3 out of 5

A weird comic that, in its second tankobon, gets weirder without going off the rails, Hikaru Nakamura’s Black Night Parade pitches that, firstly, Santa exists, and that, secondly, his mirror image “Black Santa” also exists – to give presents to bad children to make them feel worse – and that, thirdly, you can get a full time job working for these Santas. That was the role Miharu found himself in in book 1, specfically working for the Black Santa (Knecht) in the capacity of determining the exact “best” give to for these bad kids, something Miharu seemed attuned to thanks to his years in the service industry.

Nakamura has done a good job of balancing fish-out-of-water humor with world-building, and that continues here: volume 2 focuses on the Black Night Parade version of Santa’s reindeer, who happen to be elite delivery people who get paid top dollar. Part of the magic of the book is how somewhat mundane takes like this – like, they’re just people – get enlivened with a lot of the tradition held up around those mundanities, such as the odd testing procedure Miharu is put through to see if he’d be a good reindeer. This gives Nakamura opportunity to (if somewhat clunkily at points) juggle amusingly weird scenarios with the lore, slowly building out / adding on to the mystery of the history of the Clauses.

Additionally, volume 2 has a really fun twist up front that was probably pretty obvious, but adds a great wildcard into the mix… and opens up an even wilder twist that was not obvious. Nakamura’s art has improved, getting more expressive with the characters and going for some pretty complex layouts, but at the same time, this is a very crowded story with some very surreal things happening, and it becomes hard to place where people are in scenes, or what specifically our takeaway is supposed to be from those scenes. Some of that can be down to translation – it feels like a couple emotional nuances are getting lost in the cracks – but I’d put the bulk of it on the storytelling, which I really think is just a result of too many ideas being crammed onto the page. That has a downstream ironic result of wheel-spinning – like, so much happens that nothing can really move forward – but as I started with, there’s also confidence in this that suggests, to me, like we’re not just getting randomness for its own sake; there does feel like an overall trajectory that really has me eager for the next book.