Slightly Biased Manga

One of the things I’ve mentioned only peripherally so far, but really appreciate, are the essays that open each volume of this series.  The first essay was written by Frederik Schodt, the second by Matt Thorn, the third by Yuji Oniki, and this one was by Annette Roman.  Cheating, the last volume was written by Gerard Jones.  These are all names I recognize, and they all write really good essays and discuss several relevant topics for Adolf.  I really enjoyed Annette Roman’s essay in this volume, which was about editing the series.  She talks about not only the need to scan every page copiously for swastikas to flip them (since the pages are flipped, the swastikas need to be flipped back), but the amount of research she needed to put into things in order to make sure the translation worked okay.  She mentioned pouring over volumes about Nazi medals and marveling about the neutral tone the author kept while discussing them, having to pour over volumes to try and determine which Nazi officials names are meant when the names come back romanized from Japanese, and also talked about shooting the photo of the little boy for the cover of one of the books and having to make sure that the “Heil Hitler” was done correctly.  These are things which can be really terrible and really hard to research, but are important since they can be details which, if done incorrectly, will either misinform or… you know, take away from the work.  Her essay has been the most fascinating so far.

This volume was largely about Adolf Kauffman.  He’s gone more than a bit off the deep end at this point, and it’s just so hard to see the cute little boy from the first volume who did not want to be a Nazi being what is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect Nazi.  He… rounds up the Jewish people and all that, though he doesn’t do the killing himself.  He still has his limits though, which sort of brings about his downfall, but as a result he gets to talk to Lamp a little bit.  He also has more dialogues with  Hitler himself, who is clearly being portrayed as more and more insane.  Adolf questions Lamp about this at one point, and several other characters remark that such an unbalanced leader needs unbalanced followers.  Adolf begins to show signs of mental instability, not only because he is portrayed with zero humanity as a Nazi, but because he literally goes insane at one point as his conscience plagues him about all the deaths he’s caused directly and indirectly.  It works quite well, and it probably works as my second favorite scene in the series so far.

We get some resolution as far as Toge’s documents go.  The story touches briefly on spy activity in Japan, and a really admirable character does what he can to get Toge’s documents to the proper authorities.  His story is an extremely sad one, and you find yourself rooting for all the spies that are featured in this part, even the real-life ones that helped out America.

There’s a really sad story about Japanese racism in Manchuria that is related by the main character for this spy segment.  It works really well not only to show that it is monstrous even if the Nazis aren’t involved, but also to show that the problem wasn’t strictly a German one (if that made any sense, the two points are kind of related).  It was particularly interesting since this is being told from a Japanese perspective to a Japanese audience.

I still maintain that if you get the opportunity to read this series, you really should.  It continues to be fantastic.