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Valentine's Day has passed and All Saints' Day is still far away. Yet the first volume of My Beloved Revenant would be perfect for both feasts. Discover in this chronicle how love and death coexist in this new series
A deadly love story
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In the first images of My Beloved Revenant, Riku Ninose appears as a totally ordinary office worker. While he is still sleeping, his new wife Remi picks him up for lunch but, seeing her, he screams. Indeed, the face of the woman in his life is dripping with blood. The reader is shocked but Riku does not panic. Indeed, he married a ghost. Riku is deeply in love while not being able to bear the morbid gaze of his wife. Their love seems impossible. However, the rest of this first volume show the enormous efforts of the couple to make this extraordinary relationship work. Riku goes out in public with Remi.
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She flourishes with him but the rest of humanity panics when they see her. In response, she can't help but hide behind a curtain and stick her face on it. Remi suffers from being a ghost. She can't wear a new outfit without her aura tearing it apart. Sometimes his anger against humanity overflows. Yet this strange attitude becomes a publicity asset. My beloved revenante is indeed not a drama but a comedy about horror.
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It is through this mixture of opposing registers that laughter arrives in My beloved revenant. Remi wears tattered clothes but with a blouse. She wants to please her beloved husband with a bento except that she draws with the small dishes a funerary stele. When she is happy, she screams and opens her eyes wide. Indeed, Takeshi Wakasa's drawing illustrates very well this cohabitation of opposites. In two boxes, we go from a cute romantic comedy to a disturbing horror scene. Riku's face can be that of a supermodel or a corpse. The structure alternates between the simplicity of comedy with lots of empty space and the many scary strokes in the background.
A couple yet so banal
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Each short chapter details a daily moment of this atypical couple. Remi stays at home to keep the secret of his ghost situation but also to clean up. The writer and cartoonist Takeshi Wakasa shows us in My Beloved Revenante a very conservative couple. Remi prepares food for her husband while he sleeps. Humor then becomes a weapon to ridicule patriarchal society. A neighbor wants to flatter Riku by extolling the beauty of his young wife but when she appears at the window the malotru runs away. At Riku's company, employees complain about harassment at work by their superior.
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However, Riku remains a man who cannot envisage equality with his wife, nor that she can have an independent life. He puts a lot of emphasis on her physical beauty. He will introduce his wife to his mother. The two lovers of My beloved revenante go out for shopping or go for the day to the beach. But everything goes off the rails very quickly when taking the metro becomes an adventure.
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With My Beloved Revenant, the reader discovers Japanese folklore. An urban legend states that specters appear in women's toilets. The aura of ghosts forms a stain wherever it remains for a long time. Salt keeps demons away. The J-horror fan is amused by the many nods to genre cinema such as Remi's body position: she tilts her head 45 degrees, she crawls like a spider.
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Edited by Mangetsu, My Beloved Revenante follows the daily life of a young couple. This banal theme is upset by the strange choice to marry a ghost. The horror becomes comical but passages at the end of the volume show possible evolutions for Remi. If the first volume can haunt you for a few nights it is especially by the funny scenes that it will mark you. It remains to be seen if the initial spell will continue in the rest of the series.
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Find on our site other horror manga in Love and Death and Soichi by Junji Ito
