Slightly Biased Manga

Finally, my copy of volume 8 came. I was hesitant to start, because I realized that somehow Eroica had been knocked back to 2 volumes a year and I’d have to wait another year and a half, if I could, for another 3-volume bounty like this. This was a big event for me. I got myself warmed up with Lupin III, but now I’m rocking out to Led Zeppelin and am ready to talk about all the Eroica I crammed into this week.

If you couldn’t tell, I love this series SO MUCH. I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but forget One Piece or Guru Guru or anything else I said was my absolute favorite, the Earl stole my love and wears it like a sparkly crown atop his head. He is on top. He is number one. No question about it.

This volume starts off with a side story featuring no Dorian. It’s an all-Klaus vacation special where the director sends the Major off on a mandatory vacation in hopes that he’ll relax and meet a nice girl. We find that the Major has a soft spot for old nuns and french fries, but was a bully in school. He’s forcefully sent to a class reunion as well, much to the chagrin of his fearful classmates. It makes for a very funny, awkward scene which Klaus does nothing to alleviate. He panics towards the end and beats up a Dorian look-alike, which was really the highlight of the story for me.

The next case stretches across the rest of this volume and the first half of the next, and involves a kind of European World’s Fair where the English Crown will be on display. The Major winds up being on assignment to guard the special German plexiglass that the crown is encased in, and Dorian shows up to steal the crown. Well, not quite.

Klaus engineers a scheme which sends the Earl and company on an empty errand to the war-stricken country of Iraq. They get stuck digging in the middle of the Desert for several days, then get stuck in the middle of a bombing raid. The Earl is NOT amused, and dresses up as Klaus for the duration of the volume and pulls of many stunts, such as flirting with young men for the camera, that make the Major look bad in revenge. Such photos make the Major’s superiors ask how drunk he was when the photos were taken.

Dorian has a lot of fun dressing and acting as the Major. The perfect cantankerous imitation had me laughing, as well as the fact that Dorian left James tied up at one point because he managed to fool James into selling the Earl’s location to the Major for 50 marks and change.

Led Zeppelin seemed like a fitting thing to follow up this volume with seeing as how Yasuko Aoike crammed ALL FOUR MEMBERS into this manga. The Eroica teams contains “James” Page, Dorian as Robert Plant, an obscure member named John-Paul for John Paul Jones (who I think gets mentioned in the first volume and then gets a vague mention in volume 7) and yes… even our mustachioed friend Bonham as… John Bonham. If you love this manga as much as I do, Stairway to Heaven is like the after-sex cigarette.