3 out of 5

I can’t draw a single good-looking comic panel, much less an entire issue or magazine entry’s worth of material. So it’s petty to criticize, except that people are putting their work out there, and we’re paying for it, so I’ll allow for some leeway and say: man, the cover to this tankobon looks cheap, and is just flat uninteresting. A poorly placed title over a blank-faced Eren – I guess the spot of blood at the corner of his mouth could engender interest, but given that it’s a plain white background without any further details, not so much. This is really like a temp cover that they didn’t have time to finalize, so, here we go. That’s not necessarily representative of the contents, except that you can feel Hajime kind of trying to hammer the lore into shape, and doing a lot of exposition dump to do so, so maybe there is some alignment there: this is a set of chapters you just kind of have to accept and absorb; go into the same kind of trance that cover Eren appears to be in.

Volume 15 is a transition point. It’s gripping in spots, and some of that exposition dump informs pretty impactful scenes – a trial; the Survey Corps confronting the MPs – but these scenes are also more impactful in a top-down sense as opposed to panel by panel, as Hajime really works to twist things around somewhat, getting us over a hill of mystery and lore and into the next phases of story and character. Calling it a “point” is what’s misleading, I suppose: looking at the publishing date, the anime would’ve been running for about a year, and it’s undeniable that that must’ve had an impact on how the manga was being scripted, alongside the creator growing up while working on it. AoT would, over time, go from a straight puzzle box actioner into something that wove more socially complex themes into its puzzle box; and so, I think, we feel / see Hajime, in this volume, becoming aware of this shift as he’s trying to effect it, making it kinda exciting and kinda clunky at the same time.

We’re clearly on the precipice of something big.