Book Cover
Title Volume 1
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2003
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 1998
Book Cover
Title Volume 2
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2004
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 1998
Book Cover
Title Volume 3
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - ?
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - ?
Book Cover
Title Volume 4
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2004
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2001
Book Cover
Title Volume 5
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2004
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2003
Book Cover
Title Volume 6
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2005
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2003
Book Cover
Title Volume 7
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher ---
First Printing ---
Book Cover
Title Volume 8
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2007
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2006
Book Cover
Title Volume 9
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2008
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2007
Book Cover
Title Volume 10
Author Kohta Hirano
Publisher Editions Tonkam - 2012
First Printing Shonen Gahosha - 2009
Category Manga
Warnings ---
Main Characters Alucard, Seras Victoria, Integral Hellsing, Walter, Vernedead, Alexander Anderson, Maxwell, The Major
Main Elements Vampires, werewolves




Click to read the summaryVolume 1

Click to read the summaryVolume 2

Click to read the summaryVolume 3

Click to read the summaryVolume 4

Click to read the summaryVolume 5

Click to read the summaryVolume 6

Click to read the summaryVolume 7

Click to read the summaryVolume 8

Click to read the summaryVolume 9

Click to read the summaryVolume 10




The artwork - I thought it was gorgeous, except where it devolved into the doodles of a sexually frustrated male teenager (including the extra bits at the end...I had to roll my eyes when there was even a fart joke thrown in). Though for what it's worth I probably wouldn't have put as much thought into all the work that must have gone into drawing the rest of the manga if it weren't for the terrible doodles...they weren't even chibi doodles, which all manga have, they were...Beavis and Butthead quality. I always cringed when those little asides occurred, though the appearance of the actual Baron Harkonnen (from Dune) in a dream sequence made my inner nerd all happy. However, the rest totally impressed me.

The plot - Protestants in England fighting Catholics in Rome, with 50-year-old Nazi vampires tiggering an all out World War (well, we don't see much outside of England though something is going on in America too, presumably the whole world was affected). There was a lot of blood, and fight scenes, and corpses being eaten. I'm not all that great following action scenes in books, let alone in the choppy way mangas have to present it, so I could skim through those pretty quick. It was pretty brutal and violent, and that teenage boy peeking through with a fair number of boob jokes (poor Seras...), and really, really, absurdly big guns. But I knew what I was getting into at the start, just read the volume summaries above, and it's easy to skim over the bits that are too much.

The characters - You know, I mainly read manga for the pretty bishie boys, especially if they have wings. Alucard doesn't have wings, and he's a little too crazy-eyed to be considered bishonen, but surprisingly, I got really attached to a female character. I usually don't, but Integral Hellsing is the awesomest female character I've ever run across probably in any format, not just manga. She dresses in a suit, smokes cigars, wears glasses (as the manga artist himself noted at one point, most of the characters actually wear glasses), and is the toughest character of them all. I could see how the most powerful vampire in the world would be willing to serve her (it's not entirely clear if it's voluntary or not, but it appears to be, him taking actual pleasure in forcing her to decide when he should release his powers or not, thus the guilt of those deaths are technially on her...Alucard, though our protagonist, is not actually a good guy, he's just a bored monster playing a game to pass the time...the quote on his coffin about the bird of Hermes, Google it, it's an interesting interpretation of the character himself). And of course Alucard, crazy, brutal, psychotic, but also fun and snarky. And really, if you can't figure out who he really is, you're not reading his name close enough, though the section where that "twist" was exposed were kind of cool actually. And the best part? Not a teenager in sight!! Everyone here is an adult, many of them are actually downright middle aged or older. Don't run into that too often, so much manga/anime has teenage protagonists at their core.

I had a lot of fun reading this one, though I had my gross out moments, but those two main characters are really gonna stick as some of my favorites. Fortunately there are two animes based on this manga for me to enjoy even more of them, so far the older of the two series seems to be changing the core plot (no Nazis??) but I'm only a few episodes in so we'll see.


Posted: October 2017

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