Manga Review: Millennium Snow GN 4

Millennium Snow volume 4
Author: Bisco Hatori
Viz Manga/Shojo Beat
200 pages

Spoiler alert: Review contains major spoilers for the fourth and final volume of Millennium Snow, as well as events leading up to it.

Toya still hasn’t agreed to make Chiyuki his partner, but while his opinion hasn’t budged, time has. It’s now their last year in high school, and Toya is facing the prospect of supporting himself for the rest of his long life. But even with Chiyuki’s calming influence, is Toya capable of holding down a job? And if he’s not, how will a lone vampire survive in this cold world?

In 2001, manga-ka Bisco Hatori would begin work on her vampire shojo series Millennium Snow. A year later and another series would quickly eclipse the first's in popularity and steal away Hatori's attentions, leading to putting Millennium Snow on hiatus for years and years (that second series being, of course, the classic rom-com Ouran High School Host Club).

Over ten years later, Hatori has returned to her first series proper and given it a real ending. While it occasionally dips into the melodramatic and the rushed, it marks a significant uptick in Hatori's manga repertoire and gives the story of Chiyuki and Toya a much desired conclusion.

Manga Review: Millennium Snow GN 3

Millennium Snow volume 3
Author: Bisco Hatori
Viz Media/Shojo Beat
200 pages

Toya still can’t shake his blood aversion, even though Chiyuki would happily share hers with him, and the malnutrition is starting to take its toll. Chiyuki tries to supplement his diet with solid food, but that’s just barely enough to keep him alive. Can Chiyuki find a way to support her vampire when he refuses the help she knows he needs?

Between the second and third volumes of Millennium Snow lay years in which Bisco Hatori never inked a single page for the series. She had taken a hiatus and put her energies to another series, a little shojo manga known as Ouran High School Host Club. The Bisco Hatori that returned to Millennium Snow years later is an older, wiser, and more skilled manga-ka—and it shows on every page. 

If you tired of the typical shojo comedy antics that filled the first two volumes, let the third reassure you that this series is worth following.

While Reading Millennium Snow Volume 3

I don't usually comment on books I'm still reading, but I felt like I could comment a bit on Millennium Snow's third book before the end of it. I'll have a full review of the book up either tomorrow or Saturday.

The remarkable thing about the third volume of Millennium Snow by Bisco Hatori is that the manga-ka started it up again after a long, multi-year hiatus.

During this hiatus, of course, Hatori started up and finished a whole 'nother series: Ouran High School Host Club. Not a small series by any definition, and it quickly became her defining series. When she eventually came back to Chiyuki and Toya, one can imagine the set of fresh eyes and new perspectives she brought to the page.

Right now, the difference between the last couple of chapters in book two and the opening chapter of book three, pre-hiatus and post-hiatus, are like night and day. The art has improved, there is less squawking and contrived drama, and Toya and Chiyuki seem more mature in their interactions with each other. There is a significant shift from supernatural rom-com to supernatural drama, although still with rom-com elements.

It's kind of amazing to see this kind of change in a manga-ka's storytelling and art style between series. It seems that recently, many popular manga-ka get locked into long-running series and we don't often see how they skills shift and mature between different titles. But Hatori was not only able to bring Ouran to its own deserved end but got to return to Millennium Snow to give it a proper conclusion (volume three is not that conclusion, though!) and now readers get to see the new Hatori in her old stomping grounds, and that's something both long-term fans and new fans can appreciate.

Retrospective Review: Millennium Snow GN 1 & 2

Millennium Snow volume 1 & 2

Author: Bisco Hatori

Viz Manga/Shojo Beat

Approx. 200 pages per volume

Seventeen-year-old Chiyuki Matsuoka was born with heart problems, and her doctors say she won't live to see the next snow. Toya is an 18-year-old vampire who hates blood and refuses to make the traditional partnership with a human, whose life-giving blood would keep them both alive for a thousand years. (Source: Viz)

Spoiler warning: Retrospective reviews contain spoilers for the books they discuss as well as possible spoilers for later events in the series.

Before Bisco Hatori broke out onto the international manga stage with Ouran High School Host Club, she was the manga-ka of several earlier series that ran in Hakusensha magazines in Japan. And one of them was Millennium Snow/千年の雪, also known as Thousand Years of Snow. It's not her first manga—Isshunkan no Romance, her first one-shot which won a Hakusensha Newcomers’ Awards, is actually included in the first volume of Millennium Snow. But readers can see Hatori's sense of humor and drama come to life in these early works about a sickly young girl, her vampire friend, and their unlikely and dramatic courtship.

(Bisco Hatori's) Winter Is Coming

The continuation of Bisco Hatori's early manga series of romance and vampires and werewolves, Millennium Snow, has me excited to see how the manga-ka will revive the title after taking time off for the immensely popular Ouran High School Host Club. So naturally, I will be revisiting the first two volumes, created very early in Hatori's career, which is very evident from the art style and writing.

Buuuut that won't be until tomorrow. Until then, please enjoy this AMV (MMV? Manga Music Video?) I've found based on Millennium Snow's manga. And then wonder what kind of anime this title would make. If the same team who brought Ouran to life worked on the story of Chiyuki and Toya, that would be fine by me!

Y'know, for a manga that up until recently only had two volumes worth of material, there are a fair amount of fan vids about it on YouTube! I'm sure the number will rise when fans realize the new Millennium Snow chapters are being put out in English by Shojo Beat now. And maybe there will be less Avril Lavigne songs on the Chiyuki/Toya vids.