotive retelling of scenes from ABARA, there’s still value in the perfectly calculated moves it makes to situate itself in a tradition of similar stories while also borrowing the heft of said traditions to bulk itself up. I call it “reference” because that’s the word that comes to mind, but obviously these aren’t one-for-one “easter egg” References, I don’t think. Instead, it’s referential in a craft sense—building itself up with less exertion by way of tapping into familiar beats and then sprawling in its own weird way at other times.

I want to summarize a bit more of ABARA, both as further support for this technique of meaningful “reference” I’ve been describing and to argue for the efficacy of its emotional appeals.

We left Denji Kudou a couple paragraphs back, in the early story, transformed and presumably going after the White Gauna from the clinic. The Ministry of Martial Justice forces are attempting to kill the monster, but it isn’t going well, and in swoops Kudou to save them. He and the creature exchange blows for several pages before smashing down through the roof of a multi-story building and landing in a heap with Kudou on top. After pummeling the White Gauna some more, he bites into its exposed spine in a thoroughly bestial fashion to finish it. There’s this one panel where we see the two from above and where the scene is kind of grotesquely eroticized—where Kudou’s form seems to almost straddle the middle of the larger creature, with his face buried in what was once its neck while viscera vines around his body in a sort of embrace. Afterward, when the Ministry of Martial Justice arrives on the scene, they find little more than a burst sack of tentacles and guts next to a partially de-armored Kudou who, we learn later, once the area is being treated like a combination crime scene and biohazard, has been fused with the floor.

All this action is ultimately more set-up for other important elements of the story that I want to emphasize than it is exactly noteworthy by itself, but I will side-track somewhat briefly to comment on these elements of what I’ve come to privately think of as “Gross Sentai”—like Power Rangers but your super suit is probably made of your own regenerating flesh (or flesh replacement). The figures of Denji Kudou’s and Nayuta’s Black Gauna forms are recognizably some twisted sort of Super-Sentai-like, in my thoroughly under-informed opinion, but their fights are so much grosser and are more likely to end with their heads or limbs torn or blown off.

It’s fun to see Nihei revisit and re-use or remix ideas and designs across his various works. A design very like Denji Kudou’s armored-up state appears in the short manga miniseries Digimortal that comes bundled with this collection of ABARA, for example, but the concept of Black Gauna is also reworked very prominently into the “Reincarnateds” in the recently-ended Aposimz (2017-2021). There, humans can interact with a “Code” to transform into a “Regular Frame”—a transcended human that can use a malleable flesh-like substance to enter an armored, Black Gauna-like state, and also to mimic what used to be their original body and even clothing. Beneath their “Placenta,” these beings are now actually gross living skeletons, and it’s possible for a Reincarnated to have their faux flesh blown away or sloughed off, revealing their inner self without harm as long as their head is not destroyed. Aposimz is a smidge more Commercial-adjacent than ABARA, as it features more familiar, accessible power-level focused struggles, with clearly delineated unique abilities per combatant, and generally resembles a less gross version of the same concept, but the grossness still remains, to an extent. Aposimz and ABARA are in pretty close competition for my favorite of Nihei’s work, with their “Gross Sentai” elements being a key consideration.

This particular horror-tinged action really appeals to me, and it’s similar to what made me initially so fond of Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan, which likewise focuses on body horror in a foundational way. Its various naked, animalistic (fodder) man-eating giants are more or less body dysmorphia personified, with typically outrageously-proportioned figures, where some singular feature might be either ridiculously large or small in contrast with the rest. Meanwhile, the more powerful, generally cooler-looking “Titans” are essentially piloted and function as fleshy mechs or battle suits: A human capable of turning into a Titan generates a massive amount of flesh (a whole separate body) on the spot, encasing themselves inside themselves. Aside from just finding these concepts “cool” in a distant, abstract, or vibe-y sort of way, there are also no doubt personal, body-related reasons I like all this transformation, distortion, and destruction of the human form in these series. ABARA’s cover is like squirmy catnip to me—personally alluring and also repulsive with its open focus on gore and body horror that makes it not so great to just have out in mixed company. There’s real pathos in this content that certainly contributes to my individual investment in ABARA, although, moving on from my freak self, there are still other, more conventionally or universally appealing characters and moments I want to highlight.

 

My favorite moment from Attack on Titan (or at least what I read of it, through volume 20) is this one, pictured above on the left (Nayuta holding… some of Denji Kudou is on the right for comparison), from quite early on, when protagonist Eren Yeager first transforms into a Titan. He damages his own body from the force of the blows he’s delivering to the other Titans he’s fighting, but since he’s essentially a magical being, he just regenerates. That doesn’t eliminate the grossness—and maybe not even the pain?—of punching someone so hard you hurt yourself, though. This sequence and concept resonated with me because of the body horror and because I associated the comic with this early selection from journalist and author Katherine Dunn’s collection of essays and articles on boxing, One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing, from the “Handwraps” piece specifically:

“The core dilemma of fist fighting is that the human hand isn’t designed as a weapon. The metacarpal bones radiating from wrist to knuckles are too fragile to withstand a blow delivered with the full force of the body. Skin tears. Wrists and knuckles are wrenched apart. Bones snap. . . . Even the best wrapping job doesn’t provide complete protection. . . . An amateur I once knew fought and won the National Golden Gloves while the bones of the back of one hand were buckled in a lump like a brooding tarantula beneath the skin.”

Obviously, there’s plenty about the violence of Attack on Titan that is completely fantastical, but I think this one moment always stuck with me because of the mix of realism and fantasy—how you would completely ruin your hands and destroy your body if you could punch with the force of a Titan, but, then, you’d also just regenerate, negating the damage. The weakness of the human form is something a lot of action media, across cultures, chooses to just ignore, letting people punch the hell out of each other without much regard for reality, but Dunn’s description of the “tarantula” is one that always rises to my mind when I see depictions of people fighting with their fists without protection, and Attack on Titan actually kind of (at least in this early fight) runs with how you would hurt yourself to fight this way. It’s at least a little grounded, which makes it nastier, and more appealing for it.

Chapter two of ABARA begins with Tadohomi being detained by the previously mentioned Ministry forces/cops, and it’s here that this crucial faction enters the story properly. We get another sort of quintessential or referential scene back at their headquarters as they encounter all the classified and redacted information surrounding the woman they’ve got calmly sitting in their interrogation room. The Observation Bureau is a mystery to them, and they soon get a message from their boss to release Tadohomi immediately, but Sakijima storms into the interrogation room anyway and tries to get answers from her. He shows her a picture of the half-transformed and seemingly comatose Denji Kudou and gives her (and us, ultimately) more information about his background as Itou—or the lack thereof. The record is missing some information, like his age and an address. Furthermore, Sakijima draws attention to the improbability of Kudou somehow ending up where he did, “in a severely compromised state,” so far from where he was last seen yelling at Tadohomi.

“You two must’ve had one hell of a conversation,” says Sakijima, telling us absolutely everything we need to know about his character archetype with one immaculate line.

I’m repeating myself here, but this plot beat of some well-meaning cops stumbling onto something well above their pay grade and getting invested and heated about it is also executed perfectly. It’s not exactly “original,” but it works very well, and ABARA’s unique flavor helps pleasantly obscure the fact that we are, at least on one level, being served classic Canned Cop from the pantry shelf.

Much the same thing can be said of a later scene where Sakijima has to meet with a heavy-set older man who sits behind a desk and tells him that the case is closed and to drop the matter: “Who cares? The case is closed! [The Bureau] even let us take the credit for it.” Of course, Sakijima and his teammates won’t drop it, though. They’re Good Cops—wholly committed to the ideal of justice and the public good—of the sort you only see in fiction, and even though I’m familiar enough with real-world cop behavior to find these sorts of portrayals less moving, I still can appreciate the craft at work. Sakijima refuses to simply accept that Kudou is guilty, and one of their own was murdered at the crime scene after the Observation Bureau dispatched Nayuta to retrieve Kudou, which gives the rest of the team still further motivation to keep digging into the sort of conspiracy they’ve stumbled across. They are mostly unnamed, but they are, as a group, a recognizable, referential Type of character that’s easy to root for, if for no other reason than that they’re committed to discovering the truth of the matter much like we are as the audience. They’re proxies for us in their interest and in their ignorance.

I said before that the Observation Bureau seems to be weirdly staffed with mutants, and while there could be a Lore reason for that, it also serves an emotional function in the story. The misshapen appearance of the Bureau agents makes them look more villainous, and specifically in contrast with the cops when there’s a bit of a stand-off at the building that is now a crime scene twice over thanks to Nayuta. The physical monstrousness makes it easier to root for Sakijima and company and to see their perspective, as the human one—ours by default. “Under-developed” they might technically be as characters, but as the story goes on and they start to get cut down one by one in dispassionate and brutal ways by the threats they face, you see their human frailty and the human cost of this conflict, which is easy to feel because we can relate to them for all the above reasons. For what it’s worth, Sakijima does also technically develop as a character in the sense that he ends up working with Tadohomi by the end.

ABARA does lack a strong focus on the lives of the normal humans that live in its world. We catch brief glimpses via a couple shorter scenes that ultimately mostly focus on the White Gauna manifesting corporeally, which includes the opening at the clinic, but the people of this gigantic city are otherwise mostly seen—and killed—as distant silhouettes only suggestive of human lives. The cops are one possible human element, though their status as special agents of a “Ministry” undermines that impression a bit. Though not superhuman (give or take Sakijima ripping off an Observation Bureau mutant’s arm a little easily during the aforementioned heated meeting), they still feel special, better equipped to face the end of the world.

The strongest truly ordinary human throughline comes in the form of Kudou’s boss from the factory and that boss’ daughter, whose name we only learn very late in the story. We get three scenes with them: the first one at the factory where they serve the function of introducing Kudou and Tadohomi, a third where the end of life as they know it is firmly underway and a battered Kudou returns to them one last time at the factory to recover and to tell them to flee, and the second, which I like best, where they take a break from work to eat a meal. It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kinds of short—just two pages and six panels, during which the boss, his daughter, and the workers troop into a little windowless room to eat together. As they’re settling in, they hear a news report claiming Denji Itou was responsible for the “mass killing” the day before and that he killed himself before he could be arrested.

I like this very small scene a lot, in part because its function is more emotional and character-driven than anything else. We don’t learn any substantial new information here, so it only exists to show us a little slice of these people’s lives and to let us see them react to the news about Kudou and to showcase how that news is being packaged for public consumption. It’s one (admittedly extremely rare) scene that doesn’t push the plot forward. I also just find myself responding to the sight of their little eating nook that seems to be tucked away somewhere in the factory building. It’s such a small space that perhaps speaks to the dehumanization of the dystopia, but there’s also a kind of warmth in it too because this really feels like a family affair. The daughter seems to have done all the cooking herself, for one thing, and there’s a sense of the workers as just part of a family of sorts that I like. And there’s also humor here, which is an element under-represented in this discussion of ABARA: We get some great lines about “the dreg soup look[ing] good tonight” and how at least one of the workers “[a]in’t turnin’ down the crawdaddy turds neither,” and then there’s a sort of comedy spit take with the boss and his drink as he hears the news about Kudou’s actions and supposed death.

It kind of sucks that we’re just informed near the very end of ABARA that there’s no one left to save in the city, which implies the deaths of these human characters “off-screen,” rather than potentially getting some final moment with them, though the previously mentioned third factory scene primarily focused on Kudou and the daughter (Shige) does ok enough at this, I suppose, with its focus on a very human-feeling moment where she responds to Kudou’s instructions to flee by arguing that it’s pointless and then invoking “the story of ‘The Starving Crab’” as a parallel to their situation. It adds more texture and a sense of intimacy to the conflict. While Kudou does recover from his previous injuries at the factory, this moment where he touches base with his point of origin in the story also serves a clear emotional purpose: This is our farewell to the last shred of normalcy, as the stakes will only get more and more (literally) world-shattering from here. Nihei could have told this story without revisiting this location or these characters, but their inclusion, without some obvious plot relevance, demonstrates a clear attempt to do more than just have armored superhumans and monsters pummel and gnaw on each other. These are elements of, at a bare minimum, competent storytelling and characterization and world-building, the things some people claim ABARA does not have.

 

Chapter four begins with another White Gauna “manifestation” and yet another scene of casually-presented dystopia: A lonely little figure in a tiny, cluttered cell of a living space located somewhere in a massive apartment complex so tall that its base is rooted somewhere in shadow below the bottom of the panel in which it’s depicted. This anonymous person is trying to eat a humble (it looks) liquid supper straight from the cooking pan, only to have intense noise from next door disturb the meal. That’s a relatable moment of human interaction in a space where humans live in such close proximity, but, of course, when the noise is investigated, an infested, transforming body is revealed, and the whole complex seems to sprout tentacles.

In terms of narrative beats, it’s a fair match with the clinic scene. It could easily be the satisfying, intriguing start of an “episode” in the same manner. Here, marginally later in the context of the whole narrative, it gives us another look at normal human life in this world, while also having some comedic elements. The short sequence of panels where the apartment resident tries to eat their meal but gets interrupted multiple times by loud noises is… quietly funny, but there’s another great single panel of just a close-up of their surprisingly unbothered expression upon discovering the neighbor’s transformed state where they simply say (in one bubble) “Oh.” and (in the next) “Excuse me.” As if just walking in on the man doing some unanticipated renovation work instead of having his flesh grotesquely broken down and twisted.

This is definitely an aspect of Nihei’s work that might be altered or obscured by the language barrier and through translation, but there seems to be a consistent element of understatement to the humor in the works I’ve read by him. There’s a matter-of-factness to it (a certain flatness to the presentation) that vaguely reminds me of other styles of humor, like some of my favorite jokes in Blake Edwards’ films or even in the adult animated sitcom Family Guy, where the lack of a huge reaction to something or the… tonal evenness around some element of absurdity just makes it that much funnier.

 

A similarly not strictly referential emotional throughline for ABARA comes from the story of the pale-haired sisters and seeming twins Ayuta and Nayuta. They are/were part of the same Black Gauna-creating program with the Observation Bureau, and they seem to have joined before or around the same time as Kudou, based on the presence of two young, similar-looking girls we see in the series’ penultimate chapter’s opening flashback of a young Denji being brought in and meeting Tadohomi for the first time. While Nayuta went on to become a Black Gauna just like Kudou, Ayuta’s situation is a bit more mysterious. We are first introduced to her after Nayuta is deployed to capture Kudou, and she appears to not necessarily be a Black Gauna herself. Instead, she seems to require a wheelchair and has some psychic link with her younger sister that the Bureau can switch on or off and that they exploit in order to manage Nayuta, who may have a developmental disability (a mental handicap in contrast with her sister’s physical one) given that the one time we hear her speak very late in the story she seems only able to grunt and laugh. In this earliest scene with Ayuta, when she is unable to make her sister bring Kudou back to base and stop roaming the city, the link between the two girls is disconnected and Nayuta’s head is blown off using an explosive implanted in her neck. There is a bit of important foreshadowing here—The link the two girls share isn’t only mental. When Nayuta is wounded later on while fighting another White Gauna, Ayuta is similarly hurt across the distance back at base.

The science fiction concepts at play with these characters are never fully explained, but, like some other elements of ABARA’s story and world-building, they don’t really require concrete explanations to “make sense.” We can figure out how the mental-physical link works, and the way in which the sisters are divergently weak or strong could have been explained but is also a fascinating gap to fill in with imagination. It makes artistic, symbolic, or thematic sense. We know enough about the particulars of the girls’ powers and their spot in the Bureau’s line-up of employees and servants/slaves/research subjects to make sense of them.

What matters more, at least in the context of this discussion, is the pathos the sisters create. They are something like research subjects and slaves, just like we can assume Kudou would have been if he hadn’t escaped. While Ayuta isn’t exactly abused outright in obvious ways that we see, it’s easy to imagine that her complacency, physical weakness, and usefulness protect her. Meanwhile, Nayuta is thoroughly dehumanized and treated like a weapon. She’s essentially “stored,” like I described earlier, in a sort of meat tube, completely naked, to be deployed only when necessary. And, actually, “deployed” is too human of a term that makes her sound like a soldier. Instead, she’s used (“Ready Nayuta for use,” says the head of the Observation Bureau)—like a weapon, at best. When she won’t follow orders, her head is blown off, and, then, in a later scene, we see the re-attachment process: a naked Nayuta restrained in a chair/device that looks brutal and invasive while her head is stitched back on and a new explosive is inserted. It’s a grotesque and brief bit of somewhat sexualized horror imagery. And then, perhaps worse still, she’s deployed again very quickly after the second Corporeal Manifestation occurs and after two other Bureau agents are killed by this new, bigger White Gauna. This time, she’s dropped naked like ordnance from above the city to transform in mid-air. It’s this escalating encounter that leads to Ayuta being wounded.

When Sakijima and Tadohomi are freeing Kudou at the Bureau’s base, we the audience are shown Ayuta’s convalescence elsewhere in the building. Her machine is less obviously cruel looking, and her body is covered. In this scene, however, she’s overtaken by the White Gauna disease or possession (whatever it actually is) and becomes yet another antagonist going into the final arc of the narrative. Kudou fights her during the back half of the collection and ultimately dismembers her, though her ravaged torso crawls to the end of a much larger White Gauna’s head-less neck and fuses with it to restart that beast’s advance on the nearby mausoleum, which is met with resistance from Kudou and Nayuta as the remaining Fourth Aeon Guild members attempt to save Tadohomi and Sakijima from what may be the final destruction of the world.

Even if we don’t know everything about their abilities or connection or even that much about them as fictional people, Ayuta and Nayuta are clearly victims of the Bureau’s cruelty, and it’s not hard to feel for them as characters, however loosely-sketched, when we see the pain and suffering they endure throughout the story. The way in which Nayuta gets sent out again after having her head re-attached just strikes me as especially nasty since the implication is that, aside from maybe not even being fully healed from last time, the Observation Bureau presumably wouldn’t hesitate to decapitate her again if she stepped out of line, mortally wounding her and then putting her back in the chair-thing to repair the damage once more. It’s a purely fantastical situation in its particulars, but it’s also broadly just so inhumane and dehumanizing. Stuff like this makes it easy to root for the end of the Observation Bureau as the story goes on despite the fact that they were ultimately trying to prevent an apocalyptic scenario.

The escalation of ABARA also reads to me as, if not “perfect,” then perfectly sensical in terms of the plot and stakes. We start with what could be a monster-of-the-week scenario, with the protagonist dragged back into the field he thought he’d left, and with a sort of conspiracy or mystery for the less in-the-know cop characters to solve, and then we ratchet up the stakes from one White Gauna to two and then, much later, to dozens. Meanwhile, the Observation Bureau is as good as destroyed after Ayuta’s transformation. Sakijima keeps losing men; Tadohomi becomes an ally instead of an enemy. The Fourth Aeon Guild make themselves known. As the second White Gauna, having grown exponentially in size thanks to all the human lives it’s claimed, advances on a mausoleum, we’ve clearly reached world-ending stakes. The developments make sense, and the emotional appeals are obvious and recognizable. Maybe they’re even stronger because we know so little about this world and it turns out now that we actually entered it at what seems like will be its final hour. For what it’s worth, if there’s unexplained stuff happening here, that also kind of makes sense given the situation. We’re talking about the end of the world, so naturally there are going to be some unanticipated wrinkles that surprise even the Fourth Aeon Guild, the characters ostensibly in possession of the most knowledge in the story. It seems fitting that we move from situations that are understandable to those that feel increasingly arcane and weird since things are coming apart. Characters either can’t explain the action or don’t have time to do so (is an excuse I could make up).

Against this backdrop of cataclysmic destruction, Kudou’s fight against Ayuta isn’t so clearly dramatized and explicitly rendered as the previous clashes. Its final moment is observable and intimate (though not Intimate in the same way as that first White Gauna kill—looking more like an embrace and less erotic), but it mostly feels like a fight that happens in the background of the action as two loosely sketched bolts bounce off one another and nearby structures. It’s the kind of anime-style fight you expect to see at a point when the budget has maybe been stretched to its limit so that a more impactful rendering isn’t exactly possible, while the stakes of the action have also been escalated to the point that the combat kind of has to be more impersonal in order to make it feel appropriate. The scale has increased. When the biggest White Gauna consumes a mausoleum and opens “The Forbidden Cage,” releasing an army of smaller White Gauna, the individual fights don’t matter at all anymore. One-on-ones no longer mesh with or adequately serve the late-stage narrative and tone, and, in terms of simple cool-ness factor, we’ve also seen what this looks like already. We’re onto bigger, better, and cooler stuff now.

In order to capture the end of the world—the way that the climax of the story sweeps everything up in an emotional tempest of destruction—the artwork undergoes a transformation as well. Looking at the closed volume of ABARA and at just the edges of the pages, the first half has more of a grey look, while there’s a distinctive whiteness to the later section. The art on the page is more stark and harsh than soft and sooty. There’s more white involved because the action takes place higher in the skies or at the snowy peak of one of the mausoleums instead of on the ground and in the shadow of all those massive buildings, but it’s also my impression that this back half-ish also looks more scribbly than the first overall, regardless of the setting, which, whether that’s actually the case or not—and if it is the case, whatever the cause may be—feels appropriate for the circumstances, as the world comes apart at the seams. The landscapes sort of disappear as the characters are traveling through or fighting in the skies or in the snow. The world whiting out around them feels fitting since it’s in danger of breaking down and disappearing.

No doubt, the presence of all the white in the story was a boon for Nihei, as he’s able to potentially get away with less density of detail per panel and do more suggestion of filled space or else use the generally empty space to great dramatic effect. The thick, black, inky darkness of the filled space really pops in such strong contrast here. Nihei’s reputation as an artist and storyteller has long turned upon the strengths of his visual style: his simply massive structures (sometimes deployed with a minimum of action, much less dialogue, to hold a reader there and make them engage with what was no doubt labor-intensive work) and an apparent extreme attention to detail while also employing a certain degree of sketchiness. It’s no wonder that the man might enjoy a break from that. I’m a middling artist thanks to less attention paid to that particular skillset, and when I was messing around with comics off and on for years, it was always satisfying to find an excuse to still render something cool but to do it in a way that also let me cut corners. I’m going to assume that even “good” artists probably feel similarly at times. Nihei’s Aposimz takes place more or less exclusively in snowy environments, which provides a consistent “excuse” for sketchiness and stark environments. There’s an in-universe explanation for why there’s so little of the thick darkness and dense detail he had been known for, though interpreting the setting that way doesn’t exactly work since the style is also clearly an intensification of a noticeable shift that began partway through his previous series, Knights of Sidonia (2009-2015).

This evolving art style is a controversial element of Nihei’s later work—not just the increasingly thin and broken lines and the lack of strong shadows, but also the more distinctly commercial angles. His early characters, including those in ABARA, are obviously stylized but also frequently read as “realistic” to me, particularly the way that he draws the most human characters’ faces head-on. They’re more shapely, and their features… fill their faces and look… weightier to me, in a way that a lot of manga and anime character designs do not, often feeling lightly sketched and “blank-faced,” in a sense. “Modern Nihei” has a much more familiar, “typical” anime or manga flair to it, though there are still some things that stick out to me as more unique and interesting and recognizable, like certain faces and expressions (still).

In my years of occasionally searching something like “tsutomu nihei art reddit,” I’ve seen criticism of both the aforementioned lower-detail nature of the newer work, as well as the obvious commercial appeal of the new character designs, specifically the more intense objectification and stylization reminiscent of more conventional manga and anime art. I want to be careful how much I speculate here. Writing this (by comparison) tiny section of the essay is part of why it took so long to finish, as I went back and forth on how much I wanted to look for some kind of smoking gun-style explanation for the shift in Nihei’s art. I looked at a couple of interviews from 2016, including the one linked at the start of this piece, and if I was to summarize the attitude Nihei has there, I would say it’s… thoughtful. He seems like a readily reflective person who has been aware of the tension between the business and art of making manga for quite some time. He comes off as pretty frank as well when discussing his work and how it’s changed, possibly as a result of that tension.

In the linked interview, for example, Nihei talks about working as an assistant to Tsutomu Takahashi and says “I learned that one of the key concerns for a manga creator is how much they can produce. Up until then, when I drew my manga, I wasn’t concerned with working on deadlines. . . . I learned what it really meant to draw manga as a job, versus just drawing for myself.” Summarizing (again), though, he doesn’t seem to approach the shift in his art from simply the perspective of deadlines/business. He says he’s “intentionally changing [his] art style,” and even though he mentions that “It’s really tough work to paint all this black in the background,” he also has genuinely artistic-sounding reasons, like “Nowadays, I’m more into expressing things, telling stories just with lines”: “When there’s more linework than dark blacks in the artwork, I’m able to convey more information.” As I said before, my impression is that he’s someone who’s well aware of the balancing act he’s doing and may also genuinely want to make a change, maybe for personal reasons of evolving taste and interests but which may also benefit him commercially.

I’m not sure how much actually is known about Nihei’s situation—both how much he’s even openly revealed and how much we (read: an English-reading audience) are aware of. Obviously, the above interview I quoted so readily—and the second, which I chose not to quote since I read it “secondhand” via a blog—comes from 2016 and was also part of an official promotional trip for, for one thing, the upcoming release of an anime adaptation of his first manga BLAME! That he would be upbeat under such circumstances is a given. That was probably a positive development for him financially, and he was also promoting his work and the adaptation alongside people from the animation studio. What were his “real” feelings, though? And have those feelings changed? I don’t want to say that I’m “uninterested” since that just sounds uncaring, but the Reason behind Nihei’s changing art isn’t really of interest to me since my feelings about his work are the same no matter what that explanation might be. I also just don’t think there is a definitive answer—a true smoking gun. It’s likely, to use another tired expression, a little from column A (say: business) and a little from column B (say: art). I felt that I couldn’t talk about Nihei’s art and work and not acknowledge the tension and controversy, though.

The closest thing to the gun or secret third column to rule them all, or something, is an “afterword” from the Japanese “Master Edition” of BLAME! Academy and So On. I’m going to link a Reddit post here, and the translated master edition afterword in question is available as a comment just below the original post. According to the commenter, this is “another afterword in the newer master edition that I got someone to translate from my own copy.” The issue here is the “I got someone to translate from my own copy.” I also initially encountered this translated afterword as a 4chan post screenshotted for yet another Reddit post, and… hopefully that string of words alone says it all. I want to be careful how much authority I give this thing, which I’m seeing by way of an authority I cannot at all confirm, but it’s considerably darker in tone than the interviews I read and features Nihei struggling to meet editorial demands for increasingly fan-service-y character designs, expressed in a way that, assuming the translation is accurate, feels incredibly raw or even inappropriate to publish: “[T]he editors forced me to ‘just draw tits.’ 20 years of being a manga artist, sometimes I just wanna draw what I want to. But still, all I get is emails from my manager asking me for the direct opposite of what I want to draw.” The translation mentions “complaints about using too much gray and black for a color print” and “tearing up as I realize my unworthiness” despite not having time to cry because of the remaining workload.

 

The above image taken from volume 4 of Aposimz may exemplify Nihei’s approach to scale in his newer work. Aside from the lack of black ink and detail, the titanic size of the environment is depicted via just a larger panel on a single page (of a physically quite small book, for what that printing detail is worth) rather than as a full-page or double-page image like Nihei might have produced in the past. Meanwhile, the focus on generally uniformly thin lines can arguably hide detail rather than communicate more of it with how characters, objects, effects like explosions, and environmental detail in the fore-, mid-, and background can collide with one another. While not a consistent problem, there are some images from Aposimz that I find hard to parse or that just look… bad.

I would say that I like the new style overall, however. The sketchiness appeals to me on a subjective personal level, and I don’t mind the character designs since even ones that are more traditionally “commercial” still have a bit of Nihei’s flair that make them unique. When I see examples of the Aposimz art with color, I feel like it’s much improved by how the color adds a stronger impression of detail even when it’s not necessarily there in the lines, while, conversely, I would say that I prefer the old, detail-heavy stuff to be in black and white instead for the opposite reason—Color “smears” or blurs the visuals and makes details run together (or at least it seems to on the handful of color pages in this version of ABARA).

I can understand why the shift in Nihei’s art style is disliked by some people, but I also A) appreciate how it might be justified (whatever the reason) and B) can see the positive qualities in it. It still isn’t directly imitative of any other artist, to my admittedly under-exposed eye. It still looks and feels like Nihei—just different.

This dreary message would be a bit old itself by now, even setting aside the uncertainty about its translation, and even if it was accurate, is it still? At this point, I think I’ve pursued these sorts of questions as far as I want/need to, and I’m ready to deploy my conclusion, which, as I mentioned before, would be the same regardless of whether I had done any of the above “research.” Even if the gloomy afterword was accurate—even if it still is accurate—Nihei’s situation wouldn’t be unique, broadly speaking. Maybe circumstances pushed him to change his approach to art and maybe not; however, he certainly needs money to survive and has to earn that money within a system where there are things like editorial mandates, even if only in the form of deadlines to meet. How many of those of us who make things (in one form or another) actually get handed a blank check? We all need a “hit”—the thing to propel us over the top. It’s not a new tension here, between art and industry, between what’s personally interesting and what will sell. Anyone who creates has to try to find that overlap as best they can. Even as just some dude with a blog, I go through something similar when I choose what to write about.

I could write about, like, Dark Souls and try to get more attention, or I could write about Jim Jarmusch films, or whatever—thousands and thousands of words about a manga that doesn’t seem to be considered one of its creators best works. Stuff that’s at least somewhat more niche but that I like a lot more personally. The odds aren’t in my favor, too, since I write long essays rather than making videos. I’m well aware that announcing a huge prose piece on Tsutomu Nihei’s ABARA, which has taken months of work on and off to write and polish, isn’t going to be met with millions of clicks, at the risk of inserting myself too much into a discussion of someone else’s work…

As for the complexity or density of Nihei’s art in particular, setting aside any sort of commercial angle and the fact that I actually like the new style fine, my feeling has been that if he wants or needs to simplify things after so many years of work, that I’m ok with that. It feels justified—or earned—given the intensity of the earlier stuff. Like I was saying before, somewhat in passing, I was often struck while reading his much-beloved epic BLAME! by just how many incredibly detailed and massive pieces were essentially “given away” “for free,” thrown to the reader like they were nothing special for how much more mood-focused and fleeting they were despite the obvious level of effort that went into them. That casual attitude toward the physical work of creating the art only reinforced the intensity of these moments or scenes, I feel, but it also gave readers a perfect excuse not to dwell on them, unless they had some personal interest in the art beyond its more obvious value to the story. You could look at the art, see that “Ok, he’s/they’re walking,” and then just move on. The lack of apparent value was part of what made it capital “A” ART in that context, I feel: It was a flex, as well as an effort to establish mood and to capture the immensity and complexity and horror of a massive, impersonal, dangerous science fiction world.

ABARA is still very much drawn in that style. There’s a two-page spread, for example, where one of Sakijima’s peers is descending some stairs deep into the seemingly unoccupied reaches of the city to meet someone familiar with the Bureau’s operations and secrets (a not unkindly-looking little old man with the odd, lumpy features of the other Bureau mutants), and the actual action being depicted is completely unremarkable and arguably undeserving of such attention.

It’s just a particularly long flight of stairs with no safety rail, curving downward along one wall and then the other of a simply titanic shaft. Hitting a landing some distance down, it then continues still further, twisting into low-detail simplicity and then ultimately nothingness. The pit of darkness is essentially reaching up, leaking upwards. Some of the lines feel drawn in ways that the art doesn’t always. Often, as in other illustrated media, the art itself ceases to register as it is, materially on the page, and just becomes whatever it’s representing. Here, the darkness of the pit is like an inverted sun, the strands “shining” up the walls—some of the shadows impeccably thin and precise, but other lines thick and still liquid-seeming, blotchy or spattery in places like the ink was dashed onto the page with passion. And it’s all in service to a rendering of an indistinct human figure descending some stairs. He’s descending into the shadow of inhuman immensity and/or deeper into conspiracy and toward revelations that will swallow him and then his whole world, in an artistic sense, but that’s interpretative and not literal. Literally, there’s no dialogue, no excitement. You could register the plot-relevant content of the image in less than a second and turn the page without dwelling on it.

This is why I say Nihei would be justified in willfully simplifying his art style, with or without the excuse of snow or editorial mandates or the drive to be more commercial or even just a desire to change or experiment. Simply being tired would be an acceptable reason for me. There’s so much exertion that clearly went into art that may be, from one perspective, wasted. But this moment of artistic… dilation with the stairs is also a perfect example of how/why ABARA’s world and story can still be so compelling when they are, by contrast to the art, so very simply sketched and reliant on templates of a sort: It’s the thick atmosphere and mood that makes them sing.

The meeting to come somewhere down those stairs is the plot-important element here, but the stairs themselves are dwelt upon along the way in this extremely elevated manner. It’s something like raw pathos. As much as I want to argue that ABARA has a story and characters that do not need to be imagined, you can—or sometimes need to—also feel as much as actually read it. While perhaps more a simple printing choice than an artistic one, the art fills the pages of this collection. There is no outer margin, and I always worry about smudging the pages when I hold the book and turn them. Opening ABARA again after not reading it for a while, I was immediately struck by the fullness of it visually, both stylistically and physically. 

 

As a fan of Nihei’s work, it’s frustrating to hear that he (may) be struggling to find the financial success he wants or needs. He’s a talented artist and writer, and I’d like to see him have his Dragon Ball or [insert the name of another long-running, infinitely merchandisable series]. At the same time, though, one interesting element of Nihei’s work is that because he seems to have more, shorter series, you can see him revisiting characters, concepts, and themes across the various works with increased clarity and get to see the iteration and subversion happen more easily—which could still very well happen in something like One Piece (which started back in 1997 and is still going), but as I’ve aged, I’ve definitely found myself less interested in stories, Japanese or otherwise, that run “forever” and find myself drawn more to shorter works. As a reader, artist, and critic, I can see the appeal of both, however.

In a recent essay about a different comic (Teen Titans), I referenced an Alan Moore quote disparaging a certain type of so-called “graphic novel”—what Moore described as “not particularly graphic” and “certainly not [a] [novel]” and as, typically, “twelve issues of She-Hulk stapled together.” It’s a really great quote, and behind the superficial vitriol directed at She-Hulk in particular is the more broadly incisive implication that there is a difference between, presumably, a completed long work in comic form and a collection “stapled together” (probably cheaply produced, not as art but as a product, and as disposable). Despite its brevity, ABARA was originally a series, and whatever the exact circumstances or decision-making involved in its ending, it concludes like a lot of comic collections—American, Japanese, or otherwise—do, with a cliffhanger.

If there’s a scale that ranks a graphic novel from something like “real deal” to “twelve issues of She-Hulk,” where should ABARA fall on it? Starting from my personal, subjective conclusion and then working backward to explain my reasoning, I’d say it’s somewhere slightly south of the mid-point, on the “twelve issues” side of things. Maybe that’s actually surprising given my enthusiastic tone in previous paragraphs; however, here’s the reasoning: First, ABARA is a commercial product. Few graphic novels aren’t that, but it’s worth acknowledging here that it is Commercial, even as it’s also apparently impenetrable to certain people and may not have been the financial boon Nihei wanted or needed. As I’ve said, it trades in references to establish mood and character and plot. Its battles are indulgent and exciting and take up a lot of space. It’s clearly meant to engage and to please in a baser sort of way. On the other hand, though, there are elements of its design that elevate the Saturday morning cartoon antics. The singularity of the vision behind it certainly adds some mystique. Rather than some “run” on some pre-existing book (like, uh, Teen Titans), this is presumably in large part, if not entirely, Nihei’s vision. Its excesses of style—massive images of landscapes just because they’re moody and look cool and display its artist’s technical prowess—further suggest something like vision and intent and artistic drive that could be considered meritorious.

The aforementioned fights, which I kind of derided, do have a “choreography” to them. Maybe they’re “artsy” with how they often unfold in silence (or at least sans dialogue), letting the physical action and the art speak for itself in ways that are considered laudable in other mediums—like similar scenes in a kung fu movie, for example. Compared with the sort of fights I saw rendered in the superhero comics I read while working on my Teen Titans piece, the ones in ABARA feel like they have significance to them in the manner of the exorbitantly detailed rendering of the stairs. Which is to say that the indulgence itself and the competence of the depictions and, critically, the lack of soap opera dramatics laid over top of them (the lack of a sense of the fight as secondary and as just a means to an end as a quasi-symbolic working out of some other conflict) confer upon them a higher quality, a subjective purity of purpose.

My general feeling about Nihei since I first read the first volume of his mecha-focused Knights of Sidonia series is that he does lean on the art as an actual critical part of the storytelling he does. In the superhero comics, I found the art kind of superfluous (if not also outright kind of bad), with the text—dialogue or captions—often being the sole element required to follow the story. By contrast, with Sidonia, I remember finding myself “skipping ahead” without meaning to when I started reading it. I had moments of wondering when or why something had happened, only to realize that I hadn’t paid enough attention to the art, which was where the explanation was located. And this element has also been present in the other works by Nihei that I’ve read since then. The art in ABARA isn’t just a delivery mechanism for or garnish on the “real” story—It is the story, sometimes quite literally. Nihei isn’t unique in that regard, but, again, I’ve definitely seen examples of the two not both feeling meaningful. In this way, ABARA appears less “stapled together” and more considered.

Even the ending—the element of the story that probably ruins it for some people and that may mark the whole work as incomplete in some way that makes it less commendable and less whole—can be spun as a mark in ABARA’s favor. Whatever the intentionality, it ends having conveyed (maybe) what it needed to convey. It has completed its descent, or ascent, from recognizable-enough entry-point conflicts to destruction on an incomprehensible scale. In terms of mood, where could it still go from there? It could explain itself, but, of course, Works of Art don’t always do that. You could see it as a, perhaps not entirely successful, attempt on Nihei’s part to mediate between the artistic impulse and commercial appeal, or you could just see it as unfinished. I think people are too willing to let the ending of a story dictate their feelings about the rest of it. If an ending is predictable (read: properly foreshadowed and sensical?) or if it’s “bad” in some way, then that means the whole thing was always bad. That’s certainly how the human mind works, with first and last impressions probably being outsizedly prioritized, but I think we (and I include myself in this “we”) have to fight that impulse if we’re going to give a narrative our serious evaluative attention.

ABARA’s ending is probably disappointing to a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean the story is bad! I do think ABARA has a “good story” on the whole. Or it at least does, definitely have one, whatever a given reader’s perception of its quality might be.