Fullmetal Alchemist

Title:  Fullmetal Alchemist
Japanese Title:  Hagane no Renkenjutsushi
Mangaka:  Hiromu Arakawa
Length:  27 Volumes (Completed)
English Translation?  Yes.  All released by Viz Media.
Demo/Genre:  Shounen/Fantasy/Adventure/Action/Comedy

How did I find out about it?  I caught a couple of episodes of Brotherhood on Adult Swim and decided that I really needed to read it.

At a very young age, brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric attempted the forbidden act of human transmutation to try to bring their dead mother back to life.  The transmutation rebounded, and Alphonse lost his entire body, and Edward lost first his leg, and then an arm when he transmuted his brother's soul to a suit of armor.  Now the two of them are determined to find a way to restore their bodies.  Their research has led them to a single possibility:  the philosopher's stone.  However, this extraordinary alchemical stone is only a legend and any information on its true properties and creation are heavily guarded.  Their search for a philosopher's stone unveils a plot that involves their entire nation.

Arakawa-sensei's art is very simple, but very effective.  She draws action very well, and I love her character designs.  Even in her latest series, I love the art.  It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's very functional and appealing (to me, at least).

The plot and the characters are where this series really stood out to me.  This is another series that is definitely in my top five favorites.  First off, I love that it doesn't follow the typical shounen formula.  Our heroes don't constantly level up to ridiculous levels of strength, gaining more and more outrageous skills.  Ed pretty much has the same set of skills at the end that he did in the beginning.  Instead, FMA focuses more on the actual plot at hand.  Rather than a story told through a few different story arcs, FMA consists of one-single arc.  Each chapter in the entire series is a single piece of that story.  That's something else that I loved about it.  I would also count FMA as one of the funniest manga I've ever read.  There were countless times that I was laughing out loud.  Despite that, this series also takes a turn for the incredibly dark as it explores moral themes such as the value of a human life, betrayal, and sacrifice.

I love the cast of FMA.  Ed and Al were both great protagonists and were two of my favorite characters in the series.  That being said, there were still a great deal of supporting characters that stood out.  My absolute favorite character in the series was Roy Mustang.  He was a badass if there ever was a badass.  Okay, so he might have a little competition from Kakashi Hatake in Naruto, but still, Roy is awesome.  One of the things I found most fascinating about him was his relationship with his lieutenant, Riza Hawkeye, who was another favorite of mine.  There is no romantic relationship between the two of them (at least, not one mentioned.  I bet somewhere down the road they end up together though.  Just speculating.), but they have a complete trust in one another as comrades.  They've been through a war together, and either one of them would (and does) put their life on the line for the other.  Actually, while I'm mentioning Hawkeye, let me go ahead and say that FMA had a stellar female cast, which is fairly rare for a shounen.  I don't know if that's because the mangaka is a woman who understands women, but no matter what, I was very impressed by all the X chromosomes present.  Hawkeye was serious and to the point.  Olivier Armstrong was cold and militant (very appropriate for a hardened general).  When asked just who the hell she was by whomever was on the receiving end of her ass-kicking, Izumi Curtis would respond with a yell, "I'M A HOUSEWIFE."  Lan Fan ripped her own freakin' arm off to throw someone off the trail of the man she had sworn her life to protect.  Even the young May Ling was a little badass.  Winry, Ed's love interest, may not have been an alchemist or in the military, but she was still far from a dainty character.  I loved the fact that she was a gearhead and never hesitated to call Ed out on his shit.  I know I sound like a raging feminist here, but I just wanted to say that I was very impressed by these characters.  It's rare to see the girls get so much recognition in a shounen.

Not that the boys were lacking.  Basically, there were no characters in this series that I disliked.  As I mentioned above, I loved Ed, Al, and Roy.  Olivier Armstrong's brother Alex was a favorite with his surprisingly gentle and...sparkly...personality.  I loved Ling/Greed.  No matter whose personality was foremost in that duo, he stole the scenes he was in.  Also, I loved the main villain.  Not in a "favorite character" kind of way, but more in a "epically awesome" kind of way.  I think I may have mentioned in a review already that good manga villains typically fall into one of two categories:  1) conflicted, with human motives and good intentions, or 2) epically evil, with carefully laid plans that are usually on a ridiculously huge scale.  This villain falls into the second category.  He laid his plan centuries ago and has been patiently setting the stage ever since.  Very nice.

I chose the above picture because I remember thinking when I came to that page, "Whoa.  When did Ed get taller than Winry?"  If you haven't read the series, Ed is pretty short, and he's very sensitive about it.  He starts off being a little shorter than Winry.  I love it when mangaka show their characters growing over time.  Fruits Basket was good about that, too.  I guess it just makes the story feel a little more real to see signs of the characters aging?

This is another series where I could probably ramble all day, but I'll stop there.  Needless to stay, I loved just about every aspect of this manga.  Despite how much I loved it, I actually haven't collected a single volume, and if I ever do, it'll be quite a while from now.  Instead, I opted to buy the entire anime.  The second one.  See, the first anime adaptation took the characters and the basic premise, but ran in its own direction, one completely different from the one that played out in the manga.  Then, some years later, a second adaptation was made, and this one (called Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in NA) follows the manga to the T.  The voice acting is some of the best I've heard in English.  The soundtrack is amazing.  It's probably my absolute favorite anime.  I'm so glad I bought it!  Because I have the anime, I have been slow to commit to purchasing the manga.  Like I said, Brotherhood follows it almost exactly (except for the first couple of episodes), so it almost seems pointless to buy 27 volumes of the same story.  At least for now, when I have so many other stories to collect, I won't be buying this manga.