To say fantasy manga is having a bit of a moment right now would be a bit of an understatement. While there’s no harm in having more fantastical tales about witches, elves, and dungeon crawlers, sometimes you need a speculative sci-fi manga to spice things up. Viz Media’s Lynx aims to fill that void with a cyberpunk tale about a no-nonsense detective and her talking cat sidekick.
Lynx, written by Samuel Sattin (Wolf Walkers) and illustrated by tokitokoro (Jeff The Land Shark), is a neo-noir mystery thriller whose vibes are in a similar register to Blade Runner, with a touch of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto.
Its official plot synopsis is as follows:
Lynx Takuma is standing still. A bio-enhanced detective, Lynx knows what she’s meant to do, keeping the peace alongside her reckless-but-trusty partner Task and her crime-fighting, talking cat Skua in one of the last cities after climate disaster. But ever since Simone… Well, she’s not thinking about Simone. Or about anything beyond the next day, and the next, and the next… Until she sees something impossible—something that looks like an angel…
If the talking cat and forlorn cyber detective duo with some Sapphic baggage piqued your interest, io9 has an exclusive preview excerpt from Lynx for you to check out and see how their dynamic works in action.
In tandem with an exclusive excerpt, io9 also received an advance copy of its first volume from Viz Media, which we read and have a brief review of what we liked and what left us wanting more. Whenever one picks up a new sci-fi anything, odds are you’ll be front-loaded with world-building with tons of lingo and terminology delivered in cluttered ways before you get a real sense of its characters as characters rather than walking exposition dumps. That’s not the case with Lynx. Its first volume drops readers directly into its post-apocalyptic city of New Borealis as if it’s any other day in Lynx’s life.
It takes about halfway through reading the first volume of Lynx for it to highlight what makes its brand of sci-fi singular. In contrast to other sci-fi series that draw a line early about where their stories are going, Lynx takes its time establishing a sense of normalcy in its world before kicking it off its axis. Along the way, readers are treated to naturalistic dialogue among Lynx, her overbearing boss, her sassy cat sidekick, and her doleful inner monologue as she makes sense of her past and present. In that way, reading Lynx feels less like taking out a notepad and jotting down terms for a pop quiz and more like playing the role of an anthropologist wiping away the dust from topics Lynx no longer has a bone to pick with and assembling the full picture of the world she inhabits in real time.
The picture I got was that Lynx is a superpowered detective with tokusatsu-leaning power-ups, sure. But in actuality, she’s begrudgingly a lapdog to her higher-ups in the bootheel of the New Borealis nobility who delight in waving the threat of lobotomizing her through her cybernetic enhancements should she make any wrong moves that threaten that social hierarchy. Put that in the mix with Lynx’s troubles at home as the guardian of a kid she has a strained relationship with (to put it lightly) and her willfully avoidant baggage with her deceased lover, and you’ve got the perfect cocktail for a damaged detective worth rooting for, if not uncovering how far her damage goes and whether she can overcome it while juggling all her other burdens running amok in the FUBAR neo-noir metropolis.
The one gripe I had from reading the first volume was its manga panel layout. Although it uses a Western comic’s left-to-right reading format compared to manga’s right-to-left layout, my issue was less about how I was flipping through the pages. In fact, it was a pretty easy adjustment to follow the flow of dialogue, which tokitokoro lays out in dynamic ways, adding some zhuzh to otherwise bog-standard visuals of people talking in a room. Its action sequences, however, were a little hard to follow.
I’d routinely have to reread a page to make sense of the flow of what was happening in fights, which wasn’t helped by radial lines of motion having a similar line depth as character outlines and its dynamic panel boxes breaking a sense of where my eyes should flow between pages to accentuate the movement and sense of space of where everyone is in their bouts of superpowered fisticuffs. It’s a small nitpick in a vacuum, made all the more cup-half-full by the manga’s paneling absolutely singing in scene-setting and dialogue within its politically rich world, showcasing the atmosphere and dramatic page-turn reveals. It’s just a bit of a shame that the sci-fi action between its cybernetically enhanced detectives battling hulking angels routinely left a bit to be desired in how it was all laid out.
That being said, Lynx is a promising sci-fi read, not just in how it puts puzzle pieces together into a new cyberpunk mystery for readers to get into. Its humble beginnings as part of Viz Media’s originals set an exciting precedent for other aspiring mangaka to follow suit with their one-shots getting picked up as original series too. With any luck, fans will get to see how the mystery unfolds in Lynx, both in future volumes and in a film or TV show, now that Viz Media hasteamed up with The Gotham Group to create projects based on its original IP. But for the time being, the note that the final chapter of Lynx‘s first volume left us on has us at the edge of our seats, wondering where its titular heroine’s battle with monstrous angels and the ghost of her past lover will land her and her sassy talking cat.
Lynx is available for pre-order now and releases on August 11.
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