The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

The Fable

What's It About? 

When you're the infamous prodigy hitman known only as “Fable,” many things come easy. Being a normal person, however, isn't one of them. In fact, being told that he can't kill anyone for a while may just be the hardest job Fable's ever taken...

The Fable has story and art by Katsuhisa Minami and English translation by Adam Hirsch. Kodansha Comics released its first volume digitally for $7.99.

---

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

The opening chapter and presentation of The Fable show off a seemingly simple set-up: "Fable" is a stone-cold badass of an assassin, a prodigy at killing people not just with guns, but with his body, or one of those attachable finger-blades you bought at the mall when you were 14. Katsuhisa Minami shows an eye for extremely filmic framing of the action, alongside realistically-rendered character designs that further up the grounded, gritty drama vibe of the whole thing. It sucks you in as a supposed crime thriller before the following chapters make clear what the book's actually about: Something more akin to Grosse Pointe Blank, or In Bruges, where we follow a hardass pro killer (and his snarky assistant) as they lay low in Osaka for a while, doing their best to fit in with the low-key locals despite their extremely illegal backgrounds.

The tonal tracing leading up to that conceptual punchline works because of Minami's aforementioned abilities with pacing and presentation. The gritty styling, centered on Fable's social quirks befitting a walking murder machine, plays up the deadpan humor surrounding his situation. We already saw him murder several dudes in the intro chapter, so it drives up the absurd tension when we know he's holding back not trying to kill a bunch of petty car thieves the instant he and his fake sister roll into Kansai. And that eye for the oddities of reality lets Minami populate pages with oblique, business-based gags, like Fable pulling guns and ammo out of seemingly-innumerable hiding spots in his home, or the mob captain constantly fussing with his nose hair after Fable makes him self-conscious about it.

It's the sort of comic that's only hindered by its own dedication to detail necessarily hobbling its length. This first volume is over before you know it, a consequence of all those expertly-paced camerawork-simulating panels, carrying only the faintest whiffs of a conflict driving this plot for now. What we get here is very fun, particularly when it's focusing through Fable and how his honed assassin senses affect the ways he looks at his everyday world (and also allow him to spot hidden cameras), though his assistant, who adopts the pseudonym of Yoko, makes for a fun foil to him. For now, the structure mostly seems to be about watching Fable playing an extended game of Wile E Coyote vs Road Runner with the mob captain's lackey ordered to run him out of town. That results in the highlight of the volume at the end, watching Fable take us through the technicalities of appearing to 'lose' a fight while still serving the guys trying to beat him up. It's this sort of deliciously dry comedy that makes good use of such a hypercompetent genre gimmick like Fable, and is absolutely something I can see myself looking to read more of.

---

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Everyone's got a skill. His is killing. But being a prodigy hitman's perhaps not all it's cracked up to be when you're too good at it and rack up way too many kills. Now the man known as The Fable and his driver are being forced to lay low for a year in Osaka under the auspices of the Maguro Gang as “Akira and Yōko Satō,” and my, is there ever going to be an adjustment period. Well, for Akira, anyway. Yoko, not being a hitman with zero social skills, actually seems to be looking forward to a year of what amounts to paid vacation – she's got an apartment, there's a bar down the street, and she can't ask for more than that, apparently. Akira? Things are going to be a little harder for the guy, but at least he managed to disable all of the spy cameras a Maguro guy hid in his apartment, so now he can just walk around naked with no worries. I wish he'd done the same for Yoko, though, because she's unaware of having become a yakuza's personal peep show.

That more or less encapsulates my issues with this book. It's clearly meant to be funny, and it does have its moments. Akira's many and varied hiding places for his guns and ammo are entertaining, and his internal(ish) monologues about what two-bit thugs are up to are also good. But there's a mean edge to this fish-out-of-water story that makes it hard to truly enjoy for me, with Yoko's camera-packed apartment being the worst offender. The tone does make sense, because this is still a fairly gritty crime story; it just doesn't feel like this volume goes far enough in either the drama or humor directions to make it really work. That could absolutely change going forward, because there's a sense that the creator of this book is really working out what the overall tone is going to be. Akira has been taken out of the game, but it doesn't seem as if the game has been taken out of him, and his adjustment to civilian life could develop into something very funny, especially since he's now in the land of his favorite comedian, a naked man in a tie named Jackal. Simply put, this has potential even if it doesn't quite have its footing yet, and the swear-packed translation and grey-laden artwork both really help to emphasize that. It's not great yet – but it could be.

---

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Fable is a legendary hitman in the underworld known for killing politicians, doctors, criminals and anyone else he's paid enough to kill. But after an extremely successful year, the heat is on him, and he's tasked with taking a year off to hide in Osaka and lay low. He and his getaway driver are given new identities as a pair of siblings, taking refuge under the local yakuza. All they need is for Fable, now “Akira Sato,” to not kill anyone for a year. Too bad some of the local yakuza don't like having him around, and are desperate to get him to break his cover...

Fable lies somewhere between a gritty crime dramedy and a slice-of-life story. The artwork feels appropriately grimy, but the story is almost a little too sedate. I appreciate the restraint as far as the violence is concerned, but there's not much happening in Fable outside of a lot of pieces being moved into place. It's cool to see Akira's inhuman skills, but they don't come into play very much. This first volume is just a lot of setup and build-up. To what, I don't know. Hopefully, the series finds its footing as either a cringe-comedy or a suspenseful romp into the underworld.