…and promptly lose your farewell dinner on the bloodstained floor. After getting yelled at for messing up evidence, the two gentlemen still alive in the room tell you that the scene was the end result of the fighting between gangs in the city. You ask how such a massacre can happen in Cicero City and he responds:
“…Friend, you must be from out of town if you think this is abnormal. This? This is just another normal day in Cicero City. Sure money and opportunity is here, in the city of immigrants …if you’re willing to kill and maim for it. What’s your poison: the gangs, the crazies, the police or the jackals? If you can’t understand that much, the take my advice: Go back home…where the world makes some sense, at least.”
As the detectives walk off and the officers do their work, you stand there, looking around the town, not with wonder and hope, but with slowly dawning fear….
Written by Shinya Murata and drawn by Byun-Jin Kim, Jackals is an Action manga peppered with some Seinen elements. The story follows the life of the Jackal “Alligator Nichol” as he cuts a bloody swath through Cicero City. Along the way we encounter the other characters in this tale that make Cicero City a cesspool of crime and villainy: Don Salieri, the de facto leader of the mafia-like Gabriella and the assassins of Mermaid; Lee Mei Lang, the new head of the Triad-styled Tennouren, “Requiem Huya”, a rival Jackal that aims to take out the gangs by any means necessary – including joining up with one of them. There are other characters, namely the assassins of Mermaid, but as of the completion of the manga, the majority of them are dead through SOME form of brutality.
“Hollow Claude. One of the high ranking members of Mermaid. Can create blades of air though quick draw techniques. Dies after killing numerous weak enemies by a man wielding a sword three times his weight.
For anyone that has enjoyed Hellsing, Basilisk, or any brutal show/comic – Jackals is right up your alley. From cover to cover, start to finish, Jackals is pure blood and gore. Its greatest strength is that somehow, somewhere in each volume, someone is going to die a horrible death. Body parts fly through the air like they were never meant to be on a body. Blood spurts from bodies like water from leaky faucets. The amount of gore drawn in this series is so great that if I didn’t get the sense that it was a bit over the top, I would have been vomiting into a barf bag every chapter. The Byun-Jin’s rough and clean style allows for the fight scenes and the eventual eviscerations of the combatants to never lose their degree of ferocity, while still maintaining a high degree of detail. This is notable because, when anyone of these guys fight, the whole environment gets involved.
The storyline and the characters also follow the general theme of the manga. Nichol and Huya are men who, due to some past instance, are brought up to be killing machines. Nothing happens in the story that makes them try to be less than killers, or try to kill for some greater meaning – they are killers and nothing will change that. All they end up doing is increasing their lethality and capacity for killing. Similarly speaking, while the plot of Jackals eventually leads to a humongous conflict, at the end of the day (and at the end of the series) Cicero City is still that bastion of crime and death that we’ve come to know it to be. Still, if you want to see liters of blood fly through the sky, then give Jackals a read.
