Made in Abyss Review

The dissonance is the design. Tsukushi draws his cast as round faced children in a soft, detailed style that recalls European picture books, and then sends them into an abyss where the environment itself inflicts agony on anyone who tries to climb back out, where the creatures are predators of nightmarish invention, and where the story's most famous sequence involves a fate that the reader will not forget.

The world is the star: each layer of the Abyss is a fully realised ecosystem with its own rules, and the relics, the curse and the mystery of the bottom are built with a consistency that rewards close reading. Riko and Reg are likeable, though the cast around them, Nanachi excepted, are thinner than the setting. The sixth layer arc is the series' peak and its most disturbing. The ongoing serialisation is slow. It is not a manga to hand to someone based on the cover, and it is one of the most fully imagined fantasy worlds in the medium.