My intentions were to have a few Manga Monday’s out at this point, but oh well. Here we are with our first review of the year. We return to Rebirth. If you have not read my review for volume #1 you can find that here!

Spoilers: There are mostly just spoilers for the individual characters and not so much the plot or anything major.

Plot- Following the events of volume #1, our motley crew of a cast, Deshwitat, Remi and Millenear set out to teach Deshwitat the ways of light magic. However, Millenear is set that she cannot be the one to train him. She informs the group that there are some monks in Hong Kong that can teach him. Long story short, the monks have other plans. We meet several new characters at the temple and some great black and white fight scenes captivate the pages.

New Characters– Just to touch base, nothing new is really discovered or advanced on the behalf of our 3 main characters. Not that they are completely static or boring, just nothing groundbreaking for them as characters occurs. However, we are introduced to a handful of new characters. The first is Rett.

Rett- Now a lot of his backstory is told through flashback and not exposition per se. This means while we see his eventual defeat, his complete relationship to Deshwitat is not fully explored. I also do not think they explained how he got to the temple. Despite this, we see how a “mere human” like Rett, who knew Deshwitat 300+ years ago, would still be alive. Kalutika, the baddie of the series, and his army defeated Rett very easily. Still, they “gifted” him with eternal life so he could witness the end of the world. He honestly does not do much but I am sure he will be a welcomed part of the series moving forward

Beryun– She is a really cool character. She is devout servant to the third character we will meet soon. She comes across rather boring at first. However, she goes toe to toe with Deshwitat fairly impressively. They have one of the cooler fight scenes I’ve seen in a manga to date. And their fight gave birth to one of my favorite quotes. (Ignore how ghetto my picture is below)

Ultimately, neither kill each other, but the fight is pretty darn good. Obviously, she is short on words, quick to the punch kind of monk. So her origins remain shrouded in mystery.

Master Tae- This section will be short. She shows up for a few pages and surprisingly beats Deshiwatit in one shot. We know nothing else of her except she most likely runs the temple is probably going to play a huge role in the series to come.

The World- The world remains relatively the same as last issue. We already knew about magic, vampires and demons. So nothing really new here.

I found this issue to be slightly better than the first. It is always nice to add more characters and dive deeper into old ones, even if just slightly deeper. The writing of the characters feels a little off but I think the characters are just being natural which makes the dialogue awkward. Remember, Deshiwatit just killed Remi’s dad and now they have to travel together. Every moment is high stakes and tensions are high. As a result, the room is always hostile. I don’t really like aggressive dialogue but I think it is how the characters would naturally react, too. At least, to a certain extent anyway.

With that in mind, I’ll give it an 8.25. There’s a pretty good chance we review 2 or 3 more volumes of this series before the year is over. So stay tuned if you want to hear more of my thoughts.

Don’t forget we have a whole section here on the blog dedicated to manga reviews. Check more out here.