Review: Emma

Emma, vols. 1-3
by Kaoru Mori
Rated Teen Plus
CMX, $9.99

Kaoru Mori’s lovingly detailed upstairs-downstairs story of a rich man and a maid who fall in love in Victorian England is a joy to read, although it gets off to a slow start. The first volume is worth reading for the art and settings alone, but it’s the second that got me hooked—that’s when the characters really blossomed and the story started to pull me in. And don’t be put off by the demure covers: These books are full of drama and surprises.

The first volume starts with a Victorian take on that shoujo manga cliché, the girl bumping into the boy. William Jones, scion of a wealthy merchant family, stops to visit his old governess and manages to step up to the door just as the maid, Emma, opens it—right into his face.

William is immediately smitten with Emma, and she with him, but Mori doesn’t show enough of their love affair at first for it to be convincing. They chat briefly, they go for a walk, William buys Emma a gift—and then suddenly the dancing girls arrive, along with William’s friend from India, Hakim, and the story goes careening off in another direction altogether. Mori starts to show off her artistic chops here, with wonderfully detailed drawings of Hakim, his elephants, and his exotic entourage, but William’s reaction just makes him seem blander than ever. And Emma, who is naturally reserved, doesn’t do much to encourage him.

Although the plot stalls a bit, there is still plenty going on. Hakim’s hijinks—and his infatuation with Emma—are entertaining, and Mori has fun depicting dinner parties, evenings at the club, and assorted outings. The side characters are great, not just the irrepressible Hakim but also Emma’s employer, Kelly Stownall, a severe but kind former governess, and William’s bratty siblings. And Mori lavishes as much attention on the crusty handyman and his pals at the pub as she does on the high society types at the dinner parties.

The story really gets moving in volume 2, when we start to learn the characters’ backstories and Emma and William have their first date. When Kelly dies and Emma sets out on her own, Mori begins to explore her characters’ personalities in greater depth. The scenes of Emma cleaning Kelly’s house for the last time are a masterpiece of wordless emotion, and even Hakim, who has been played for laughs up till now, shows a new sharpness. William still seems like a dolt, but in volume 3, he reacts to his family’s disapproval with some interesting changes. Meanwhile, Emma shows her spine and some unexpected skills when she gets a new position with a family of German immigrants, and the plot begins to get more complicated.

Mori really enjoys her period settings, and she sets her scenes in a variety of places: A lending library, a bustling train station, a boating party in the woods, the Crystal Palace. Sometimes these period scenes slow down the action, but they are always fun to read. My favorite parts are the ones where Mori peeks downstairs and shows the cooks flying around the kitchen or the maids going about their duties.

Mori’s panels seem old-fashioned: small, rectangular, with very few bleeds and splash pages. She nonetheless manages to use shapes and sizes expressively, often ending a scene with one or two full-width horizontal panels that pull back to a panoramic view. She also uses horizontal panels to pause the action for a moment, indicating a brief encounter or showing a detail, like an oar dipping into water, that sets the mood.

Although her panels are small, Mori does not shy away from detail, and this visual richness helps make the story interesting. In the first volume, the interiors seem too sparse and clean to be Victorian—this was an era that loved clutter—but Mori soon gives in to her fascination with elaborate costumes, place settings, and period pieces like the Crystal Palace. While she clearly loves details, she does a good job of modulating the backgrounds to fit the mood—lots of detail for a busy party or kitchen scene, simpler scenes for quiet moments.

It seems churlish to mention this, as it doesn’t detract from the story, but there are a few bloopers. In the first volume, William gets a model airplane, which wouldn’t have existed in 1885, and a bystander looking at the elephants asks “Is it Picadilly Circus come to town?” Picadilly Circus is a traffic intersection, not a place to see clowns and elephants. Mori did study the era extensively, and in the later volumes she brought in a consultant to ensure that the series is historically accurate. While the English adaptation is also pretty good, it was a bit jarring to see a Victorian woman named “Kelly,” which would never have been used as a first name in those days.

While Mori does a good job of drawing distinct characters with obvious personalities, for some reason a lot of the young men in this book look alike to me. Blonde, big-eyed, clad in dark suits, they are so interchangeable that some sequences, like the one where William overhears a conversation about Emma in his club, are confusing at first—it took a while for me to figure out that the man talking about Emma was not William but a stranger.

CMX put some extra effort into this series, with a nicer grade of newsprint and an attractive textured matte cover. Each volume has a three-page extra comic by Mori, where she talks about her Anglophilia and its consequences. The cover and spine designs are lovely, but like all CMX books these volumes feel a bit thin, and some color pages would have been nice. And while the original probably didn’t have them, I would have liked some endnotes about the period details, such as the Crystal Palace.

These are minor quibbles, though. Emma is escapist reading in the best upstairs-downstairs tradition, a book you can get lost in because it creates a world of its own.