Oh My Goddess 4
Posted: November 26, 2006 Filed under: Oh My Goddess! Leave a comment »It’s hard to go back and read these early ones. Not only is the art so much different (though the illustration of Belldandy on the cover of this volume is still one of my favorites), the stories got so much better as the series went on. As I’ve said before, I’m no fan of the Nekomi Tech MCC storylines, and this volume’s full of ‘em.
So, of course, Tamiya and Otaki spend all their budget money on one race, and this means that Keiichi and Bell HAVE to win. Though the various goddess tricks that she and Urd employ are still cute, and I liked seeing strange American pair, it’s a story that gets told too often, and after reading the racing sequence in 19/20, it’s hard to read some of these less epic ones.
There were various one-shots in this volume, too. One involving Urd’s love potions that was kind of cute though not even really… good, and another that may have been two chapters about excavating a rare Japanese WWII prototype plane that Keiichi gets to fly. That one was marginally better, as it seemed to have more of that special OMG soft touch to it. Maybe I just like it when the machines talk to Keiichi. Who knows.
The only even remotely notable thing that happened this volume was the introduction of Mara. Even that wasn’t that cool… though the novelty of Keiichi thinking she’s male is bizarre. I didn’t know about that misunderstanding until after I’d had much more of the series read than I should have. Come to think of it, OMG is the only series I’ve ever read out-of-order (it was literally one of the only manga titles my B. Dalton carried, and I wasn’t going to turn down store-bought manga like that seeing as how it wasn’t too common at that point).
With the exception of the entrance of Mara, there was absolutely nothing exciting about this volume… and if it hadn’t been the first Mara story, that one wouldn’t have been that good either.
Reading this in the old format, I realized how much better I liked the old format vs. the new. Having all of any given storyline within one volume, large size, nice paper… though we get color pages now, there’s a lot more that I miss now that it’s gone.
