There are three races which live, and sometimes coexist, in this world: the humans, as typical as you can imagine, the beastkin, who straddle the line between civilized man and savage beast, and the hunters, who seem to exist only to hunt the beastkin and literally cannot understand their voices as they cry for mercy.
Wul is one of those hunters, and his name is known and feared among both humans and beastkin and they call him “Red Hood” for his ill-omened red hair. It seems as if he has no emotions at all and disdains humans as much as beastkin. One day in the woods he comes across Mani, a wolfkin, and seemingly on a whim takes in this young child and apparently resolves to raise her until she’s able to hunt on her own, Red Hood’s own wolf apprentice.
Someone needs to coin a term for the “single adult, usually male, raises young child” genre and, while in a far more fantastical setting than most of these titles are, Red Riding Hood’s Wolf Apprentice is at least half that kind of story (although if Mani does indeed eventually kill Wul, as the end of the first chapter suggests, then that would be a first for the genre). Wolf Apprentice tends to focus more on the fantasy side of things, however it tries to set up a world with both good and bad beasts to simultaneously justify why Hunters like Wul even exist and yet why a non-bloodthirsty beast like Mani also doesn’t surprise Wul. For the moment it’s not very nuanced or deep but it does the job.
If I had to pick between deeper world building or adding more depth to the characters however I’d choose the later since that’s what the story is lacking the most right now. Mani is a perfectly fine child character, a bit confused about her situation but has a defined personality and has a concrete goal to find her mother, but Wul is a mystery so far. It’s not even completely clear why he decided to take care of Mani, something that’s usually an establishing part of this parenting-a-child genre. The story hints that Wul is doing it out of penance for another wolfkin he previously killed/let die (possibly Mani’s own mother and most likely someone who Wul believed to be the last wolfkin) but without even that look into his mind Wul feels like the flatter character of the two. I was concerned that the “beasts can understand hunters but not vice-versa” lore was going to be played up a lot (especially since it leads to Mani having an accident in Wul’s house in the first chapter) but the story is actually handling that aspect pretty well and using it more as a way to instigate incidents instead of being the sole problem in and of itself.
This is a short series, only three volumes and all of which have been digitally published in English, and I’d like to finish reading it. Some recent news caught my eye however — manga-ka Sayaka Mogi has apparently been working on a sequel manga series, Red Riding Hood’s Wolf Apprentice – A Testament to the Moon, and apparently after she finished these first three volumes she announced her intent to self-publish the rest of the series in Japan. Anime News Network reported in late January that she is also “preparing” to publish this sequel series in English and I’m curious if she intends to self-publish abroad as well (which sounds arduous and I can’t immediately think of any American author who has done the same, even in the indie/webcomics sphere) or if this is a sign that Kodansha USA will be picking up the series soon.
Since Kodansha hasn’t elected to publish this series traditionally I can’t tell if this means the series didn’t do very well or if this means the series did fine but not spectacularly, and with the amount of digital-only publishing they do (and general lack of marketing around those titles) it’s tough to say; for any other company I’d say that a series that was published digitally only has a slim chance of getting a sequel series picked up since often that is an indicator of lukewarm reception. Still, I certainly hope we get the rest of the story since I suspect I’ll be dying for more after volume three!