Frieren - Beyond Journey's End had a premise that I found intriguing, so I checked out 5 digital volumes from the library onto my Kindle Scribe.
The graphic novel volume starts with the end of a big adventure = the Elf mage Frieren and her fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. They are hailed as heroes, and part ways. Frieren, being an Elf, does not age or die, but her companions are two humans and a dwarf, so she attends her funeral.
The cleric in the party tricks her into adopting his mentee as her apprentice, and she embarks on a new adventure. The story starts slow, and you get the impression the Freren seems to be an unmotivated (by human standards) sort of person. Since she lives forever, she can effectively take her time and tarry at places for years at a time in no hurry.
As the backstory emerges, however, you start to see that she's no ordinary mage, for instance, suppressing her mana aura deliberately so that she appears weaker than she is. You discover that she was the apprentice of a legendary mage.
Like all Japanese graphic novels, a lot of the story is told in pictures instead of words or dialogue, so pages can fly by without a single word. I assume that the story was serialized in one of those weekly compendium magazines, so there's no hurry on the storyline. The story arc about demonic magic took more than a volume to cover. The story arc about getting a mage certification took more than a volume and still isn't done when I put down volume 5.
The characters are slow to evolve, so you have to give the series time to read (hence at least 5 volumes before I tried writing a review). It's a good enough read that I will keep checking out more volumes from the library as they become available.
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