“Someday, I wish I could stumble across the memories of certain people that exist in the abyss by gazing at their pain, their sorrow, and the movements of their souls…”

This dream-like work dwells on memory and family, and follows ambiguous figures that stride through the snowy lands adjacent to the realm of the dead. Hagiwara Rei explores the processing of grief, and how cyclical mechanisms of human emotion map out a geography of memory inextricably intertwined with the natural world from which we spring. Prepare to be absorbed in a work unlike any other coming out now.

Translation by Anna Schnell
SFX Lettering by Tim Sun
Design and Editing by Emuh Ruh

Reviews

Manga Machinations
“…It’s like looking at paintings… it is so good… Ripples is awesome. It’s such a lovely looking book… It’s really about what you’re going to get out of it, it’s kind of personal… This is dealing with grief and loss. This is dealing with death…This book is really hard to describe, but we all like this a lot… it’s like looking at an art piece [when you look at a n art piece] you just get the feelings of what you see, and because there’s so much ink work.. you look at it differently than you do a commercial manga… sometimes commercial manga will do a page that looks something like this [more painted] to drive home a point or mood, but when you have a book that’s all this, it’s just all mood, and it just washes over you without you understanding what’s happening.”

But Why Tho [Olive St. Sauver]
“…A reflection on grief and memory, with beautifully distinctive art, Ripples by Hagiwara Rei is a manga like no other on the market right now. Glacier Bay Books has done a great job with this release, and if readers are comfortable taking a journey with no set destination, this might be a healing meditation for many this year.”

Broken Pencil [Graham Sigurdson]
“… Glacier Bay Books has another gem on their hands. Rei Hagiwara’s Ripples is a reflection on grief, emotion, and memory, all in manga form. It’s incredible.
Drawn in cold, dark watercolours, the characters and settings in Ripples are only distinguishable negatively, through their absence of shade…Unnamed figures wander through cold bleak environments, speaking of their distant memories and reminiscing on past events. “Where can I return these feelings?” asks one figure. ‘What do I do with this sorrow?’ Relationships are never explicitly spelled out, but Hagiwara is easily able to convey that the connection, whatever it may have been, was (and is) an important one.”

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“These stories are going to put you in touch with your deep (and not so deep) grieving but in the end it will leave you with a “it’s not so bad” feeling. At the end, I wanted to read everything again. Definitely a book to revisit in the future.” [Urbon Adamson]

“It’s just phenomenal, far and beyond beautiful… This is so emblematic of life right now… extremely, extremely timeless. If you are someone who enjoys a melancholy story – with hope, it’s a hopefully collection – then definitely, definitely get this book. It is beyond beautiful, it is so, so lovely.” [Simply Gee]

“Glacier Bay hits it out of the park again, with perhaps their most beautifully printed book yet. The attention to Rei’s patient and layered art is appreciated, as the book itself allows us to experience the story with the dignity it deserves. No one is going quite what Glacier Bay is doing, go get this beautiful book.” [Austin English]

“I really enjoyed PANDORA, Hagiwara Rei’s new collection of short comics from @glacierbaybooks. Like RIPPLES, Hagiwara’s authorial voice is loose but assured, vividly depicting the landscape of grief fueling it, not reaching any easy answers and all the better for its questions.” [Hagai Palevsky]

“Every once in a while, a unique work of art comes out of nowhere that really hits you… this is a manga I would recommend to everyone. If you are able to connect with this book like I did, it is something special. Despite the language and cultural barriers, I understood the artist’s message and feelings at a deep level. This is different from what I typically experience with works that are “artistic.” I am able to appreciate the craft but often feel emotionally distant. Hagiwara makes me feel like I am in the room with them. I can watch them create their story, feeling what they’re feeling in synchronous harmony. These are feelings that are hard to put into words, and everyone will feel different. But Hagiwara’s stories struck an emotional chord with me. Days later, they still reverberate within me.” [Will / Rightstuf]

“It is luxurious, it is a damn fine book… Directly talking about loss… there are many beautiful paintings of post-tsunami towns. [The watercolor is really beautiful, but] there’s a sequence that’s just pencil that I really really liked too. I really like Hagiwara Rei’s lines. They are spare, and they are meaningful… you get just enough information from their linework, and it’s really lovely. Really, really lovely stuff… This is a book that I will revisit many times.” [Manga Machinations Podcast]

446 – Triple Dip 72 – PANDORA, Mothers, A Favorable Wind on Full Sails

“Two of the big artist touchpoints that I got were Miyazaki with the watercolors and some of the faces, and John J Muth with the really light, desaturated really soft watercolor letting everything bleed a little… you’ll see panels… that are so simple, but really beautiful… very very sparse pencil drawings, but the compositions are perfect, and the sense of presence and atmosphere that is created by these drawings is perfect… there’s a lot of really sophisticated visual play. I think this is a really sophisticated, really beautiful book…” [Carson Grubaugh / Living the Line]

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