I, for one, would appreciate being informed of my impending death ahead of time. It's very considerate. What if I was about to go do my laundry, or file taxes? Now I needn't bother. The IRS can send me my refund in hell.
Square Enix Manga has been releasing a "perfect" edition of Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater manga. It's a hardback book, and each volume is equal to, I think, 1.5 volumes of the original softcover releases. Looks nice, and I'd heard the anime didn't entirely follow the manga, so I was curious.
Whatever differences there are going to be haven't started by the end of this volume, though, as it's mostly concerned with setting up the characters and the world. There's "meisters" and "weapons", the latter being people who actually turn into weapons wielded by the meisters. They then work together hunting down humans who commit horrible crimes which could eventually turn their soul into a "kishin", which is like some incredibly powerful demon. If the weapon eats 99 souls of evil humans, and 1 witch's soul, they become a weapon fit to be wielded by Lord Death (not to be confused with Lord Death-Man) himself.
So there's three teams: Maka and Soul (who's a scythe), Black Star and Tsubaki (a ninja weapon that can take many forms), and the Death the Kid/Liz/Patty trio (the sisters being a pair of handguns, which Kid holds upside-down for some dumbshit reason). Of the three, Maka and Soul are probably the most functional. Their biggest issues are Maka's temper (and issues with men because of her dirtbag lech of a father, who is also Lord Death's current weapon), and Soul being too concerned with being cool, while he's really kind of a dork.
Black Star is fairly strong, and when he focuses, he's an impressive fighter. But he's too interested in being the star, yelling that he's the one who will surpass God, so he screws up a lot. Tsubaki's a quiet, gentle person, who finds it easy to get along with him, but can't exactly reign him in, either. Kid has this weird hang-up about symmetry, to the point he abandons Liz and Patty in the middle of a mission because he thinks a painting in his home might be slightly off-center.
Ohkubo gives each character a highly unique sense of fashion and design, which is nice. A lot of the villains are based on historical or Western fiction characters, and some of the design choices for them are. . . interesting. I wouldn't even know how to describe Jack the Ripper's look in this thing. Most of the settings are designed to be either spooky and atmospheric, or perhaps a parody of it. Graveyards and narrow alleys with buildings that seem to lean in and loom over you. The moon has a giant grin and drools blood. The fight scenes are generally pretty clever and fun. Always some back-and-forth, interesting attacks, a mixture of comedy elements and violence. Ohkubo can draw punishing hits. Uses a lot of little lines, that kind of make the person doing the hitting and the person getting hit look like they're vibrating or shaking from the impact.
About the comedy, though. Some of it plays off the main cast being dumb kids, who make dumb mistakes. Like Maka and Soul trying to hide behind a tree, but their butts and their heads are sticking out in plain view. Or Kid freaking out over an enemy ruining their own perfect symmetry. But a lot of it is a lot of, like, "Master Roshi's a pervert, ha-ha" stuff. Soul tries to ambush the witch they're after but crashes in on her in the bathtub, oh no, he got a nosebleed. Black Star tries to spy on Tsubaki in the hot springs, but can't keep his mouth shut and gets a shuriken in the forehead. That sort of thing. And it's not really even funny, so it just becomes annoying. Hopefully there's a bit less of that in subsequent volumes, once the main plot kicks in a bit more.
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