Dragon and Chameleon Volumes 4 and 5 Review

Volume 3 of Dragon and Chameleon saw Garyo being banned from working with Shonen Wonder for a year and a half, but luckily for him, he reunited with his old mentor. Will this lead to him launching a successful new series? Let’s find out with these two further instalments.

Garyo has completed a storyboard for the first chapter of his new series, and thanks to his old mentor Orochi Yamadano’s help, he’s feeling more motivated than ever. But now he has a whole new challenge to overcome – finding some assistants. Garyo first turns to the friends he made during the boot camp, but unfortunately, they’re all too busy to work with him. So now Garyo has to start his search from scratch, which means it’s time for us to meet some new characters!

First off, we’re introduced to Yamato Kenzaki. He’s a struggling assistant who constantly gets in trouble because of the time it takes him to draw backgrounds and his inability to handle screen tone and effect lines. But the backgrounds he draws are filled with little details that help bring a scene to life, something Garyo really wants for his new fantasy series.

Next is Rion Honesaka, an assistant who’s grown a huge fanbase on social media through posting short manga. Orochi thinks Rion will be perfect for Garyo, but the girl is a wild card who’s not fond of working under others and is keen to launch her own series. If she wants that to happen, Orochi tells her to steal Garyo’s spot, which leads them to engage in a wild manga battle!

And last we have Seiichiro Hiiragi, a veteran of the industry who goes by the nickname Mercenary. He’s 45 and known for bringing series out of a crisis; even Garyo worked with him during his time on Dragon Land. With Rion and Yamato being rookie assistants, Garyo thinks Seiichiro will be absolutely perfect for helping them learn the ropes and keeping the schedule moving smoothly. However, Seiichiro only wants to work a single day a week for a weekly serialisation because he knows first-hand how much of a battlefield those schedules are. With a wife and young child in his life, Seiichiro wants to ensure a work-life balance.

Each of the new assistants is given a couple of chapters each, ensuring we readers both get to know their personalities and the problems that plague them. Ryo Ishiyama, as a mangaka, is proving that they excel at character writing, which is something I felt during the boot camp arc as well. The characters they come up with are always really interesting and show a surprising amount of depth in a relatively short time. I used to worry about the number of characters Dragon and Chameleon had to juggle, but that has largely been put to rest as time goes on.

Volume 5 continues along the storyline of Garyo preparing for his serialisation. With assistants decided and a house bought to act as his studio, they’re more or less ready to kick things off. But of course, nothing is ever easy for our protagonist, and he’s found himself in a feud with superstar Ikki Fugaku, who is also launching a new series in the same issue as Garyo is. Using the weekly surveys, they’ll be battling it out for the top spot.

But even despite the fact that these two legends are about to go toe-to-toe, Volume 5 actually focuses a lot more on what’s happening around Garyo instead. The spotlight is still on his assistants, but there’s also a chapter dedicated to an unnamed character who is simply a fan of shonen manga. There was a long-running series that started when he was in middle school, but has now concluded after he’s reached adulthood. No longer a child, he contemplates moving away from manga. That is, until he sees Garyo and Ikki’s new series…

And that’s an example of one of the things I like most about a series like Dragon and Chameleon. It’s very much an industry story in terms of creating and publishing manga, but it’s also a series that wholeheartedly loves the medium. That one chapter shows how much Ishiyama understands the relationship that readers have with series they follow and creators they like. Even Garyo, as a protagonist, embodies a lot of those feelings with his pure and enthusiastic love of his work. It’s a series that simply gets better and better as time goes on.

Dragon and Chameleon Volumes 4 and 5 come to the West thanks to Square Enix Manga and continue to be translated by Kevin Yuan with lettering by Sabrina Heep (taking over from Phil Christie). Both releases read well and come with colour pages, and there are some character profiles between chapters, which are a fun addition.

There are 8 volumes of this out in Japanese now, while here in English, Square Enix has just released #6 this month. #7 is currently in the schedule for August, so understandably, we are slowing down now that we’re more or less caught up, but it’s not too long a wait for more.

Overall, Dragon and Chameleon continues to be an excellent read. With a variety of interesting new characters thrown into the mix and Garyo finally launching his new manga series, the future looks nothing but bright for this one.

Free previews can be read on the publisher’s website. 

Our review copies from Square Enix Manga were supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).

© Ryo Sihiyama / Square Enix CO., LTD