Slightly Biased Manga

This is another ARC from CMX.  I don’t actually like reading series unless I can start from the beginning, but for some reason I had it in my head that somehow this series started over at volume 7.  I’m not sure where, why, or how I came upon this impression, because this is the last volume of the series.

It wasn’t that hard to get into, and that was my backup plan - if it didn’t start the series over, I figured the plot wouldn’t be overly-complicated.  I read the character descriptions at the beginning of the volume and felt pretty comfortable the rest of the way through.  Gotta love those character descriptions.  Basically… there are boys who can turn into robots.  Some of the robots are going up against each other.  There are two scientists who are… at odds, I think.  The three most powerful robots are at least partially human.  There’s lots of fighting with other robots, and one guy gets his head torn off.  All this is pretty cool.

I liked it a lot, despite the fact I knew nothing about it and it seems to have a pretty basic story (though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’m just seeing the resolution to everything, for all I know there’s been some hard stuff going on in the past 6 volumes).  This could be because I’ve been reading a lot of superhero comics lately and this type of story is appealing to me at the moment, and it probably helps that I like sentai series a lot, though this is a much straighter take and seems more like a tokusatsu.  It helps that its got really attractive art and character designs.  The art is always the thing I have the hardest time figuring out in these ARCs because they’re sort of low-quality roughs, but the drawings in this series are pretty amazing, and that can sometimes make up for a lot of other things story-wise.  Not always.  I’m looking at you, Alichino.

The only two things I can think of to say against it are that sometimes I had a hard time figuring out the fight scenes and I suspect I wouldn’t have liked the ending had I read the series all the way through.  I liked it reading just this one volume though, because it does what it does and gets it over with, and I thought it was kind of funny the way it left everything… even though it wasn’t supposed to be.  The difficulty I had with some of the fight scenes may have had something to do with the ARC, again, since I was looking at two low-quality pages at once, so it may actually be a lot clearer what’s going on in the actual book.  Plus, uh… I didn’t actually know who the characters were, so I couldn’t tell which robots I was supposed to be rooting for, and it took me a long time to figure out one of the characters transformed into the brain-bot.  That likely didn’t help either.

I immediately felt the need to go back and read from the beginning when I heard that the inspiration for the story was Pinocchio, and that it was sort of hinged on the question of “was Pinocchio happy when he became a real boy?”  I’m… not really sure the question is answered in this series, but it’s awesome all the same.  I also just found out that this is pretty much a straight retelling of the older Shotaro Ishinomori series (he’s credited as the writer, and I was kind of wondering how that worked), so I know that it was probably heavily influenced by/ripped off from Astro Boy.  I liked Kikaider a lot better, but that could have a lot to do with the art and maybe some tweaks too, I’ll have to see when I go back and get the rest.

So yeah, I thought it was awesome, just judging from the last volume, but I can see how if you’re not interested in robots fighting and whatnot you may not be into it.