Most pages have nine to fifteen panels and never in a grid. It’s great to see Miyazaki’s letters, especially the creative drama and visual language of effects. The lettering choices from Walden Wong are also clear and professional with a touch of Renaissance flair that is shared with the general aesthetic. It is on the alien high fantasy side of things, but personalities come through and you connect with everyone as intimately as they do each other. The dialog feels crisp, the myriad allegiances and double crosses are clear. The translation by Dana Lewis, Toren Smith, and Rachel Thorn was handled beautifully. The drama of flashing sword showdowns are executed with Seven Samurai perfection and then criticized for their ego. One power experiments with using this environmental destruction to wipe out the other, the other strikes back with the lost technology of annihilation behind the scourging of the planet. Nature’s reset to continental tabula rasa has ended the age of man. Overgrowing these last castles are giant forests of poison spores, protected by mammoth beetles who spread the plague when drawn to their borders. Miyazaki’s ceramic age of knights and airships totter at the brink of their era’s collapse.

Nausicaä rises as a folk hero, the accidental leader of an army of outcasts- others who are caught between the sides and the blight. The matriarch of a family of vipers on one side, religious zealots led by a dark wizard and his watch-the-world-burn brother on the other. Nausicaä: princess and heir, capable with a glider, contemplative regarding her toxic world, bound to honor her small kingdom’s allegiance to one side of a war. Some of the changes Miyazaki made are explained in Scott Ryan's Nausicaa Manga Comparison article, in which example panels from the original serialisation in Animage Magazine and panels from the 7 Japanese Volumes are presented side by side.The war begins at home. As with all previous English language editions, all the edits made by Miyazaki, prior to the publication of the Japanese Volumes, are incorporated in this box set. Sample pages for various other editions can be found on The Hayao Miyazaki Web. The sample page image shows Panels 7 and 8 from page 445 (UP# 972) of the second volume of this box set. See Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (manga) Page Numbers for a slightly more detailed index of the contents, a guide to illustrations cross-referenced with Watercolor impressions and a Universal Page Number conversion table.

There is a guide to the sound effects in the back of each volume. Sound effects are left untranslated in the panels. The box set comes with a separate bonus poster. In each volume the story is preceded by several pages of colour illustrations. Consists of a slipcase with two hardcover volumes. Contains Hayao Miyazaki's entire Nausicaä manga.

Nausicaa box