Week 7 reading

[meganbmoore]

(32) Her Majesty’s Dog Vol 5 by Mick Takeuchi:  I've decided that the Japanese have a fetish for schoolgirls and temperamental centuries old dog demon guys, cuz it's all over the place.  I think I like this book more and more each volume.  This volume has Amane and Hyoue(and of course their personal shipper, Takako) travelling back to their village for the annual festival where the koma-oni  choose their masters(for the non-spoilery version) and flashes back to how they first met.  Little Amane is beyond adorable, and Hyoue with long hair and traditional clothes was quite nice to look at.  Still, I wonder what the mangaka is going to do next, as a fair bit of the shippiness was Amane not actually, you know, noticing that Hyoue was a guy(manga girls can sometimes be amazingly blind in that way)

(33) Dragon Avenger by E.E. Knight:  This is a sequel to Dragon Champion, and follows Auron's sister, Wistala, after they're separated.  The series, for those who haven't heard of it, is about standard high fantasy, but about dragons, from their point of view.  Auron's story was the dragon who lived for centuries and became a leader and legend and united dragons.  Wistala's story, though, is the dragon who grows up among the humanoid races, and is shaped by them.  It also focuses on the back story that led to the attack on their family, and followed through on those plotlines.  Hopefully, there will be another book.  Even though things weren't left dangling, there are some things that should be followed up on(such as the fact that both Wistala and Auron are alive but haven't seen each other-or known the other was alive-since they were hatchlings)

(34) Seven Soldiers of Victory Vol 4 by Grant Morrison:  Sigh, it started so great, but the ending...Frankenstein was barely comprehensible from the start, and was consistently less and less so.  Mister Miracle tried to conceptualize the New Gods to the point where it didn't make sense, and Bulleteer was good up until the last few pages, where it just fizzled out.  And the last issue?  Made no sense at all.  All higher thinking with no ladder to help us climb up to see it.  Not holding the readers hand is one thing, but the reader needs to be able to understand it somehow, and Morrison didn't give us a way to understand it.  The project was a case of a lot of good ideas at once, but too many of them to keep track of or follow through on at once.  The minis that wrapped up earlier fared much better because Morrison had more time to make it work.  On the one hand, there WAS a lot of good reading up to this point, on the other hand, the mess of the ending pretty much negates that.  Ah well.

(35) Wild Adapter Vol 1 by Kazuya Minekura:  I have mixed feelings on this one.  Part of me really likes it, the rest of me isn't overly comfortable with.  There's also the fact that we don't even get to the main plot until the last few pages.  The rest of it is material that we should have got to a couple volumes later as a flashback, once we were acquainted with the characters.  Still, I'm interested enough to keep going, and like I said, we barely get a feel for the main story.  I'll be sticking with it a bit longer, but I don't like it as much as Bus Gamers, much less Saiyuki.