The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet

What's It About? 

"Make me think it's okay if you're the one who eats me..." In the mountains somewhere, a tiger catches its prey―a lone dragon, the kind that is hardly ever seen. Eating the dragon's meat extracts the ultimate flavor, drinking its blood heals all one's injuries, and devouring its heart grants immortality. Yet, upon seeing the dragon's undeveloped stature, the tiger refuses to eat it. Dragon and tiger, predator and prey―is what ties them together simply natural hunting instincts, or something more...?

The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet is a manga by Hachi Inaba. This volume is translated by Giuseppe di Martino and lettered and retouched by Greg Deng. Published by Yen Press (March 19, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay
Rating:
The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet is a weird story, not because it's difficult to follow or overly complicated. Rather, it's a weird story because a lot of little technical things eat away at the overall presentation and hold the story back from whatever it's trying to communicate. It has a lot of strong elements that we don't see often in manga these days. In a world with incredibly wordy manga like Jujutsu Kaisen, where an entire fight scene can feel bloated from power-scaling explanations, it's refreshing to read about two animals learning to coexist. The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet can go on for pages without any dialogue, yet the exquisite artwork can communicate volumes. In many ways, the story would work better without any dialogue because the attention to detail in the subtle nuances of realistic animal facial expressions carries over incredibly well.

However, this isn't a nature documentary, and there is dialogue despite the story technically following animals. These animals could transform seemingly in the blink of an eye into humanoid semi-hybrids with no real discernible explanation. There is a bit of a mythical air about The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet with lore regarding the ecosystem and how the animals interact, but a lot of it can be boiled down to straightforward explanations. In the animal kingdom, it's either eat or get eaten, and most animals don't live past two decades, so make the most of your time on this earth while you have it.

All of that is good, but I'm not sure what kind of story The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet is trying to tell, particularly regarding our two main leads, the dragon boy and the white tiger woman. Sadness permeates the story, and loneliness can be felt in this eat-or-get-eaten world. However, regarding the specific relationship between our two leads, I can't tell if the story is trying to craft a familial bond to deal with that loneliness or a romantic one. In a lot of ways, it just feels like events just happen in the book, and then when characters are talking about how they feel, it comes off as just repeating, "Why are you here?" or "Are you going to eat him yet?" over and over again.

By halfway, the story had already done everything it was trying to do and was now stretching that content to meet a page quota. This is doubly concerning, considering that the story continues beyond this point. But if I'm being honest, I don't feel the need to continue. All the artwork is gorgeous and the presentation is solid, unfortunately, The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet is held back by its wandering nature.

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Christopher Farris
Rating:

There's the air of the artsy to The Tiger Won't Eat the Dragon Yet. The setting is a minimalist fantasy wildlands affair. The cast is small, and only one has so much as gotten a name thus far. Whole panels and pages can pass by wordlessly, easing the readers into its folkloric tale at the book's own insisted-upon pace. It is, in so many of these ways, evocatively effective. There is dialogue in this story, but it can come off as incredibly restrained in its deployment and details—secondary to the sheer vibes of the presented concept.

That concept entails less and more than first meets the eye. With all the loaded discussion of "eating" and the adversarial tension between this lady with her tremendous tiger titties and the cute, cheeky dragon boy, one might be forgiven for thinking this was setting up for some allegorical (and not so allegorical) sexual shenanigans. While there is a bit of fanservice scattered throughout this tale of tigers and dragons (including a few drawings that technically don't show a ton of skin yet are profoundly horny), it's hardly a central feature. This is instead primarily a sincere tale of a couple of cute animal people making a found family in this vicious, vore-or-be-vored world. Alongside that are some slow uncoverings of the psychological motivations that power them. For instance, we realize that the tiger lady is a meathead. This is important.

It's mostly appreciable stuff, alongside a decent amount of animalistic action scenes. These…could be better. The individual drawings, like so much of Hachi Inaba's art in this book, are fundamentally strong. The character designs, posing, and backgrounds are all impressively detailed. However, the actual panel-to-panel storytelling structure is lacking at many points. There's an inconsistent grasp of pacing out proper beats between pages and panels, causing many scenes to ring confusingly as if moments are missing. It robs at least a few visual punchlines of their intended impact, resulting in a confused "Wait, what?" reaction instead. Things seem to settle a bit later in the book (or maybe I just figured out how to go with the flow), so however this one continues, it could improve to be a consistently intriguing, attractive time.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Strictly speaking, I don't think this story needed its anthropomorphic component. Mind you, the artist wouldn't get to draw the white tiger's gigantic breasts if that was the case (real tigers notably not having them), nor her taut stomach or her shapely legs, and for some readers, that's very likely to be part of the series' appeal. For me, however, the bigger artistic draw is the animals themselves. They're drawn as realistically as possible, with details in their markings, musculature, and movements, and are beautiful to look at. If the plot didn't need us to know that the dragon looks like a child to the white tiger, the whole "people" element could have been excluded.

As it is, the animal's human forms push the potential romantic subplot forward while allowing for more of a fantasy element to the story. The dragon's existence isn't enough to fully mark this as fantasy because the plot goes out of its way to mention why there aren't many dragons anymore in the story's world: dragons eat each other, including their own young at times. This means that they need to reproduce frequently, but because they're also the jerks of the animal kingdom, birds took to spreading malicious rumors about how eating a dragon's heart will make you immortal. That meant that dragons tried to avoid the ground, making it hard to reproduce. Hence, our dragon is the only one most of the other animals have ever seen.

The title gives away the plot's main drive: having caught the dragon, the white tiger has decided not to eat him. The "yet" is very much disputable because she seems keener on raising him as her cub, although he doesn't see her as his mother. The story is meandering, introducing other animals, such as the orange tiger and a snake who fill the role of rivals for the main characters, showing a lot of hunting scenes (so fair warning if you don't like animal-on-animal violence), and just generally giving us a slice of mountain life feel. It's good enough, but the art earns it an extra half-star, especially the ink paintings between chapters. I'm not entirely sure who this series is looking for as its audience, but it's certainly interesting enough to merit picking up if anything about it appeals to you.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.