If I Call Them "Lovely Angels" Maybe My Blog Won't Get Destroyed

Yeah, I can see how being hit on by a bunch of rejects from Miami Vice would be unpleasant. These guys did not read the convention guide about appropriate behavior towards cosplayers. And when Kei talks about "hitting", well. . .

If the guy on the right didn't bite off his own tongue from that knee strike, it's because all his teeth shattered under the impact first. Ouch.

The Dirty Pair Omnibus collects three stories by the writer/artist team of Haruka Takachiho and Hisao Tamaki. I'm not familiar with Takachiho's work, and I only know Tamaki from the Star Wars manga adaptation I remember seeing ads for in Wizard back in the day. Two of the stories are, as far as I know, pretty standard fare for Dirty Pair, in that Kei and Yuri get assigned a case to investigate, and in the process of solving it, do something that causes immense property damage and loss of life.

Although I'm not sure how much you can really blame them. At one point they stopped a device that would have wiped out all of space for 8 light-years, but the way they did it created a micro-black hole which descended into the planet's core and is eating it from the inside out. At least the 7 billion people are able to relocate to another world eventually.

The middle story of the three is a much shorter one about them being hired to retrieve a probe from a black hole, and due to time distortion, they accidentally kill their future selves, and then have to figure out some way to avert that before they reach that point in their own timeline. Since they're stuck inside their ship for the entire story with the scientist who hired them, there's a lot more exposition than anything else. Interesting if you're into theories about how time and space react near intense gravitational fields, I guess.

Tamaki's art works very well for numerous fight scenes. It's a little weird how the book isn't always consistent about how violent things are getting. There's a point Yuri briefly loses her memories and free will, and is operating almost on autopilot based on Kei's command to fight, and shoots a guy in the head repeatedly with a machine gun. Which freaks Kei the hell out, but Yuri was cutting through guys' necks earlier in the book with her razor sharp throwing cards. Although in the shooting scene, the blood is colored black, and in the card scene, it's white. I don't know what I'm supposed to take from that difference, though.

But, I'd say the key is the art mostly works for both the serious scenes, and the more comic ones (usually involving the two of them freaking out at some misfortune they're going to be blamed for). The cyborg henchmen guy from the third story looks fairly intimidating, for all that he stole Tom Hardy's Bane mask. I said "mostly", because even when we're supposed to be unnerved by what's happening, Kei and Yuri are still drawn in a way to play up their sexiness, attractiveness, whatever you want to call it.

That's not even getting into cyborg guy's boss, who has a chest size Jim Balent would say was excessive. Takachiho tries to provide a sad backstory for the boss lady to explain why she'd get implants like that. The backstory is sad, but I'm not sure it works as an explanation. I could say it's about her having been repeatedly told by men her only value is in her body, and that she'll be cast aside for anyone more voluptuous at the first chance. So she tried to make herself #1 in that regard, so she could pick and discard as she pleases, so she'd have the access and power she wanted. I don't know if that really holds water.

I read something online, last month maybe, that argued "fan service" has gotten overused to the point it lost all meaning. The argument was it was meant to refer to things that are in the series that don't really serve any point, other than pleasing a certain segment of the audience. Probably dudes. In which case, it might not be the right term in this case. Because I'm pretty sure drawing two ladies kicking the shit out of bad guys while looking hot is pretty much the point of this book. In which case, mission accomplished.