Reviewing Volumes 1-54 (everything before The Thousand Year Blood War)
As a child growing up in the embarrassing pop culture nightmare of the early 2000's, anime was gaining some mild popularity. Teens and adults could get their fill through
Cartoon Network's Toonami and Adult Swim blocks while kids were gobbling up the much maligned (at least in hindsight) 4Kids dubs of shows like One Piece, Naruto, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
Some of these aired later in the day but a lot of what kids like me watched came on during the ancient rite of appointment viewing known simply as "Saturday Morning Cartoons". A hard week of slacking off at school completed, it was time to sit way too close to the television with a bucket of high-fructose corn syrup crunchies drowning in milk to catch the latest adventures meant to entertain and get me to tell my parents to buy me stuff.
Ah how young and innocent I was then. But at some point I grew out of that and I wanted my entertainment to come with more edge. My hair was longer, my cherubic face was now shadowed in a baggy Disturbed hoodie. I wanted something similar to One Piece but a little more...adult.
Bleach holds a special place in my heart because of this. While I knew that the series' I loved as a younger kid were actually bloodier and edgier than I realized in their unedited format (I'll discuss this in the future when I take you through a personal history of Shonen Jump magazine), I didn't get my initial exposure to those until afterward, which changed my perceptions of those shows in many ways. But Bleach aired unedited, with all the buckets of blood and violence that I craved.
It's been a decade plus since I paid attention to Bleach and with the release of the new Thousand Year Blood War anime, I found myself picking up the manga and going deep down the rabbit hole, reading hundreds of chapters over the past month.
The first question you're asking: Why is it called Bleach? It's a story about sword-wielding Soul Reapers battling against Hollows (corrupted souls) that progressively get stronger and stronger. The manga has nothing to do with cleaning product, but author Tite Kubo (who illustrates and writes the manga) came up with the title when he realized both "Black" and "White" were too generic. But
Bleach is associated with white, so better title (though it's still irrelevant).
16-year-old Ichigo Kurosaki is our protagonist, a high schooler who can see ghosts and eventually stumbles across the aforementioned Hollows. Saved by a Soul Reaper named Rukia, she loses her powers, transfers them to him, and thus begins Ichigo's adventure.
The early manga is rough. Tite Kubo's art is fantastic but the story is trying to find its footing. Vacillating wildly between comedic and emotional moments, it acts as a kind of monster-of-the-week attempt at introducing us to the world and main characters. We get typical antics of teenagers in high school, but these are countered with emotional battles and character moments playing out across dozens of chapters. A lot of the early volumes came across pedestrian to me, interesting in concept but middling in execution.
It takes six or seven volumes before we get to the first big arc, where Rukia is taken to the Soul Society and awaits execution for giving Ichigo his powers. Ichigo and his friends train and eventually go to Soul Society, engaging in dozens of battles with Soul Reaper Captains. Here is where things take off, with impressive battles, larger-than-life powers, and cinematic artistry to each fight. The biggest problem for this arc is, more than anything, that Rukia was established as a cool and intelligent female lead and she is now relegated to a damsel-in-distress.
And following this dramatic rescue, as the plot unfolds even further and more training takes place for another very similar arc, Orihime, Ichigo's muse, is kidnapped. And thus do we have pretty much the same arc repeated with new villains in a new area with a new damsel. And another dozen plus volumes of entertaining action and unique characters.
Bleach follows the same formula as other shonen manga with the hero constantly running into another, stronger character and needing to power himself up to another degree to defeat him/her. Which means Ichigo has to train a lot or occasionally randomly discover powers at the perfect moment in a fight. Bleach's biggest weakness is this fact — you know none of the main characters will die because there is always a cop out. A new power, a weird healing spell. It takes a lot of tension out of intensely drawn action knowing that in the end...the good guys will always win.
But again I return to the art. Because if nothing else, Tite Kubo is a brilliant artist. His distinct character designs mean you can pick his drawings out from the crowd and the way he evolves to become one of shonen's most cinematic storytellers is inspiring. While early volumes of Bleach have great action, it's in the later volumes that it really shines. The flow between panels adds to the movement, giving readers the perception of seeing a storyboard for a martial arts fight rather than stagnant hit-for-hit action. You always have a sense of where the characters are at, where they are going, and what they are doing. I can't imagine reading this series week-to-week because of how breezy the chapters become because of the action choreography.
Bleach is a fun read because of the action and the unique characters but there isn't a lot of depth to it. I don't feel a particular attachment to any characters, the story is always resetting itself and forcing characters to level-up in inorganic ways. The world Kubo has crafted is interesting and expansive but every arc introduces more to it that might have been introduced much earlier. The Visored's and the Fullbringers (for instance, if you know Bleach) just kind of show up when convenient when they might have had a bigger splash were they introduced or hinted at in prior chapters.
Too many characters means many get lost in the mix and none have enough time to really grow on the reader. While women are portrayed in some really heroic and awesome ways, the main heroines get tossed to the wayside for generic damsel-in-distress plots when they've proven they can be so much more. And the constant leveling up, introductions of new powers and groups, makes it feel as if Bleach is being written more off-the-seat-of-Kubo's-pants than planned out.
Bleach holds a special place in my heart regardless of its flaws. It's well worth a read for any fan of shonen and a perfect gateway into manga and anime for those trying to dip their toes in the medium. It's great and even Kubo's final volumes manage to have the kind of care and love that apathy somehow couldn't quench.
