Soul Beat, Volume 1

The Devil better watch out because Soul is on the prowl, and not even the Devil can survive that 80s funk. Humour, battles - personal and physical and lots of ‘Soul’ is to be found within the comic’s covers. Only slight disappointment the comic is black and white, I was looking forward to some 80s colours. Thank you to Quarto Publishing Group - Rockport Publishing and NetGalley for the comic ARC. The views expressed are all mine, freely given.

This comic is everything you want in a manga, as long as you’re comfy with Christian content. By that, I mean a hot brooding devil - the necessities. Hundreds of years ago, evil won and sinners have overtaken the earth. Our hero, Dante, a righteous 70’s-styled local boxer, is told this by his aging friend, Ben, as he passes on an ancient Relic. Dante gains heavenly powers and decides to save his friend’s soul by taking out the devil - and any demon who gets in his way. I absolutely loved this book. It ticked every box at exactly the right time for the “formula” of this type of manga without feeling tired and overdone. Character design was fun and filled with variety, tethered to the real world in most ways but still filled with the over the top design often found in manga like giant weapons or unrealistic costumes. I can not wait for the next installment!

Sensitivity Reader Comment for Author/Publisher: I love religious content but hadn’t expected it in this book (I just read Soul like Black culture and completely missed the intended double entendre, which I loved as soon as it finally hit me lol) and with the way the media is right now towards queer people, my radar was on high alert. If something Christian doesn’t immediately recognize itself as queer friendly nowadays, I’m unfortunately a little wary. This book had two points that had the tiniest inkling of probably unintentional homophobia that I probably only even noticed because of that high alert and the premise of “sinners have overtaken the earth”. At one point our main character refers to the group of baddies as boyfriends, using it as an insult. By it being the main character who is quite literally the last bastion of good in this book, that implies it is morally good to use gay as an insult. At another point later on, a demon states that no one can resist her, woman or man. As this is the only queer representation (is it even that?) in the book, and it’s a demon, this implies that queerness is demonic (Yes, there’s also more than two genders, but let’s give writers a lil slack somewhere people). I genuinely don’t think the author was trying to put any anti-queer messaging in here, I imagine it’d have been a lot more present if so. I freaking loved this manga, seriously. Like this is me being as nitpicky about it as I could possibly be. But it’s dangerous out there for the community right now, so even the little things sting. If there’s not intent to include the queer community in the “sinners have overtaken the earth”, I’d love to see the boyfriends line changed and a clearly ‘good’ character who’s queer added, ideally early on. If Asa and Dante aren’t meant to be a will they/won’t they (because they aren’t siblings, right?) down the line, Asa would be an awesome queer character. As long as there’s morally good people who are queer, villains can also be queer without implying it’s evil.