Slightly Biased Manga

This made my day, if only because the phrase “what the sam hill is going on” was used not once, but twice in this volume.  The first time gave me pause, the second time I just laughed.

Has it been awhile since we’ve had any plot?  I don’t know, I can’t remember, but probably.  This volume is one of those rare scraps of plot we get thrown every now and again, this time a pretty significant story about the Organization. Conan and Ai basically happen into Gin, and they find out the Organization is planning on killing someone at a party being held in a certain hotel at a certain time.  Gin doesn’t realize what’s happened to Shiho/Ai/Sherry, but he does know she’ll be there thanks to a hair she left in his car.  Some… tiptoeing around this delicate plot point is done, and in addition, at one point Ai is locked in a wine cellar, which gives her access to the alcohol Conan had earlier in the series.  Yeah.  There was more action than usual though, even down to some of the characters taking bullets, and as a result the mystery is somewhat downplayed.  I liked it a lot, though.

Also, I couldn’t get over the self-referential joke that Conan made.  When Ai worries about being recognized by members of the Organization at the party, Conan gives her his glasses and says “For some reason, nobody can tell who you are when you wear these!  Superman would kill for a pair like this!”  It made me laugh pretty hard for no real reason.

What else… well, we get the wrap-up from the mystery at the end of last volume.  It gets a bit more exciting when we find out that the building the detective and suspect are locked in is scheduled to blow up around the same time the other detective is due back, but other than that, I wasn’t really all that impressed with this one.  Despite the fact I have to abandon all logic for a lot of other things in this series, for some reason I couldn’t let go of how unprofessional it was for that one detective to run around with five children trying to sove a murder case by himself without telling anyone, while leaving one of his colleagues handcuffed in an abandoned building to the suspect.  That even trumps Clarice Starling wandering into Buffalo Bill’s hands by herself at the end of Silence of the Lambs.

There was one other case where the theme of the episode was whether or not Rachael had a crush on one of the doctor characters.  The mystery itself was pretty classic, and I liked the way it worked itself out once again, but I have to admit the way they built up the possibility of Rachael having a crush on this guy, and the way they explained it away at the end just didn’t match.  That’s okay, though.

I have a bad habit of referring to “they” when talking about any given artist or manga series.  I realize how wrong this is, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling right to me.

I just got the next volume in this week, but I’m not sure how soon I’m going to tackle it.  I really like this series, and I genuinely enjoy reading it, but unless the next volume has a mystery that really knocks my socks off, there’s a good chance I’ll just wear myself out on it.