Manga Review: Attack on Titan Vols. 1 & 2 by Hajime Isayama
One hundred years ago, humanity lost its war with the Titans. The gigantic humanoid anthropophages were just too powerful and numerous. What remained of the human race withdrew into a city-state guarded by three circles of fifty-meter tall walls. The Titans found these walls too sturdy to destroy, so there has been peace within the city. Everyone now alive has grown up within the shelter, only the bravest venturing outside the walls, usually to their deaths.
It’s understandable that the general public attitude is that it’s best to get along in the safety of the walls, the higher and thicker the walls the better, and just leave the dangerous outside world alone. But Eren Yeager is not like most of his contemporaries. He feels stifled knowing there’s a wider world available, and doesn’t want to be caged. And since he’s a loudmouthed kid with little tact, he’s made himself unpopular. Only his friends Mikasa and Armin will stick by him.
Eren wants to join the Survey Corps, who go outside the walls to scout the surrounding territory and when possible kill or study the Titans. This despite their horrific casualty rate and seldom actually accomplishing anything.
Then one day, the fifty-meter Wall Maria is overlooked by an unprecedented sixty-meter tall being who will become known as the Colossus Titan, and the wall is breached. The Titans swarm in and start eating people. The garrison troops, including the drunken Hannes, are no match for the monsters. Eren’s house is flattened and his mother eaten before his eyes.
Now humanity has to shrink within the second line of defense, Wall Rose, abandoning those the remaining land cannot sustain. Eren, now bent on revenge against the Titans, joins the military alongside his friends.
This action sci-fi manga ran from 2009-2021, and spawned an anime adaptation (with a kickass theme song.)
Volume 1’s starting chapter is set just before the attack, giving us a glimpse of normal life within the walls. Eren is a loudmouth; his adoptive sister Mikasa is quieter but a better fighter, and their friend Armin is a budding intellectual. Eren’s mother is dead set against him joining the Survey Corps for reasons of safety; his father, Dr. Yeager, seems less opposed, but is hiding a secret in the basement. He’s going off to another village. The chapter ends with the first appearance of the Colossal Titan.
Subsequent chapters bounce back and forth between the events of that day and five years later, when Eren, Mikasa and Armin complete their military training. Eren’s mother is eaten, along with many other people, and his father goes missing, presumed dead.
Mikasa is top graduate of the training program, though Eren also places in the top ten. Most of these ten will be important characters going forward. Being in the top ten is important, as only the best and brightest can choose to join the prestigious Military Police Brigade, who serve the King directly. Jean Kerstein is looking forward to this, as the MPs work exclusively inside the innermost Wall Ness, safest from the Titans. He clashes a lot with Eren, who considers that cowardice and is still hellbent on joining the Survey Corps.
Our main trio catches up with Hannes, who learned from his failure and has become a diligent garrison soldier who takes his duties seriously. He feels he still owes a life debt to Dr. Yeager, and thus Eren, but Eren is having disturbing flashbacks of his father injecting him with something. Eren goes up to the top of Wall Rose to clear his head, only to have the Colossal Titan appear for the first time in five years!
Eren’s fully prepared and tries to use his Vertical Maneuver Gear and Replaceable Blades to kill his nemesis, only to have it disappear again in a puff of steam. Admittedly it’s way too early in the series for our hero to be killing his arch-nemesis, but this isn’t something other Titans have shown the ability to do.
Unfortunately, there’s a hole in the wall big enough to let some Titans through, and the Survey Corps is away on another mission, so the rookies will have to assist the Garrison troops in battling the monsters so that the civilians can be evacuated. (The good news is that this is a gateway “bulge” village that’s built out from Wall Rose proper, so the worst hasn’t happened yet.)
Eren rejoins his squad, only to learn that Mikasa’s being assigned to a different part of the defense. While preparing for combat, he reflects that very little is actually known about the Titans. Flashback to a training session where it’s admitted that the Titans don’t seem to make sense as living beings. They don’t seem to be affected by the square-cube law, and while they exclusively eat humans don’t need them for nutrition. The monsters also have a ridiculously fast healing factor that makes them very hard to kill. Only cutting in a specific spot at the nape of the neck is a sure kill, so all the military tactics are based around getting that shot in with the special blades.
The rookie squad is starting in high spirits, after all, they have some of the top graduates. But contact with the Titans smashes that hope, as the monsters easily smash the soldiers and start devouring them. Even Eren loses part of his leg, and Armin freezes up. Armin’s grabbed and about to be eaten, so he flashes back to reading a forbidden book about “the sea” with Eren, and deciding he needed to see the outside world.
Just as Armin’s about to be swallowed, Eren swoops in and tosses him out of the way. But this means he’s now in the Titan’s mouth. It bites down, leaving only Eren’s arm on the outside. Does this mean our protagonist is already dead?!
Volume 2 opens with even more Titans entering the village as the troops at the wall cannons futilely shoot them to slow them down a little.
Connie (a crew-cut lad) finds Armin, and we see some interplay with Connie’s squad. Despite Armin’s trauma, he’s convinced to at least move. Armin comes across Franz and Hannah, who were a couple, and Hannah’s even more out of it than Armin, trying to revive her now bisected lover.
Over at the gate to the interior, a greedy merchant is blocking the gateway with an overloaded supply cart and won’t back off to let human beings through, throwing his higher social status around at the Garrison soldiers. A Titan is barreling down at the helpless civilians but the merchant just shouts at the people to push his cart through first.
Mikasa swings in and dispatches the Titan with a flawless strike. Once she sees the problem with the cart, she suggests moving the cart, which the merchant isn’t having. It’s her duty to die for others, and if she tries anything against him, he’ll have the commander (his close personal friend) punish her. Mikasa cooly replies that corpses can’t complain, and he does clearly understand why some people must die for the good of others. This gets him to finally let the humans through the gate.
Her squad leader is pleased that Mikasa is a natural at soldiering, but wonders what she went through to make a rookie so calm under pressure.
Mikasa Ackerman starts her own flashback. When she was quite young, her parents were murdered by sex traffickers. It turns out that only a very few Asians were able to make it inside the Eldian city walls, and Mikasa’s mother was the last full-blooded Asian alive. The slavers could have made good money from their depraved clientele, but one of them got panicky when Mother fought back. Now they had only Mikasa, who’s mixed race, and so far underage that only the sickest of their patrons would be willing to buy her. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t sell for whatever they can.
As it happened, Dr. Yeager and his son Eren, about the same age as Mikasa, were on their way to visit the Ackermans, and came on to the crime scene. Eren was told to wait nearby for the military police to come, but decided that was stupid. Somehow he managed to track the abductors to their hideout. They naturally assumed Eren was just some lost kid they could also sell.
Eren killed two of the slavers in brutal fashion (this is our first indication that something is very wrong with the little boy), but failed to notice the third one entering the room. Forewarned, this creep was able to use his adult size and strength to render Eren helpless. Eren asked Mikasa to fight as well. She’s not able to at first, but then focused on the cruelty of the world and found her calm killing center.
Eren gave the cold Mikasa his scarf and invited the orphan girl to live with his family. She still wears that scarf.
The rearguard has managed to hold off the Titans long enough to evacuate the civilians, as signaled by a bell. Now it’s time for the soldiers to get away as well, if they can get enough fuel for their gear to climb the walls.
Problem! The supply depot is surrounded by Titans, and some smaller ones have even gotten inside the building. The Garrison troops inside are despairing, and one commits suicide.
The remaining soldiers outside can’t get in, since they don’t have enough fuel to outmaneuver the Titans. Until Mikasa arrives, learns from Armin what happened to Eren, then calmly realizes that unless she fights, she can’t win. Her determination convinces the others to follow her.
Mikasa runs out of gas, and a Titan bears down on her. She’s still going to fight–somehow, knowing it’s hopeless–and suddenly, out of nowhere, another Titan attacks the one attacking her. This does not make sense. Titans never attack other Titans, only humans.
A plan is conceived to use the strange Titan, soon to be known as the Attack Titan, against its colleagues so that the supply depot can be accessed.
Meanwhile Jean, who is bitter about the fact that in just one more day he would have been on his way to the interior and relative safety, is also seeing his squad-mates eliminated and using their sacrifice to reach the depot. He manages to get in and is quickly followed by Connie, Armin and Mikasa.
A plan is conceived to deal with the small Titans inside the depot. While rifles will not kill Titans, they can be aimed at the eyes, and while the Titans are temporarily blinded, the best soldiers can kill them. It works mostly. The soldiers are able to refuel.
Then the much-battered Attack Titan collapses outside, and Eren emerges from its smoldering corpse, his arm and leg back in place. This is especially confusing as the Attack Titan looked nothing like the Titan that ate Eren.
What’s going on?
The art in these early volumes is pretty crude, but effective. The anime really gave it a glow-up and made the story a bit more linear.
There’s lots of mysteries here, creating a desire to know more, and the “anyone can die” feel keeps the reader on their toes. While some of these characters obviously have a bit of plot armor, most of them will die before series’ end.
Content note: Lots and lots of violent death, sometimes gory. Suicide. Sex slavery is mentioned. I’m told that later volumes have some odd political overtones.
If you’re looking for slicker production values, then you may want to consider the anime instead, which ended in 2023. But if you’re okay with scratchy art, recommended to fans of violent action.
