One Great Panel: Omori

And it all comes crashing down.

I hadn’t heard of Omori before it popped up on the K Manga app, but having enjoyed the opening chapters of This Promised Neverland, I wanted to get into another series starring kids in a bit of a dark and atmospheric story. Especially in the sense of seeing how kids face the darkness that’s all around them and how they even perceive it.

Omori seemed to fit the bill and while I found myself confused (intentionally so, I’d wager) throughout the first chapter, that confusion amounted to tension and misplaced anxiety. I didn’t know what was happening, but in the best way. Secrets were being hidden, and the panel we’re looking at here is the first time a secret is revealed, and it hits big time.

This is from chapter 1, page 39.

Context: For the entire run-up to this panel, there’s been this haunting mystery of what exactly is wrong with the boy pictured, Omori. He keeps seeing monsters in his house, but none that do anything other than look creepy. His friends come to try to get him out of the house, but it’s clear there’s something we’re not seeing. At this moment, all of the mystery comes to an explosive panel and we find out why Omori is so disconnected from life. His sister, Mari, died and he holds himself responsible.

My favorite part about this is the scribbles falling down around him. Up to this point, those scribbles have formed words and names, hovering in the white space around Omori. I saw it as the way he heard the world, almost like the teacher in Peanuts, slightly distorted. Even here, you can see remnants of “Mari” in the scribbles, like the distorted sound of her name has been playing in his head since the incident.

That’s what makes this moment so stark, because all that white space, or silence, reclaims the panel, and the words fall away. He can’t hide, he’s exposed. It’s one of those amazing panels that you can practically hear because of how everything leads up to this very moment.

Not just that, but to expand on where the next few panels go, we see the scribbled words reclaim the white space, which makes this silence even more poignant.

It’s also noteworthy that Omori is under a shadow. I spent a long time debating what he’s in the shadow of, but I think the simplest answer is the most resonant—he’s in the shadow of his own speech bubble, this looming guilt that he couldn’t save his sister. It is so heavy on him that he can’t get out from under it. Even in this unprotected white space, he’s still stuck under that burden.

And all of that is just the way the panel looks. When you look at this panel in the context of setting the stakes of the story, this is essentially a massive convergence of so many things. Primarily, it’s the landing strip of Omori’s trauma. But it’s also in the midst of him trying to reconnect with the world (somewhat willingly) as well as the moment when readers are let in on the secret. Nothing is the same after this panel, and everything that came before it now adds up to something more definite. Before, it was all a feeling; now there’s fact woven in there too.

It also doesn’t end the mystery though. We still don’t know how Mari died, what role Omori actually played in it, and how much of what he’s seeing and hearing (from the monsters in his house and elsewhere) is real.