Young women who are trained to be scavengers inhabit the Bus Stop, where they transfer to the “Black Parade” in order to retrieve artifacts of value. There, they fight of Avengers, creatures that inhabit the remaining bodies and items that have merged into terrifying beings. Toto and her partner Hana are among the best of the scavengers, but Toto has another goal: to pay her way out in this science fiction adventure.

Scavengers Another Sky has art and story by Ryō Furube. Translated by Cynthia Caraturo and lettered by Tom Williams. Published by Titan Comics (January 20, 2026).

Erica Friedman
Rating:

This story ticks very specific boxes – little girls in dangerous situations, horrific foes that merge human and inanimate objects, and a little light dismemberment for fun. It's not bad, but it definitely goes for the shocking over world-building.

By the end of volume one, we don't know that much about Toto and her partner Hana, except that they are considered two of the top scavengers. We also know, because she tells us, that Toto is committed to raising one million money amounts, but to what end is left open. There's a sense that she's buying out her contract, but again, since the worldbuilding is left open, we don't know what options she has.

The one stand-out quality here is the art. The BP is left unfinished in many places, with a rough sketch style being used to indicate the transition between the Bus Stop and BP. This makes the finished art seem much more impactful, especially when it features the enemy, whatever they might be. Unfortunately, we never do learn what that is by the end of the volume, presumably to get us to tune in to Volume 2. While there is a definite audience for post-apocalyptic tales of little girls getting body parts blown off, I am not that audience. Nonetheless, I wonder what the actual story is. How these human-object hybrids were created and, much more importantly, to whom are the scavengers selling their finds….and why do they want them. There are a lot of questions that could be asked of this story, but I'm just not sure that any of them will be answered, in favor of blowing children's bodies up a bit more. I really do hope that the story is developed and we learn more about these girls and what happened to the rest of humanity.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

I really liked this one, partly because it jams together elements of a bunch of manga/anime/light novels that I love. One part Otherside Picnic combined with one part Gantz, starring goggle-eyed young female characters aesthetically reminiscent of Tanya the Evil, this first volume is certainly a wild ride. It's one of those intense sci-fi stories that throw the reader straight into the action without much overt explanation of what's going on or why. Important plot points and world-building elements are dropped into dialogue or the occasional interstitial text boxes in a way that feels appropriate for the discombobulation experienced by both characters and reader alike.

A little like Gunslinger Girl's protagonists, in this world, young orphan females are trained, sometimes from infancy, to become gun-toting warriors. Instead of working for a shady government agency to assassinate political targets, they're confined to a secret laboratory/military facility and sent on missions to the “Black Parade,” a creepy alternative reality where the rules of physics bend until they snap. Some girls have never even seen the real sky outside of the facility, which begs the question of what the “real” world is really like.

We follow a quintet of teenage girls, all with their own particular combat skills. Often, they use weaponry gleaned from the Black Parade that exerts a personal cost for using them. One girl uses a weapon that reduces her body temperature by two degrees with every blow to the enemy. She has a sauna built into her quarters to warm her after battle! Another's weapon blows up parts of an enemy's body while also duplicating the damage to her own. Such visceral brutality, along with the almost clinical, digitally-assisted and hyper-detailed backgrounds, makes Scavengers Another Sky incredibly reminiscent of Gantz.

The Gantz similarities continue with the bizarre enemies that the girls must face – nightmarish abominations, the simplest of which are merely human-shaped, but with inanimate objects like cameras or television sets where their heads should be. Most of the volume is taken up with a fight against a misshapen creature with the power to invert gravity. With the Black Parade taking the form of a Doctor Strange-like pocket dimension, skyscrapers pointing down from where the sky should be, the dreamlike imagery is both potent and strange.

With a very intriguing, creative world, fun characters, intense action, extremely detailed art, and a deeply disturbing cliffhanger, I'd like to read more of this.