The best things I can say about this are the same things I loved from his other series. Hellsing was a glorious monster of a manga, and his art is really something beautiful and grotesque. This carries over nicely into Drifters, too, but whereas I wanted the same mystery and the fantastic over the top reveals associated with some pretty awesome storytelling, we get a real mess of over the top uberviolence permeating a glancing blow of a premise.

Don't get me wrong, the premise might turn out to be something pretty cool if it gets more time than the piss jokes or the language elitism, but it isn't there yet.

The art... is amazing. Everything pops like blood engorged candy in my mouth. The mix of all these historical figures thrown into a land of elves and dragons and magic is too much to take in to care. There's just too little time or development, and where there could be substance, there was instead crude humor.

Believe it or not, I'm still okay with that, because, holy crap, did that WWII pilot just blow the crap out of a fire breathing dragon? Yup. And the art tells a wonderful story of madness and bloodlust that hasn't quite topped Hellsing, but it comes close, and if the story picks up, I'm definitely in this for the long haul.

Fan status will buy this a lot of grace. I hope I'm not disappointed in the end. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is the first volume in the Drifters series. I bought this book.

Story (3/5): The concept here is an interesting one, if not fully fleshed out in this volume. Basically, heroes from human history are thrown into this one fantasy world where they become Drifters. The Drifters fight in a giant battle with a number of magical creatures. It is a cool idea but completely confusing in how it is presented.

Characters (3/5): At first it looks like we are going to get a solid group of characters to interact with but then more and more and more characters are rapidly thrown at the reader. By the end of it all I had no idea who was who or what they were doing or where they were from. It started out with some pretty kick-butt characters but dissolved into complete chaos.

Setting (3/5): Again, this was a neat idea but ended up confusing. This seems to be set on a fantasy world that warrior humans are teleported to. It started out pretty engaging but then dissolved into a mess.

Writing/Drawing Style (3/5): This is all drawn in Hirano’s trademark illustration style (It’s overly characterized and bloody.) which I love. There are lots of pages of battles which were a bit hard to follow because of all the characters thrown in and all the scene changes. I feel like Hirano tried to do too much too fast and kind of lost everything on the way there.

My Summary (3/5): Overall I loved Hellsing and wanted to love this as well but it was just too chaotic and messy. By the end I wasn’t even sure what was happening here or who the main characters were. Ugh, this is a series I am setting aside because it is just so poorly done and I am soooo disappointed. I hope for the sake of fans who continue to read this that future volumes are better. ( )

The artwork was good, but the dialogue was somewhat hard to follow which detracted from the storyline. The story was a bit thin and you're left with more questions than answers at the end ( )