Black Butler: Volume 4

by Yana Toboso, 192 pages

An English noble family is murdered, their home burned to the ground, and their young son missing. A few months later, he mysteriously returns with an eyepatch, a cold seriousness too great for his age, and a mysterious, disturbingly efficient butler at his side.

Ciel Phantomhive's family has been in Royal service for generations, dealing with the sundry elements of the English underworld so the surface of good society continues to run smoothly. Sometimes this involves tracking down gruesome serial killers with both other worldly and uncomfortably close connections. Sometimes it involves determining that opium den proprietors prove more useful as informants than as prisoners of the Yard. And sometimes, apparently, it involves babysitting naive, spoiled Indian princes with their own surprisingly skilled manservants. Ciel half-heartedly agrees to help Soma and his faithful retainer Agni discover the fate of the prince's favorite nanny, who was spirited away by an English businessman, but only because the case appears to be connected to his latest mission from the Queen, which is to investigate a series of attacks on British merchants and soldiers recently returned from India. As things get more complicated, the boys realize that in order to resolve the mystery and make things right they'll have to pit their servants against one another in an all-out competition...to create a curry worthy of the Royal Warrant.

Black Butler is a strange combination of the darkly disturbing and the really rather silly. From the first volume, you realize the silly is necessary to soften the disturbing, and the balance of the two has worked well so far. This volume is no different. Obviously, setting up a curry-cooking war is going for comical. But the contrasting glimpses of Ciel's memories of his parents' deaths and the immediate aftermath, as well as Agni's history before Soma offers him redemption, and the titular butler Sebastian's cruel but spot-on lecture to Soma about the prince's blindness to anything not himself are all clearly in the serious column. As unnerving as it is, I like not being able to completely relax because I don't know when things are going to turn one way or the other, and that's because whichever way they do turn doesn't feel forced or arbitrary. I want to read more so I can see deeper into Ciel's sad history and the ominous soul-securing contract that binds Sebastian to him, and then take comfort in the shenanigans of the boy's other outlandish, though more human, household staff and the otherwise cold Sebastian's uncharacteristic fondness for cats. The skilled art, with its period detail and clearly individual characters, just draws the reader further into the mystery.

Having watched the two seasons of the increasingly dark animé, and having read that it diverges greatly from the manga a few volumes in, I am looking forward to seeing where it all leads (and where it's all been).