#something about not making Cottard a villain but a neither good or bad character sticks to me

[catcoffeeenjoyer]

Rieux’s design in one thing

but don’t forget the best character design in the whole manga

TIL there is a 2021 Japanese manga adaptation of Albert Camus' "The Plague", and the author (Ryota Kurumado) made Rieux look like THIS:

The same mangaka also adapted Camus' other famous book, The Stranger, in 2023.

Reminds me of when Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" got a (heavily abridged) manga adaptation in 2019 (by Hiromi Iwashita):

Maybe I'm just prejudiced, but I always feel like the "manga artstyle" in these makes for a very goofy combination with the subject matter. There's this incongruity in my head between the seedy, dour tone of the original books and the extremely clean, youthful look that mangaka tend to give their protagonists. (Forgive the overgeneralization - Japanese illustrators are not a monolith, I know, I know!)

Anyway, if anything, it's pretty nifty that these European literary classics are getting this sort of recognition in Japan. I may not personally vibe with the style, but I have to respect the effort; taking a book you like and bringing all of its scenes to life in a visual medium is no small feat.

(Still, I just cannot compute Rieux as this baby-faced teenager. At least the Crime and Punishment adaptation stuck to fairly realistic character proportions...)