Parasyte 3
Posted: May 30, 2008 Filed under: Parasyte 4 Comments »I had to wait SO LONG for this volume! It took seven months! What’s up with that? Apparently volume 4 will be much sooner in coming. I was worried they decided to make this 2-a-year due to bad sales. I can’t imagine it’s Del Rey’s worst selling series. Must’ve been some sort of production hiccup or something.
It’s still awesome, in case you were worried. There’s still lots of monsters and fights and lots of mouth heads. The best part is probably a fight that takes place in the school. The parasites are finally revealed to the general public through it, sorta, and the reaction is a lot more mild than I imagined. The reactions are actually sort of hilarious. “Mouth-heads” are what some eyewitness accounts describe, so there’s lots of cartoon drawings and things of what people think parasites look like in a human body. There’s also a trick people learn with a strand of hair that causes them to pull each other’s hair out to see if there’s a parasite.
I’ll leave the details of the actual fight at the school alone. It’s a great scene, though.
The second best thing this volume had going for it was the slow transformation of the main character. It’s implied that he and Migi are merging and that his feelings are becoming less and less… moral and sympathetic, I suppose, and more and more parasitic. The transformation is slow, and I appreciate the amount of subtlety and discussion that goes into it.
The third best thing was the reappearance of slit-mouth girl, last seen in volume 3 of Octopus Girl. I missed her so.
How the public will react to an actual parasite attack, or the true nature of the parasite, has yet to be revealed, as does what eventually happens to the main character’s humanity. Both of these are interesting questions, as is the Parasite’s views that they are killing off humans the same way humans kill off everything else. The girl that’s having the human baby is also still hanging around and directing certain things behind the scenes. There’s still a ton of story to go, and it’s still all pretty fresh at this point. I like it a lot.
It does look like the increased frequency of releases is a trend that’ll continue. Volume 4 at the end of July, 5 at the end of October, and 6 at the end of January 09. It seems they’re also going to be releasing Mushishi and Nodame Cantabile more frequently than previously, also. Huzzah!
[...] of Yozakura Quartet at PopCultureShock’s Manga Recon blog. Connie checks out the long-awaited vol. 3 of Parasyte and vol. 10 of Moon Child at Slightly Biased Manga. Over at Active Anime, Scott Campbell reviews [...]
I did notice Mushishi didn’t seem to have quite as many volumes out as it should, I wonder if it suffered from the same production hiccup. Thanks for those dates though, I’m so glad to hear that the volumes will be regular for the foreseeable future.
I suspect that was really the only gripe anyone could manifest about Del Rey, and that they’re now trying to address it. That’d be nice if they kept up this pace.