Isayama’s lack of technical skill shows in other ways, too. His panel layouts often seem cramped and haphazard, with little regard for when a particular scene might need room to breathe. This is particularly noticeable when the art is reproduced at the tankobon size, which is what we see in the U.S. and is significantly smaller than an American comic book, let alone a Japanese weekly manga magazine. Some panels become almost incomprehensible at this size.

What’s more, while Isayama’s decision to eschew expository narration is a perfectly good stylistic choice, he has not mastered the visual language needed to convey changes in time or location. From page to page, we’re often left to puzzle out just where we are.

His placement of dialogue balloons is similarly amateurish. Characters’ speech is often split into multiple balloons that don’t correspond to paragraph breaks. Balloons are only occasionally given tails, so we can’t always tell who is meant to be speaking. And in Kodansha’s English language editions, the font size varies widely, seemingly for the sole purpose of cramming translated dialogue into the available balloon shapes.

Maybe not all of this is Isayama’s fault. But my point is that these failings are by no means universal to translated manga. Plenty of other manga series are far more legible and readable by Western audiences than Attack on Titan. Berserk is Stephen King compared to this jumbled mess. Go Nagai can tell as much story in 20 pages as Isayama can tell in a thousand. This is a failing that Isayama’s manga has had from the beginning, and as the reader continues through the series, it makes the story ever harder to follow as the storytelling slides further and further off the rails.

That story, though

So let’s get back to the story, and how it leads up to that anything-but-satisfying conclusion. At some point after the revelation of the Female Titan and even some hundreds of pages after the introduction of the Beast Titan – which can speak and therefore maybe explain something of what’s going on – we realize that Attack on Titan has hit the Second Act Blues.

That’s when an author gets a story up and running, has some idea how it might end, and no idea what happens in between. It’s a problem that plagues novelists and screenwriters, too. Worse, though, Isayama has said in interviews that his original idea was to give Attack on Titan a doomy ending like Stephen King’s “The Mist,” where everybody dies, but he talked himself out of it once the manga became popular. Unfortunately, that left him with a manga that had a strong beginning and a lot of hype, but no middle and no end in sight. And it shows.

Right after that first act, everything starts going out the window. Erin’s basic training is presumed to be complete. The idea of Titans as a horrific, existential threat to humankind starts to disappear in favor of the idea that certain individuals “possess the power” of certain, special Titans – in other words, pilot them, like mecha robots.

It’s at this point that Attack on Titan starts to strongly resemble Neon Genesis Evangelion. Eren is our Shinji, a teenager with father issues and a dead mother, who is drawn into a war he never asked for. (There are shades of Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam, too.) A few characters have the unusual ability to pilot giant war machines, and Eren/Shinji has the best one. His opponents are monsters of mysterious origin. And in the background, the authorities seem to know more than they’re letting on.