MARS

MARS

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
15
RELEASE
December 13, 2000
CHAPTERS
41

DESCRIPTION

Kira, a shy high school student, lives only for her art. Rei, an arrogant, rebellious and violent playboy, wears his delinquency like a badge of honor. They are exact opposites in every way, but when Kira sees Rei kissing a statue of Mars, she overcomes her fears and asks him to model for her. And, to everyone's surprise, Rei agrees.

(Source: Tokyopop)

CAST

Rei Kashino
Kira Aso
Harumi Sugihara
Sei Kashino
Tatsuya Kida
Masao Kirishima
Shiori Sakurazawa
Takayuki Kashino
Kurasawa
Shoko Kashino
Akihiko Kashino

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO MARS

Cover Art for MARS Gaiden: Namae no Nai Uma

MANGA DramaMARS Gaiden: Namae no Nai Uma

REVIEWS

BloomReviews
97/100
Mars finds away to openly discuss many difficult issues in a captivating fashion.
After a chance meeting at a park, the reckless motorcycle racer Rei becomes drawn to the closed-off artist Kira. He finds out the next day that they're actually in the same class in high school and makes it a point to get close to her no matter how much she tries to push everyone else away. These star-crossed lovers come together to heal each other's deep wounds in a story packed full of drama, tragedy, and romance. From the mystery surrounding the death of Rei's twin brother to the twisted minds of students and adults that they meet, Mars finds away to openly discuss many difficult issues in a captivating fashion.

There's so much I want to talk about when it comes to this manga. I'm kind of disappointed I never picked this up until after it went out of print as it's quickly become one of my favorites. Mars obviously isn't perfect, and there's many scenes which I consider a product of the time it was written. But there are also a lot of things it does really well like: the discussion of mental illness in Japan (a place well-known to be very low ranking in that area), the meaning of family, youth's place and power in society, and the sacrifices you sometimes have to make for the people you love. All of this is wrapped up in a dazzling art style and panel layout that gives great emphasis to dramatic moments where it is needed the most.

I think the first thing I noticed about Mars was the art style. It simply captivated me with its wispy lines that added a sense of delicacy to the characters who were themselves delicate in their own ways, and its ability to change style to accommodate those tense and fast-paced moments on the race track with stunning detail and shading. Fuyumi Soryo knows how to balance the level of detail she puts into each panel to provide the best amount of impact for each scene. Her motorcycle racing scenes provide a tense contrast to the character's everyday moments to the point that you can feel the suspense surrounding the race just from the art. Not to mention that Soryo has a doubly hard time because Kira is an artist, so the look of her drawings had to be in some way different from the rest of the art of the manga itself. I definitely think she pulls this off beautifully. Even the basic composition of the panels lends to this overall aesthetic. There are many instances where the character's faces will fade into the background, leaving their eyes gazing over a scene. At other moments, full page splashes or double page spreads will draw our eyes and attention to moments of drama for the optimum emphasis. I think Soryo might be one of the few manga artists I've seen use full pages and spreads for her scenes almost to excess. Perhaps that is a product of the times with rising publishing costs forcing the cutting back of these moments, but it's very interesting nonetheless.
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Gummyfail
100/100
He picks her up, spinning. They're smiling. They’re yelling: LET IT ROT! I LOVE YOU!! IT’S DEAD ANYWAY!
Mars gives you its thesis statement by volume 2.

My sister dropped out of highschool when she was sixteen. My mother was desperate to stop her from throwing away her life, but she didn’t know how to handle this. My father (my sister’s step-father) was in jail for distribution. Mama used a second mortgage to supplement her income from the nursing home. She was going to night classes to get her nursing degree. I was in first grade and obviously got some brain stuff about it and the foreclosure that happened four years later, but that doesnt have much to do with Mars. Let me rewind back to my Sister and Mama.

Mama felt that my Sister was throwing away her life by dropping out of school. Their arguments escalated to the point of my Sister leaving to live with a drug peddler that gave me his xbox (he was pretty nice ig). It was very dramatic and something I felt was just my sister’s recklessness for a long time. To finally draw the line, Mars is about teenagers ‘throwing their lives away’. By ‘throwing their lives away’ I mean Mars is about wounded children clinging to whatever they could trust. Why would you come to a school where the teachers disrespect you? Why would you live with a father that hurts you when you could live in squalor with someone who loves you? When you can’t imagine your future, it is exceedingly hard to convince yourself to invest in it. Adults that didn’t suffer like you will dismiss the trauma even if they don’t mean to. The adults that did could resent you as frequently as they try to extend help. What if you fall in love with someone that’s aching for the same stability as you? Will you maintain healthy boundaries? Maybe, but you can’t even imagine being alive in three years. Mars is written for, or at least with profound sympathy for girls like my sister, and the fuck-up lovers they lean on.

Anything past this point could be a spoiler

Mars is weird and loud and violent. Kira, in part, is the quiet girl that firmly anchors the manga in its shoujo demographic. She gets the boisterous popular boy’s attention, because he notices her hidden qualities. Rei (the boy) unbalances her emotionally and she falls in love. He reciprocates and then the first 2 of 15 volumes are over. Mars may be easy to reduce to some fairly common romance structures, but it distinguishes itself through its emotional volatility and its complex visual composition. Mars’s understanding of violence is that of arrhythmia and the disruption of patterns. This shows not only in Mar’s spontaneity, but in the paneling itself.

Souryou Fuyumi’s style is somewhat extreme. She’s perfectly fine sacrificing legibility for emotional effect and trusts the reader to sort out their own confusion about the sequence of events. Her experimentation focuses on techniques unique to comics. Her line art is mostly spare, but her use of screen tones is aggressively detailed. Her composition relies on the lines of characters and objects to interact noticeably with the lines of the panels themselves, and her sfx will stretch and distort, reaching across panels to signify motion or exaggerate the form and position of objects/people. I think this page might be a good way to explain what I mean:

This is not to say that she’s the only one that does all of these techniques, but she foregrounds them so aggressively and uses them so unconventionally that it feels like entirely different grammars than most manga and comics use. Its easy to see something this baroque losing sight of its core narrative for the sake of stylistic experimentation, but Mars’s broken, sometimes disorienting pages exist for the same reason so many war painters turn away from realism. Mars understands that honest depictions of violence should be necessarily unpleasant. It also understands that indulgent anatomical detail isn’t the only way to be honest about its violence.

Mars may feel like a teen drama directed by Martin Scorcese at times, but its core is still that warm, uneven shoujo romance. No matter how violent the story gets, everything circles back to Kira and Rei’s love. It's one that is full of codependency and insecurity, but neither Mars nor its characters are under the illusion that their attachments are strictly healthy. This bright, obsessive love is the only armor these children have and you don’t have to approve of their decisions to root for their happiness.

Ultimately, Mars is everything scary about shoujo and those things are important.

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RoseFaerie
95/100
A psychological shoujo that successfully explores the dark side of the human experience.
Mars is a classic shoujo manga from the 90's, which still has a hold on people. It's highly sought after by shoujo fans and manga collectors, due to being a beloved but out of print title. I remembered hearing about it in my search for interesting looking shoujo manga when I was younger, though I'm glad that it being out of print kept me from buying it, since I was not mature enough to read it at that point in time. Now that I'm much older and wiser, I have gotten to experience this classic for myself, and I'm glad to see that it's worth the praise shoujo fans give it. It's thematically rich, very dark, and it features one of my favorite tropes: traumatized individuals coming together to form healthy relationships.

Kira keeps to herself and doesn't want to make waves. All she wants and all she needs is her art. It's her salvation. But one day she crosses paths with Rei. He's everything you would imagine a rebellious bad boy to be, he's got a motorcycle, playboy tendencies, and he's a bit of a delinquent. He's everything Kira isn't, and his charisma has the whole school enthralled. But when Kira sees him kissing a statue of Mars, something awakens in her, and she asks Rei to be her artistic model. Despite not liking people capturing his likeness, Rei surprisingly agrees, and thus begins their relationship. However, in order to stay together, the two must confront their personal demons...

Mars is a story that revolves around the darker aspects of the human condition. Obsession, sociopathy, rage, violence, fear, hatred, guilt, spite, and vengeance. Even people who appear to be kind and pure hearted have something lurking within them. This is also a story of trauma, as both characters experience PTSD from harrowing past experiences, making things difficult for them. This story may begin as a romance drama between the "bad boy" and "good girl", but it evolves into something quite different.

Rei is charming and charismatic. He may be a delinquent and a rebel, but he's friendly and headstrong. He deeply cares about Kira, and he wants to protect her. He's passionate about riding motorcycles and winning races, even if it costs him his life, the way it did for many others before him. Suicide and death are a tricky subject for him, since his twin brother committed suicide a few years back, and Rei perpetually blames himself for driving his brother over the edge. He even believes that he killed his brother and that his father hates him for it. However, I'll note that he's an unreliable narrator in his own past. His twisted family life is blocked from his memories, and what he remembers might not be the truth. To grapple with all these feelings and trauma that he doesn't understand, Rei rebels. He's a messy person with more than his share of problems. He's not one of those guys who looks scary but is just a kindhearted soul. Rei is dangerous, and he's been aggressive ever since he was a child. He doubts his own humanity, and he knows that he's capable of horrible acts including murder.

The manga mostly focuses on Rei and his problems with his family, as well as his inner turmoil involving his darker capabilities. This internal conflict is heightened with the inclusion of Masao Kirishima. Masao seems like a cute and innocent bisexual boy with a harmless crush on Rei, but in reality, he very clearly has anti-social personality disorder and isn't just willing to kill, but he has killed before. (I will note that having the one not straight character as a soulless villain did not age well, but at least the mangaka wrote him as a bi character who happens to be evil instead of a character who's evil because he's bi. There's also a trans character who's positively portrayed, but she also flashes everyone, so... Yeah, those parts did not age well.) I will describe Masao as a soulless evil bitch. He literally pushes a bunch of people down an escalator and laughs about it. He sees something similar between himself and Rei, due to having witnessed Rei's violent tendencies in the past, and he wants to eliminate Kira because she is what makes him human. He's obsessed with Rei and wants him to become a sociopath, just like him.

I will say that Masao was kind of ridiculous at some points since he's so evil it can be comical. The part where he's fake crying to make people believe he actually feels human emotions kind of cracked me up, even though I shouldn't have been laughing. I do think his inclusion at the end felt shoehorned in, though it also felt like without bringing him back there wouldn't be any proper closer or resolution with his character. The best way to have dealt with him would have been to have some sort of confrontation when they put him in the mental hospital, and to have them see him in the mental hospital but bringing him back was just too much. I liked the part where Rei decided between Sei and Kira at the end, but they could have done something else other than bring back Masao... I do think his introduction and inclusion really help to set the stage and introduce key themes for when Rei's family comes into the picture at the end.

I also thought the implications that there were some sort of hereditary mental illnesses in Rei's family was interesting, and that's also paired with the horrible trauma and unhealthy parenting during his formative years. I wonder if that's why he and Sei were so messy and twisted. I unfortunately cannot talk about their parents without going into spoiler territory, but it's no wonder that the twins were unstable after what happened to them.

Kira's storyline is simpler, but it's by no means less compelling. Her trauma comes from her father's death and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her step-father. Her journey is all about intimacy, fear, and her hatred of her abuser. There are hints that Kira was physically or sexually abused since the beginning, and she has a challenging time forming friendships, as she's withdrawn into herself. She can barely physically touch Rei, and he's the person she loves the most, as well as the person who's protected her when she most needs it. When her step-father comes back into her life after her mother can no longer support her, she's afraid, but she feels obligated to live with him for her mother's sake. It's interesting how, despite his apologies, he constantly downplays her trauma from his actions and constantly pushes her boundaries, trying to control her when he has no place to. Kira going back to her step-father was what pushed them apart, but it was also what brought them closer together. Kira's monster is her trauma and desire for her step-father to die. It's only after she leaves the situation and stays with Rei is she able to become intimate with him and confront her step-father.

I was actually worried that Kira going back to her step-father would lead to a redemption arc for him, but it never does. The narrative never pushes Kira to forgive him or get over her trauma so that she can have a happy family life with him. She never forgives him or even respects him, and she wants to push through her trauma so she can separate Rei, who loves her, from her step-father who took advantage of her vulnerability.

While the story could be melodramatic with its twisted characters, I found it to be very satisfying and complex, with a lot to say. However, some of the stuff felt shoehorned in, like randomly pairing off Kira and Rei's best friends, despite them showing no interest in each other for most of the manga. In general, I felt like Harumi, Kira's friend was poorly handled in general, since she went from bullying Kira to being her best friend very quickly.

However, the core relationship is strong. Rei and Kira do so much for each other, acting as each other's support systems. Kira is there when Rei confronts his father and the truth about his mother and brother, as well as Masao. And Rei is there when Kira needs to get away from her former abuser. There's just something about them that makes it so easy to believe that they're in love, and I adored their relationship and how realistic it felt.

The art is gorgeous. I could look at it for hours. It's so elegant and emotionally evocative, all while being extremely simple and minimalistic overall. Something about the simplicity makes it more stylish. Nothing feels unnecessary and out of place. The outfits and hairstyles are simple, and yet they seem like something stylish but comfortable you'd see an average high schooler wear. There's something about the way it looks that's just magical for me. I would incorporate it into a layout sometime.

It can be overly dramatic at times and had a few parts that didn't age well, but I think its overall themes and approaches to mental health and trauma hold up spectacularly. I can understand why this is such a beloved classic, and why so many people appreciate this as an example of dark shoujo. I'd just advise that you check the trigger warnings beforehand, just because this series is extremely heavy. However, if you can handle it, it's beautiful.
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