Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Manga purchases

Over a month since my last entry!
Sorry for the lack of updates, but actually my financial status right now is really troubled, so I don't have much money to spend...

While I was living in Japan, of course I did not buy any Spanish edition manga, and once I returned the amount of volumes in my purchase list was enourmous.
Recently, an Spanish publishing house made a press release saying that they are not reprinting some of their collections. Fearing that the rest will do the same, today I began to purchase Spanish manga again, starting with collections that are already finished: the last volumes of Trigun Maximum, the last volumes of Hellsing and the last one of Teizokurei Daydream.


Trigun is the most known work by Nightow Yasuhiro.
To tell the truth, the manga hasn’t been good at all since the volume 10, perhaps even earlier, after the death of a certain character.
Since the beggining Nightow's style is visually confusing (specially the fights) and the story doesn't make sense at times, but in the last 4 volumes those faults are really at it's worst. It's so messy that you don’t know what is going on. And the ending is... well, an ending.

As a side note, Takeuchi Takashi openly admitted that Nightow was the most influencial author in his drawing style, specially visible in his earlier works:

Pages from Takeuchi's short mangas Wish and Two Hearts, released in early 1998.


Hellsing, by the also Nightow-inspired Hirano Kouta.
The end was surprisingly well rounded and satisfying, quite nice considering that the manga caught an increasingly frenetic pace on volume 5 that I feared a trainwreck ending...
I feel bad for the fate of the Vatican people, specially the poor Yumie ;_;


And finally Teizokurei Daydream, a rather obscure manga by Okuse Saki and Meguro Sankichi that was serialized in Shonen Ace. I began this series in 2002, at a moment when I had money and was trying not-so-mainstream manga... Teizokurei Daydream was not bad, but was not a masterpiece neither.
The story is mainly about Saiki Misaki, both a SM dominatrix and a exorcist-medium that is working for the government, and the bizarre "cases" that she meets.