Slightly Biased Manga

This is another series I feel is a little unfairly overlooked.  It isn’t very high quality, but it’s cute and entertaining, and it’s certainly better than a lot of the other mediocre Japanese series Tokyopop is releasing right now.

This volume is almost entirely made up of one story, and I can’t figure out if I like that better or worse than the episodic ones we’ve been getting.  Once again, the characters are trying to earn money, and they’re told that the best way to do it in the town they’re currently in is to participate in a gladiatorial tournament, which is kind of odd, but really fits the story.  Rose, the cat +Anima, is along for the ride, and there’s a subplot involving rescuing her brother from the depths of the coliseum.  In addition to the fights, the characters are imprisoned in various ways by various people, and they meet up with the future queen of the town, Maggie, who can’t stand people running away from her.

A couple cool things happen.  Rose’s brother is not a +Anima*, which means that it’s not inherited (they mention on and off that for awhile it was thought that only Senri’s tribe could be +Anima).  It’s actually revealed how one becomes a +Anima at the end of the main story, and it’s quite remarkable.  We immediately see how Nana became a +Anima, and she raises the question, hopefully answered in future volumes, of how the others got to be as well.  It’s really original things like this that make me love this series so much.  Well, that and the whole human/animal thing, I’m kind of a sucker for that, too.

One of the other cool things deals with the fights themselves.  Only Cooro and Husky wind up fighting, and both times the events are brief in order to deal with the more complex plot of being stuck in the coliseum.  Cooro’s fight goes about how you’d expect it to, but Husky is surprisingly good at fighting, and it’s awesome to see him in action.  You wouldn’t think he had it in him.

The last chapter is a short story about the relationship between Nana and Husky.  It’s not quite romantic at this point, but it is adorable, and it could easily go in that direction.  One of the things that stops it, though, is that Husky still wavers somewhere in the middle of the boy/girl gender assignment.  Though we’ve had lots of evidence of him being a boy, he’s still portrayed as quite effeminate for some reason.  Maybe there’ll be an explanation later on.

*the grammar here assumes that the plus is pronounced.  I’m not sure how this is handled in the story, or even how I handled it before, but it gave me fits tonight when I was trying to decide whether “a” or “an” was more appropriate before +Anima.