Bless Volumes 2 and 3 Review

Early last year Kodansha brought Yukino Sonoyama’s Bless to the West, which impressed readers with its beautiful art and interesting premise. Now with a couple more volumes under its belt, it’s time to check in and find out if it continues to offer an interesting read.

Having become friends and worked together, makeup artist Aia and aspiring model Jun are more committed than ever to achieving their dreams. When Aia is encouraged to join MIRROR, a school for aspiring makeup artists, he finally begins to figure out the next steps toward his goal.

Meanwhile, Jun decides to begin attending casting calls for modelling with a portfolio created with Aia’s help. But modelling is a highly competitive business and even if Jun has the looks, she needs the confidence to demonstrate that she’s a better choice than the other girls she’s competing against.

As the two begin wandering down their respective paths, they start to see a lot less of one another. At MIRROR, Aia is surrounded by talented individuals who have been training and working in the industry far longer than him. While he’s learning a lot from the experience, his fellow students are also rivals competing in the U21 (Under 21 Hair and Makeup Competition), with the winner getting to work under stylist Oya as an assistant (Aia is already familiar with and respects Oya from his modelling days).

Because everyone has their eyes sight firmly on winning the chance to work with Oya, Aia can’t rely on them to give him the guidance he needs to advance to their level since the last thing they want to do is nurture his talent to the point where he could snatch the prize out of their hands.

Volumes 2 and 3 of Bless are both firmly focused on this development arc for Aia and Jun. With Aia at MIRROR and Jun attending casting calls, they’re slowly gaining the experience and skills they need to thrive in their respective environments. Everyone around them acknowledges they have talent; Aia especially is surprisingly skilled at applying makeup despite not having all the fundamental knowledge that would take him to the next level.

In Volume 1, Jun and Aia relied on each other for support but across these two volumes, they’re so busy that there’s no time for them to talk much. Instead, they’re building support networks with the people they meet through their work. With Jun constantly being rejected for roles due to being shy and Aia lacking in key skills, it would be easy for them to get depressed and discouraged, but to mangaka Yukino Sonoyama’s credit, they don’t take the two down that road.

There certainly is an element of Aia being depressed he’s so far behind the other students at MIRROR, but ultimately he decides to channel that feeling into learning as much as he can as quickly as he can. He knows he’ll make mistakes, but he has people to turn to should he need to. It’s the same for Jun who wants to be a model enough to channel all these feelings into her next opportunity and continuously move forward. And that emotion comes through to those watching her, which may eventually lead to her getting her foot in the door with a job. And the end of Volume 3 does prove a turning point for both of them.

If you enjoyed Volume 1, then you’ll certainly like where the story has gone since then. Sonoyama’s art is still very detailed and captivating, working well to emphasise the core themes of the series, which are the make-up and modelling. Like the first book, these are both fairly slim volumes, containing four chapters each, and I think I’d advise reading them together as I have since they feel like a continuous story without a good breaking-off point (until the end of #3 anyway).

That does mean Volume 2 feels slow as it’s busy setting up the new arc and introducing new characters, which is by no means a bad thing but the first release felt like it was better paced. And to some degree, I worry that future instalments will be similarly up and down in that regard, but time will tell.

Bless Volumes 2 and 3 come to the West thanks to Kodansha where they continue to be translated by KPS Products Corp with lettering by Nicole Roderick. Both books read well with no issues of note. No extras to speak of here, which is a shame since Volume 1 did have some colour pages included and Volume 2’s lead image does look as if it had been printed in colour at some stage, so it feels like an omission rather than there not being anything to work with.

Volume 4 is due for an English release later this month with #5 following in June. Japan are up to Volume 6, so we’re not particularly far behind.

Overall, these two volumes of Bless put Aia and Jun through their paces as they walk the long road toward their dreams. With new friends, rivals and challenges, there’s plenty to enjoy as we continue to follow along with their story.

Our review copies from Kodansha were supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.