James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, Volume One is the first tankōbon in Haruo Iwamune’s post-apocalyptic manga. The Color of the End has been serialized in Enterbrain’s seinen manga magazine Harta since March 2022. John Neal’s translation came out in 2025.

The alien Executioner who descended on Earth little suspected humanity’s pluck and ingenuity. Truly, it was the height of arrogance for the pitiful aliens to believe they could sweep humans aside as easily as a human could sweep aside a small insect. Well…

Fifty years after the Great Disaster, Saya is a special investigator for the Ushimitsu Technical Research Institute. Her mission: to decontaminate crumbling cities and to determine if any humans survived into the present day.

Saya has never seen another living human. Indeed, whether Saya herself qualifies as human is open to question, Saya being the beneficiary of a certain research project that grants her prodigious disease resistance as well as the ability to regenerate. Nevertheless, her mission is her mission, and she persists.

What helped the Executioners win was disease. Crystallosis is extremely contagious (save to Saya) and invariably fatal (save for Saya). Once a victim dies, they exude a deadly miasma. The only way for unenhanced humans to survive was somehow isolate themselves from the miasma… which in the crisis conditions of the Great Disaster was nearly impossible to manage.

Nevertheless, while there may not be any human survivors, there are survivors of a sort. Humans had begun dabbling in artificial intelligence before the aliens arrived. Robots cannot catch crystallosis. Despite the ongoing collapse of human infrastructure, some of the robots survive.

And as Saya discovers, those robots have their own directives, directives they are as determined as Saya to obey. Directives that may be incompatible with Saya’s continued existence.

~oOo~

Content warning: there is a burned library in this volume. I don’t think anyone particularly minds mass death, but be aware that among the buildings in bad shape is a library and it does not appear that all of the books were salvaged.

Is it surprising that the same industry that gave us Girls Last Tour, Touring After the Apocalypse, Zom 100, Giant Spider & Me, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, and so many others would deliver a manga like this? A manga in which, if humanity is not functionally extinct, it can definitely see extinction from where it is standing?

It would appear that the sudden, irresistible collapse of civilization is a bad time in which to launch ambitious projects. As early in the series as Volume One, we are shown the detritus of hopeful projects that failed due to lack of time and resources. Either the project did not work as planned; people were unable to take advantage of the projects in time; or human foibles sabotaged efforts.

The catastrophe does not appear to be limited to Japan. Enough pre-Great Disaster technology survives that short-wave radio should be available. Saya’s robotic colleague at the crematorium never mentions overseas survivors, which suggests that there aren’t any¹. Or at least, none with radios.

The manga is very, very pretty. Readers who enjoy decaying urban landscapes, photogenic corpses, and a plethora of robots will enjoy this volume. At the risk of annoying North American comics fans, manga often plays in an entirely different league when it comes to scenery porn. The Color of the End is a fine example.

As to the story itself… as far as Volume One goes, the work is skillfully executed but it all seemed boringly familiar to me. It may be that surprises await in later volumes — and I will persist in reading to see if that’s the case — but Volume One, so far, is a variation on a story with which manga readers will be familiar.

The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, Volume One is available here (Yen), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: USA delenda. I wonder what happened to the nuclear sub crews?