Oh My Goddess 8
July 15, 2008
Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. Sometimes you have to go to Michigan for several days and come back with festering spider bites all over your hand.
I liked this volume a lot, actually. It’s hard for me to tell whether or not I appreciate these stories because they’re good stories, or because they’re triggering nostalgia for me. Maybe a little of both, but they’re definitely the type of quiet stories that the series is good for.
In the first story, Keiichi et al have to exorcise a memory spirit of some kind from a dilapidated hotel that the Motorcycle Club is having a camp in. The setup is basically that the spirit wants him to fulfill a promise on behalf of his grandfather, who he looks just like. Mixed into the bargain is a super-rare motorcycle his grandfather left behind. It’s just sort of a nice story with not too much rocking the boat. I really liked it.
There’s a beach story that attempts to bring Belldandy and Keiichi closer together, with Urd and Skuld interfering. I’m not sorry to see this type of story go in later volumes in favor of Skuld and Urd antagonizing themselves and Peorth, but this one’s okay as far as it goes.
In the aftermath of that story, it appears that Skuld has some sort of crush on Keiichi. This one always struck me as weird, but I also liked it since it’s sorta rare that Skuld acts human, especially in these older stories. I also just like the end of this story, plus it’s one of the few stories with continuity, so hooray for that.
There are color pages and 4-panel comics too, which are still awesome. It’s a shame they don’t appear more frequently in the later volumes, but it does give me a reason to reread these older volumes.
July 16, 2008 at 3:10 pm
[...] the Manga Maniac Cafe. Lissa Pattillo checks out vol. 9 of Cantarella at Kuriousity. Connie reads vol. 8 of Oh My Goddess at Slightly Biased Manga. Erica Friedman’s take on vol. 1 of Suzunari: It’s not bad [...]
July 16, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Yipes. That sounds unpleasant.
July 17, 2008 at 5:36 am
Around this point is where the series picks up, IMO :) Later ones continue to improve but a lot of the annoyances I had with the really early stuff have faded a bit.
July 18, 2008 at 3:21 am
True. The last volume is one of my favorites still, but the characters sort of start to mature from this point on, which is what makes me like it still. My point of no return comes a bit later, when I realized that the Nekomi Tech stories were being phased out. I like that the characters occasionally appear still, but they were definitely my least favorite part of the series.