Slightly Biased Manga

Here’s Mr. Satan!  The fact that the gag was played out over the course of several chapters was actually the best part.  I thought he was a bit more of a major character, and maybe he gives commentary on the “Cell Game,” but what he did in this volume was just fine.  I loved the fact that not even Cell could bring himself to really hurt him because he was just too stupid.  That was made even better by the fact that everyone on Earth really just believed in Mr. Satan in the most intense way possible.

The fact that Trunks just gives up and asks Cell to simply kill him struck me as hilarious for some inappropriate reason.  Maybe because I’m used to battles being played out for a long time, and it was just weird to see someone give up after only a few blows were exchanged.

There was actually a good amount of fairly silly Dragon Ball-esque moments.  Before the Cell Game, the characters are given 10 days.  While training, Goku and Gohan somehow get permanently stuck in Super Saiyan form because this is somehow “the best.”  Chi-chi asks them if they can please stop doing that while they’re having a picnic.

I’m pretty pumped about the Cell Game after all this buildup.  I think I can kind of guess what happens since there’s a picture of Goku saying “Good-Bye!” on the cover of the next volume, but I know the stuff leading up to that will be worth reading.

Man, I realized what this series was missing was Super Vegeta.  Boy am I glad things are complete now.  I’m also glad to see that Super Vegeta has the same asshole personality as regular Vegeta.  You know what I mean, the kind of arrogance that lets him allow his enemies to get strong enough to just blow him away when he could easily just kill them and get things over with immediately.  He just wouldn’t be Vegeta otherwise, and I’m glad to see that there was at least one, if not three, chapters dedicated to Vegeta taunting Cell, both before, during, and after they fight.

My favorite scene in this volume was when Trunks and Vegeta stepped out of the training room and Goku commented that Trunks hair had grown, but Vegeta’s had not.  Vegeta explained that saiyan’s hair does not grow, and Goku just goes “NO WONDER!”  like this was something he’d been pondering his entire life.  And he had indeed.

Cell does some absorbing as people fight against him futilely and not-so-futilely.  But when will Mr. Satan get his chance?  I know he shows up in here somewhere.  Maybe next volume, after Perfect Cell beats both Super Vegeta and Super Trunks.  God I love adjectives.

The time travel stuff is becoming less and less clear to me for each volume that mentions it lately, but it seems like it will become a moot point story-wise after this since things seem to be moving exclusively to Cell.  So… Trunks isn’t from the future, but from the future of an alternate reality?  Is time-traveling Cell from the same reality as Trunks?  How about our reality?  Or is it a different reality?  Why does 16 only exist here?  And, maybe it was because I just couldn’t wrap my brain around this (or was unwilling to sit and ponder a minor plot point of Dragon Ball for too long), but how would killing the proto-Cell in the present not make him cease to exist?  Because he time-traveled?  Or because

NO.  No.  I’m going to stop thinking about this now.

My roommate had to explain to me that Cell has many forms, and that I was in for a long haul if he had not absorbed anyone yet.   Goku and Vegeta also discussed going “beyond” super saiyan, which I know is a big thing in Dragon Ball.  I was under the impression this coincided with fusion, but I’m not even sure that’s something that happens in the manga.  If it does, it seems like it won’t happen until after this story is over.

Well, basically all that happens is that Piccolo fights Cell briefly, the good guys look for Cell and the Androids while Vegeta and Trunks train in the… room where 1 day equals one year, Piccolo fights Cell again, and then various androids fight Cell.  I’m sure this is a trend for at least the next three volumes, but maybe something more interesting will happen.

Well, I can’t say I’m not impressed with Cell’s power to absorb people.  That’s pretty cool.  I like Cell a lot, actually.

One wonders how the characters will get the Dragon Balls back.  People just don’t stay dead in this series, after all.

Once again, this stuff’s new to me because I didn’t get any farther than Freeza in the story when I first got into comics/anime.  For a while going through this volume, I thought maybe I was mistaken and the Android story and the Cell story were separate.  By the end of the volume, I’d met Cell, and apparently he’s ready to rumble.

I kind of liked how the Androids were hyped up to be this massive threat, and they certainly are (they beat everybody without even trying), but they also seem like they don’t really care much for taking over the world or anything save for killing Goku.  I gotta say, if Goku is the only casualty they’re after… as much as I love Goku (and I certainly did adore him as a little kid), one has to question their evil intentions.

I also liked how wound up Vegeta got after being beat.  He’s so funny.  Also also, I don’t know how I feel about what Piccolo and Kami are doing.  I’m sad they’re won’t be anymore Kami around.  Who’s supposed to be the God now?  Piccolo?  Aw man.

I kind of like the idea that the characters are having a hard time with the Androids because they can’t sense their life force.  I also like that Goku winds up being crippled by his heart disease anyway, though you can smell the ploy to keep him away until the end of the battle a mile away.

What I don’t like is the fact that most of Dragon Ball Z seems to take place in what appears to be Arizona, regardless of whether or not things are taking place on Earth or Namek (well, to be fair, Namek had water), and whether it’s Freeza, Saiyans, or Androids that are being fought.  It’s kind of sad, really.

I like that Yajirobe seems to have reappeared for no reason, too.  I had read about an “error” on the spines of the books, but I don’t know that I would have noticed Yajirobe on there twice.

So yes, the fight with the Androids is actually kind of exciting and is holding my interest so far.  I also like that the Red Ribbon Army was drug back into things for no reason.  I suppose the length and variety of the fight will determine what I think of it in the end, because I have absolutely no foreknowledge of this part of the series.

I’ve only got one more volume of this left in my backlog, hooray!  After that, I’ll still have about 13 volumes of the series left, which is a lot, but at least I’ve cleared the Freeza story.  I’m now into stuff I don’t know anything but the bare essentials about.  Great, so now I can enjoy the battles a bit more instead of bracing myself for the long haul I can see coming.

The end of the battle with Freeza was in this volume, and I was actually kind of surprised. It appeared that Goku killed him, despite his best efforts not to.  That would be a first for him, because Goku has never killed anyone before that.  Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case, though I can’t agree with the way he was brought back.

They didn’t mention King Cold’s name at all save for on the title page in the back of the volume.  I thought that was kind of odd.

After a bunch of between-story stuff (which I wound up not enjoying as much as usual… it just feels like humor’s out of place in this series now, especially since Vegeta’s now a regular character), we get right into the Android stuff.  Like I said, I don’t know much about the android stuff other than they are numbered and that Trunks comes from the future to help them out.  I’m kind of looking forward to reading about them, though.  Well, for at least one more volume, anyway.

There’s much summoning of Dragons here, and time is condensed so that each of the dragons can be called.  Well, actually, I don’t know if Shenlong is showed being summoned, but Porunga gets called twice.  At one point, when the characters find out Goku isn’t immediately on his way back from Namek, the Turtle Hermit says that it’s because Chichi is worse than Freeza, and something to the effect that the strongest warrior in the universe was humbled by Chichi.  Actually Piccolo may mention this a bit later too, but I thought it was kind of funny.  Also notable is the fact that Kuririn points out that at one point all the characters in the main group (Goku, Kuririn, Yamcha, Tenshinhan and Chaozu, Piccolo, and Vegeta) were enemies, and that it would be scary if they didn’t have a common enemy to fight.  Also true, and also very funny.

Akira Toriyama mentions in the front of the volume he doesn’t think of the blurbs that go in the front of Weekly Jump himself, because he can never think of what to say about the most recent chapters of Dragon Ball.  After reading through this volume, I believe him.  I finished one chapter, then flipped back to the beginning of it and flipped through it again in disbelief.  A fan of Dragon Ball, someone who faithfully followed the series on a weekly basis and who waits eagerly all week to see what would happen next, was treated to a chapter which was nothing more than Goku powering up the Genki Dama.  Though Dragon Ball seems particularly bad, this is also the reason I don’t follow One Piece on a weekly basis anymore - because with this kind of series, when you get mired in a battle things move painfully slow.

Once we get past the boring first couple chapters, things move impressively fast.  Goku does make Super Saiyan in this volume, which makes the fight between he and Freeza much more interesting.  The catalyst for this is another character’s death, and this death is still hard for me to take because the character is fairly innocent and also one of my favorites… the kind of guy who doesn’t ever seem to be in league with the other characters, and I always feel bad for him.  The plot moves elsewhere too.  After Piccolo was brought back to life, Kami was also brought back and the Dragon Balls were gathered on Earth.  They use the one wish in a tricky manner so that Porunga was brought back and a lot of things were undone.

Also, Freeza blows up Namek.  Or will shortly.  I always kind of liked that insane element, too.

Merry Christmas!

Lots of death in this one. Two characters bite the dust, and if I remember correctly, at least one more will get taken out before the dust settles. Gohan, Kuririn, Piccolo, and Vegeta are all almost killed, but are brought back thanks to Dende. As Freeza goes through all his transformations and reaches perfect form, the characters gain hope as they power up themselves, then lose it totally as Freeza blows them out of the water.

But wait! Goku comes back! Once the other characters roles have been played out, Goku comes out and starts fighting Freeza. The last few chapters are just the two of them sparring. I… think that this is going to go on for quite some time, unfortunately.

Super Saiyan stuff is spoken of quite frequently in this volume. Does Goku turn Super Saiyan during this battle? Man, I hope so. At least I’ll have that to look forward to, because as it stands… I’m not really happy about plodding through this section of the story.

Well, finally, the end of the Ginyu Force, so I can forget about them forever now. Captain Ginyu tries his trick a couple more times, but alas… it just doesn’t work out for him.

Goku goes into hibernation while the lesser characters take on Freeza, which is a very Shounen Jump thing to do at this point.  Freeza reveals his true form… all the characters are healed after Freeza almost kills them… and Piccolo fuses with someone.  That’s right, Piccolo’s back.

They summon the dragon too!  I did remember that the Namek dragon was named something like Porunga, and that the Namek system was slightly different than the Earth system.  Even in this part of the story, I still think it’s great when they summon the dragon to make a wish.

I have five volumes each of Dragon Ball and RG Veda to go through, so I brought them home with me in order to read at my parents house.  So look for big slugs of those series peppered with possibly a few random volumes I brought with me… and probably Iron Wok Jan, which just got delivered to the neighbor’s house.

I forgot about the Ginyu Force again.  I think I’m just incapable of remembering they exist, because whatever context I see them in they shock me as a new and different enemy.  The big event this volume is that Goku shows up, and of course he’s much more powerful than ANYone else is.  He quickly dispatches most of the Ginyu force save for the white-haired hard rocker and heals Kuririn, Gohan, and Vegeta.  Then he goes on to fight Captain Ginyu, who pulls out a trick that I of course forgot, but is still kind of cool after all these years.

Part of me is ashamed of reading Dragon Ball Z, part of me thinks it’s like reading “War and Peace,” and part of me loves the… template nature of it, the way it now reads like a basic version of every other Shounen Jump manga that came out in the 90s.  It’s pretty rad and boring at the same time.