Bastard 6

I don’t know.  This is certainly one of the worst series I’ve ever read.  The only thing that stops me from pulling my hair out and throwing it in the trash is the fact that it’s well aware that it’s bad, and it even revels in it a little bit.

The plot is still no good.  As far as I can tell, there is no hiding the fact that Abigail is still sending unbeatable opponent after unbeatable opponent after Dark Schneider.  This volume consists entirely of the fights between two such opponents.  To give you a little break, Gara does a lot of the fighting on the second opponent.  Nothing happens between Dark Schneider and Yoko.  Nothing happens between Dark Schneider and the princess.  We do get some angsting about Dark from Arshes Nei, but nothing really comes of it.  The status of the kingdom is still uncertain, and I have no idea how close the kingdom is to being saved or how close Abigail is to getting what it is that he wants.

What’s bad?  Well, how about the lazy art?  Some panels are drawn pretty sketchily or rushed-looking, which I may forgive if they didn’t happen so frequently, or if they were used consistenty as part of a joking-type style or art.  They’re really not, and they’re often accompanied by asides where he apologizes for not having enough time to draw stuff.  The characters are often drawn bizarrely off-model, sometimes with side comments joking about an arm drawn in backwards.  One chapter ends with two pages of panels filled in with only dialogue and no drawings, which I know was a deadline that he didn’t meet.  Dark Schneider breaks the fourth wall almost every time he opens his mouth, and it’s too much for me.  A lot of time is spent with simple character reactions to huge spells and things like that, which can get tiresome after several chapters.  Much time is spent on character death scenes, sometimes several chapters, and the characters never die, and there’s never much of a good explanation for why they come back to life.

But all that stuff is the point.  It’s meant to be a really hammy fantasy series that makes bad jokes.  I think I’m just not getting them.

I’ve got four more volumes of this to read.  I bought seven or so on sale when I found out some of the earlier volumes were going out of print since I tend to like fantasy series.  Goddammit, I should have bought Basara instead.  Maybe if I wish hard enough, when I go to sleep tonight I’ll wake up and the first ten volumes of Bastard will have turned into the first ten volumes of Basara on my shelf.