Customer Reviews

Eden: It's An Endless World!, Vol. 1 (v. 1)

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This is in the post-apocalyptic survival genre and is rated 18+ due to violent content. A new virus has spread through humanity, hardening the skin and dissolving internal organs. Those who are still alive are crippled, cybernetic or immune. Meanwhile, the human desire for power continues and there is a new organization looking to rule the world. It's an interesting look at man and nature.

This first volume is very good. The art is excellent. The story is introduced well and in an interesting way. I'm looking forward to finding out not only what will happen to the characters, but filling in what has happened in the past.

Finding out that Dark Horse has picked up this amazing manga is one of the most exciting events of the year. It is one of the best series I have ever read, and I am surprised it took so long to be picked up.
It takes place in what could be considered a post apocalyptic age of man, but it is nothing like any other post apocalyptic manga out. It is filled with political intrigue, personal drama, and mind blowing plot arcs. The apocalyps is just the beginning and the canvas on which this story is painted.
It follows the life of a boy, Elijah, and his travels through the unique anarchic landscape of a world ravaged by a plague known as the Closer virus. With an ensamble of friends of happenstance, vicious enemies, and mosters, Elijah's world is far from the biblical paradise of Eden.
The author builds an array of interesting complicated characters, giving time to them as much as any main character, no matter how brief their life in the comic is. They are people for the most part real, aside from some who have been modified cybernetically.
As far as the artistry of the graphic novel is concerned, it is precisely that, graphic. It is not a novel for children, and often attacks adult issues head on. Aside from that, the action scenes are dynamic representations of the climax, either emotional or physical, of that scene. No shortage of blood, and guts, but not so splattered across the page as to be considered obscene.
These pictures are only there to support the myriad of plots, sub-plots, serializations and cliffhangers that are throughout the manga, as it heads toward an uncertain conclusion. There are twists turns and, growth, actual full fledged growth of the situations present, which become continually profound.
Read this manga for its drama, its violence and its imagination, whose vision of a post apocalyptical world can only be described as human.

Eden is an awesome manga. If any manga has achieved a literary state it has to be this one. For example, it doesn't exactly present characters the way other manga do, by showing what they look like, and having them act out in a way that would be characteristic. What Eden did in this volume was present the setting first, and have the characters interact with that setting. Being a post-apocalyptic tale, the setting is key, and having certain people react a certain way to the setting will reveal a lot about that character. Personally, I thought this was brilliantly done, and I felt that I knew Elijah, the main character, well enough to like him, even though he was only in three short chapters of this volume.

The story in Eden--in this volume at least--begins with two teenagers, Enoah and Hannah, as they care for their guardian Layne, who's dying of a disease that hardens the skin and turns the insides of a human to mush. While caring for Layne, these kids learn of their responsibility to human-kind, as well as the tragic past that aided in bringing about the apocalypse in which they are living in. Later, the story moves to young Elijah, a boy whose only companion is a robot named Cherubim, as he goes about the everyday job of survival, including scavenging and hunting, as well as dreaming of girls.

Though admittedly the story is slow, and very little is given away as to what direction Eden is heading in, I can't knock it for the simple brilliance in which it is unfolding. Hiroki Endo put an emphasis on presenting the stark setting and conditions of living in the volume, and also made it clear that it is an intelligent plot no matter how slow it is. The back cover states that Eden is "a brilliant love song to post-apocalyptic survival genre" and I would have to agree on that. Eden is a smart story rivaling even Akira, and one I highly recommend for fans of darker, smarter manga.

Having read the first three volumes so far, I'm blown away. I haven't found a manga this engaging since Akira. At first glance, what appeared to be a typical "post-apocalytic" story is actually deeply fascinating on multiple levels, most especially characterization. The technological elements are as well done as anything by Shirow (Ghost in the Shell), perhaps even better, as they are more clearly explained and shown to be a logical extension of present-day technologies. The future the author has created here is totally coherent and convincing. Like the best sci-fi, you feel like you are simply glimpsing one aspect of an enormous world.

The visual storytelling is extremely well done. The battle scenes are clearly sequenced and paced in a way that is very cinematic. I found myself racing from panel to panel, my eyes frequently bugging out at dramatic and gory moments that are perfectly presented in service to the larger narrative and the emotional content.

The characters are quite convincing and engaging.

This is a fantastic piece of entertainment!

A worldwide plague has struck Earth, and there's no cure in sight. The disease is particularly nasty because your skin hardens into rock-like consistency and then your internal organs liquefy and drain out through your orifices! So you have all these statues of people laying around like so many victims of Medusa. A bio-dome named Eden is constructed under UN control to quarantine uninfected humans from the pandemic sweeping the world. Many years later, all that's left of the once hopeful experiment are two adolescents named Enoah and Hannah, who have genetic resistance, and their dying guardian Layne, who is rapidly succumbing to the sickness. The rest of this first volume fills you in on how Eden, which was once a bastion of Man's hopes, has now become an empty shell of its former self. We're also introduced to Cherubim, a military robot which Eden's now dead inhabitants blamed for their destruction. The second half of the book takes up a different thread, 20 years later as a young boy named Elijah, accompanied by Cherubim, fights to survive in the ruins of civilization.

This first volume of Eden had it all: Sci-fi, Violence, love, human fears, religious symbolism, and realism. The characters at times feel like mythological, if not Biblical, figures given human shape, but they retain our sympathies. They are protagonists trying to live in a world that has been destroyed by forces on a different level than themselves. As in all times of chaos, factions arise to take advantage of the situation and take control. It's difficult to see how these characters are going to fit into the scheme of things. The little violence in this book is graphic but necessary to tell the story. Death isn't pretty. The art in Eden is some of the best I've ever seen in a manga and is reminescent of a more refined Ghost in the Shell style-wise. Video Girl Ai is another series that is similar in art. This is a gripping and thought provoking first volume in what looks to be a great series.

All I have to say is that this series is by far the best manga/graphic novel I've ever read... This is not the plotless violence that you see in many manga series', Eden's story line is one of the better plots that I've read in quite some time. This series is absolutely incredible and a 'must-read' for everyone who loves... well... anything.

Eden is simply an amazing graphic novel set in a world ravaged by a killer virus, that wipes out the majority of the population. We start with three survivors on an island. A dying man confined to a wheelchair and two children. From this simple begining we delve into complex subject matter. The concept of sin, sexual desire, explore the meaning of life, question the existence of god and man's role in the natural order. Heady stuff to say the least and then there are the mecha robots, cyborgs, mercenaries and global conspiracies. Breathtaking in it's scope and imagination, Hiroki Endo has created a tribute to the cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic survival genre.