Black Clover Season One

Okay. I confess. Before picking up the Blu-ray for Season One Part One I had never heard of Black Clover.

My bad! Perhaps. Because Black Clover, written and illustrated by Yuki Tabata, is a significant and popular fantasy shonen manga series, with a strong fan base, publishing weekly in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in Japan (as well as in digital format in the United States).

And that, I have to confess, I found hard to believe at the outset. In fact, by the time I was about three episodes into the Blu-ray (which contains 10 episodes running to approximately 25 minutes apiece), I was seriously wondering whether I could stomach another three hours of this stuff. Would it, I wondered, be OK to plead incompetence, cut my losses, and hand the review over to some other person?

In the end, I am glad that I did not.

The set-up is straightforward. Asta (voiced by Gakuto Kajiwara) and Yuno (voiced by Nobunaga Shimazaki) are orphans raised together from birth after being abandoned at a church orphanage in a small and insignificant village on the outskirts of the Clover Kingdom. Yuno is a prodigy with immense magical power and skill. By contrast, in a world where everyone has the natural ability to perform magic, Asta appears unique: the only person born with no power.

That should place him at a disadvantage. But by way of compensation, he trains physically, becoming super-strong and that, combined with an insatiable desire to outdo his brother, goes a long way to make up for his lack. Oh, that and, hinted at but not fully developed here, the fact that he may possess rare “anti-magic” abilities.

Key to understanding this world is an ancient evil, a Demon, bested in the long ago by an individual who becomes the first Wizard King and founds an order known as the Magic Knights.

So these first episodes see Yuno and Asta travel to the capital and try out for the knights. Goody-goody Yuno gets offers from every single chapter and accepts a place with the best of the best, Golden Dawn. Asta is picked up by the Black Bulls, an assortment of oddballs and contrarians who nonetheless seem to pull through when sent on missions.

Because that is what magic knights do. They go on missions, protect the weak, defeat evil and if they do exceptionally well, receive stars for their respective chapters.

It's a simple premise - a rivalry between two sibs determined to win all the prizes and fight their way to the top of the magical heap, thereby winning the biggest prize of all: becoming the next Wizard King. As one reviewer (of the manga) put it: "what if Harry Potter was a knight and also kinda dumb?"

Let's start with what made this first bloc of episodes difficult to get into. Several characters are shouty to the point of inflicting pain to my ear drums – and the shoutiest of them all is Asta.

The whole is simplistic, with plenty of class snobbery – the established knights and the nobles look down their noses at commoners like Asta and Yuno. Whereas the very existence of the Black Bulls, a squad so bad that their star score before Asta joins them is negative 30, has its clichéd roots in Animal House/every oddball frat house ever.

The characters are caricatures, for the most part conveyed according to one over-arching vice or virtue. The Black Bulls leader, for instance, is a reckless gambler. It is repetitive, with various tropes, from Asta's, “I am going to be the Wizard King” to Finral's womanising to Vanessa's incessant partying and drinking, to Gauche Adlai's ever-so-creepy i-love-my-sister contributions played over and over, often several times an episode.

On the plus side, this, its ability to recognise that flawed people can produce good outcomes, saves Black Clover from toppling into the clichés of a wholly manichean universe.

But that is to treat it like a film, which this is not. Black Clover is more akin to Tintin which, before reaching the big screen, had a lengthy incarnation in cartoon format just before the daily news. In such form it makes sense to have a few strongly drawn characters (Tintin, Captain Haddock) and a host of support (Prof Calculus, the Thom(p)son Brothers and so on) defined mostly by one over-riding personal trait or foible. Or think Asterix (focus: Asterix and Obelix, supported by Getafix, Dogmatix and so on).

It takes a while to tune into each of these worlds. But once tuned in, they are addictive. And so is Black Clover.

This is not great storytelling - but it is fascinating, compulsive. And that is why, despite initial misgivings, I was, by the end of this first tranche, thoroughly hooked. What will become of Asta? What hopes for his seemingly doomed relationship with Lily? And who will eventually come out on top? Asta or his saintly brother Yuno?

Accept that and the only question that matters. When is the next instalment coming out?