Attack on Titan Vol. 4: Attack on Titan 4
- ISBN
- 9781612622538
- Publisher
- Kodansha
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 14–18
- Anime
- Season 1 ep. 1–25
Chapters 14 to 18, which close the Trost arc and then leave the present tense entirely. The first chapters finish the battle. The remainder jumps back two years to the 104th Training Corps, and that is worth knowing before buying: the second half of this book is a flashback introducing the cast who matter later, and it reads as a different story from the one on the cover. It is a clean place to stop if the siege was what interested you. Season 1 covers chapters 1 to 34, so the anime has been through all of it. Omnibus 2 collects Vols. 4 to 6.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The training flashback is doing structural work rather than marking time. Reiner, Bertolt, Annie, Jean, Sasha and Connie are all given faces and habits here so that the reveals in Vols. 8, 10 and 11 have somebody to land on, and the series does not return to this device at length until Vol. 23. Read in order, the flashback feels like a pause. Read after the Marley arc, it is the first place Isayama hides the answer in plain sight. The Japanese volume shipped on 8 April 2011. Anyone reading digitally should note that the English release ran a year behind Japan at this point and caught up later; the two numbering schemes never diverge, only the dates.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.