4 out of 5

Warning, or, maybe, spoiler: Opus has no ending.  The Dark Horse 2014 edition includes a rough version of a conclusion that was discovered after Kon’s death (published in the original Japanese collected edition from Ryu Comics, as per some notes in the book) and it works, but one must wonder if it was the original conclusion or something worked up as an abbreviated postscript.  So in a way, this sucks, because this is a layered and layered and layered story that deserved to be seen to its end… But at the same time… its final (finished) page is so far from where we started and has ‘rewritten’ itself so many times that – and this is amusing in context of the story – perhaps a ‘real’ ending could’ve only have caused Opus to disappoint; to collapse upon itself.  Who can say?  Not me.  AND NOT YOU EITHER, CRAPPER, DESPITE YOUR EXTENSIVE MANGA COLLECTION.

Not a warning, and not a spoiler, but some context: My only exposure to Kon, thus far, is through Paranoia Agent.  My fascination with and entertainment derived from that series was absolutely enough to get me on board with exploring Kon’s other stuff, and Opus happened to be coming out at around that time.  So this is basically to say that I can’t review this from a view of Kon’s full output, only in comparison to PA – with which it definitely shares themes – and with the knowledge that Opus was Satoshi’s last manga work before switching over to film.  Regarding the first: Opus absolutely has a shared obsession with perceptions of reality.  In ‘Agent’ this seemed to be wrapped around larger contemplations on life and death and guilt and cause and effect, filtered through a mystery; in Opus it’s an obsessive study on the creative process, filtered through a winky action tale.  Regarding the latter: one of the failings of the tome is simply a limitation of the form – there are some ideas here that are very hard to illustrate in the way in which Kon envisioned them.  So while I’m not saying the path is as literal as “oh, I can’t illustrate this so I’ll start making movies,” it seems that Kon was interested in pushing the format, and perhaps his brain gears were already shifting toward what he could do with moving pictures.  Who can say?  This time, though, probably some smarter historians could.  Alas, I ain’t a smarter historian, and I’ve got too many comics to read to take the time to go hunt them (or their smart historian words) down.

‘Opus’ starts the reader with the concluding pages of an in-story manga called Resonance, written and drawn by Opus’ main character, Chikara Nagai.  We’re reading the penultimate chapter of a showdown between telepathic cop Satoko, her crazy protector / friend (?) Lin and his flying dog, and the evil mind-controlling villain Masque.  We pull out of the story as Nagai is explaining to his editor some planned changes to the conclusion: Lin will die in battle stopping Masque, which is a slight diversion from a happier, initially planned ending.  Later, Nagai scurries to finish the final pages, and manages to draw the killing blows exchanged between Masque and Lin.  Maybe he drifts off… and then suddenly realizes that the drawing he did is now seemingly a blank page.  Or maybe a hole?  …Into which he falls, and finds himself inside his own story, within those concluding pages.  It’s a crazy ride from here on out, as Nagai tries to wrap his head around what’s happening – certainly it’s a dream – and deals with the fallout from explaining to Satoko and crew that he is, essentially, their God; their creator.  Also: Lin’s pissed he’s going to die, which is why he ‘stole’ that final page, supposedly kicking off this whole ordeal…

Or did he?  It’s hard to say if Kon had the whole thing mapped out, and it would be actual spoilers to explain where the story goes from here.  The initial section of Opus is amazing, though, a full throttle momentum chase with inventive smash-ups between Nagai’s “real” world and the fiction he’d created and well-distilled dialogue pondering the nature of that relationship, with a good dose of humor to keep things from getting too morose.  But again, similar to Agent, once this concept is established, the story seems to tip-toe out into a few different directions – perhaps an unfortunate consequence of the serialized format, as Opus initially appeared as chapters in a magazine – and with those wandering plot tendrils, the momentum slows a bit and the purpose becomes a bit wishy-washy.  A good American comparison is the (fucking awesome) Last Action Hero, which follows the story from a shift into the fiction world and the real world and back and forth, and though the structure makes sense, the ‘fun’ becomes less so when that shifting seems like more of a necessity to wrap things up than an inventive direction into which to point the ol’ plot.  And, back to Opus, as a secondary consequence of the story complications, representing it in a clear way to the reader becomes difficult.  It’s possible my eyes just aren’t used to manga-isms, but there are sequences which I could only grasp contextually versus actually “seeing” it in the art.  Meaning if I was given the page without a story reference, I wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on.  This breaks up the flow later on, which also highlights how the plot has had to fall back on pinning things on a villain (instead of the meta concerns) to keep things going.

But none of this is a killer, nor does it come close to dismissing the intense creativity obviously fueling things, made all the more readable by how fleshed out the core characters feel.  And though turning that “final” page – a cliffhanger – to see the note that says there’s no ending is a huge pants pooper, again, maybe it saved us from a disappointment.  And maybe, interestingly, that external observation is a fitting conclusion to the tale.