While faux dungeon delicacies were presented as the hook for this manga, by Delicious in Dungeon Volume Four, it has matured into a love letter to fantasy-themed role-playing games, with the occasional reference to an unreal recipe for the sake of consistency. Whereas in initial volumes Ryoko Kui would build towards each monstrous entree, now the mangaka uses this time to stage each scene and develop the slowly hulking cast of the expanding universe. Like a good dungeon master, who spends more time on motivation and backstory than on the physics of an encounter and the goodies it delivers, Kui is spending less time on stocking her dungeon with edible treasures than with connecting it to a meaningful tableau.

One of the more interesting threads running through Delicious in Dungeon is that of the impact casual resurrection would have on a culture. In a way, the characters are more attached to each other than people in this world, for they know that love not only survives death, it can reverse it with a certain amount of gold and a willing revivifier. In the world of Delicious in Dungeon, death is no barrier to friendship or love. On the other hand, death being as permanent as it is in a video game, it is also as ephemeral. Death signifies not endings and legacies but a big bill and a nuisance, though your friends and loved ones are willing to put up with your annoying corpse in order to see you again. In the case of Laios’s sister Falin, the first three volumes were spent in tracking down a dragon in the hope of spilling its guts, so that they could extract her remains from its viscera, and volume four, in marking the conclusion of this dragon arc, finally delivers Falin’s bones to the adventurers.

If I’m glossing over the dragon battle that you’ve been anticipating for three volumes, it’s not only to preserve the suspense, but to focus on Resurrection in Delicious in Dungeon. The big spoiler of volume 4 is not that the dragon is finally slain and Falin’s corpse recovered, as those things were no doubt expected by the readership, but that Marcille used demon magic–which seems as ineffable in her world as it is in ours–to resurrect Falin on the spot, using the dragon’s carcass to provide the raw materials to enflesh Falin. If you think this will end well for our heroes–at least not before it has a chance to go horribly wrong–you are no doubt a virgin to manga, fantasy, RPGs, and, well, stories.

Delicious in Dungeon succeeds on so many levels that we may not have noticed the sincerity and thoughtfulness with which this story cheats death. Whereas most other fantastic narratives, whether fantasy, science fiction, superhero comics, or manga, cheat death regularly and arbitrarily, and in ways that aren’t always satisfying, Ryoko Kui, whether to parody resurrections in genre fiction or to realize faithfully the raising of the dead in RPGs, has set rules of exchange. While we don’t know exactly what these are, we know that they come at a great cost, both in gold and in effort, and when Laios hugs his dearly departed and recently revived sister, he has paid for it in ways that are much more meaningful than the marketing tricks by which mullet Superman made his way back to Lois.

Overall, Delicious in Dungeon Volume Four was my favorite volume since the first. While the comedy is being supplanted by a dark fantasy epic, I’m enjoying those shadowy narrative threads just as much. My favorite comics are usually able to sustain a tone change or a subgenre shift from time to time, a capability that can indicate series longevity, and I have nothing but high hopes for a healthy run of Delicious in Dungeon.

dungeon volume four

Yen Press sent the review copy.