Arago Review: A London Cop Who Inherits His Brother's Arm and a Rotting Touch

I have a soft spot for the manga nobody talks about. The ones that ran for nine volumes in a weekly magazine, did their job, and quietly ended without an anime or a movie or a fandom big enough to argue about. Arago is one of those for me. I picked up the first volume years ago because the cover had a young guy in London with a wrong-looking right arm, and I'm a sucker for that exact image — a person carrying a piece of someone they lost.

What surprised me later is that the author, Takahiro Arai, actually lived in Scotland for a while before he became a mangaka. He'd already drawn the manga adaptation of Darren Shan — that British vampire horror series — so the UK setting in Arago isn't decoration grabbed off Google. It's a guy who liked dreary stone cities and Celtic mythology and built a shonen action manga out of them. That's the thing I keep coming back to with this one. It's not a great manga. But it knows exactly what it wants to be.

Quick Take

• A supernatural detective shonen set in London: a young man inherits his dead twin brother's arm and a power that rots whatever it touches, then joins the police to hunt the killer responsible
• Nine volumes, complete, no padding — it escalates fast and ends on its own terms, which is rare for a weekly series
• T (Teen): supernatural violence, a body-harvesting serial killer, and grief over a brother's death — disturbing in concept more than in gore

Story Overview

The Hunt brothers — Arago and Ewan — grow up in London after their parents are slaughtered by a monster. Years pass. Arago is the directionless, vengeful twin; Ewan becomes an elite police officer. When killings start up again in the city, the two are pulled back into the thing that destroyed their childhood: a serial killer called Patchman.

Patchman is the engine of the early story. He's a Frankenstein-shaped horror who murders people to harvest their body parts and stitch himself toward completion. In the confrontation that opens the series, Patchman overpowers both brothers and mortally wounds Ewan. Arago finally defeats him — and in the aftermath, two things happen that define the whole manga: Arago inherits Ewan's severed right arm, and he wakes up with an unexplained ability called Brionac. Anything not made of metal or plastic decays the moment it touches his skin.

That power, and the demons only he can now see crawling through London, get him recruited into the Metropolitan Police's special criminal investigation unit. From there the series turns into an escalating hunt against the Four Horsemen — four lieutenants modeled on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse — who are chasing mythological artifacts (the Lia Fáil, the Claíomh Solais) toward a larger plan. The reveal underneath it all is that Ewan didn't simply die: he was resurrected, tangled up with Patchman's own resurrection, still holding onto enough of himself to tell Arago to run. The final stretch sends Arago and his allies toward the Cauldron to pull Ewan back out of it. It's a clean arc — revenge story to rescue story — wrapped up inside nine volumes.

Characters

Arago Hunt — Starts as the revenge-driven twin, the one with no direction, and the series is essentially the story of him being handed his brother's literal arm and having to decide what to do with the rest of his life. The Brionac power is a cruel gift: it makes him a weapon but also means he can't casually touch most of the world without rotting it. His arc is the inheritance — fighting with what's left of Ewan.

Ewan Hunt — The competent twin, the police officer, the one who had it together. His death is the hinge of the plot, but the better twist is that he isn't gone: resurrected and partially conscious, he becomes the thing the whole back half is reaching toward. The brother you're hunting through hell, not avenging.

Patchman — The opening antagonist and the strongest single image in the manga: a body-harvesting killer literally assembling himself from victims. Honestly the weakest as a character — beyond the Frankenstein concept he doesn't get much interior life — but as a monster to launch the story, he works.

Rio Butler — Arago's childhood friend, back in London after fifteen years away. She's the human anchor, the person who disapproves of the dangerous road he's on, and — being honest, since the manga is honest about it — she spends most of the series sidelined from the supernatural events.

Joe Sullivan & Coco — The police side. Sullivan is the assistant inspector who vouches for Arago and ends up sacrificing himself to protect him. Coco is a detective who works with a K-9 partner and gets more room to breathe than most of the supporting cast.

What I Love About It

The arm and the Brionac power, taken together. Most "protagonist inherits a dead person's strength" stories make the power feel like a clean upgrade. Arago's doesn't. He's carrying his brother's right arm — the brother he failed to save — and the ability that comes with it, Brionac, destroys things on contact. Anything that isn't metal or plastic rots when it touches him. That's a genuinely good piece of design, because it turns the gift into a sentence. He can't shake a hand. He can't hold someone without ruining them. The thing that makes him strong enough to hunt monsters is the same thing that walls him off from the ordinary life Rio keeps trying to pull him back toward.

That's the tension I kept reading for. It externalizes grief into a physical rule: the dead brother's power literally degrades whatever Arago reaches for. You can read the whole manga as a guy learning to live with hands that break what they hold. The plot around it is standard escalating-shonen stuff, and I won't pretend otherwise — but that one mechanic gives the action a weight it wouldn't have if the arm were just a sword that came with a cool backstory.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The moment that stuck with me is the realization that Ewan was resurrected — that the brother Arago thought he'd lost in the opening fight is alive, dragged back alongside Patchman, still holding onto enough of himself to warn Arago away. It reframes everything. Up to that point the series reads as a revenge story: Arago hunting the thing that killed his family, carrying his dead twin's arm as a relic. Then it quietly becomes a rescue story. The arm isn't just a memorial anymore — it's a piece of someone who's still out there, trapped, and the whole final push toward the Cauldron is Arago trying to make him whole again. For a nine-volume action manga, turning the corpse you've been mourning into the goal you're fighting toward is a sharper move than I expected.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The Brionac "everything you touch rots" power is a genuinely strong piece of design
• London and the Celtic-myth scaffolding feel chosen, not decorative — the author actually lived in the UK
• Nine volumes, complete, with a real beginning-to-end arc and no weekly-series bloat

Cons

• The plot leans hard on supernatural-shonen conventions without subverting them
• Side characters outside the core few are thin; Rio especially gets pushed to the margins
• The art can get scratchy and hard to follow in the busier fight scenes — that's either rough energy or a flaw depending on your taste

Is Arago Worth Reading?

If you want a short, complete supernatural-action shonen with a strong central hook and an unusual setting, yes — it's a satisfying weekend read. If you're after deep characterization or genre subversion, this isn't it. Arago is a clean, escalating revenge-into-rescue story carried by one excellent idea: a man fighting with his dead brother's arm and a touch that rots the world.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Arago Differs
D.Gray-man	A weaponized arm and a war against monsters across a gothic European setting	Arago is far shorter and grounds its arm in a single dead-brother relationship rather than a long mythos
Blue Exorcist	A protagonist carrying inherited supernatural power he didn't ask for	Arago's power actively isolates him — it rots what he touches rather than just marking him as different
Darren Shan (Arai's own adaptation)	British-flavored supernatural horror with a young protagonist pulled into a hidden world	Arago is Arai's original take on that mood as a police-procedural action shonen, not an adaptation

Official English Translation Status

There is no licensed English edition of Arago. The series was published in Japanese by Shogakukan (nine volumes) and translated officially into languages like French and Italian, but it never got an English release. If you read Japanese, the original is the only legitimate way to own it.

Where to Buy

No English release yet. That just means you find it before everyone else does.

Find the Japanese edition on Amazon.co.jp →

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