The Amazing Digital Circus - Review
I received a digital copy from Viz Media via Edelweiss. All reviews are my own.
I recently became a fan of The Amazing Digital Circus by Glitch Productions and Gooseworx after catching a couple of stitched clips on Instagram. See, sometimes social media does have its benefits! After binge-watching the entire show on YouTube, imagine my surprise when I found out that there was going to be a manga series! I immediately requested an ARC, and here are my thoughts:
The Amazing Digital Circus is about a group of gamers who are subconsciously stuck in a virtual reality game with no way out, led by an artificial intelligence ringmaster named Caine, whose erratic behavior starts to go rogue. Any player who puts on the VR headset is transported into the digital circus and immediately forgets their name and pieces of who they are outside the funhouse. To keep them from going crazy with boredom, Caine arranges daily wacky adventures that lead to no real prize. We follow the players as they try to keep their sanity while finding a way out of the circus and back to the real world.
I was so intrigued by this show that I wanted to check out the manga. I figured we would get a continuation of what happened after the final episode of the cult series, or at least see some of the background adventures we missed. Alas, volume one of the manga was the exact repeat of the pilot episode of The Amazing Digital Circus. In volume/episode one, we are introduced to Pomni, who appears in the game during the show’s “introduction”. She is immediately discombobulated, as her memory of her name and identity is wiped clean. She then gets a rundown of the circus and notices an exit door floating in the void. She was warned that there were no exits past the circus grounds, but an unfinished section that Caine created. As she processes, she and another character, Ragatha, come across a previous player, Kaufmo, who “abstracted” and is hell-bent on attacking them. Pomni spends the rest of the comic running and trying to come to terms with her new reality.
I don’t really have many thoughts on the manga's first offerings. It's exactly like the first episode down to the sound effects. I’m more curious about how Sakura will replicate the visual style on paper and in print. With visual specialties like sudden glitches and abstractions, I’m not sure how well it will translate into comic form.
Overall, I rated this book 3-stars. Since I’ve already watched the show, seeing the exact same comic frame for frame wasn’t the highlight of my day. I had hoped to see something we didn’t see in the show, but hey. Who knows. Maybe the series will shape up to be more chaotic down the line. For those who haven’t seen the show, I’d recommend taking a gander through the pages. But if you can, check out the show on YouTube or Netflix. I think this is the one time I can actually say the TV show is better than the book.
The Amazing Digital Circus is available now!
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