After reading Gestalt — a fantasy-adventure about a priest, a mute slave girl, an elf, and a psychic who are seeking a demon so terrible he goes only by the name “G” — I can’t decide if Yun Kouga is incredibly efficient or exceptionally lazy. To wit: the main narrative is frequently punctuated with callouts that identify characters and explain spells in the manner of a Magic card. One might interpret these digressions as an expedient way to help readers understand what’s happening, but I was more inclined to view them as a cop-out, as Kouga never develops her characters beyond what’s spelled out in these lists. (No pun intended.) Worse still, these callouts give the illusion that Kouga’s story is complex and carefully plotted when, in fact, Gestalt reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, a loose aggregation of scenes with no organic connection to one another.

If the art were exceptionally beautiful, I might be able to overlook such narrative deficiencies. It isn’t. Kouga’s male and female characters are nearly impossible to distinguish from one another, as everyone has long manes of hair, delicate facial features, and a fondness for earrings. To some extent, this ambiguity is deliberate: at least one character’s gender hadn’t been firmly established by the end of volume one. But too often, I was left scratching my head, trying to figure out who was doing what to whom. Kouga’s fondness for busy screentone patterns adds another distracting element to the layout, further obscuring the characters’ identities and making it awfully hard to make sense of the action.

It’s a shame that Gestalt is so poorly executed, as its weird, gender-bending story has the potential to be compelling: think Andromeda Stories, Moon Child, or NG Life. Instead, Gestalt comes across as a Heavy Metal cover come to life, a collection of scantily-clad babes and men in capes battling monsters… and other scantily-clad babes. Strictly for the fantasy-fanservice crowd.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

GESTALT, VOL. 1 • BY YUN KOUGA • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)