Wandering Island Volume 2 Paperback – January 29, 2019

Don’t let the naysayers steer you away from this beautiful manga. Yes there’s very little dialogue. But it’s sooooo wonderfully strange. Beautifully drawn and such a pleasure to follow this wordless story. Carl Gustav Horn from Dark Horse writes an essay at the end. Basically apologizing for the lack of word balloons (does he have no faith in what he publishes) and puts a plug in for Tsuruta’s newest manga Emanon. Which I just read and it’s not half as interesting as this second volume of Wandering Island. Mikura’s facial expressions tell the whole story.

Volume one brought you into a labyrinth, and volume two gets you lost. Plot is incredibly light, but there's so much atmosphere and detail that I spent just as long admiring each page's art that it took me longer to read this volume than normal. The mystery behind this series is just starting and waiting for more will be agonizingly difficult.

beautiful Art. Interesting story

It's a fine chapter in the story, but little progress happens. It's mostly a girl in a bikini exploring a weird island. Nothing makes sense and little is explained, but it's still a neat bit of world building. Hopefully it's all brought together in the next volume, and the story doesn't just trail off.

Enigmatic story of a young girl searching for a elusive roving Pacific island in order to deliver an old package via a Biplane Sea Plane. Mysterious!

Fast read but the art is perfect

The background is fantastic as well as the storyline, the inhabitants of electric island themselves hiding some kind of secret what is it I wish I knew and though I must confess I’m curious at what made the young girl cry. I’ll have wait for the third volume to come out soon.

Extremely Disappointed - Vol. 2 is empty! Devoid of character development, dialogue, plot! Volume 2 is hard to read mostly because there are hardly any words in the book. Sigh. I loved Volume 1 and eagerly awaited the continuation of the story in volume 2. To be candid, my interest in volume 1 had nothing to do with the fantasy concept of the protagonist searching for this lost wandering island. Instead, I loved volume 1 for it's unique character development, dialogue, geography, and subject matter - youthful adventure flying a sea plane in the Asia Pacific. A single girl who lives with her cat and flies a retro sea plane to island hop through Japan's myriad Pacific islands to deliver packages - she knows the remote islands well because she has continued to operate an old family business. This story in volume 1 is cool and points in the story touch your emotions! For all that volume 1 has, volume 2 utterly lacks. Volume 2 has sparse dialogue, no character development, virtually no plot. The entire volume presents one scene that hardly moves the story forward. I got the feeling, the person/team responsible for writing the story for volume 2, either was preoccupied with a different, higher priority project, suffered from writer's block or perhaps, they put this story in the bottom of a file cabinet drawer, completely forgot about it, had nothing to deliver at the deadline, and merely used the artist's brainstorming renderings of the concept of the girl landing on the island and exploring the island - and then they tried to throw in a few words here and submit it for publication - trying to pass off a rough draft of the artwork for a polished, finished product. No, the story did not continue in volume 2. No, the story just fell off a cliff. The volume 2 book is devoid of the captivating, sophisticated, story found in volume 1. Hopefully, volume 3 can get the train back on the tracks and continue where volume 1 left off, otherwise it's going to just free fall away with volume 2. The end of volume 2 has a back page note with a lot of extra commentary about the new developments in Japanese Manga versus the traditions of the 1980s, 1990s. This extra stuff was written to try to explain away how terrible volume 2 is, but that doesn't cut it. No excuses. This was trash. The author who penned volumed 1 has exceptional talent and skill, but it was not applied in volume 2. I suppose one could argue the idea of no dialogue and a lonely girl on a magic island may have sounded cool in discussion--it was a risk-- but it was a total flop. Volume 2 has sketches of the protagonist, wandering around in her bikini, but the quantity of illustrations overwhelms the paucity of plot, dialogue, and character development. How can the creator/author/publisher abandon the readers, the fans? I'm so disappointed. The only moving thing about volume 2 is how disappointed you will feel after buying it. I don't want to lose hope. I hope the story gets more real, more complex, more touching in volume 3. The historic, real world background anecdotes about Japan's islands and airplane deliveries, and the lonely girl with her cat and her rich, meaningful relationship with her grandpa, all found in volume 1, exclusively in volume 1, had a certain truth, depth, complexity, and charm that piqued my curiosity.