Comic Review: RWBY – The Official Manga, Vol 1

We’re back with yet another RWBY based manga adaptation, but instead of expanding on the color trailers or making character focused anthologies, this time we have a full blown retelling of the series. Or rather, just the first two seasons, since apparently Japan lost interest after the fourth season when the series left Beacon. But here we are with RWBY: The OFFICIAL Manga, which takes the story from Volumes 1 and 2 and hands it to someone with writing experience to see how that goes. I’ve actually been quite excited for this adaptation since it was announced a couple years ago, partly due to the fact that I have a fondness for adaptations that like to tweak and play around with the story they’re given while keeping the bones of the plot intact. Obviously that is not a guarantee for something good and sometimes things can go horribly wrong, but other times you can get extra scenes with characters who may have gotten less time in the original work or ways to streamline or add connective tissue to things that didn’t quite add up before. And ultimately, I’m of the mind that an adaptation should be encouraged to be different than its source, not exactly the same.

If you’re picking this up, you probably don’t need me to tell you the plot of the series itself (and if you do, just look it up on Youtube for free), so this review will mainly be about how this works as an adaptation. It’s common knowledge that the beginnings of the series were a learning curve for Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross as writers, as well as the late creator Monty Oum, in putting together a functioning story, and it shows. Volume 1 may be fondly remembered by fans of the show, but calling it a total structural mess would be an understatement. It started fine with the introductions to the core cast and the Initiation Test, but then floundered around with no clear focus until its first season finale. The Official Manga has the benefit of hindsight in that regard, knowing what the intent for certain scenes was to better frame them, which characters are well liked and giving them more to do, and having a heads up on which episodes are almost universally loathed and cutting them out entirely (coughcoughJAUNDICEcough).

Though in that sense, this first volume is actually the most intact of the three (kind of surprised they didn’t spring for four, but okay), covering the first eight episodes up until the end of initiation. The story of those episodes, how the main four girls meet and form the titular Team RWBY, is more or less the same as you would see in the series itself, just in black and white and not animated. The notable changes, then, are in slight tweaks to characterization. Most notably, Ruby Rose gets some modifications to her personality, giving her a more solid ethos about being a Huntress (something you can’t say she had in the show at that point) and more willing to stand up for herself, which adds a bit more flavor to scenes she’s in with other characters. It also touches up scenes from these episodes to ironically be more cinematic, making me wish that these had been the way they’d been storyboarded to begin with. Not something that Rooster Teeth was really capable of at the time, mind you, but it makes me think about what could have been.

It feels a bit weird to say this, but this manga might be the superior version of RWBY Volume 1, if only for how much more polish and thought it had put in it (as well as what they cut out, but more on that next time). We’re unlikely to get an animated redo of those early seasons anytime soon, despite how poorly they’ve aged, but this is probably the next best thing. How this covers Volume 2 is decidedly more of a mixed bag for reasons to get into in the next book, which starts adapting that, but I would definitely say Volume 1 benefitted greatly from being retold in this way. If you’re a fan of the series overall, you’re probably already ordering this now if you don’t have it already, but it may also be a good gateway for newbies who might be turned away by how rough that first season was.