Escape from the Grace Field house arc review

"You mean, in exchange for spying on us, they won't get shipped out and are allowed to live?"
- Emma thinking about what types of motives the spy has (The Promised Neverland).



The Promised Neverland (2019) is the animated version of one of the newest best-sellers on the Weekly Shounen Jump magazine. The manga has been written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu and it has sold millions of copies between 2016, which is when the manga first started, and 2019. I’ve been a big fan of the series for a long time now, ever since the first arc finished in the manga as the amount of atmosphere, storyboarding and character writing the authors did in the first 37 chapters (length of the first arc is 37 chapters) was phenomenal. 
Normally series don't start out strong because the authors either are novice or they create a story that is supposed to get better and better (rarely they do). In my opinion, as far as series in the shounen demographic go, the first arc of this series stands at the top along with series like Death Note in how amazing the first arc of the series is.

This blog post will be talking about the first arc of the series which has now been animated by A1-Pictures into a 13-episode TV series that adapts the Escape from Grace Field house arc. The story continues beyond the Escape from Grace Field arc and a second season has been confirmed for 2020, but that's a story for that year.


Emma, code number 63194, is a bright and cheery young girl who loves her family. In the Grace Field house where she lives, Emma’s large family consists of Isabella, whom she and everyone else in the house calls 'mama,' along with Emma's dozens of brothers and sisters whom Emma plays with all the time. Grace Field house is said to be an orphanage in which every singleday there are IQ tests being done by the children. The children doing those IQ tests is the first ominous thing in the manga that tells the reader that this series isn't as rainbow and sunshine as it's made out to be. 

One day, Conny, one of the younger sisters of Emma, assumedly get adopted and leave the house, but Emma notices that even though Conny was supposed to take it with her, Conny’s stuffed toy rabbit is still in the Grace Field house when the girl has already left through the front gate that leads out from the Grace Field house’s large gardeny-foresty area. No child that has lived in the house has ever left through the gate because of warnings and creepy stories the children are told by mama Isabella.

As Emma and her brother Norman decide to go to Conny to give her the stuffed rabbit back, they come across something very dangerous and creepy. Conny’s cold corpse is found in a truck with a rose penetrating through her heart, and as Emma and Norman hear voices they decide to go under the truck to spy on the ones that have potentially killed their sister Conny - only for them to see that there are large, crazy looking creatures next to Conny that drop her corpse into a large bottle of liquid. Those creatures can speak human language and are seen to be talking with mama Isabella by Norman and Emma. Those creatures are literal demons. 
This is when Emma and Norman get the realization that they don’t in fact live the type of happy family life with a great mother that they originally thought they did – no, the children of the Grace Field house are actually food to the demons, they are cattle who now must escape from this prison, they must escape from the clutches of the demons and mama Isabella before it is time for more imminent deaths of the children that get regularly "adopted."


Basically: once a child reaches a certain age (related to their IQ but still at oldest they are 12 years old) they get picked by the demons, killed by putting a rose through the children's hearts and then the entire dead body gets bottled and taken away only to be sold to the the rich demons, due to the delicious brains that humans have.


The Promised Neverland series has three easily recognizable and memorable main characters with Emma, the loud-mouthed and caring protagonist, Ray the cool-guy-looking silent book-worm, and Norman, the mastermind of the series - even though Emma, Ray and Norman are all peak-level students, Norman is a god tier even among those three when it comes to outsmarting your opponents. The series still manages to have certain equal mind battles between all three of them when it comes to emotional level. This is also the first time in Grace Field history that three extremely smart children exist at the same time.

The story also has couple of semi-memorable side characters in Don and Gilda. The three main characters are the smartest characters in the Grace Field house, as I already mentioned, they are always scoring top scores from tests, but Ray and Norman especially are fantastic to watch or read about with their mind games, which I won’t be talking about in detail because of their very spoilerish nature as they are very important parts of the plot of the first arc. All I can say is that Norman and Ray make the series for me, which is why I believe that after the first arc of the series has really fallen off a lot, honestly. But aside from the character writing, there are many cool-looking and -feeling parts in the first arc as well, the presentation of how messed up the world is to the characters being psychologically challenged is beautiful to look at and think about more deeply.

The Promised Neverland is a shounen series with a gripping and dark atmosphere that plays on the psychological aspects of the characters. 
The artist of the series, Posuka Demizu, also really shined and will be remembered for what she pulled off in the first arc of The Promised Neverland. The artwork of TPN doesn't stick to a certain mold, so it's very different from most series. Even though it's not similar to Hunter x Hunter, it can be likened to it because Yoshihiro Togashi, the author of HxH, also has art that doesn't look the same all the time, both of these artists can really hit the bullseye with character expressions that look really deformed but great. 

There are crazy pages, spreads, paneling styles, and so on in TPN. The art at worst can seem kind of mediocre and at its best it can feel like something you have never seen before. There is a panel where Norman is walking through a hall of the Grace Field house with a glass of water in his hand. As two children run past him playing games, the walls of the hallway Norman is walking through feel as if they are becoming deformed and the face of Norman is seen reflecting on the water on the glass he's carrying. There are quite a few pages of fantastic stand-out art like that in the series, and mostly all the color spread-pages of the series are like that.


Yeah, all in all there is a lot of good to say about the first arc, the Escape from Grace Field house arc, of the series, but as most things do, the series in my mind really should have ended there at the end of chapter 37. The manga did not have any that relevant plot lines left that would have excused the continuation of the story at this point. The series is 100 chapters past the first arc and not even a fragment as well written or presented as it. The characters are also shadows of their former selves. Look at Don and Gilda or the main characters; they all feel underutilized, irrelevant and just... waste of space. The series should have focused on fleshing out other characters and introducing them over time rather than dump dozens of characters in the group that the readers have no emotional attachment to. There is another arc in the series that is also an escape arc, but it lacks all the qualities, the psychological aspects and so on that the first arc did. I am usually the kind of person that appreciates when an author can change the way they write things, monotonous writing can be pretty boring after all, but the next escape arc is a downright downgrade of the Escape from the Grace Field house arc, it would have been better if it was entirely different arc from an escape arc, I guess. Didn't like that arc at all. Also the series has been skipping arcs and events that it should have shown us by now as the Promised Neverland manga is right now in its final arc.

The series started out strong with the authors clearly having planned many plot lines throughout the first arc which kept the series fresh and interesting to both the authors and the readers, but as soon as the first arc ended with that amazing ending, the series was not the same ever again.

Zero's Tea Time

"Well, a child's curiosity and a detective's spirit of inquiry... do have much in common, after all."
- Amuro Tooru (Detective Conan, vol 76, chapter 799, p. 14)

In 2018 Detective Conan got its 22nd mainline movie, Zero the Enforcer, which I’ve talked about before. It is a movie that goes more in-depth about the dark side of the justice system and it focuses on Amuro Tooru, one of the smartest characters in the series who is a triple face character that the reader first meets as a waiter whom then becomes a so-called apprentice of the great sleeping Mouri Kogoro,  and I can say that the 22nd film has ended up at the top three or so of my favourite movies from the franchise.

What really makes the movie stand out in the real world however, is that it broke all box office records the series has accomplished so far – raking over 100 million dollars during its run.

This massive popularity the movie gained gave birth to something else, an idea of a collaboration that soon bore fruit. That collaboration was the birth of a new manga which was created between Aoyama Gosho (overseeing the new series) and another lesser-known manga artist named Takahiro Arai (the artist for the drawings), and their manga was dubbed as Zero’s Tea Time (ゼロの日常 Zero no Nichijō).

Now, Zero’s Tea Time basically tells the story of Amuro Tooru outside of the scenes you see in Conan. You get to know how Amuro spends his days and interacts with other people, things and places – even ones from the movies. Some of the events actually require in-depth knowledge of the DC verse and what has gone down in the story so far to pick up on all the places in time where the story of Zero’s Tea Time takes place. The story itself is mostly episodic, but the story's jumps between the events that we are familiar are what makes the story seem very different from practically any other work out there when you get to the nitty and gritty of it all – the story itself is very light-hearted and simplistic as a lot of it is Amuro Tooru simply making food and eating with other characters, however, it’s where all the events are placed in the mainline story that give it more depth. A new reader would probably feel as if they are missing something about Amuro's character every time they read a chapter (to be fair though, the chapters in ZTT are much shorter/lower in condensed content than Gosho Aoyama's DC chapters).

So for people that are not too familiar with Detective Conan I can see that Zero’s Tea Time would seem a lot different than for someone like me who is a huge Conan and Amuro fan, so I can understand all the nuances that make Zero’s Tea Time stand out. For example I can enjoy seeing a chapter showing us Amuro at a shooting range with his underling Kazami (see M22 for Kazami) and I also like how we get to know why and how Amuro is basically a peak human in strength and speed (obviously he’s weaker than Makoto who will also appear in Movie 23); well obviously because he has a special training regimen, but it’s nice to see him train hard on-panel. 

But even without all that, the Conan(series)-styled artwork done by Takahiro Arai really manages to complement the script supervised by Gosho. From what I've seen, most spinoff series in general are not that good-looking (not just character models are off), so I’m actually pretty surprised how this looks like. Arai is very good at paneling - the manga's pages are not just made up of square boxes, but a lot more than that. There is clear creativity at work here that for sure goes underappreciated by many. For example I REALLY like how Arai is capable of making the feel of a flow of time in single panels come to life, ie. in chapter 2 as Amuro is cooking you can feel the time pass in the panel itself as it shows multiple events, or in chapter 5 where Amuro is jumping rope, doing push-ups with one hand and doing lifts, all taking place in one panel and the layout of how he gets closer (character model gets bigger) to the screen during the page. In chapter 15 there is also a remarkably done page where Kazami and Amuro eat curry together. The feel of a flow of time can be felt in the double-spread page with "Scotch" and Amuro as children fishing on the right and the present version of Amuro fishin on the left of the spread as the sun is shown in the horizon beyond the sea, as Amuro spends his time with his eyes closed. That fishing spread done by Arai might not be filled with content but it sure is breathtakingly marvelous in atmosphere, one of the best in the entire franchise.

Aside from that, the color pages look really nice as well; there is some clear creativity in them. I especially like the double-spread page done for chapter 8 or chapter 13 (love this) as well as the panels where Arai imitates Gosho’s art in his own way to pull out different types of expressions for Amuro. The page where he saves his yet-to-be-named dog from getting hit by a car in chapter 9 is a normal page that looks really good all things considered – by that I mean the paneling, layout, art, creativity (making the character model go out of the panels as well as use of SFX effects and blank panel for the conclusive panel of the page) are all very well handled.

The story itself is, as I said, very simple in its core, but there are nice surprises in it for a hardcore Conan fan. I can appreciate the famous lawyer Kisaki Eri’s (Mouri Ran’s mother) secretary Kuriyama Midori appearing at Cafe Poirot where Amuro and Azusa (Poirot main worker who many ship as the perfect girlfriend to Amuro. Though, for Amuro’s girlfriend see M22!) work during daytime and talk about how the sandwiches – made by Amuro – are a being talked about in the legal circles. These kind of things bring Cafe Poirot to life as it’s a clear hot spot for the Beika District residents such as Mouri Detective Agency that live just upstairs, or the Kisaki law offices, and for many more residents.

Reading the series week-to-week however wouldn't be ideal as the pacing is slow, and by that I mean that even though it’s episodic, not much happens in an individual chapter, but collecting all of the little things together, it becomes a very enjoyable read for a long-time fan as there are many moments I can simply stop to appreciate such as Vermouth having sleep problems added on top of everything I've mentioned so far.

The most important aspect of the manga however is to see what drives Amuro forward and how he goes on with his days, how he balances things out in his busy schedules, and how he handles normal life hardships.