This was a 3-volume manga series that was released in digest form in the early 2000s, but was originally released in the U.S. as single issue comics. The same dimensions and general page counts as an issue of Spider-Man. Which is something I vaguely remember seeing every once in a while back then, but I was mostly confused. What are these weird comics? I don't understand these titles! There's a strange lack of "X" or "Bat" in them! The manga is based on the anime El-Hazard (which is a little odd, I think it's usually the other way around), which was created by Hiroki Hayashi and Ryoe Tsukimura in the early '90s, who also created the Tenchi Muyo! series a few years earlier.
Which, if you're familiar with Tenchi Muyo, you can see the similarities. The main character being a shy, but kind teenager who finds himself abruptly surrounded by a lot of women with incredible power, many of whom develop an immediate interest in him. Including a princess and an alleged "demon" named Ifurita, who is really an artificially-created weapon who defies her controls out of love for him. Makoto's even able to access and control things which are only meant to be used by people of a particular royal bloodline.
It's not all the same. The romance/harem stuff is wedged in around a war that's going on between the so-called Allied Kingdoms and the Bugroms, who are bug creatures. Rather than trouble coming to him, Makoto falls into the middle of this via an abrupt sinkhole in front of his school. And this passage somehow grants him the power to access royal stuff. And it isn't just him. His schoolteacher falls in and gets super-strength if he's sauced. Or is it if he's sober? A fellow student, an egotistical ass named Jinnai falls in, too, and becomes the general of the Bugrom. Heck, there are even a few women that don't fall in love with Makoto.
Despite the fact the entire manga takes place during an apparently planetwide war, the tone remains light. The story starts with Jinnai chasing Makoto, who started a petition to have Jinnai expelled as student council president for abuse of authority and massive corruption, and got everyone in school to sign. And it keeps a certain amount of that silliness throughout, especially when Jinnai is around, chewing scenery like crazy, and just generally being a petty asshole. Even when Ifurita is fighting against a manifestation of her programming inside her mind, things feel more melodramatic than tense.
3 comments:
Somewhere in one of my longboxes, I have a single 22-page issue of DragonBall. Given the -- let's be generous -- sedate pace of that title at the best of times, putting it in a US format "floppy" makes for very odd reading.
I'd imagine so. It'd be one thing if manga was normally written to that length for chapters, where Toriyama might put an entire fight within that 22 pages. But even the most fast-paced fights tend to spread out across two or three chapters with some other stuff at the beginning and end.
Still better than Bendis!
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