RWBY Paperback – January 16, 2018

It the best manga ever!!

If you are a rwby fan this is definitely worth the 15 bucks or so. Its a one off so its not like your committing to buying an entire series. Good short stories about team rwby and a great conclusion. Not to mention art is fantastic.

This is a fun manga that any fan of Rwby will love. Its a slightly different imaging of the story. Full of wonderful character arks and new girmm. Some unanswered questions feels like they might make a second volume at some point.

I'd already read this online and just wanted a physical copy. The translation is almost perfect (with languages as different and unique as Japanese and English 100% translation is almost impossible) and the artwork is amazing. The story (while short) is still quite good.

I don't really know RWBY, but Miwa Shirow is one of my favorite artists. That said, I think he's a far, far better designer and illustrator than a comic creator. Based on the early fight scenes in the comic, I was afraid his choreography never improved beyond loosely connected shots of pretty people posing while enemies randomly get hurt. But as RWBY progresses, individual moves are presented with more coherency and bother flowing into each other for more impactful maneuvers. Maybe it's Monty Oum's influence, and I'm glad to see Miwa got better since his DOGS days. So the resulting visuals here are generally top notch.Unfortunately, he did not improve at writing and dialogue, to the point where it lessens how interesting those fights are.* Worsened by a clumsy, overly literal translation, everybody just randomly spouts off anime cliches that neither build up the battles nor result in a plot. Tidbits about the setting get unnaturally crammed into the dialogue, but none of it goes anywhere or makes the weapons, abilities, or monsters more interesting. Characters spell out each others' tropes and have dramatic flashbacks, but it's never emotionally relevant to give weight to their efforts or victories. They're more like badly timed info dumps that make it harder to ignore that all fights are pointless random encounters which affect nothing.Buy this book if you dig the art style and character designs, but don't make the mistake of reading the text. It is rare when basic shounen tropes get botched so bad, they un-hype fights to the point of causing nihilism. If there were no bubbles, I might have given it another star.*Edit: I've since been comically informed by a youtube review and watching the trailers that this is mostly just how the source material was written. Apologies to Mr. Miwa; if anything he deserves credit for seriously punching up the atmosphere within the same script. The opening fight scene is a stylized interpretation of a hectic action sequence that would have needed to be at least three times as long to effectively illustrate each move. It's a pretty big accomplishment capturing its striking mood within 13 pages.The dialog remains pretty bad, but there was an attempt to add context and a more consistent tone. It's a worthy effort considering the overall improvement while being tossed back and forth across a language barrier and into a whole other medium. While I don't know how it read in Japanese, the changes point to Miwa having made leaps and bounds in world building, flow of information, and understanding of presentation within comics. This book tracks how far he's come as an artist and writer to give a sincere effort to improve upon an existing work. That earns another star from me.

Great addition to the RWBY-verse. Shirow Miwa's art fits perfectly with the universe and I can't stress enough how much of great addition this is to the collections of RWBY fans everywhere. It may not add a lot of story to the show (This was set in Volume 1 and as of writing this review Volume 5 had just concluded and we are in hiatus hell...) it's still worth just learning a little bit more about the lives of the team in between the episodes.

As a big RWBY and Rooster Teeth fan this was a must have. It tells the same story as the Red, White, Black, and Yellow trailers, but adds more detail and depth to them. It’s cool to see those stories from before the main character’s even met expanded upon.

Love the show and Rooster Teerh. Like the fact that it’s not a straight adaptation of the show’s story, but instead plays on certain elements of it (Yang’s club fight from the trailer, Weiss’s scar, etc.) and tells its own original story. Recommend if you are a fan of the show.