2 out of 5

Hm, bummer. Black Night Parade has been a very conceptually crowded title from the start, but Hikaru Nakamura had some good bones to hang things on by giving the reader a POV character via lead Miharu, learning the ways of the Black Santas and the Red Santa lore alongside us. The friends he made – Teppei, Shino – already had a grasp on the innerworkings, which gave some twisty reveals with Kaiser (his pre-Santa-ing coworker) some juxtaposition.

Volume 3 heavily indulges in one of my least favorite manga tropes, though: the everyone’s-background-is-connected series of flashbacks. And while this arguably has more “justification” here, since everyone wound up at this North Pole job for likely related reasons, I still prefer breathing room between arcs like that, and instead it’s a sequence of tying each character together, chapter by chapter. Additionally, we’re now into the final round of Reindeer auditions, and Nakamura’s barreling ahead with wild concepts without full explanation of them gets out of hand: I don’t know that the Reindeers – or elite deliverypersons – have really been fully explained (which I’m partially thinking may be a translation issue, with some highly contextual concepts maybe just not coming through), but that gets stacked with too many other Big Ideas that are now also net new to the rest of the cast (living cookies; killer toys; a mirror Santa Land) that Nakamura forgets to / doesn’t have space to register Miharu’s surprise, and it begins to “normalize” all this stuff. Which is weird. And the reason this feels like it’s more out of control than before is because the art can’t really keep up, with the page direction, and lettering, and the nitty-gritty of drawing these things in a way that clarifies what’s happening all stumbling.

And sure, let’s toss in a new character at the end also, another manga stereotype (the big, dumb innocent) to possibly further derail the story and give us an it’s-all-connected flashback. …That last piece didn’t happen yet, but I worry that it’s forthcoming sooner rather than later.

Tankobons like this are somewhat inevitable in big creative swings like Black Night Parade, where the scope starts to outpace the creator, but so are followup chapters where the story is roped back into control. And I’m hopeful / confident that I’ll get to experience that soon.