The best way to describe the vibe of Eniale & Dewiela is to think Good Omens… if Aziraphale and Crowley were manga girls.
Between her outstanding cover art for Marvel and DC and her Eisner Award-winning fantasy manga Witch Hat Atelier, Kamome Shirahama has become widely recognized as one of the best artists working in comics today. Yen Press is now publishing her first manga series, Eniale & Dewiela, in English. This wacky angel-and-demon buddy comedy is very different in both plot and tone from Witch Hat Atelier, but it’s a fun read in its own right and the art is as gorgeous as you’d expect from Shirahama.
The best way to describe the vibe of Eniale & Dewiela is to think Good Omens if Aziraphale and Crowley were manga girls. Eniale’s an angel, Dewiela a demon, and while they might disagree on such issues as, say, whether it’s OK to eat people’s souls, a shared love of fashion and the common goal of stopping a constant series of near-apocalypses (often of their own causing) have brought together these natural enemies into something of a friendship. They travel the world, from New York to Paris to Darvaza, Turkmenistan, on a series of comedic adventures with elements of satire and an irreverent mythology-fusing approach to religion.
As of the first volume, each chapter basically stands on its own. What makes these episodic stories pop is just how much they escalate. A quest to find a lost baby’s mom leads to fighter pilots taking on a giant poodle and resolves in a raunchy manner straight out of Greek mythology. A spa day builds to climate disasters, rising zombies and a fight with a disturbingly buff parrot demon. Sometimes Shirahama works in a bit of heart alongside the comedy, as in the story of a girl praying for her mother’s health amidst a failing insurance system, but laughs take precedence over anything else.
Well, almost anything else, because while Eniale & Dewiela is funny, it’s even more visually beautiful. This was Shirahama’s first manga series, but it’s as artistically stunning as anything she’s drawn since. The beauty contributes to the sense of epic scale, which in turn makes the silliness all the more effective. The title characters are both very attractively designed, and when they’re shown in various fan service-y outfits or lack thereof, the effect is both more tasteful and more genuinely sexy than the mountains of cruder fan service manga out there.