It is quite possibly the hottest day thus far this summer here in the SF Bay Area. So hot that I lounged around the house all day and didn’t feel like doing anything.

I haven’t talked about manga lately, so here is a new series that I recently added to my reading list.

Summary from One Manga:

At the beginning of the 20th century American Doctor, Duncan MacDonald, engaged in a series of unethical experiments. Those experiments concluded that should one suffer a death not ordained by fate the human body lightened by an average of 30 grams, the weight of a man’s soul stone.

Today, two men, Sakarai and Amano, are in the hunt to find people who are about to die before their time and either prevent their unnatural death or recover these stones, “Livingstones.”

Since the premise states a specific person and historical event that sounds plausible, I naturally looked into it to see if it was true. In my research, I happened upon a website that I haven’t heard about before named Snopes. Snopes is a site that verifies or refutes urban legends and rumors with facts, and further explores their origins. Their entry on the weight of the soul has details on the doctor’s experiments which made for a good read.

The general gist of it is that there was a doctor that performed those experiments, but the conclusions he drew from them are highly skeptical due to the lack of sufficient data.

Livingstone has potential, I just hope it doesn’t become too repetitive/episodic and instead develops an original plot.