Manga reviews: Fullmetal Alchemist

On the 27th May 2003, I made my usual daily check of Toriyama’s World. Back then, TW was without doubt the biggest and most important scanslation site on the internet, providing scans of big shounen series like Hikaru no Go and HunterXHunter. They were also not only scanning an up-and-coming series called Naruto but even releasing fansubs of the anime – but back then, I wasn’t too keen on the juvenile-looking series, heheh.

On that day, Toriyama’s World released a chapter of Hikaru no Go, which I was very eager to read, but also announced a new monthly manga called Fullmetal Alchemist. ‘it’s about an alchemist who can do a lot of cool stuff. it's pretty good. you should read it’, went the release, somewhat unconvincingly, adding as an afterthought a little note: ‘you’d better read fma, cuz we may or may not have hidden an integral page of the hng chapter in the fma chapter… tho really, who needs a gimmick to make people read a manga this good!’

Well, if that announcement was hardly auspicious, I downloaded the chapter and loved it. Some great artwork, really appealing characters, a superb setting and the great concept of magic deeply based in science.

It’s now more than seven years later, and Fullmetal Alchemist is huge. From the first episode of the anime, where I was very surprised Al sounded like a little boy, to seeing the movie in Japan on the day of an earthquake, to the new Brotherhood remake growing from redundancy to innovation, Hagaren would seldom be out of my life. It has a huge but fickle fanbase, and even though the manga has been a constant fixture for all these years, when the first anime stopped airing, it was remarkable how many people seemed to give up on their beloved title.

I’ve summarized the series in general as an anime, so I don’t need to go into that here, but it ought to be said that it’s always been the manga I’ve enjoyed the most. The art is unique and often very odd but beautiful to look at, and the pacing is superb – other than in the flashback segment. Few series have so perfectly balanced humour and action, and this series deserves to be a classic. Its concept, characters, world and storyline are all genuinely exemplary.

But the manga rolled on, and I kept reading, through the flabby chapters of flashback and through Arakawa’s other side-projects. And now it’s all finally come to an end with chapter 108, an extended special of over 100 pages. I thought I would rail against it. I thought that it couldn’t possibly end satisfactorily in one more chapter. But I was wrong: the summation of the homunculus storyline was also the climax of all the main characters’ paths and it ended neatly, cleverly and with so many little flashes of where the characters will go next, each one fairly moving.

This is somewhat the end of an era, for me. And I can’t help but feel a little moved!