I haven't fully embraced the manga revolution, more because I just don't have time to dive full-on into such a deep subset of the medium and still keep up with the stuff I'm already enjoying. So I can recognize a lot of the manga style from casual exposure, but I'm hardly an expert. So take it with a grain of salt when I say that to me, Last Hope, a manga style graphic novel written by an American writer and drawn by a Filipino artist, reads very much like the manga you'd get coming out of Japan. Dignan's Last Hope isn't quite as drenched in some of the stranger cultural phenomena (no panty shots or sex-obsessed 12-year-olds), but it's a pretty solid blend of high school hijinks and science-fiction and action genre elements. To this casual observer, it reads like a pretty good story for those who are into the decompressed writing style and distinctive general artistic style of manga, especially those with a fondness for extradimensional adventures such as those in Fushigi Yugi.
Last Hope hits the ground running, as Hiro (our hero, coincidentally) flees his home dimension after his uncle slaughters the rest of his family in order to gain the throne. That's the last we see of this fast-paced plot until much later, however, as Dignan and Sison delve into the friendship of young girls Ikuko (your average shy girl manga heroine) and Colleen (her more outgoing friend, who is not unlike a younger version of Blue Monday's Clover). The high school stuff is interesting, in large measure because Dignan writes Colleen and Ikuko so well, and their friendship and little crushes lets the reader feel as if they are stepping into lives already in progress, with histories that are hinted at in the way these two talk to each other. Dignan introduces his characters well, and before I knew it, I had a cast of about a half-dozen characters that I knew well enough to care about.
While the character stuff is great, the plot isn't quite so smooth. It's an interesting idea, that this interdimensional prince grabs a handful of normal kids and is forced to make a dimensional jump, but given that it's likely the premise, it's a little disappointing that the situation isn't entirely clear by the time the first volume ends. Dignan gets a lot of setup done in terms of character, but the plot is left fairly sketchy, and the reader is left to guess at what's really going on with the shocking transformation of the school into some kind of fascist hell. This may just be my American eyes not used to manga pacing, but I was weirded out that in an entire graphic novel, the premise of the book isn't entirely spelled out.
It would be easy to write off all manga art as the same, since much of it is based on the same storytelling conventions, but that's kind of like lumping Jim Lee and George Perez into the same box; it's true on one level, but it doesn't really capture what the individual artists bring to the page. Kriss Sison's artwork is pretty solid, and I really like his character work in particular. Volume one of Last Hope comes with a sketchbook section, and it's clear that Sison can get his characters to do a lot of personality acting with the way they stand and "move," the way their facial expressions shift and so on. Sison's backdrops and costumes are somewhat sparse and not as detailed, but they serve their purpose, and he pushes the action to the forefront enough that the lack of backgrounds isn't really noticeable, and in fact helps storytelling clarity. If I were to describe his style, it would be like that of someone designing a play rather than a movie, using a few key dressing elements to set the stage and letting the reader's mind fill in the rest, rather than fully realizing the setting. It works, especially since the focus is on the character interaction rather than any particulars of the settings.
My biggest gripe with Last Hope is that as of this first volume, I really don't know where it's going. However, I'm definitely interested to find out, and I'm impressed with the level of craft that Dignan and Sison have brought to the page.
