The Winter 2021 Manga Guide

Cells at Work! White Brigade

What's It About? 

Ever wonder who's keeping your body safe? The fantastic, fierce White Blood Cells, of course! Follow these feisty fellows on their journey to eliminate everything that could make you sick!

Cells at Work! White Brigade is Tetsuji Kanie's spinoff of Akane Shimizu's Cells at Work! manga. Kodansha has released the digital version of the first volume for $10.99

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

I understand on a basic level that there are 'fandoms' (as there inevitably are for all things) around the specific characters in things like Hetalia or, relevantly, Cells at Work!. Readers enjoy the stories being told, allegorical or not, and can form that attachment to the people presented. But on a personal level, there's just a mental block that prevents that from happening for me. Sure I appreciate that the NK Cell from Cells at Work! is a shredded badass, but I'm never letting her get anywhere near my ol' Favorite Characters list, because I can't see her as a 'character'. She's a symbolic representation of one of those labels in my old biology textbook. All that pre-ramble is my roundabout way of qualifying why the idea of Cells at Work! spin-offs that don't explicitly focus on expanding into different medical subjects have a hard time grabbing me, conceptually. But White Brigade, bless it, comes close.

There is a nominal amount of cell factoids here, anchored primarily by following a young Band Cell as he hopes to grow into a mature Neutrophil. And a few favorites from the original Cells at Work! pop in to remind you what their jobs are. But for the most part, White Brigade is more of a standardized work comedy than even the original allowed itself to get. Little allegorical mind is paid, for instance, to what cellular processes an inter-team game of tag amounts to, or what one of the established Neutrophils encountering a young Band Cell in the past meant for his development as an organism. The most detailed diagram we get is an extended sequence of phagoctyosis featuring the cells chowing down on some bacteria. But even that just gets its explanation out of the way quickly to focus on jokes about bad-tasting food and the futility of cooking hobbies.

And that, for all the efforts of White Brigade, does kind of make it work. An effort is made to differentiate the White Blood Cells of the squad, and while I still struggled to tell some of them apart by the end of this short-feeling volume, I was at least able to pick out a few faves. The camaraderie borne of closely working with others over a long time is demonstrated effectively, and the series even knows how to mine that along with its unique setting spin: The last chapter in this book features a recreation of the 'Scratch' sequence from early original Cells at Work!, but focusing not on the process of repairing it, but on the White Blood Cells helping each other get through the event. So there's still that weird overall sense of trying to anthropomorphize these concepts as characters a little too hard for my tastes, but if it still worked for me at all even through that, then more receptive readers will probably find even more charm here.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It isn't easy to recapture the magic of that first hit series. I think that might be doubly true for titles like Cells at Work!, where the sheer bizarreness of the original managed to gleefully blend education with entertainment in a way most science stories that weren't Bill Nye the Science Guy or the original Magic School Bus books could only dream of. Some of the spin-offs have simply gone with slightly different angles on the original, like Cells at Work [Black] or Cells at Work! Baby. Others, like this Cells at Work!: White Brigade, are a little less creative.

As you can infer from the title, White Brigade follows a group of the original white blood cells from the originating series, including our pal 1146, whose run-ins with Red Blood Cell make up a lot of the plot for those books. What could be better than tagging along with him and his squad as they carry out their duty? My answer would have to be “learn stuff,” because unlike some of the other iterations of the franchise, this one is pretty thin on the actual biology. We do get a few basics, like that white blood cells are free-roaming and a rehash of the whole killer t cells/naïve t cells bit, but for the most part this is just a gang of four WBCs hanging around and training (or “training”) a young band cell, who is an immature white blood cell. The focus is much more on hijinks than biology.

In and of itself, that's not terrible, and the personalities are all fun, if not particularly unique. Band Cell's would-be friendship with Naïve T Cell is a good chapter even if it's mostly going over old ground, and Band Cell's run-in with a particularly nasty bacteria is another entertaining segment. But mostly it's just the guys hanging out and being silly. If 1146 is your favorite part of the original, then this might be more appealing, especially since the artist really captures the spirit of it, despite notable plot differences. But if the educational bit was what drew you to the franchise, this one may not be worth checking out unless you're feeling like a completist.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

Half a leg, half a leg,
Half a leg onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the White Brigade!
Charge for the germs!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Nobody out there is reading Cells at Work! for its strong, distinctive character writing, right? As endearing as Red and White are, as adorable the platelets are, as vaguely threatening Macrophage may be, they're not really fully-realized people. They're collections of just enough traits strung together to make the edutainment series engaging and humanize the bodily functions each type of cell carries out. Just as reading a biology textbook is a dry experience, stripped of the educational aspect, Cells at Work! just feels kind of… pointless.

This is the issue with White Brigade, yet another spinoff of the super-popular series that focuses on a brand new Band Cell joining the already-established group of Neutrophils. He's eager and excited to get to work, but also intimidated by the dangerous nature of the job. He gets lost and almost killed by an invading germ. He goes through training courses. He looks up to his senpai in the squad. In other words, he's the prototypical newbie and not particularly interesting, even as a self-insert character.

The thing is, I've never really wanted to chill with the neutrophils in Cells at Work!. None of them have sufficiently defined personalities – not even our old buddy 1146 – so there's not a lot of chemistry for them to bounce off one another. They just kind of blend together into one blob, kind of like an actual neutrophil cell. Unfortunately, White Brigade wants you to be really, really invested in their camaraderie, with flashbacks and pictures of them as newbie cells multiple times throughout the volume. I'm sorry, but I just don't care. There's also very little new educational information, so I don't even get to learn cool facts about cells.

With the breadth of natural variation in human bodies, there's no shortage of potential spinoffs for Cells at Work! that retain the edutainment aspect that made the series originally stand out. There could be series about disabled bodies, gender variant bodies, bodies undergoing certain kinds of treatments, aging bodies, and countless others. What the series does not need is more chill hangout spinoffs.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

On paper, side stories in the Cells at Work! universe that focus almost exclusively on the white blood cells make sense. They were fan favorites by many people who enjoy the original series and their over-the-top pension for violence could lead to some hilarious scenarios. In fact, I would be lying if I said that I did get quite a few laughs out of this volume considering its strong sense of comedic timing. There is also a great sense of camaraderie amongst the characters that is infectious and our new recruit acts as an adequate POV character. However, my biggest problem with the manga kind of comes down to the fact that its setup doesn't always complement its style and presentation.

When most of your characters are explicitly white in a black-and-white comic, stylistically everything blends in together in a not-so-appealing way. The original series circumvented this by having one or two characters act almost like a representative of an entire part of the body (white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets etc.). It almost felt like it was a bit of an acknowledgment that a lot of the individual pieces of these groups can be seen as synonymous with each other and that really rears its ugly head here in this manga. While I praise our new perspective character, that doesn't distract from the fact that a lot of these white blood cells look exactly the same aside from minor changes in their hairstyle. It really made me think that this premise would work better in animation where there could be other distinguishing factors like colorful backgrounds or distinct voice acting. Not a bad first volume by any means, just one that felt like it was the most held back by the medium of its publication compared to the others in the franchise.