Slightly Biased Manga

There was an interesting post over… hm, here, about talking about older or obscure comics this month.  It got mentioned a couple places, and it seems like there might be a lot of articles popping up.  I talk a lot about old manga anyway because I love going back and buying old series, but I think I’ll revisit a particularly old, obscure series I haven’t read in awhile this month.  It started running right when I first got into manga in 1998, and it’s one of my first series.  I loved it hard, so it’ll be fun to see how it holds up to everything else I’ve read since.

3×3 Eyes isn’t this series, unfortunately, I just got it over the weekend.  It qualifies as old though, which is why I prefaced it with that little bit of news.  I’ve wanted to read 3×3 Eyes for awhile, and was totally destroyed when it got canceled a couple years ago.  Of course, I wasn’t actually following it at the time, so it’s not like I was helping the cause any.  I’m glad I thought to get it while it was still in print.

I love fantasy, but I have a hard time with many fantasy series because they suck.  Not overtly, just… a lot of the ones I’ve read are horribly disappointing.  I think I could get into 3×3 Eyes, though.  It’s got a really solid mythology it seems to be basing itself on that I’m not familiar with, it’s got main characters who are part creatures, and it’s got an epic, adventurous spirit to it.  Unfortunately, it’s also a romantic comedy, but so far I can forgive it that.

It scored major bonus points for proclaiming right away that Pai, the main female character, was not human and was actually a 300-year-old freaky monster.  More bonus points were scored when the main male character, Yakumo, was transformed into some sort of zombie (sort of, not really, but STILL).  Even more points for Yakumo being introduced as working in a drag queen restaurant.  The first thing that happened was that a gigantic freaky man-bird escaped in the middle of an urban environment and killed Yakumo.  Immediately, 3×3 Eyes wins.

The main storyline of the book is that the couple is trying to turn Pai human, which will also turn Yakumo back into a regular human.   They begin this quest by trying to track down a statue.  They find it right away, but mayhem and setbacks occur in the way only a 40-volume manga series dares attempt.  The romantic comedy moments are kind of sparse, and are understated enough not to be embarrassing at this point, but they still feel out-of-place.  When I say Pai and Yakumo are a couple, they aren’t REALLY, but they’re just as much a couple as Bell and K1 in the early volumes of Oh My Goddess.

I was surprised that the volumes are so slender.  There’s no way they correspond to the Japanese releases.  They’re also old, so they cost more than a longer, modern volume of manga.  But they don’t rot your brain in the same way as a new volume of Pichi Pichi Pitch will, and perhaps that’s worth the extra $3-$7.   Plus, it’s awesome and they use a quote from Rob Zombie on the back to promote it.