There are two gripes that I have with stories that take place after their protagonists awaken from cryogenic stasis. One they tend to be about the unending sliding scale of reinvigoration the ripplelike but otherwise fruitful clamoring for sustenance the acceleration and exacerbation of discord on top of fringe ideas followed by the eventual time of reckoning where either the heroes live to tell the tale or do not. They methodically and generously filling us in on the various trajectories heralded by these pioneers by whom we are cordially invited along to invest our energies into providing affable running commentary lest their prayers go unanswered and no one is present to cry out in anguish alongside them drone on for proverbial eons about which path is the right one for them and ultimately waste our time by handwaving us through a oceanic cistern of beentheredonethats that understandably speaking we do not recall asking for in the first place. This feeds directly into my second gripe. Maybe instead of pooling ambition and scope into the fold and making the linearity of all progression so patulous and dependent on the whims of authorial intent why not spare beguiled audiences the narrative sprawl of cursory tales of personal growth and learning to graft oneself onto communal values and in a certain regard allow the pages of a concisely outlined work to be occupied with the held beliefs of its pertinent author. Despite how conceited such an undertaking may seem at a glance when you account for the flexibility of creative expression in a medium as sorely underutilized as manga you immediately begin to wonder where its imaginary boundaries lie and how much an author an illustrator an AUTEUR can push the envelope before being urged to tone down the overflowing madness that is spontaneously birthed and spurted from the crest of his noggin. Shotaro Ishinomori. His was a name that Id already been acquainted with since my early days on the internet scouring for all manner of rubbish to latch on to and make my temporary personality before letting it all fade into obscurity. Kamen Rider was one of these things. As a nine year old with all the world in the palm of his hand id binge 2030 episodes of varying Rider shows across the Heisei era of televised broadcasts at a time proceed to tell my besties about it to which theyd just nod in solidarity and just go about whatever it was they themselves were fixated on at the time and elaborately recite aloud the transformations sequences from heart. With unbridled glee no less. Id watch these crimefighting heroes go about their perennial duty of painting the notsosavory personifications of disorder in a monochrome light with none of these framed evildoers ever being giftwrapped the opportunity to make amends for what theyve done and so forth. Straightforward morally linear stuff. Indeed the series has always postulated the idea that the wants and needs of justice or the vague feelings of warmth and premeditated comfort beheld by society at large come ex aequo. Which drives home the personal significance of it all to me I would graciously stomach with a tinge of admiration evermore stories about the partisanship and ironic duality between the forces of good and evil. Both are like two sides of a seemingly lunardraped coin. What constitutes good things? An innate sense of purpose? The parallels between a person/object and its role in the natural order? And conversely does a fundamental vacancy for interest in cohabitation occupy the root of all evil? It cannot be proven for certain. Everyone has conflicting views on what they describe as the truth regardless so defining such equivocal concepts in equally reductionistic terms would be counterintuitive to the single most ingrained tenet of the written form. I happened across Ryuu no Michi as do many other readers do. Observe a group of individuals discuss the body of work of a sole man become curious myself do a little bit of digging on who said man might be and what he has published to date and then realize he was someone whose name Id known about since forever ago and at last select from his hefty collection of stories and accounts of real world happenings at their time of conceptualization. With 28 chapters spread across 8 volumes I went into it expecting it to be a cakewalk considering its diminutive length and that it was the first in a long line of manga Ishinomori would go on to stamp his name on. I couldnt be more wrong. To start with the art is to put it lightly majestic as the Aether consistently fluid in its depictions of busy limbtolimb action and achingly rapturous in how its illustrated for close to every spread youll lay eyes on insofar as your attention is kept sailing over the course of the read. Not once will you ever work your across landscapes devoid of soul poured into every miasma of uniformly repeating squiggles and the mark of while yet an accomplished artist but truly bewildering talent of the highest pedigree. To think he managed to achieve this much while only still in his early thirties. In one spread of Ryuu our titular character sits alone in a field of dust and debris with plumes of smoke filtering into the atmosphere in excess. The aftermath of the carnage is rendered in such a way that the largest objects take up most of the frame and are consequently blackened out either completely or partially to show the difference in distance between the foreground and background. Another of Ryuu no Michis inferred strengths is its arcbyarc structure of showing how the planet got to the point it did where it became virtually inhospitable for further human progress. Instead of being shown bits and pieces of survival bravado and what each character introduced is supposed to help with in Ryuus bearing of the torch and ultimatum for a better tomorrow we are graced with the fallout of a onceshimmering and onceprosperous cluster of evolutionary ingredients now desecrated and in a state of monumental disrepair. Well not quite but the gist is that the food chains disrupted and predators once have now become the hunted and vice versa. Likened to many myths of ancient origin the individual tales told within these arcs put on an air of postmodernity atypical of the espoused schools of thought made ubiquitous in the 1970s. The gods guiding him by the hand on his journey for resettlement lay the brickwork for what is expected of him as a future bastion for the declining remnants of the civilized man reminding him that if he is to perform at an acceptable optimum he should pay no worry to his worst critics and just go about ruling with loose morals implying that he should first establish sunny relations amongst peoples of the gamut of gene pools there now fill up the unearthly landscape. Projecting his own set of beliefs and moral axioms has to be the least of his responsibilities given that propounding forwardthinking or backwards arguments for an entire populaces worth of tunnelvisioned faculties to hear would most certainly stoke the flames of discord not to mention the unintentional conundrums that doing so would inevitably leave on the table. He has to earn these dispersed men and womens trust and adulation if he seeks an opportunity to round them up and have them get along with one another. The extent of Ishinomoris knowledge of divergent species and the enumeration of specifics that come with it is definitely something that cannot be overstated. He repeatedly brings into focus concepts pertaining to how a demarcated civilization may unexplainably exploit the use of the limited resources and realize their potential as a society by having a democracy in place to decide upon whats best for themselves and other subservient species that live alongside them. He clearly acknowledges that preexistent systems that have been lost to time due to the devastation of their forebearers will spontaneously crop up again at a certain point along a linear flowchart of time also due to the cycle of causality and how things repeat themselves after enough time has passed. All in all i have to say that Im fairly pleased with this manga. It has all the hallmarks I often associate with tales taut ambitious in scope and yet comfortably reminiscent of an idealized my perceived ideal manner of storytelling that pulls no punches. Would I have wanted more of this padded out to include at least a dozen more chapters to wrap certain plot points revolving around a number of the side characters whose final appearances were so unnecessarily far back from when the finale was finally set in motion? Of course But what it all does right for me greatly outweighs what it doesnt.