Slightly Biased Manga

I’ve got this volume and volume 15, then I think I have to stop until I find the volumes on sale again.  I’m just broke and moving right now.

This volume opens with one of the most ridiculous chapters ever.  I thought that things would get relatively sane save for the constant demon slaying after the whole sacrifice thing, but Casca does one more bizarre and improbable thing for the road.

As much as I would love to dismiss what happened outright, part of me is also intrigued.  The dead king implied that it was Guts’s demon, which makes me wonder more about his role in all this.  On the other hand, I think I would be much better off blocking that entire chapter out of my mind.

After some training and Guts getting hooked up with the equipment we saw in the first volume, things snap back to the present.  Well, first there’s some sort of religious/prophecy angle, and some Holy Knights appear to let you know that it was foretold that events surrounding the “red lake” they found were foretold.  The fact that the leftovers from the massacre are called a “red lake” made me smile, but this scene was very short.

The next storyline starts off with Guts rescuing a little girl and taking her back to her village, where she is promptly beaten by her father and the entire village turns on Guts for having Puck, and elf, in his possession.  The aversion to elves is due to the fact that elf-like creatures apparently swarm all the towns in the area, destroying everything, eating people, and carrying off children.  When Puck vouches for the fact that elves don’t eat people, a swarm flies overhead the mark Guts has starts to bleed, so we know they’re monsters.  Guts then goes about dispatching the monsters, and the volume ends on a cliffhanger.  One of the more compelling images in the series is a gigantic panel where Guts has a bunch of little man-shaped smears all over his sword after swinging it through clouds of the elf-monsters, causing them to stick to the surface like bugs on a windshield.  I’m not sure just yet how I feel about this story arc, other than the fact that this village is a sad and depressing place, so I don’t really want to pass judgment until I read more.  What I’ve seen so far is pretty good though.  It’s hard to go wrong since I enjoy the demon slaying, and there’s quite a bit of it in this volume.

The design on the elf-monsters is quite good.  They look a lot like Puck with some insect-like features, and when they get mean, the get even more bug-like.  They’re vicious little things.  The queen elf-monster looks like the same creature we saw when the injured Band of the Hawks members were devoured several volumes ago.

There’s also a short story in the back which was apparently the pilot for the series.  It was hard to read because the Guts in that story is a really exaggerated, cartoony version of current Guts.  He rescues a little girl that looks just like Griffin, which made me laugh.  Puck is also a lot more cartoony, and I also laughed when he struck the perfect pose when the little girl called him cute.