Arm of Kannon 3
November 19, 2009
Masakazu Yamaguchi – Tokyopop – 2004 – 9 volumes
I don’t know, guys. I kind of like this series. Did I fail some sort of test? I hope not, because this stuff is pretty rad. I knew what was in store when I saw the rotting corpse of Daisoujou on the cover. Thanks, SMT, for the deity recognition!
It’s about what you would expect. The fight in the woods between the army and the mystics continues, and the army is loosing pretty horribly, in the most graphic ways you can imagine. The female of the group is hanging out of the torso of someone who is apparently “particles of death” and can’t be killed, and she is of course still alive (and naked), for maximum emotional impact on her one surviving teammate. He wears a visor that can detect any enemy weakness. Not to spoil anything, but the visor, along with his eyes, are torn out a bit later.
The leader of the army group (who isn’t a teammate, so he doesn’t count) fares a bit better against the leader of the mystics, except Mao intervenes after a short-lived scuffle against his “protector.” We don’t see the result of this battle, because after a few heavenly blasts and gory regeneration moves happen, the story switches over to the monk Mao’s sister found in the woods last volume that claims to be a former host for the arm of Kannon. We hear his story, and how he met the “protector” many, many years ago.
His story is pretty radical, and delves deeply into the world of Buddhist religion and mysticism. Now, when most series do this, it is in an oblique way, where characters happen to be fighting demons based on blah blah blah, or they themselves represent whoever. Arm of Kannon is guilty of this, obviously, since Mao is possessed by the arm of Senju Kannon, but it is the actual arm of Senju Kannon, and the reason he is going berserk is that it is only meant to fall into the possession of the earthly incarnation of Buddha. See, we learn all this because the old monk in the woods is actually a Bodhisattva that was part of a secret sect of practicing Bodhisattvas that lived in the middle of the woods and knew all about this stuff. There’s a really long, awesome scene where we learn about humanity and how the arm has been feeding off bodies without souls for thousands of years. Normally all the mysticism stuff loses me and is handled badly, but I actually understood it in this series, and it… makes a strange sort of sense in the plot. Especially the Arm of Kannon.
All of this is pretty gory and horrifying, as you might imagine. I can’t fault this series for anything it’s trying to do, honestly. I’m pretty engrossed in the plot, and I came here for the over-the-top fighting and gore, which is present in spades. What’s not to like?
November 19, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] Century Boys (Comics Village) Peter Gutierrez on vol. 1 of Akira (Graphic Novel Reporter) Connie on vol. 3 of Arm of Kannon (Slightly Biased Manga) Danielle Leigh on Crimson Shell and vol. 1 of Jormungand (Comics Should Be [...]