When the law fails to punish criminals, is it really that wrong to take justice into your own hands? It’s the question at the heart of any number of vigilante superhero stories (see also: Punisher, The), and one examined with thoughtful nuance in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s mind-bending thriller Death Note. In his latest manga Code: Breaker, Samurai Deeper Kyo creator Akimine Kamijyo tackles the subject with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

 

Rei Ôgami is a Code: Breaker, a vigilante who punishes murderers, drug peddlers and other baddies by literally using his long arm of the law: by removing the single black leather glove on his left hand, Rei’s touch conjures a blazing blue flame that burns his victims alive while eradicating all evidence of his kills. When his classmate Sakura Sakurakôji witnesses his powers in action, she first pleads with him to stop and then, when that doesn’t work, she threatens to squeal to the police. Rei scoffs, claiming that being a Code: Breaker makes him untouchable by the law, but that doesn’t stop him from ensuring her silence by threatening to incinerate her and anyone else she reveals his secrets to.

 

If Kamijyo played his hand right, Code: Breaker could work as a philosophical battle between Rei and Sakura, between wreaking Biblical vengeance (“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and evil for evil,” as Rei puts it) and preserving the rule of law. But that battle never really takes because in Code: Breaker’s world, there are no shades of gray: in this first volume, Rei kills nothing but the very worst of the worst, cartoonishly evil gangsters who cackle as they stomp on old people and (I shit you not) kick defenseless puppies. In that context, you can’t help but root for him to burn more and more guys alive, Sakura’s protestations be damned.

 

Code: Breaker’s tonal inconsistencies also don’t help its cause. Between Rei’s amateur cremations, the book transforms into a bland high school romantic comedy where every boy chases after Sakura and every girl swoons that Sakura is spending so many private moments with the dreamy new transfer student Rei. The joke is supposed to be that their fellow students are so clueless as to the pair’s true nature—Rei is cold as ice but puts on a warm and friendly show, while the boys all picture Sakura as “Miss delicate, frail and prim, the girl who all the guys ‘want to protect’” when she’s really a super-strong bad-ass with a jones for martial arts manga—but when people are being burned alive, who’s in the mood for laughing?

 

Art-wise, at least, Code: Breaker is solid. Kamijyo’s page compositions are richly varied but easy to read, and he and his assistants (six are credited) rarely skimp on detail or backgrounds (and when they do, it’s usually for the sake of a dramatic close-up, of which there are many). His character designs have a clean, uncluttered, realistic look to them—no costumes or preposterous spiky hairstyles here, just normal-looking kids in school uniforms. To make it easy to pick the leads out from the crowd, Kamijyo makes Rei and Sakura virtually the only characters with black hair, which reveals another shortcoming in his writing: he’s invested so little personality in his side characters that they’re all virtually interchangeable. Most of them aren’t even granted the courtesy of a name.

 

Overall, Code: Breaker isn’t bad so much as a generic, middle-of-the-road book that fails to live up to its potential. It’s hard to say who this book might best appeal to: while its simplified take on its central moral dilemma might land well with the young-to-mid-teen set, the second page features numerous people burning alive, and later pages feature villains being relieved of their ears and fingers in particularly graphic fashion—not exactly kid-friendly. (Del Rey rated the book for ages 16 and up.) It’s also hard to say if it might take off in a better direction in future volumes, with a surprising revelation about Sakura toward the end of the first volume and the promise of a confrontation with police and the arrival of another Code: Breaker in volume two. Based on this volume, though, I’d be inclined to rate the whole series a “skip.” | Jason Green