A New (Lunatic) Challenger has Entered the Fray

That's standard for arranged marriages, isn't it? Lots of contracts? 

Volume 7 of Yakuza Fiance is split between two stories. In the first, Kirishima asks Yoshino to accompany him to a visit to his family. Specifically his great-aunt Sumire. Sumire has a pretty sharp tongue, especially towards Kirishima, and is stunned he has a girlfriend, let alone the granddaughter of her no-good Yakuza brother's old buddy, who Sumire clearly sees as a bad influence.

More interesting is her conversation with Yoshino about Kirishima. He apparently showed up at the family home one day, and burned every photo of himself. Why is unclear at this point. Sumire also offers more about the incident from Kirishima's childhood where he beat the crap out of a bunch of other kids. Sumire knows it was more than them bullying Kirishima and demanding money, because he kept a record of it, and not in the sense of wanting evidence for a later court case.

Kirishima ends up in Gaku's orbit not long after, when Sumire pushes him at Gaku during his grandfather's (Gaku and Sumire's brother) funeral. Kirishima's parents just, gave up on him, and later divorced. Well, OK. Kind of odd. Seems like a shortcut to explain why they aren't around, without going the "they're dead" approach Konishi used with Yoshino's father. Sumire doesn't seem to have a high opinion of Kirishima, and even advises Yoshino to leave if she really doesn't want to stick with him, but also hopes he'll have someone like Yoshino in his life.

I'm a little surprised that, when pressed on why she likes him, Yoshino can only say he's a hard worker. I figured she'd say something about how, even if he drives her nuts, he's always authentically himself. Anyway, somehow she impressed Sumire, so Kirishima's attempt to follow Tsubaki's advice (show Yoshino more of himself) worked! Yoshino even gives him a birthday gift!

Naturally everything goes to hell in the second half. While Kirishima is attending a funeral for some person, Yoshino is at a cram school prepping for exams. Kirishima gets distracted by what turns out to be Squirrel's Nest Hair stealing one of their guys' phone, so who appears to pick Yoshino up but Azami, the creepy guy with a scar that fought Kirishima a couple volumes ago.

There's a bunch of odd detours, which feel a lot like Konishi padding things out. Maybe it's supposed to humanize Azami, but given what comes next, that ain't happening. Long story short, he drugs Yoshino and she wakes up in a bathtub. Where Azami reveals his inner Silver Age villain. He was able to ditch her phone earlier, but assumes there's a tracking device on her. He has a jammer, but he's been turning it off periodically so someone, meaning Kirishima, could trail him here, at a pace of Azami's choosing.

And if she wasn't wearing a tracking device?! Well, that's the second part. Azami wants Yoshino to ditch Kirishima and return to Osaka, with Azami as her new beau. That way he can kill her grandfather, part of that power struggle Yoshino is largely unaware of (though there's a subplot through the entire volume of Shouma doing some investigating and gradually figuring it out.) Azami will kill Kirishima as a bonus. After all, her grandfather hired Kirishima to protect Yoshino, and Kirishima knew Azami was looking for her, but never warned her. What does she owe him? Suffice to say, Yoshino ain't going for that.

The fight doesn't exactly go well, though she certainly intends to go down swinging. Manages to break one of his fingers and short out the jammer. Would have appreciated if she actually did bite his tongue off entirely, though. Azami, knowing Kirishima's now coming right for him, gives her a chance to survive. If she can escape the building, he'll leave her be, for now.

Kirishima shows up during the escape attempt and runs right past Azami - who he has seen without a mask, so he must recognize him - to get to Yoshino. Which means, when he tries to get her out of there, Azami is able to put a knife in his shoulder, before they drop 3 stories. What the hell happened to beating the shit out of anyone that even looks funny at Yoshino, man?! The one time the damned lunatic actually needs to go berserk on somebody, and he doesn't. 

Hit Reset

Seen that before. Guy ties the knot and it's like he forgets everyone else in his life. 

The 8th volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World is about most of the cast coming to realize the troubles of their world go deeper than the Seven Fallen Angels.

After Archbishop Elton's transformation and rampage in the previous volume, Annette has questions for His Holiness. They stop in the village Annette where vaguely remembers growing up (ominous statement), but find it almost deserted. All the men huddled in a single cabin, in deep depression because their wives are bewitched by an Otherworlder. The same Otherworlder that promptly captures Tama.

(This marks another volume where writer Hiroshi Nota doesn't really have anything for Tama to do. Outside a couple of cheap gags, she might as well not even be there.)

Annette goes alone to confront the "Fallen Angel of Lust", whose ability allows her to seize people's memories, making them into an easily controllable puppet. Annette, remembering what Sensei said about her not being a caged bird, resists, breaking free about the time Sensei shows up, excited to be dissolved by this strange power he heard about from Diantha, the only young elf woman in the village not bewitched. Significantly, Diantha's also the only young elf woman in the village not married.

The Fallen Angel's attempt to use her power on Sensei backfires. I think because his soul is too bleak? When she enters his thoughts, it's just a dark void. Or else he's so nosy his will overwhelms hers and he ransacks her memories instead. In this volume's tragic flashback, Eliza was a child TV star. Boys constantly hit on her, then insulted her for not responding. Girls assume she's sleeping with the guys and treat her horribly. Her one friend is a shy girl who draws a comic about a girl who looks like Eliza and is transported to a high fantasy world to become friends with an elf girl. But when Midori's boyfriend assaults Eliza, Midori blames Eliza for it. Enter the old Isekai Jackpot Truck.

Eliza joined the other Fallen Angels and was sent to conquer the elves, but made friends with Diantha instead. Diantha just wants to craft jewelry, but is constantly hounded to marry some douchebag man-elf. When they trashed her workshop, Eliza decided it was time to get down to business.

Sensei having seen all this while poking through Eliza's memories like a dirtbag private investigator, is disgust by the locals claiming their village is full of love. The wives, understandably, are not inclined to take the word of a woman who enslaved them, and insist their husbands did nothing wrong. Eliza probably made their husbands intimidate Diantha and wreck her workshop as a method of intimidation and coercion! So Diantha takes Eliza and they leave the village together.

So Eliza's better future is to stay here. This only makes the fact Yuriko and her sister were sent home even more curious. Their happy future involves being sent back to a world where the sister is always very ill (she was healthy in Zauberberg) and Yuriko's entire future is thrown away playing caretaker because the parents were too lazy to do it themselves? I don't get what kind of point Nota is trying to make there.

Still, with another crisis dealt with - sort of; the village's tendency to impose harsh expectations upon the women to conform to certain roles hasn't been addressed - everyone converges on His Holiness. Sensei and his crew, the remaining Fallen Angels, Annette's colleagues Ysha and Wolff (also suspicious after what happened to Elton), and the Dark Lord's daughter, Waldelia. Certainly feels like time for the big showdown, but there's not much fighting.

The leader of the Fallen Angels says they were ordered to kill the Dark Lord by the Pope. Once it was done, he made them the new boogeyman, and is using Sensei to remove them. This is a piss-poor argument considering the people he's talking to, like us, know only one (Yuriko) of the 4 Fallen Angels was sent away. Tama killed the cannibal. The other two are still roaming this world. Plus, there's all the Otherworlders who simply abused their abilities for their own gain. Why weren't they being ordered to defeat the Dark Lord? Well the guy has the hairstyle of a mob lawyer and eyes like a vampire. Clearly not to be trusted.

Meanwhile, the Pope's pitching Sensei on using his Cheat to help fix this world by expelling the Otherworlders. Predictably, this bombs, all the more when Sacchan shows up and uses her "Pride" Cheat to bind Sensei to her. While Annette seems able to briefly shake the hold on Sensei, the Pope shows off his own power, resetting things to when Sensei first arrived in this world. Only this time, he and Sacchan arrive together, Sensei still bound by her power.

Saturday Splash Page #241

"God's Mistake," in "Future Present from God", in Wanted!, by Eiichiro Oda

I reviewed this 5 months ago, so we won't belabor the point. Wanted! is the collection of Oda's work prior to starting One Piece. It consists of 5 stories, including Romance Dawn, a kind of first draft for One Piece, as it stars a rubber boy with a straw hat named Luffy, who wants to be a pirate, but ends up fighting more dishonest pirates.

Most of the stories revolve around twist endings, and the protagonist, up to that point portrayed as a goofball or not someone to take seriously, turns out to be a badass. Gill Bastar, star of Wanted! spends most of the story either avoiding the many bounty hunters after him for the price on his head, or defeating them through trickery like, "Look over there!" It's only at the very end he turns out to be such a great marksman the ghost of a bounty hunter he killed with trickery moves on to the other side, having realized (if unwilling to admit it) he'll never find someone skilled enough to take revenge for him.

Describing him like that, Gill sounds like Vash the Stampede if he really did turn murderous once pushed far enough.

You get stories with a swordsman whose fixation on disrespect appears to doom a town to destruction via dragon, who in the end exposes a couple of frauds, and kills the dragon in one swing. Or a monk who spends most of the story running in terror from an evil spirit haunting a forest, only to immediately overpower the spirit once he learns it killed and ate his master. Maybe Oda wanted to do the comedy, but still have the cool finish. I'm not sure it really works, as I don't find much of it funny. 

You see his artwork evolve, especially as he gives himself more room on the page by decreasing panels. His lines tighten up and grow thicker, the characters look less sketched and more sturdy and defined. It doesn't hurt his ability to exaggerate expressions, and I think the additional space helps his action sequences.

Sunday Splash Page #437

"Broken Hearts Club," in Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers will Save the World, ch. 1, vol. 1, by Shinta Fuji (writer), Masaki Kawakami (artist)

Nick's a light warrior who, after he finds evidence another member of his adventuring party stole from them, is kicked out by the leader of said party. The leader's reasoning is, he raised and trained Nick, but Nick's grown to the point his values no longer align with the group's, so Nick needs to find his own place. Then Nick's girlfriend breaks up with him, because she was really only using him. In a depressive funk, he throws himself into worshiping an idol (which are like pop stars, I guess? I've never understood the "idol" thing) and soon exhausts all his money. He needs to join a new party, but how can he, after his trust was abused so badly?

Well, he can meet three other people, also drinking away their sorrows after having their trust abused. Each of them is also broke due to their vices. Gambling for Tiana the mage, women for Zem the excommunicated cleric, food for Karan the swordswoman. Nick proposes forming a party based specifically around not trusting each other. They'll only interact enough to clean out dungeons and collect things to sell, divide the money, then go their separate ways, free to blow their shares on whatever they choose. He even devises a plan where all of them are involved in guarding the money, so no one can cheat each other.

Obviously, this is not tenable for combat. They have to trust each other enough to describe their skills and weaknesses, or they won't be able to make a strategy. That sharing bleeds into other interactions. Tiana drags Nick with her to a casino. Nick teaches Karan math, because otherwise she won't be able to tell if the others are swindling her.

The arc is, at some point, they'll learn to trust each other fully, and that will make them invincible, as all of them turn out to be exceptional in their fields. Nick's former leader was the supposed greatest fighter in the world, and if Nick doesn't have the build for heavy weapons, he's probably the best around with a dagger. Karan is a dragonian, and carries the fabled enchanted broadsword of her people. Tiana knows multiple forms of elemental magic, and Zem has all kinds of spells to heal or buff the others' abilities.

They're eventually sent to investigate some ruins, looking for a magic weapon, the Sword of Bonds. Which turns out to be a sentient weapon that can essentially fuse those whose hearts are in tune and make a new warrior, one exponentially stronger. Except it's never worked between more than 3 people, and they were triplets. But the sword is certain there must be adventurers out there with that sort of trust and connection! Hint, hint.

The "Survivors" as they call themselves, don't really want the sword, but it gets them out of the ruins alive, so they agree to keep it. Just in case.

I bought the first 5 volumes before I stopped, though I think it's only gotten as far as volume 6 (the light novels it's based on may be further along.) The 5th volume gave Nick a chance for some payback against his ex-girlfriend and her party, where he not only beats her tiger-man boyfriend in a fistfight/math quiz, but the "Survivors", as they dubbed themselves, expose the Iron Tigers as cheaters and get them arrested. Then the back cover of the 6th volume said the Iron Tigers were coming back for revenge. They just got rid of them! How are they back already!? Are prisons in this world as porous as Arkham Asylum?

Mostly, the direction the series focused wasn't really doing it for me. It felt heavily centered on Nick, and to a lesser extent Karan. Not unreasonable since Nick's the most experienced adventurer, the one who suggests forming a party, the one who keeps putting himself out there in an effort to get them to work together and trust him. And Karan was left to die in the lowest level of a dungeon by her previous party because she was too naive to recognize they were using her, so her trust issues are the most severe. But the idea is the 4 of them growing to know and trust each other, and the series hadn't done anything with Zem - dude was basically a healing lamp who likes to hit nightclubs - and was just barely starting to dig into Tiana's backstory.

Maybe that's a reasonable pace if the series expected to go 15, 20, whatever volumes, but I didn't really feel like hanging on long enough for it to get there.

Saturday Splash Page #239

"Legion of Losers," in The Weakest Contestant of all Space and Time, ch. 5, vol. 1, by Masato Hisa (writer), KRSG (artist)

Hitomu Yoshizawa is an office drone, remarkable only in how little he can actually accomplish. He doesn't want to go to work, but doesn't want to get in trouble for not going to work. So he lays on a park bench and daydreams about how that could happen. Maybe a truck could crash into the building! Oh, but he doesn't want the driver to get hurt. Maybe the truck is hijacked! By terrorists! But the hijacker has a heart attack and dies painlessly. Oh, and the security guard is patrolling elsewhere in the building so he doesn't get hurt. And on and on, an endless stream of pointless hypotheticals.

So the god of his reality deems him the most useless person in the entire universe, and dumps him into a death battle tournament against dozens of other realities' candidates. Hitomu dies, again and again. He doesn't even try to fight back, the fear of doing anything, even to defend himself, too overwhelming. Finally, it comes down to him and 4 other contestants who also lost all their matches. Hitomu basically has a breakdown, but in the process, deduces the arena floor is not one solid piece and there's a lever that will open it, dumping all five of them into another world. Unfazed, the former god who arranged the contest says this was a planned alteration. Those five will now be hunted by all the other contestants, and this time, death will be permanent.

At the end of the first volume, Masato Hisa says this is the first time after 16 years as an artist they're writing a story. Rather, it's the first time the draft was actually accepted, because apparently the editors wanted Hisa to also draw the story, and I guess Hisa didn't figure they had the time? For whatever reason, having KRSG draw this one was acceptable, although it seems to have ended/been canceled after just 2 volumes.

The basic formula is, Hitomu is repeatedly presented with moments to try and fight or kill his opponents. He rejects them, choosing to flee instead. On the rare occasion he considers fighting, he fully expects to die. Fighting is just a way for him to give up without necessarily looking like he's giving up. All the time he spends pondering hypotheticals apparently makes him good at noticing little details and putting them together into plans. So he leverages the skills the other 4 have to make their escapes.

You have K, from a reality where war has grown so pervasive everything has been conscripted, including cleaning robots. He talks big at first to disguise the fact he has no actual ability to fight. (Hitomu calls him a "war virgin" and draws uncomfortable parallels to his own behavior when he invited a girl he liked in school back to his room.) Tofu Brat is some mythological figure that obsesses about his hat and his plate with tofu on it, always muttering snide remarks, then denying he said anything. Godden is some sort of Pokemon caterpillar-thing that passes out at the drop of a hat, spewing a strong, flammable silk in the process.

The slime girl was originally just a basic slime, like you'd see in a DragonQuest game, but some of Hitomu's blood got on it and it changed shape. To resemble a naked slime girl version of the girl Hitomu demonstrated no game with back in high school. Yeah, I don't know. It wasn't like Hitomu was thinking of her at the time he was bleeding. And he gives the slime girl the same name as that girl, Sayaka.

The gods are presented as capricious and cruel. While there's some talk of contestants being awarded "useless points" for fucking up particularly badly, the gods don't care about the outcome. They just want to be entertained by how pathetic the contestants are. Like one of those obstacle course competition shows, except everybody's really out of shape.

When one god gets happy his representative showed ingenuity and looks ready to actually make a kill, the others are embarrassed by his enthusiasm. When he tries to subtly interfere, causing his scarecrow to fall into a river, his entire reality is erased. This all seems to be part of some plan by the former god who arranged the tournament, to show how petty the gods are and make people disgusted with them, but I can't see the point.

If they can erase an entire reality just like that, what was Hitomu going to accomplish? He certainly isn't going to kill the gods, that would go against his whole nature by involving doing something. But even if he convinced every other contestant to refuse to fight, so what? When a cartoon pig questioned the point of the contest, his god - who I would describe as Liberace Abe Lincoln - rips the pig's face off and screams at it not to question him. I don't think Hitomu could Rube Goldberg his way out of something like that.

Trouble Comes in Threes

I guess those three could technically count as trouble. Like a bug bite. Not one in an impossible to reach spot, just one that's kinda awkward.

I don't remember why, or for that matter where, I bought volume 10 of Dragon Ball last year, but I did, so let's take a look. Volume 10 wraps up the second Dragon Ball hunt, which is probably better known as the Red Ribbon Army Arc.

By this point, Goku's already single-handedly trashed the entire RRA - as far as he knows - and is just trying to gather all seven balls so he can wish his friend Upa's father back. There's one ball to go, and while it was hidden from Bulma's radar, it's not hidden from Fortuneteller Baba's magic. And who's got it?

Yeah, the Pilaf Gang. They think they've got a good shot against Goku, and could almost be forgiven for the over-confidence. They trapped him successfully last time, and he only escaped because he transformed into a giant, berserker ape. They know his tail is his weak point, and they have three mech suits to exploit it! Except his tail is gone, and he's a lot stronger than they remember.

Look, I'm not showing any scans from the fight because the burned off Goku's pants trying to get at his tail, so he's fighting bare-assed most of the time. And a defeat like that just about draws a line under those three as characters of any significance. The only other thing they do in Dragon Ball is somehow find the rice cooker Demon King Piccolo is sealed in at the bottom of the ocean, and open it. Maybe Goku should have hurt them a little worse.

Dragon Ball retrieved, deceased father figure revived, and Goku even managed to catch his 4-star ball before it shot off over the horizon. Nothing left now but to prepare for the next Tenkaichi Budokai! Toriyama skips the intervening 3 years, although I know the anime added some filler episodes of Goku meeting some different martial arts experts and learning stuff.

But in addition to Krillin, Yamcha, and Jackie Chun, there's some new challengers to worry about. Roshi's old rival Master Shen is here with his Crane School students, a porcelain doll-looking twerp and a 3-eyed asshole. Tien talks a lot of shit, to Yamcha and Krillin's annoyance, but Goku's sure the guy can back it up.

And Yamcha finds out quickly that he can, suffering his second consecutive first-round defeat. To make it worse, Tien goes and breaks Yamcha's leg, just to be a dick. Yamcha's down already, there's no need for it. He just does it to prove a point. One thing that annoys me, after the Tournament is over, Yamcha brushes it off. Yeah, Tien apologizes, but I'd be a little pissed about someone doing that. But I tend to hold grudges. Maybe that's not in keeping with the true spirit of martial arts.

Also, Goku vows to avenge Yamcha in a match, then loses to Tien in the finals. Great job, Goku! Of course, years later Goku will promise Krillin that, if he lets Vegeta live, Goku will kick Vegeta's butt if he comes back to cause trouble.

*Looks at Vegeta helping Cell achieve his perfect form.*

*Looks at Vegeta helping Babidi release Majin Buu*

It's possible that, like "marriage", "promise" is a word that Goku doesn't actually know the meaning of. Or, in clickbait sports talk, Goku just isn't clutch. I'm picturing Stephen A. Smith on some show, yelling about how Goku always chokes when the stakes are highest. 'There is no question he's a great fighter. . .when the pressure is off. HOWEVAH. . .'

After a comedy match-up between Jackie Chun and a Man-Wolf angry he can't change back into human because of Jackie blowing up the Moon in the last tournament - pour one out for Boss Rabbit, stranded up there by Goku then blown to HFIL with no warning - we get another Turtle vs. Crane match-up, as Krillin's up against Chiaotzu and his weird bullshit.

But it's Goku blabbing his mouth about killing Master Tao (Shen's brother) that will kick things to another level of hostility. 

Saturday Splash Page #232

"Batter Up," in Yakuza Fiance ch.24, vol. 6, by Asuka Konishi

As far as I know, Yakuza Fiance isn't finished, but it's been over 18 months since volume 8 was released in the U.S., and I haven't seen a listing for volume 9 in months. So, rather than wait indefinitely. . .

Somei Yoshino is a high school student and granddaughter of Somei Renji, a major figure in the yakuza that dominate the Kansai region of Japan. Renji announces he's looking into Yoshino possibly marrying the grand-nephew of his old friend Miyama Gaku, a major figure in the largest yakuza org in eastern Japan. It's decided Yoshino will live at the Miyama house for a year and get to know this Kirishima.

What she gets to know is there's something off about him. He's a sadist, a masochist, hiding all that behind a polite facade until he gets bored and tells Yoshino she's too normal and boring too interest him and should just go into sex work. Or run home and report to her grandfather what he said so there'll be a turf war and Kirishima might get killed. Yoshino refuses to let herself lose to this guy, but in revealing her inner mettle, shows him a side of herself - read: violent - he finds incredibly appealing. Now he wants to marry her, while she finds him alternately infuriating and terrifying.

Yakuza Fiance is a weird reading experience, because I really like a lot of it. I like Yoshino, who is mostly very polite and even a little socially awkward, but has an explosive temper in the right circumstances. Plus, her hair sometimes covers one eye and I'm a sucker for that a lady with look. I like her childhood friend Shouma, who broods a lot, but has good banter with Yoshino and is generally a sarcastic smartass. Renji's goofball exterior is more of an act than Yoshino's, but it's still funny. Yoshino's friend Tsubaki is the kind of person who just loves drama, and will try to create it if it doesn't happen organically, but she legitimately cares for Yoshino and tries to help her.

There are some funny parts, and a fair amount of hand-to-hand fighting that Konishi depicts very cleanly and with a nice mixture of acrobatic moves and people just wailing on each other with whatever limb is available. There's a mystery Konishi's slowly been peeling back around the death of Yoshino's father, and some sort of internal power struggle in the Kansai crime families that I'm curious to see a resolution to, even if I don't understand all the relationships involved. So much of this book is enjoyable.

Just not half of the co-protagonists. I'm sure Konishi intends for Kirishima to be unsettling. Certainly in the first volume when he makes his abrupt shift in character, but I've never really stopped finding him unsettling. Even as Konishi shows how besotted Kirishima's become with Yoshino, or delves into Kirishima's past to show he's never been able to find someone that really understands him and what he wants, he still creeps me out. He's slipping tracking devices into Yoshino's electronic dictionary, or hacking her phone so he can follow her or track her social media.

And it's not like Yoshino doesn't tell him to stop. She does. Repeatedly. She gets new phones and he's immediately got the unlock code. She can't outmatch him physically, she's not smarter than he is, not savvier than he is, not luckier than he is. The only edge she's got is that he's apparently in love with her enough that she can maybe keep him in line, but, again, it's not like he does what she says all that often. He goes behind her back constantly, and while some of that is due to the real reason she's living with him (which is related to that mystery), I guess I don't expect that to change if the threat passes. 

Kirishima certainly seems dedicated to protecting her, but so does Shouma, who at least tends to keep Yoshino in the loop about what he's doing when it involves her. And yeah, Kirishima seems charming and pleasant towards her, hanging on her every word, but he acts that way to almost everyone, and that's all it is with those other people. An act. The same act he put on for Yoshino, until he got bored. He can say that won't ever happen, but given his whole personality, that's hard to take at face value. Tsubaki sees that he just agrees with whatever other people say, because he doesn't really care. He's just letting them talk, and most people are fine with that. Yoshino knows that he apologizes for things when she yells at him, but doesn't actually stop doing those things. What he says and what he means or does are wildly different.

It's weird, because I know I'm doomed to disappointment. There have been a few bonus chapters that show us glimpses of the future, and Yoshino and Kirishima are living together. This is, somehow, going to work out between them, and yet, I haven't stopped buying the series. The positives, thus far, have outweighed the negatives.

The Terms of the Engagement

Somei Yoshino: Mom Friend, or Probation Officer Friend? 

Volume 6 of Yakuza Fiance starts with Kirishima going to great lengths to start a fight with Shouma. He steals Shouma's lighter - a gift from Yoshino, that says "Stop Smoking" on it - then announces he and Yoshino are dating, so Shouma's place in her life belongs to him now. Then mocks Shouma for refusing to fight him. Just really acting like a dick.

Yoshino has an idea something's up, and Shouma hasn't returned the GPS tracker she put in the stuffed animal keychain she gave Kirishima, so she hunts them down and starts swinging a bat. And missing. The whole sequence is kind of confusing.

Kirishima supposedly picked the fight to try and disguise the fact Yoshino's grandfather kicked the crap out of him (and Shouma) last volume for endangering Yoshino. Setting aside the fact Renji is the reason Kirishima is in Yoshino's life to the point he can endanger her, why bring knives to what only needed to be a fistfight? (Plus, Yoshino knows her Gramps beat them up, so it's a futile effort.)

Then you've got the fact Kirishima supposedly likes getting beat up, but dodges all Yoshino's swings. I get he won't answer her questions about why he did this because he likes her yelling at him, although it runs against his claims of how important she is to him, and how devoted he is. Maybe the masochism even explains why he refuses her order to fix Shouma's torn shirt (Shouma also refuses, so Konishi undermines the notion Yoshino has much control over either of them.) But she was willing to yell and physically injure him, which is apparently arousing to Kirishima, so why dodge?

Konishi does subsequently give Yoshino the upper hand. She knocks Kirishima on his heels by explaining she agreed to be his boyfriend so he'd stop picking fights with Shouma out of some insecurity about his position in her life, relative to her lifelong friend. In her words, 'Shouma's the reason you're my boyfriend. never forget that.'

The real power move comes once they return to Tokyo, when she employs *ominous drums* The Silent Treatment. For three days, she pretends as though Kirishima doesn't exist. It's funny, watching them walk home from school, Kirishima at her heels jabbering the whole way, Yoshino acting as though she's alone. Kirishima soon resorts to desperation baking in an attempt to get her attention. Because, see, this version of punishment isn't fun for him. Which again raises the question in my mind of why he didn't take the hits with the bat.

Once the three days are up and Kirishima understands the land mines that now surround him, they have a conversation about their new relationship. OK, that's a reasonable thing to do. Kirishima asks if they can hold hands, which seems benign. Yoshino even expresses concern about a scar on his hand from an old wound he didn't get looked at. That's sort of sweet. She offers some lotion for his hands, wearing a bizarre facial expression. I can't even guess what Konishi was going for there.

Kirishima proceeds to dump the lotion in Yoshino's palms and licks it. And then she headbutts him, which he takes without blinking. Oh, so now he wants to get hit? It's just another weird sequence all around, even allowing for how fucked in the head I think Kirishima is.

After a brief chapter hinting at infighting within the Kirigaya family (the group Renji's part of), and some hints about creepy scar-face bastard Azami's next plan, there's a school culture fest! Great, I loved the culture fest episodes of Azumanga Daioh! But it's really more about Shouma showing up as an escort for Yoshino's heretofore unseen mother, Hitomi. Hitomi seems like a spacecase and a klutz, but we're told she had a nervous breakdown when Yoshino's dad died and her mental health has waxed and waned ever since, especially if she gets stressed caring for Yoshino. Hence, Yoshino living with her grandfather.

Mostly this serves two purposes. One, showing Kirishima will behave himself around Shouma now, suggesting he's possibly actually listening to Yoshino. Two, offering another hint towards the circumstances surrounding Yoshino's father's death, as Kirishima privately mentions to Hitomi he knows how horrible she must find it, Yoshino staying with the Miyama family. Which makes me think Gaku killed Yoshino's dad in a botched attempt to kill Renji, and that's the thing he thinks he owes Renji for (which comes up in volume 8, whenever we get there.) 

Sunday Splash Page #429

"Mid-Air Collision," in "Mad-Matic" from Akira Toriyama Manga Theater, by Akira Toriyama

In contrast to yesterday's entry, it feels like I bought this more recently than 3 years ago, but the blog posts don't lie. This is an omnibus collection of what was originally a 3-volume release of assorted shorter works Dragon Ball Z and Dr. Slump creator Akira Toriyama did over the years, going back to the late-1970s.

It's fun to see the evolution of Toriyama's style, alongside his difficulties finding a story idea or concept the fans like. His first two strips, Wonder Island and Wonder Island 2, have a MAD magazine feel to them in the short, squat figures and reliance on either pop culture references - the protagonist of the second story is "Dirty Herring" - or what seems like entirely random, absurdist humor. There are two suns in the sky. But one's an egg, with a 3-headed dragon inside, but all their necks are tangled. That kind of thing.

By the 4th entry, Pola & Roid, Toriyama starts to find the groove he'd adopt for early Dragon Ball. Desert settings with lots of rocky spires and plateaus. Plucky but somewhat boy-crazy heroines in swimsuit battle armors and legs that seem long relative to their upper bodies. Dimwitted but (mostly) decent guys who don't know how to behave around a girl that's flirting with them. Joke villains that are either pathetically weak or just kind of stupid. It's mostly comedy, where even the shifts towards action are played as gags. A giant lizard just reading his dialogue without inflection and defeated with a squeaky hammer. A giant fiddler crab challenges the hero - an interstellar cab driver - to rock-paper-scissors. The evil emperor's secret weapon is a rubber band.

One of the bits that's interesting, at least in volume 1, where Toriyama talks about the process for making some of the strips, is how often his work ended up being unpopular. Even after he shifts away from the style of the Wonder Island strips (both duds with the readers), his two Chobits adventures - an inept hick cop who looks a lot like adult Goku meets essentially an alien genie in a flying teapot - in his words, 'failed to garner any fans.'

By volume 2, as he adds a bit more action, though still with a heavy lean towards comedy, you start to see more of his aesthetic in machinery. The hover bikes, the spacecraft or aircraft with the vertical surfaces at the ends of the wings, attached to egg-shaped central cockpits. The idea of "capsule houses" shows up in Tongpoo - a young cyborg crash lands on an alien world while trying to learn the fate of an earlier space exploration mission, and the sole survivor is a ditzy girl - and The Elder is a long chase between a secret agent in a car full of James Bond gadgets and some perverted old sheriff in a jeep drawn in the "squashed nose-to-tail" shape Toriyama uses for so many cars.

The Elder is also where Toriyama starts in with the "creepy old man groping women" stuff, which is, not great. Up to then, he was mostly restricting the pervert humor to young guys accidentally (key word there, accidentally, the hick cop in Chobits being the exception) stumbling on a lady in undress. In those cases, most of the characters are either confused or apologetic.

He flips things a bit in the final entry in the collection, Go Go Ackman, where the demon title character is actively repelled by any hint of female sexuality. He's supposed to be killing people to collect their souls and a convenient gust of wind reveals the lady he'd targeted is wearing a thong? Nope, he's outta there. It's not like Sand Land, where the "demon" characters are far less evil and cruel than the humans. Ackman really does seem to want to kill people, but I guess he's supposed to be young enough - by devil standards - that sort of thing is still icky to him. Or Toriyama just want to draw women in underwear without having them get murdered, in a story ostensibly starring a devil kid out to murder people.

Anyway, some of the entries are stronger than others, but it's fun to see what elements and themes recur and how he mixed and matched them in different ways over time.

No Work Completed During Tournament Time. Or Any Other Time.

There's no infidelity allowed when your mistress is lady Justice, chum. Unless she's in a catsuit and carries a whip. Then all bets are off. 

As I mentioned in Part 5 of the 2025 Year in Review series, Volume 11 of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General, covering chapters 157 to 171, is my favorite of the series so far. Jin sticks to short stories, two chapters long at the most, focused on the cast in their day-to-day lives and relationships with their coworkers, which is the strongest part of the book, and the source of a lot of the best laughs.

Even when he takes the focus outside RX, Jin follows that, sparing us the bureaucratic nonsense about the Hero League that wasted pages in prior volumes. His one chapter focused on the 3-person "Organization" is Jester assuming his colleagues are busy thinking up ways to break out of jail, when, really, the Professor is busy virtual conferencing with a mad scientist that works for the Hero League, and the crazy cyborg girl is pacified by giving her access to the security feed of Jester's cell. So she can creepily drool over him all day.

Similarly, the Villain League gets a single chapter about the Monster Benefits Society setting up their new base in a different part of the same junkyard where RX is housed, and the women's coalition demanding the boss be isolated because his gelatinous body absorbs and radiates the stench. 

The Hero League get three chapters. One where Braveman's two apprentices see how, let's say "modestly" he lives, and decide to, 'teach Braveman extravagance,' with predictably disastrous results. At one point, they give Braveman a piece of toast with a variety of fancy foods piled on it. Caviar, foie gras, truffles, and son. This is such, culinary blasphemy, as one character puts it, that Jin depicts the food as blurred out, as though it's obscene. In the second, he's assigned as a mentor to another new hero, Esga, who has some weird mechanical fists, is always on her phone, and talks in what I assume is roughly current teen lingo (or Jin's understanding of such.) Posting pictures of Braveman to "Insta", describing herself as 'deffo legit strong', and calling the General "mid." Which earns her a harsh introduction to the world of fighting real villains, or whatever the General is.

Also, the younger characters have started using "paisen" instead of "senpai" when speaking to Braveman. It apparently means the same thing, so I don't really understand why Jin flipped the order of the two halves of the word, but I guess it reflects some shift in the culture. Anyway, the third Hero League chapter introduces a new character, as "Serious Glasses" wants to produce a promotional anime for the League, and this Shozo just so happens to create things he imagines, at the cost of his emotions. Serious Glasses, long accustomed to dealing with unreasonable expectations, passes this on, and utterly destroys the cheerful, eager, and competent young hero. It's just like working in the real creative arts!

All those stories come in a 6-chapter span in the middle of the volume (160-165). The lone RX-focused chapter in there is 164, "Kunoichi Fashion", where GG-Chan undergoes the same horrible experience of Scientist-San offering new, extremely fan-service-y costumes, that the General underwent a few volumes ago.

Everything else is RX doing goofy shit together. In the first chapter, they make way too much mochi to celebrate New Year's, so that's what Boss and Secretary-San start eating for every meal. Until X-Kun makes Secretary (hoping to get closer to Boss this year) conscious of her weight from all those carbs. She crash diets, leaving Boss to handle the mochi alone and get sick from eating some that goes bad. Which leads the rest of the Organization to the mistaken assumption "New Year's Sex" is happening, and no, I won't elaborate.

The final chapter of the volume, "Don't Get Greedy," loops back around to the couple, as RX's recent success has lots of criminal organizations wanting to strengthen ties with them. By offering Boss women, sending Secretary-San into a spiral of insecurity that he'll get a harem. The General makes a typically mixed effort in reassuring her coworker and Boss turns down all the offers. He has Secretary-San, after all. Just so long as he doesn't eat her pudding (not a euphemism.)

The two chapters after the mochi episode involve RX trying to corral a mysterious monster in some virtual world, who demonstrates bizarre abilities. The Henchman and the General are sent in (with the Henchmen given avatars resembling the General, Secretary and GG), and quickly realize it's just some loser sitting at home in front of a computer, going on about purity and virgins. They kick his ass, in the real world and the virtual, the General showing her usual absence of self-awareness in berating him for not respecting people's boundaries and autonomy.

Chapters 166 and 167 are the high point, as Scientist-San creates a Street Fighter knock-off with the RX characters, and the entire organization - really just Boss and the General - get way too into it, and a tournament is arranged. Most of that revolves around how hard Boss and the General are trying to win, Boss using his powers to cheat, the General having trained non-stop for an entire week, all to beat X-Kun's ass. Which, she does, and it's very satisfying, even if the annihilation is so complete we don't even see it. (Also, in what's a bit of a touching moment, Boss plays as Secretary-San, and Secretary-San plays as Boss. Awwwwwww.)

Unexpectedly, Jin turns this into a chance for some actual development in the situation between Braveman and the General, as the latter collapses in exhaustion. She's taken to a hospital, where Braveman was visiting Oobaa-sama. He gets lost, and wanders into the General's room, is mistaken by the nurses for a chaperone (for an unconscious person?) and gets stuck trying to corral the hyper-active, sleeping, General. At which point, she kisses him. Without realizing it happened or that he was ever in her hospital room. But Braveman knows, and it is fucking him up, as seen in the first scan.

In between that and "Don't Get Greedy" is a summer beach chapter. The General invites Eight Foot Tall-Chan to the beach, as an apology for not inviting her to participate in the video game tournament. She just didn't think Eight Foot Tall-Chan (can we not get her a shorter name?) was ready for that sort of violence. (I don't know if this was what Jin always planned, or he realized he forgot their newest member, who joined for the chance to have friends, and scrambled to compensate.) Anyway, Eight Foot Tall-Chan also invited her other friend, the creepy lady the General's beaten up twice already, in the hopes they could still be friends, too. Unfortunately, "Slit-Mouth-San" can't let bygones be bygones, or more accurately, can't let her urge to pursue kids go, and is hurled into the sea.

Saturday Splash Page #230

"Cubicle Zombie," in Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, vol. 1, ch. 1, by Haro Aso (writer), Kotaro Takata (artist)

Akira Tendo's a 24-year-old, in his third life-sucking year working for an ad company. Pulling multiple all-nighters, putting in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, getting screamed at by his boss, pining after the cute secretary that's sleeping with the CEO on the side. He staggers through days, deep bags under his eyes, barely aware of his surroundings, sleeping among the garbage of whatever quick ramen he ate for dinner at 3 a.m. He might as well be dead.

Then the zombie apocalypse happens, and the complete collapse of modern civilization means Akira doesn't have to go to work any more. He can clean his apartment, enjoy beer, confess his feelings to the cute secretary (who is already a zombie, but oh well.)

Surely though, there's more to do than that? Gradually accepting the notion of his mortality, and that, given the circumstances, it's a more immediate concern than usual, Akira makes himself a bucket list. Though he can only come up with 33 things initially, as he gathers more people to his little group, they start adding to the list.

The 19th volume was released in the U.S. last month, but I stopped after 6. Haro Aso had put together a decent group of 4 characters between Akira, his best friend Kencho, the conscientious and cautious Shizuka, and Beatriz, the German who just loves everything related to Japan. The bucket list concept lent itself to ridiculous adventures, like trying to deliver fish to a sushi chef, or apparently traveling into space in recent volumes. 

Kotaro Takata's pretty good at drawing rotting zombies, and especially when things need to get a little weird. Like volume 2's zombie shark that, thanks to all the zombie humans it swallowed whole, can now move around on land. Because the zombie human's are standing up and their legs extended through the shark's rotting stomach. The art leans a little heavy on the cheesecake, even if you allow for the notion the story is mostly from Akira's perspective and he's single and wants not to be ("meet the woman of my dreams" is item 33 on his list.)

I feel like that's a trend growing steadily worse in most manga, so it isn't exclusive to Zom 100, and it isn't something that, on its own, would cause me to drop the book. Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General is a lot worse in that regard, and I've kept up with it through 12 volumes, and fully intend to buy the 13th. So why'd I let this book go? Partly, I didn't want to commit to a series that long. 

But also, I think the post-apocalypse thing interests me in terms of what people do to survive (I wrote a little about it 11 years ago.) And the whole point of Zom 100 is, you could die any time. You can't content yourself to worry strictly about survival, you have to try and enjoy life. All the characters seem to have dreams of some sort - Kencho would like to be a stand-up comedian, Shizuka really wants to be a doctor - and I assume they pursue those amid all the zany adventures and fleeing zombies. Which is a good philosophy, but ultimately runs contrary to what I was looking for. Going to a casino to win big was not a thing I could picture someone deciding to do in a zombie apocalypse, even allowing for Akira and Kencho kind of being idiots.

A Poisoned Heart

That's your excuse for all your bad habits. The smoking, the excessive consumption of sleeping pills, making people drag you around in a coffin. . .

In the seventh volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World, Annette, Tama and Nir have learned it's Archibishop Elton running a secret prison beneath the castle that holds Otherworlder children and sends them out on missions. But Elton is a dear friend of Annette's, can she find the strength to confront him?

Well she better, because he's beaten up Sensei and thrown him in a cell, and dispatches Yamada's crew of do-gooders with ease. Sensei at least has the fairy whistle he was gifted, so he can call on Solulu - stress-eating after dealing with him a couple of times - to free him, but in typical fashion, he's more interested in what's going on inside Elton than actually stopping the guy.

Annette does get it together, but her big plan of using light magic against a goblin doesn't work, because the holy robes Elton wears negate the effect. She's still able to protect Itsuki, an Otherworlder she mentored when he first arrived, though it leaves her badly injured. And that's when Sensei shows up. It's a little strange because writer Hiroshi Nota has Sensei praise Annette for her convictions, then tell Elton that he's 'furious.' But all that results is him trying to dig into Elton's motivations.

I'm not expecting Sensei to start throwing punches, but at least exhale some cigarette smoke in the Elton's face if you're really that angry. It feels like something that was set up for the splash page as a big "oooooh" moment, but there's no pay off. Sensei's always demanding people tell him their life stories and motivations, being furious has nothing to do with it.

At any rate, the backstory is that when Elton was first assigned as a representative of the Church to Blau Kingdom, people didn't want a goblin around. Except Queen Saphira, a child then, who believed all races could be friends if humans just opened their hearts to others. Elton tried to make it a reality, even reaching out to an Otherworlder named Kaoru, who got sent here without any special skill and embraced apathy and cynicism. Which are very cool attributes, but not helpful for surviving a medieval fantasy kingdom. Elton eventually got through, and after being intensively trained, Kaoru was assigned to Saphira's guard.

And then Kaoru and Saphira caught feelings, a bitter pill for Elton, who loved Saphira for her kindess and acceptance. So he sent Kaoru off in an attack against the Dark Lord and decided all Otherworlders were good for was attack dogs. Elton, understandably, gets pissed at Sensei pulling out all his hidden pain and crimes, but his freak out leaves him vulnerable to a combo attack from Annette and Nir. Even that doesn't quite end things, as there's one last reveal that paints Elton and Annette's boss, His Holiness, in a ominous light.

So Annette stands on her own, even when Sensei isn't backing her up. Nir continues to grow in bravery and skill. Tama, doesn't get much of anything (and trend that will continue into the next volume.) There's possibly something put in play with one of the Fallen Angels, who makes a last second save and was someone Saphira and Elton know. Maybe he'll get involved again later, assuming the apathy and cynicism haven't overtaken his heart once more.

Sensei does actually finish the story he writes based on Elton's pain, but the people of the kingdom have developed their own idea about Elton and who he his. Sensei bows to popular opinion, so it's another unpublished work.

Hard Work Means No Play

Injae got the first win of his boxing career over the awesomely named Rock Kang. Unfortunately, now he must face Kang's big brother, Boulder Kodos!

OK, that's a lie, he's just shadowboxing with his memories of Bakesan (currently on his way to prison for 6 years.) The fifth volume of The Boxer shifts focus back to Yu's career. Now the lightweight champion, he's being aimed directly at the junior welterweight champion, Yuto Takeda. Most of the volume is focused on Takeda, emphasizing his contrast to Yu.

Where Yu's the epitome of natural talent, Takeda is described, even by his coach, as almost entirely lacking in talent. The epitome of hard work. What's more, he fully buys into the idea that if you just keep trying, you can overcome any challenge. He feels like he should protect and inspire others, give them hope they can persevere and triumph as well. This as compared to Yu, who gives zero shits about anything other than his cat.

Yuto's backstory is that he looks up to his father, who was a silver medalist in judo and became a cop. Misaki, who was a gold medalist boxer before opening her own gym, was childhood friends with Yuto's mother and father. When Dad dies rescuing a woman from some muggers, and Mom is claimed by a lifelong illness weeks later, Misaki's left with in charge of a child she has no idea how to raise.Yuto wants to protect people like his dad, so he's got to be strong, so boxing.

Except he has no talent. It's actually kind of a neat contrast with Jean-Pierre. We were told the lightweight champ would slowly go through the motion of throwing a punch, making himself aware of every bit of what his body was doing and what it should be doing, in pursuit of perfection. Takeda has to go through every motion, every piece of action that goes into throwing a single jab and memorize it to then cram each piece together, because otherwise he can't do it at all.

There's some ups and downs in Takeda's story. A classmate he tries to help, who ends up running away and looks on the verge of committing suicide. A gifted fighter that abuses his skills as hired muscle, that beats Takeda again and again and again (and again and again, and so on), until Takeda starts making abrupt leaps in skill.

I'm not sure what JH's is going for with the strange growth curve. Setting up a certain development in the title fight with Yu for one, but otherwise, I'm not sure what it's meant to represent, if Takeda is supposed to lack in athletic talent. Can you brute force talent into existence?

Either way, it's the brute force he and Misaki are counting on to defeat Yu, as the strategy is simply to keep the pressure on Yu, give him no room to breathe, take every hit without stopping, until Yu gives out from exhaustion. Will that work? Ehhhhh, no.

Making Friends is Madness

By all means then, let that guy teach children. What could go wrong? 

Volume 4 of Soul Eater: The Perfect Edition, consists of the second half of the fifth volume and all of the sixth in the original release, and is focused entirely on the students at the DWMA trying to stop Medusa and her lackeys from releasing the Kishin.

Spoiler alert: They fail. The Kishin gets loose, takes out Black Star and Death the Kid in one hit each, then eludes Lord Death by getting beyond the bounds of the city that Lord Death's soul is tied to. that said, the way that the Kishin is portrayed is pretty cool. It apparently exudes madness so strongly that people start hallucinating once they get close, even while it's still sealed up.

Yeah, that right there? That witch-lady is hallucinating that experience but have your face tore off in weird, hand-shaped strands would be a trip for sure. 

However, most of the material in here revolves around two fights. In one, Dr. Stein and Maka's dad try to take down Medusa, the powerful witch behind all this. It's a back-and-forth fight with Stein's strengths running to close combat, but Medusa having abilities that make getting close dangerous. There's also the fact Stein's got more than a little bit of a dark side in him, and so Medusa's offer to join her might be more appealing than he lets on.

The remaining attention is on Maka and Soul's rematch with Crona, the Demon Sword. The last time around, Soul got badly injured protecting Maka, which caused some tension between the two of them. Despite Maka changing her approach to stop trying to cut her opponent and try bludgeoning instead, they aren't making much more progress. Crona shrugs off their best hits.

So Soul accepts the offer of the weird little demon representing the black blood he's infected with, confident he can get the power without the madness. But, because he and Maka are in "soul resonance" she's involved as well. Which is fine, because she thinks if she's crazy like Crona, she can reach them.

Which makes for a bizarre fight, Maka cackling and staggering about like a drunken boxer, getting stabbed with a sword in the middle of her forehead and just shrugging it off. It's a sharp change from how she's fought up to that point, where she's usually charging straight ahead, all business.

End result, this somehow gets her able to connect and slip inside Crona's soul. Which is a big desert where he confines himself to a tiny circle and won't answers questions his shadow asks. The shadow is his fear, or self-doubt? I'm honestly not sure. It seems to give up and, as it puts it, go on ahead. I'm not sure where it went. Like this was a spiritual death, some part of himself Crona couldn't accept or embrace because he's too afraid to be open with anyone, even himself, and so it's gone?

Anyway Maka barges in, obliterates the line, and makes a friend. So that's one thing that went right. If Medusa was actually dead, it'd be two things, but unfortunately there's at least one snake left.

Making Preparations to Set Sail

Wanted! is a collection of Eiichiro Oda's work prior to One Piece. Which, if this volume is comprehensive, consists of 5 stories. That's including Romance Dawn, the last entry in the book, which is kind of a dry run/first draft for One Piece, as it consists of a kid in a straw hat named Luffy with rubber powers, who wants to be a pirate. It doesn't get as far as Luffy actually recruiting a crew; he saves a young girl who was trying to protect her friend (who is a magic bird) from some creepy-looking guy with weird powers.

Yeah, that guy.

All the stories have comedic elements to varying degrees, and fall into different genres or styles. WANTED! is a Western, with a legendary gunman being haunted/annoyed by one of the bounty hunters who failed to kill him. The lead, Gill, spends most of the episode trying to run away or outsmart his pursuers, or yelling at the ghost to shut up as it plots his demise. Future Present from God is set in the modern day, about a pickpocket that God intended to kill for being a negative to society, but God fucked up and now said pickpocket has to keep a department store full of people from dying in a meteorite impact. Ikki Yako follows a cowardly monk (named Guko, and there's a monk named Ginko from a series called Mushi-shi. I don't know if Oda was spoofing that, or it's just a coincidence. He says he just thought a monk manga might be fun to do) who gets roped into trying to vanquish an evil spirit terrorizing a village.

Monsters is the closest to an entirely serious story, as it involves a swordsman who poses as a courageous hero, but actually uses a town's terror at an impending dragon attack as a cover to rob everyone's homes after they flee. There's another swordsman, Ryuma, overly serious and quick to anger, looking for the greatest swordsman in the world so he can challenge them. But he seems like an idiot, and managed to piss off the entire town because it seems like his fault the dragon's coming.

One thing the first 4 stories have in common is late surprise twists. That Gill was never actually in any real danger from the dangerous bounty hunter after him, because his skills are far greater. The thief pulling a fast one on God, Guko seeming like a talentless coward for 90% of his story, then becoming a badass at the very end. Monsters has a last page reveal about the true identity of the mysterious swordsman "King," that Ryuma's looking for. Romance Dawn's the exception, as Luffy shows off his powers about halfway through, and had already told us in a flashback he ate a mysterious fruit, albeit without telling us what it granted him.

The other thing I notice is the newer works tend to have fewer panels. WANTED! runs 6-8 panels a page, in a variety of layouts, for basically its entire length. Meanwhile Romance Dawn is almost entirely 4-6 panels, minus a handful of pages near the end with only 2 panels. Those are usually pages that involve someone getting hit, so the reduction in panels might reflect a shift towards more action-oriented stories. The 2-panel pages start to appear in Monsters, where Oda understandably seems to want more space to draw a guy leaping at the jaws of a dragon.

Sunday Splash Page #411

"Casualties," in Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka ch. 11, vol. 2, by Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, and Takashi Nagasaki

Someone is targeting the seven most advanced robots of the world, as well as those who advocate for the rights of robots. Victims are left displayed with something resembling horns sticking from the ground around their head, like the Roman God of Death. The Europol detective assigned to the case of the murdered activists, Inspector Gesicht, is one of those "great" robots himself, so a failure to solve the mystery in time could have very real consequences for him.

Pluto is a work of Naoki Urasawa's, inspired by Osamu Tezuka's "The Greatest Robot on Earth" story in the manga we know here in the States as Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom in Japan.) I don't know the original work, don't know much about the character or his world, period, so I can't say in what ways this is inspired, and in what ways it's simply Urasawa's own thing that just happens to inhabit a fictional world created by another writer/artist.

The impetus for the attacks traces back to the "39th Central Asian War", where the President of the United States of Thracia convinced the rest of the world the Persian Kingdom had too big a robot army, and was working on dangerously advanced artificial intelligences which could threaten the world. So they invaded, with those same seven robots taking part to one degree or another. Some fought, others, like the pacifist Epsilon, refused to fight, but helped with surveys after the war that sought proof of these dangerous A.I.s.

They didn't find anything, except a bunch of shattered remains of robot bodies. No sign of the alleged brilliant scientist Persia had working for them, "Dr. Goji," either. But now something was killing advanced robots, and people who advocated for their rights. Something that seemed to harness nature itself.

Something Urasawa does, after the murder of Mont Blanc kicks things off, is spend time with each of the robots. What they do, what they want. North No. 2 - the second to go - is built for war, but chooses to act as butler for a blind pianist, one brilliant but embittered. North No. 2 keeps all his weapons concealed beneath a cloak, and asks to be taught to play the piano. Brando became one of two great fighting champions (another of the robots, Hercules, is the other), but he and his wife have a house full of kids. Epsilon takes in orphans, including one boy traumatized by something he saw during the 39th Central Asian War. Gesicht has a wife, and they discuss maybe adopting a child, or going on vacations. Even robots that aren't designed to look as human have lives. Gesicht delivers the news to the wife of a robot cop that was badly damaged by an assailant, and both are shiny metal, with Johnny-Five like faces and dimensions. But the loss of her husband shakes the wife dearly.

It makes it seem odd that Gesicht treats things like struggling to tell if Atom is human or robot as a rare experience, because all these robots seem human. Maybe "alive" is the better word. They aren't the same as humans, but they're still alive. They seem able to hallucinate, or see things that aren't real, as they die. Brando cries out that he won against Pluto, even though he didn't. Gesicht sees the past when he dies, the things that were locked away from him in his memory.

Urasawa spends a lot of panels on close-ups of faces, and I don't think you could tell from the expressions, which characters were organic and which weren't. Maybe Gesicht doesn't pout or grumble like some of the human cops Atom interacts with, but he smiles softly, he narrows his eyes, he shouts or grows angry when someone he cares about is attacked. He's aware he interprets the world differently from humans, that he drinks tea just to look normal. That he even bothers to pretend, to put people at ease, or simply for his own reasons, seems like a living, thinking response.

The other major theme I notice is memory. The various robots often exchange memory cards, or connect to each other wirelessly as a way to share evidence. In this way, sometimes one character learns something the other didn't notice, or doesn't remember. Atom finds something in Gesicht's memories that he's forgotten. Or more accurately, been made to forget. Hercules comments that humans erect monuments, or hold memorials, to preserve a memory against being forgotten, while robots never forget, so long as they don't erase the memory.

What we see in this story is humans do a lot more than just build monuments or hold vigils for those they miss or admire. Atom was created by Dr. Tenma to replace his dead son. Tenma, however, considers Atom a failure, because he isn't like Tenma's son. He likes a book on insects he found, a gift from Tenma the dead boy hid away. And Pluto, and the mysterious "Bora", are both products of a man's unwillingness to let go. They're monuments to his anger, to his loss, and he wants the world to be unable to forget, no matter how much damage that requires, even to himself or his children.