Lupin III 1
Posted: October 4, 2004 Filed under: Lupin III Leave a comment »This is the last of the manga I read before leaving home and I don’t have with me. Something tells me there might be a few more volumes… but I can’t really remember them. This one will be short.
The first time I read this, I really didn’t like it…I like the truly different style its drawn in, and I like the stories themselves, and I LOVE Arsene Lupin. However, it’s often difficult to tell what’s going on while you’re getting used to the artwork (which is very MAD Magazine-esque, by the way), the character designs consist of “male” and “female” and everyone’s drawn the same (which takes something away from Lupin being a master of disguise), and there are some jumps in logic that take a lot of getting used to. Those things alone ruined it for me the first time through, but when I picked it up and read it again, I found that it’s really not that hard. Perhaps you just have to be in a patient frame of mind to enjoy it.
Each chapter is a little self-contained story, with one instance of two chapters telling the same story. The second story’s probably my favorite. The first is a great introduction to Lupin, and the inclusion of a red herring Lupin was a nice touch, but I think the second story, where a smug Lupin comes out on top, is more characteristic of the series, and it’s nice. After that… there’s a chapter that has a magician in it that’s pretty good, the one called “Zenigata Gets Lucky” is hilarious, “Crime’s a Disease” is good… and I really can’t think of any truly terrible ones, which says something about the stories.
I guess the artwork is ultimately its downfall, because for as cool as it is, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, who’s who, and sometimes what just happened (though the subtlety used in these cases is nice… upon another trip through, I found things that confused me the first time were mostly just things that I didn’t pick up on in the artwork). An oldie but a goodie, and it comes very highly recommended.
