Wandering Island Volume 2

Don’t let the naysayers steer you away from this beautiful manga. Yes there’s very little dialogue. But it’s sooooo wonderfully strange. Beautifully drawn and such a pleasure to follow this wordless story. Carl Gustav Horn from Dark Horse writes an essay at the end. Basically apologizing for the lack of word balloons (does he have no faith in what he publishes) and puts a plug in for Tsuruta’s newest manga Emanon. Which I just read and it’s not half as interesting as this second volume of Wandering Island. Mikura’s facial expressions tell the whole story.

Mikura has located "Electric Island", and begun to explore it. This is a largely wordless, very atmospheric book, which is fine by me -- but although we see quite a bit of the island, we don't really learn very much about it. And Mikura is stuck there, because her plane has been shot down -- again! This is apparently a chick who does not learn from experience. If I had been blown out of the air -- twice! -- my absolute first priority would be locating, and disabling, the %&^$!+@ -- both the device and the individual -- who did it, but this appears to not even occur to our main character. The island's inhabitants range from somewhat friendly (a few) to standoffish (most) to actively hostile (a few) but we really don't learn any more than that about them, either. This is an intriguing story, and I really like the art, but I hope the next book informs us a little more about the situation.

Volume one brought you into a labyrinth, and volume two gets you lost. Plot is incredibly light, but there's so much atmosphere and detail that I spent just as long admiring each page's art that it took me longer to read this volume than normal. The mystery behind this series is just starting and waiting for more will be agonizingly difficult.

It's a fine chapter in the story, but little progress happens. It's mostly a girl in a bikini exploring a weird island. Nothing makes sense and little is explained, but it's still a neat bit of world building. Hopefully it's all brought together in the next volume, and the story doesn't just trail off.

Enigmatic story of a young girl searching for a elusive roving Pacific island in order to deliver an old package via a Biplane Sea Plane. Mysterious!

Extremely Disappointed - Vol. 2 is empty! Devoid of character development, dialogue, plot! Volume 2 is hard to read mostly because there are hardly any words in the book. Sigh. I loved Volume 1 and eagerly awaited the continuation of the story in volume 2. To be candid, my interest in volume 1 had nothing to do with the fantasy concept of the protagonist searching for this lost wandering island. Instead, I loved volume 1 for it's unique character development, dialogue, geography, and subject matter - youthful adventure flying a sea plane in the Asia Pacific. A single girl who lives with her cat and flies a retro sea plane to island hop through Japan's myriad Pacific islands to deliver packages - she knows the remote islands well because she has continued to operate an old family business. This story in volume 1 is cool and points in the story touch your emotions! For all that volume 1 has, volume 2 utterly lacks. Volume 2 has sparse dialogue, no character development, virtually no plot. The entire volume presents one scene that hardly moves the story forward. I got the feeling, the person/team responsible for writing the story for volume 2, either was preoccupied with a different, higher priority project, suffered from writer's block or perhaps, they put this story in the bottom of a file cabinet drawer, completely forgot about it, had nothing to deliver at the deadline, and merely used the artist's brainstorming renderings of the concept of the girl landing on the island and exploring the island - and then they tried to throw in a few words here and submit it for publication - trying to pass off a rough draft of the artwork for a polished, finished product. No, the story did not continue in volume 2. No, the story just fell off a cliff. The volume 2 book is devoid of the captivating, sophisticated, story found in volume 1. Hopefully, volume 3 can get the train back on the tracks and continue where volume 1 left off, otherwise it's going to just free fall away with volume 2. The end of volume 2 has a back page note with a lot of extra commentary about the new developments in Japanese Manga versus the traditions of the 1980s, 1990s. This extra stuff was written to try to explain away how terrible volume 2 is, but that doesn't cut it. No excuses. This was trash. The author who penned volumed 1 has exceptional talent and skill, but it was not applied in volume 2. I suppose one could argue the idea of no dialogue and a lonely girl on a magic island may have sounded cool in discussion--it was a risk-- but it was a total flop. Volume 2 has sketches of the protagonist, wandering around in her bikini, but the quantity of illustrations overwhelms the paucity of plot, dialogue, and character development. How can the creator/author/publisher abandon the readers, the fans? I'm so disappointed. The only moving thing about volume 2 is how disappointed you will feel after buying it. I don't want to lose hope. I hope the story gets more real, more complex, more touching in volume 3. The historic, real world background anecdotes about Japan's islands and airplane deliveries, and the lonely girl with her cat and her rich, meaningful relationship with her grandpa, all found in volume 1, exclusively in volume 1, had a certain truth, depth, complexity, and charm that piqued my curiosity.

Fast read but the art is perfect

beautiful Art. Interesting story

I absolutely loved volume 1 of Wandering Island and still recommend it to so many people. So, when the second book came along, there was no question of adding it to the collection. The problem is this falls so short of the expectations I had and is such a let down.My issue with this is the prolonging to both action and storyline. I feel as though it has simply been stretched to make a whole book.Nothing really happens in it, and you find yourself getting frustrated with the snail's pacing. Then, when something just may be about to happen, the book ends...The result is we are still not sure about the logistics of the islands appearance, and it has taken a whole book to just find a store! Now, we will now have to wait until next time until Mikura hopefully starts to gets some answers.I just hope the the third volume manages to offer a fulfilling conclusion of some sort.

This volume is the best continuation to Vol.1 for anyone who knows and loves Kenji Tsuruta's work and everything that makes it special. And this time he goes a step further in the most daring way!//Minor Spoilers Ahead//In this volume the whole narrative is led by image, not dialogue, which not only creates a greater impact on the arrival to the Island, forcing the reader to make its own conclusions about the place, but also builds a fantastic atmosphere. As I said before, this is an extremely daring approach, because Tsuruta takes the time needed to let us imagine, page after page, how it feels to be on the island.Regarding page composition and internal panel rhythm, it is equally amazing. The pace builds itself perfectly as the narrative grows stranger and stranger, leading to an ending that leaves the reader with the urge to know more, to re-read everything once more and wonder what's in this island, what's in the package and when is the third volume coming out.It pains me to see all the negative critiques around this volume, though I can understand them up to some point. This is not a story for everyone. It doesn't have the typical comic-book fast-paced rhythm nor the dynamic self-explanatory dialogue. And this is because it's not a story about mainstream adventures but about self-discovery and contemplation.The meta-narrative serves this purpose: if you're discovering a place you must show, not tell; time is needed to apprehend a "new world". This volume is not the result of a lack of care regarding the story; Tsuruta is not adding mindless and meaningless side-quests while figuring out the plot; he is letting us feel the island, know its atmosphere, and this purpose serves the story. This idea is reinforced thanks to the additional chapter from Dark Horse explaining several tiny details that appear in this volume.Mikura spent three years looking for the island. The whole plot is about the island. It is not something that can be solved in 4-5 pages. Tsuruta grants us a whole volume to meet properly the wandering island.And I wish more authors would dare to take this path in storytelling.

The main reason for not buying on going seriesMany get abandoned halfway