Dogs 0

Wow.  After reading the bland summary on the back and flipping through and looking at the somewhat plain art, I was not expecting to like this series at all.  So I was pretty surprised when this wound up being really enjoyable.

While the art is plain, it can get away with it because it has a good sense of composition and panel layout, which is fairly important in an action series like this.  And sometimes simplistic art helps out fight scenes a lot too.  Anyone who has read Trigun Maximum can tell you detail is sometimes a problem.

The book itself is composed of four short stories about four different characters who intersect in different ways.  The characters are all somehow involved in crime and/or the underworld.  Of the three, the girl named Naoto, who uses swords, is the only one who hasn’t encountered the other three characters yet.  Apparently she was pulled out from under the corpses of her parents and trained in the use of the sword by the man who killed them.  She remembers nothing except her hatred of this man.  Her story is probably the least interesting, though she does get what is probably the best action scene in the book.

Mihai seems like a retired assassin with the only actual mob connections.  His story’s mostly about how the boy he raised killed his lover, both of them are now after each other, et cetera.  He runs into Badou during the next story, which is about the strange life Badou leads as an informant who doesn’t really pick sides.  Badou then appears in Heine’s story.  Heine doesn’t really have a job, other than an apparent bodyguard and/or partner for Badou, but his story is about how he was… genetically manipulated, and trying to save a girl who has the same problems.

Of the four, Badou’s story is the only one not riddled with cliches, and he’s also the comic relief of the series.  While the stories are about the girl out for revenge for the death of her parents, the boy who wants to kill the people that changed him into something inhuman, and the man who’s past haunts him, the style and pacing make up for what it lacks in plot.  Plus, each story is a quarter of the book, so they don’t really go on long enough to get boring, and are just long enough so that they explain each character.  I liked the format a lot.

I’m also quite curious to see how this will be developed into a series.  I actually do want to see how all these characters get together and what they wind up collaborating on, because it seems like the groundwork has been laid for what could be a pretty epic story.  I also tend to be fairly impressed with Ultra Jump series (Steel Ball Run and Tenjho Tenge, but Battle Angel Alita also runs there… as does Bastard), so I am kind of looking forward to the first volume now.  Plus, Viz’s presentation with this series is really awesome.  the volume is oversized, with some metallic foil used in the title, there’s a double-sided color pull-out in the front, and the inside covers have some cute cartoony versions (I would say “chibi”, but I hate that term) of Heine and Badou.  The presentation is worth the couple extra bucks you’re paying for it.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.