Slightly Biased Manga

Yeah, I still don’t know about this one.  I’ve fallen a little behind, so I’m got the next volume coming in the mail, but I’m going to give up all hope if reading two volumes at the same time this far into the series doesn’t improve things.

I definitely hated the parts that took place in the present, and this is largely because the female (?) character is still extremely, EXTREMELY annoying.  Shikimi is having trouble controlling his cravings for blood, and an allusion is made to a bet with Gray.  Shikimi’s faith in his humanity is somewhat generically reinforced, but then we are mercifully saved by a flashback to when Shikimi was fully human.

The flashback isn’t bad, and carries over into the next volume.  Shikimi lives in a rural village and travels elsewhere to settle the undead.  He’s got a sweetheart in the village and helps raise a gaggle of orphans at the church.  The church is being switched over to a new building, and Gray appears in town.  Some of Shikimi’s significant skills are shown, but this doesn’t stop whatever it is that Gray has in mind for the village, unfortunately.  Nothing terrible has happened to Shikimi yet, but I can’t imagine the situation ending well.

Even the flashback, which at least wasn’t terrible, wasn’t terribly good either.  Something will have to happen to make Shikimi an extremely, EXTREMELY sympathetic character in order to get me to like this series… which I kind of doubt will happen, but hey.  Maybe.

Hm. I think I still really like this series. This volume had about zero action, and was mostly exposition. I did not like the new characters that were introduced. I liked the backstory that was discussed at length (and apparently will go into greater detail next volume), and the little story about the split between the two main characters was to die for… but I don’t know. It still needs to do something awesome to put it over the edge and make it good.

The two new characters… yeah. I think I was soured on the second one, who’s really not that bad, because the first was just irritating. So, it’s a boy. A boy who is drawn with breasts, eyelashes, and a skirt(ish thing) where no other boy in the series is. He gets mad at first for being called a girl, but later we get a really confusing cleavage shot. I don’t know. An identity crisis, at any rate, which may come up later. At the moment, his alignment seems to be of the m/m variety, as he’s got a big crush on the demon priest. He’s irritating because he’s one of those headstrong, loud characters that shows up because he’s got a job to do, is talked out of this job, then sticks around and has stupid fights that are supposed to be funny but aren’t… and said fights happen every few pages when he’s around. OH MY GOD I HATE HIM SO MUCH. Something truly awesome has to occur in order for the series to cancel out the huge amounts of negative energy he’s brought with him. Him being eaten by a fully demonized priest is about what it would take for me.

The other character isn’t actually that bad, but just doesn’t have a place yet. He’s a big creepy undead who has a regular human form and sticks around to menace the priest and harass the assistant.

The best thing about the volume was definitely when the priest sent the assistant home and they had a big weepy man-cry at the end of the chapter. Very nice, but not quite enough to make up for the annoying character.

Is there a comma in the title?  There’s a black sun and silver moon between the phrases on the cover, so it’s hard to tell.

Anyway, I’m all over Go!Comi series.  While I’m inclined to believe that everything they license is probably readable by me (even Cantarella, which I don’t really like but is still okay), I’ve got to be selective when starting new series.  This one involves priests and zombies, which was enough to sell me on it even though I’ve read one other series by this mangaka and hated it.

I’m not too sure what all goes on in this volume, though.  Not a whole lot of fighting, actually.  There’s a short story at the end of the volume which was really bizarre and not really to my liking (even though people with two different eye colors are always awesome), but the only noteworthy story I can remember in the volume itself that wasn’t just the two priests talking and explaining things to each other was the story of how they got their ghost/zombie dog.  It’s cute, but I didn’t actually like that story that much.

The only other thing I really remember was that the white-haired priest is actually possessed by a demon and is slowly losing his grip on humanity, which is also cool.  We don’t really see  much about this other than vaguely hinting at the fact that perhaps it controlled him in the past and he’s done something rather ugly.

In fact… I don’t even know what we really see a lot of, other than the silver-haired priest bossing the other one around and a lot of complaining coming from the other.  While it wasn’t precisely bad, it didn’t really go anywhere.  It set a path for itself, so I don’t even really want to say that it didn’t go places, but it has yet to move down that path.  It’s wide open for it in volume 2, though.   I… kinda liked it, but I kinda felt cheated at the same time, too.  Zombies are never a bad thing, however sparingly they’re used, so I’ll be back for seconds regardless.