Review by Frank Plowright
Titans are giants of varying sizes, largely mindless and predatory, and a considerable danger to humans. To date they’ve always been male in form, but lack sexual organs, which is just as well considering Japanese comics are censored. Attack on Titan 5 ended with a survey party making the astonishing discovery of at least one female Titan, but endangering Armin, the most timid of the troops.
The female Titan and what she might want occupies much of this volume. Hajime Isayama shows that on occasions when the Titan could have killed troops, she doesn’t, which alone stands her apart from other Titans, and Armin believes this indicates a human within a Titan body.
While the last couple of volumes have been heavy on planning and explanation, here Isayama returns to action, showing the damage just a single Titan can achieve, and even with all their training how troops fall short. It’s a clever four chapters. There isn’t an indication of how much time they cover, but surely an hour at most, and possibly considerably less.
While Isayama draws the survey party more or less as fully defined, there’s a deliberately loose quality to the way he draws the female Titan, using multiple sketchy ink lines, and sometimes almost angular rendition of limbs. It’s an effective contrast, indicating how the Titan is never quite fully viewed by people. Right at the end when circumstances change, so does the art.
Throughout the action there’s much questioning of motivation. The rookie squad members follow orders, but aren’t entirely sure of the purpose, while the more experienced squad members need Eren to prove he’s not a liability. As people who’ve survived multiple missions in which many others have died, their concerns are taken seriously.
Returning the rocket pace of the earlier volumes results in another satisfying volume, with a form of cliffhanger leading to Attack on Titan 7. Is Armin correct about the Titan’s intentions? This volume and the two before have also been repackaged as the second Attack on Titan Omnibus, reprinting the pages at a slightly larger size.
