MASTER OF MONSTER

As part of my research for Project AnthraXX, I was looking through this. (You can probably guess why if you look carefully enough at my notes, but I know you won't, so you'll have to wait until it's hypothetically drawn so it'll be obvious.) Sadly, one of the problems with Wikipedia, just like its English counterpart, is that for fiction, almost the entire article is under the "spoiler alert" tag, so you can never be sure not to learn something you weren't supposed to learn yet unless you've already read the entire thing. It's especially difficult with Japanese comics, where the writers can get information from the serials, while I have to wait for the compilations. Naturally, I did happen to run into one.

Meanwhile, I was actually motivated to go back and read the seven volumes that I have. I stopped following the series a couple years back due to the refocus of my priorities, but it's still an entertaining series. I was particularly surprised at how much of the Millennium stuff I didn't remember after reading once (particularly the part about Walter and the tall, stoic, nameless Werwolf captain), as compared to the parts up to the HELLSING/Iscariote meeting, which I had read in two languages and seen in the TV series. Now that I'm more experienced and had already read through it, I was able to catch more of the design elements.

I remember one of the first impressions I had of the series was Arucard's crazy eyes. Now that I look at it more carefully, the same trait is displayed by pretty much every adult male character (and Ms. Blitz). Even the unaltered humans like Maxwell look positively abnormal. Of course, that is not terribly surprising, as a good proportion of the principal characters is made up of bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. The series also has possibly the highest eyewear quotient of any I've seen, between the spectacles (apparently vampirism can cure aging, but not astigmatism), sunglasses, Walter's monocle, and Doc's goggles. The illustrator particularly likes to show people with their faces shrouded in darkness (even when standing in places where the rest of their bodies are illuminated) and glare off their lenses. I also noted that people seem to have really long arms (reaching about to their knees), but I don't have anything in particular to say about that.

Another thing that struck me when coming back to the comics was the gags. I've said before that I don't believe in the concept of the "smart joke" (although there are certainly some more intellectual than others), but I find it hard to call these ones even jokes. I liked the fact that they removed them from the TV series, but I hear that they have been retained in the OVAs.

Also, another unusual thing for an action series is that we never have to worry about the hero. The introductory stories (the village of Cheddars, the Northern Ireland mission, and the Valentine Bros. siege) serve mostly to introduce us and Ms. Victoria to the fact that Arucard is ridiculously powerful. In fact, among all the weird monsters, the chief protagonist is often the one who seems the most hideously inhuman. He also uses my favorite speech patterns (after a brief attempt at "ore" in the first chapter, later retconned), but so does half of the rest of the cast.

Incidentally, it appears that, officially, the TV series is now known as Hellsing Rescript, while the OVAs are just HELLSING. This is because this was another one where the TV series got ahead of the original comics, so they had to make up their own ending. This has happened with all three of the animations of Young King Ours series I've seen; no surprise, as they say that HELLSING only runs every other month, which means about one volume a year. In the meantime, I see that Koyasu plays Luke Valentine in both versions. It's different from my image of him for him to get such a zako role, but at least unlike his brother, he was supposed to seem like a tough guy. After all, he plays the part that shows us to the full degree that Arucard is so ridiculously powerful. Many of the other parts have been recast for the OVAs, resulting in Andersen being played by Wakamoto. I would be quite amused if it turned out that his true form is an unidentifiable round yellow creature.