Hellsing was not my first choice on the list of titles I plan to read. In fact, it was not my first choice on the list of titles I plan to read when it was first released in 1997 in Japanese and in 2003 in English, because I am someone who tries to steer clear of titles with a lot of gore since they aren’t really my thing. I was shocked the first time I saw the Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuiokuhen OVA because the amount of violence was so very different from what was shown in the TV series (for obvious reasons), but now that I have studied the Bakumatsu, I understand that that is just how things were in that period and it’s a wonderful OVA with a
great story so it’s not like it was playing up the gore to be cool. The second reason I wasn’t too interested in Hellsing when it was first released was because even though I am interested in supernatural things such as spirits, I was never into vampires, and in this decade vampires have been so romanticized that it’s difficult for me to find them terrifying anymore.
Until I read Hellsing.
Anyone who tells you that Hellsing isn’t badass is lying. No, neither the plot nor the gore might appeal to everyone, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a character in this series that isn’t cool. Is the plot offensive? Perhaps. But that’s one of the things that I like about this series. Kouta Hirano isn’t afraid to write about whatever he darn well wants to write about. What I find to be even more interesting is that this series features conflicts between Western religions from a Japanese point-of-view. It’s not going to be the most accurate portrayal of these religions but, with the absence of Japanese characters, it’s refreshing to
see these conflicts without the bias because the author cannot incorporate the “them and us” mentality that such characters often had when it comes to foreign characters. The “them and us” is still there but in this series it is much less of a turn-off to a foreign reader.
The series was following the “monster-of-the-week” pattern that is found more often in shounen than in seinen but the first thing you learn as a reader of boys’ Japanese comics is that many comics in this demographic do start out this way. And my sentiments were right, because as of Volume 3 and 4, it looks like the real antagonists are here: the Millennium. The Millennium is actually the main reason I decided to look at this series in the first place because I am a big-time history enthusiast (and before anyone decides to make assumptions about me for my following comments, because the Internet is a terrible place to make assumptions, I am Black and Asian) and have recently become interested in Nazi Germany because of my interest with Josef Mengele who, despite his twisted idea of “science”, is really quite the character. The Nazis in the Millennium are fictional but I look forward to seeing what Kouta Hirano has these Nazis do in a post-World War II world.
