The Spring 2025 K-Comics Guide
Lady Devil
What's It About?
Lady Devil has a story by Hanhun and art by FUKI. Choco, based on a work by B. Cenci. English translation by Manta Comics. Lettering by cesty. Published by Ize Press (April 22, 2025). Rated T+.
CONTENT WARNING: Incest, Implied Grooming, Implied Medieval Pedophelia
Is It Worth Reading?
Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
It's amazing what people can come to believe if they're told it often enough. For Giovinetta, it's that she's wrong to love and interact with her brothers, especially her twin Johannes, to the point where at age six she was locked away in a tower for the crime of kissing him. All that did, one interpretation of Lady Devil suggests, is create a romantic and sexual obsession where none previously existed. By punishing a child for an innocent act and continuing to treat siblings as if they were potential sexual partners, the twins are set up for a forbidden romance, which then begs the question of whether Inette and Johan are truly acting on the influence of a devil their mother's family trapped generations ago or if that's just a convenient excuse for a situation brought on by those around them.
It's an interesting setup for a twincest story, more or less taking the approach of “What if Jaime and Cersei Lannister were sympathetic?” (Although I'll admit that that's a bit glib.) The book is narrated by Inette three years in the future, and she's talking to someone named “Kretschmann,” although we don't know who that is. She's describing the way her romantic and sexual relationship started with her twin brother, the year they were twenty, and it's hard to escape the way that she blames herself for everything. She prayed to the devil in the basement, she tempted her brother with her feminine charms, she was the reason they were separated in the first place. Inette has spent a lifetime being blamed simply because she's female, made to bear the burden of men's sexual attraction to her. There are plenty of hints that Johan has always viewed her in a less-than-brotherly light, but even when their dissolute younger brother Winfried notes that, he's quick to heap the blame on the “lady devil” Inette, even viewing her as the person who took their brother's attention away from him. If Inette is a devilish creature (and I don't believe she is), that's because everyone else made her into one.
Lady Devil is the sort of book you almost read against your own better judgment. It's a bit too self-serious for its own good, but the beauty of the art helps to distract from that. The more you read, the more unfair the entire situation Inette is stuck in begins to feel. She's certain she turned Johan into a literal devil, but his offhand comment about having had seizures before suggests that that's not the case, and finding out what on earth is going on makes a good argument for reading more. With its carefully formal translation and art that makes it clear that this is the artist's first foray into comics (in a good way; they're an illustrator, and that training shows), this is worth giving a chance. I wouldn't call it good, but I can see why Ize Press picked it up.
MrAJCosplay
Rating:
The interesting thing about a lot of medieval fantasies is that they don't always lean so heavily into a lot of the implied taboo stuff that people did in those days. There were a lot of barbaric practices that different civilizations engaged in, such as the way they treated women, the way that people were married off as young as twelve years old and maybe even a little bit of incest. I know why those things are generally not the focus of a lot of stories because by default, they make it hard for the reader to become fully supportive of what is going on since we are more or less being asked to root for something that goes against most modern sensibilities. However, Lady Devil seems to at least try to do something with all of these different elements.
Whether or not it succeeds at its goals is a different story, and unfortunately I lean a bit more towards the latter. I do feel that the way some of the characters are portrayed does hold the story back from being the tragedy I think it's trying to be. I can't sit here and say that the characters aren't well defined, but they're not that consistent. Our main lead is the worst offender of this because while I understand her situation and the traumatic experiences that she has to go through, there's very little to her outside of the tragedies that are inflicted upon her. This is the problem with writing a story that is filled with so much edge and dread, it feels like I'm just supposed to support this character so that she doesn't have to deal with the horrific circumstances that she was born into. But when her idea of salvation is incest with her twin brother, who she also inadvertently cursed, it becomes a little bit difficult. In fact, this felt like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I would be more sympathetic to the events that transpired if the presentation was a bit stronger. The way that the panels are arranged, and the overall pacing of the story feels disjointed and confused at times. Scenes don't always flow into each other properly and that seems to have been intentional to put ourselves in the mind of our protagonist, other times it just felt like poor panel placement. The passage of time isn't always made clear and scenes will just end without any real buildup or smooth transition. I'm of the opinion that you can use a lot of different inspirations to tell your story and maybe there is a truly tragic tale in here, but it feels buried. You can skip this one.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
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