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Manga Trio Review

Today I decided to read only manga, so I pulled two disparate titles from my shelf and one from my stack of mail.

 


Dragon Ball Super, Vol. 6: The Super Warriors Gather

Why pull a random volume of Super​​​? I’d read through all of Super years ago as the Moro saga approached its climax. At least I think it was nearing the climax. Dragon Ball can be kind of interminable with the planetary/universal threats.

Turns out this was the perfect volume to read on a lazy day. Classic “let’s round up the Z-Warriors” story with the added benefit of the adversarial universes gathering their own fighters. Not much action, but what’s there is cleanly drawn and entertaining.

Cracking this one open was an exercise in Why am I continuing to read Dragon Ball? but after one chapter, I remembered why. It’s fast. It’s dumb. It’s fun.

And now it can grace the shelves of a little free library.


Kaiju No. 8: Relax, Vol. 1


Never read a gag manga before, and this seems a good place to start. I audibly chuckled (twice!) at some truly puerile antics. Kaiju No. 8 is a patently ridiculous series, and the absurdism turned up to 11 in these short stories mostly works well if you overlook Shinomiya’s chapter. (Did I miss that her friends are part of this world? Were they made up for this story? Regardless, this one felt tacked on.)

Highlights:

  • Misunderstood (precisely understood?) homoeroticism throughout
  • Reno’s essential goodness parodied to perfection
  • Cupcakes
  • Snake venom nipple dispersal (Oops—spoilers!)

There are two more translations in the pipeline. Happy to read them.


Berserk, Vol. 1

The back of this one says it’s 18+, but let’s face it, this a book written to feed prepubescent teen boys’ inner edgelords.

Maybe this is an apt analog: the HBO Spawn cartoon released when I was a child, and my friends and I thought it was a peak artistic achievement because it contained three things: blood, boobs, and naughty words. That’s what you have with Berserk and nothing more. It’s ludicrous, and not in an enjoyable way. The main character’s name is Guts. A naked fairy girl follows him around. All of this sucks.

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