My thoughts of “gee, parts of this story seem like a barely-veiled metaphor for racism that doesn’t work well” are probably not far off given that Valente is the son of immigrants himself. But the story tries to show this with a group of double-crossers, arrogant officials, and a-danger-to-everyone Seth.
Radiant is attempting to show why ordinary people believe that they have reason to fear the infected and simultaneously that ordinary people are simply bigoted by fearing them. You get the sense that he is just giddy with the opportunity to do long-form storytelling, but this first chapter was very much a turn-off for me.Ī much simpler, more straightforward chapter would have worked better than Radiant’s actual first chapter, which is filled with too many characters who are written with the broadest of strokes. Radiant is not his first work but in Anime News Network’s NYCC 2018 interview with him, he talks about how different the pacing is in his more traditional French comics (which comes out only once a year with just 46, full-color pages, very bande-dessinée). It’s common to see a first chapter that runs longer than usual so as to set up the story, but Radiant’s 100 page opener feels excessively long, messy, and like creator Valente was trying to cram in as many things as he could to show off what he could do as a writer. Since Radiant is actually a French comic, not a manga created in Japan (Tony Valente currently lives in Canada), I’m unsure what kind of editorial process the comic goes through compared to a more “traditional” manga title (he does have an editor, although he doesn’t use any assistants), but I would like to give the editor a hard shake and ask them why they aren’t doing their job. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a professionally published comic of any sort that is in such dire need of an editor from page one. He’s tired of the way the world works, unhappy with the prejudice thrown against the infected by ignorant non-wizards who see them only as bringers of calamity and has just made a plan to find out where Nemeses come from and to destroy this nest once and for all. Seth’s tiny horns mark him as an infected but, despite his boasts to the contrary, he doesn’t seem to be very good at doing anything related to hunting down nemeses, both because of his own skills and because of his brash, hot-headedness. These survivors are called the infected, and these wizards are marked with an (often physical) abnormality, making them an easy target for deeply suspicious non-wizards (especially since we have yet to see a non-magical, disabled person in this world).
This means only a tiny percentage of the population can use these weapons, and those are the only people who can come into contact with Nemeses and survive. No ordinary weapons are useful against these creatures, but only weapons that can manipulate fantasia will have any effect on them. In a strange world where people live on floating islands in the sky and the ground far below is nowhere to be seen, Nemeses are strange monsters that fall from the sky and terrorize normal people.
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