Is Mars Red Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

By 1923, vampires have existed in Japan long enough that the government has a policy for them: register, accept monitored blood rations, and live under military oversight — or be hunted down. Code Zero is the unit built to do the hunting, and its members are, almost entirely, vampires themselves. Commander Yoshinobu Maeda leads a squad built around Shutaro Kurusu, an A-rank vampire who's managed to hold on to his humanity, alongside a handful of other vampires and humans whose loyalties don't always point the same direction. Mars Red follows this unit as its missions keep forcing its members to question what, exactly, they're being used for.

The manga, written by Bun-O Fujisawa and illustrated by Kemuri Karakara, adapts the original MARS RED stage play into three volumes, running in Monthly Comic Garden from 2020 to 2021.

What it does well

The core premise does a lot of work on its own: using vampires to hunt other vampires is a setup loaded with built-in tension, and the manga leans into the uncomfortable position that puts Code Zero's members in — enforcing a policy against their own kind, under the command of humans who see them, at best, as useful tools. The relationship between Maeda and Kurusu is the clearest beneficiary of that tension, a human commander and the vampire soldier he's come to actually trust, and it carries most of the series' emotional stakes.

The historical setting adds real texture, too. Taisho-era Japan was a period of rapid, uneasy modernization, and the manga uses that backdrop well — a society trying to absorb something new and dangerous (vampires, in this case, but the parallel to the era's real anxieties about change isn't subtle) without fully understanding what it's dealing with. And because the whole thing runs just three volumes, it moves with purpose; nothing here is killing time.

Where it falls short

That same brevity is the series' biggest limitation. Adapting a stage play into three manga volumes means a fairly large cast — Suwa, Takeuchi, Defrott, Aoi, Rufus, and others — gets introduced in quick succession without always getting the room to become more than a function in the plot. A few arcs that could use more space to land get resolved briskly instead, and there are a couple of turns that assume a bit more outside context (from the play or the simultaneous anime adaptation) than the manga fully supplies on its own.

Verdict

Mars Red is a short, atmospheric vampire series that gets real mileage out of its central premise and its historical setting, even when its compressed runtime doesn't leave room for everyone in its cast to fully land. If a Taisho-era military unit of vampires hunting their own kind sounds like a good pitch to you, three volumes is a low-risk way to find out — just go in knowing it's paced like an adaptation, not an original long-form story.