They call it elegance.

I call it generic. That’s what first comes to mind for this book’s art style. The author Kyo Shirodaira and artist Yuri Kimura both seem to be very recent manga entities as far as mainstream popularity standards go. I have to say, though, there’s nothing in the artist’s style that remotely makes it stand out in my mind among the countless sea of other series out there. I will give them credit, though, that each page is usually fairly detailed and not littered with a lot of white portrait dialogue panels. This does make the story a little clearer in terms of the fast pace the writer has set. However, there’s pitifully little content in between chapters or in the back of the book, as is usually fairly common in popular manga. The most you get is an afterward by both creators and an illustration of Renka and Yuki.

And this, the final outcome…

Overall, I’d say The Record of a Fallen Vampire is good as a general read. It’s story has an interesting concept, but the way it’s written out (at least for this volume) everything is moving too fast to understand why certain characters are behaving or feeling the way they do. This leaves me with the impression that the author is either trying way too hard to be ambiguous, or just really isn’t that good at writing a steadily flowing story. Even in the afterward Kyo states that, “…no writer is ever in control of the flow of his own story, and the characters often bring in surprises.” While I don’t entirely dispute that claim, one as cynical as myself could take that to mean he just hadn’t thought very far ahead at this time and is trying to convey too much foundation to the story at once, which becomes confusing. However, Kimura’s artwork does help better convey the overall emotion of most of the characters (Strauss rarely shows any), so there’s that. I’m sad to say that The Record of a Fallen Vampire just didn’t grab me as strongly as I’d hoped it would. Maybe the next volume will be clearer.