Slightly Biased Manga

This series is SO BAD, but it’s still got the thin sliver of something I can appreciate hidden amid all the confusing art and terrible jokes.  When I started this volume, I remember thinking that it was getting better about taking things slowly and emphasizing relationships more, but I don’t know if that was the case here… it seemed to take a step back.

To be fair, it did a good job covering the sad background of one of the demon assistants.  That chapter was probably the best in this volume.  What goes from a story about Shirayuki turning into a cat and being held by the demon goes into another wild rampage from… well, Kuroyuki and eventually reveals the sad backstory about how the man lived his life (it sounded vaguely like he was supposed to be a Nazi, but it didn’t come right out and say it).  In addition to finding Shirayuki, Prince is also charged with sending the souls of his three demon assistants back to Heaven for good since they’ve finished their punishment in Hell.  The demons are never shown as evil, even though they’ve obviously done something to be transformed into monsters and kept in Hell for so long, and a lot of the more glaring errors that appear in other chapters, like chaotic and confusing storytelling and plots that go all over the place are toned down here.  The plot takes several unrelated twists and turns, but still manages to be fairly coherent and entertaining.  Well, for Go Go Heaven, anyway.

One of the other stories… um.  It involves octopus aliens, but only because one escapes from Hell and Shirayuki and Prince go to the octopus planet.  The octopi take the form of other characters in the story, including the demon assistants, and the octopus queen takes the form of Shirayuki and tries to marry Prince and mate with him.  It was really, REALLY bad.  The concept, the execution, the storytelling, the characters, everything about this chapter was really, really terrible.  There was a kiss at the end, and not even that saved it.

The last chapter had the former King of Hell, Prince’s grandfather, making a nuisance of himself at Obon.  It was kind of bad, but begged the question “what happened to Prince’s father, then?”  and foreshadowed trouble between Prince and Shirayuki.  Of course.

Really, I want more romance between Shirayuki and Prince, less terrible jokes per page, and maybe some sort of power exchange again so that Prince can go back to being an adult instead of having to run around as a little kid all the time.  It winds up being creepy in a lot of situations.

I meant to talk about Astro Boy today as well… but I wound up listening in disbelief, again and again, to a 20-minute drum solo on Led Zeppelin’s “How the West Was Won.”  Apparently it is also on their second album, which I do not own.  How unfortunate.

Anyway.  That has nothing to do with Go Go Heaven, but I needed something to talk about.  This manga still has a lot of flaws, but I think it’s slowly getting better about them.  I actually wound up enjoying this volume quite a bit despite some really huge story flaws.

The best story in the volume was the first.  Things pick up with Prince being the King of Hell, and he goes to heaven to seek God’s approval for his choice of bride.  God disapproves, and Prince decides he’ll do it anyway, and gives Shirayuki an engagement ring.  She can’t take it off, does anyway, then turns into a demoness of some sort.  There’s a battle between she and Prince which ends in a nice romantic scene.  There’s plenty of really weird and embarrassing stuff going on that I wouldn’t have written in myself (the school is turned into a levitating battleground, for one), but it’s still a really good story.

The volume is at its best when it focuses on the romance between Shirayuki and Prince, so I’m hoping the tone will shift to more of that.  I could go for several more volumes like that actually, if the storytelling gets a lot better in the process.

Yay!  My internet’s back!  Time to post a bunch of crap I read during the week!

Go Go Heaven improved significantly from last volume.  I was worried, because the tag line on the back cover said something like “Shirayuki’s life is on the line… THE FOUL LINE!” and it actually started out as a basketball tournament, but things got serious pretty quick, and the thousand gags a minute with one-shot stories did not happen in this volume.  The first two-thirds was actually all one story dealing with Shirayuki’s last days and her rebellion against heaven and hell, which wound up being pretty good.  I liked the ending a lot, in theory.  I also still like the plot a lot, but it still suffers from what seems like… I dunno, a rookie story.  The storytelling style is still extremely messy, pages are still fairly busy, and sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s going on.  There’s also issues with the flow of time and weird jumps from panel to panel sometimes.

There were a lot of other things I could have gone without, too.  The extremely long chase scene at the end was lousy in some spots and awesome in others, the basketball tournament was a weird way to lead up to everything, and there was just many instances of things that were just frustratingly unclear.  And though I liked the ending of the series, I thought the last few pages was a cop-out.  The series was supposed to end there, but it looks like it kept going, which makes me worry about the quality of future volumes.

On the other hand, I like stories about judgment of souls, which is why I enjoyed the plot of this one a lot.  I did like basically everything that was going on at the end here, and I even grew to like the little romance between Prince and Shirayuki.  I also thought the beasts of hell that were unleashed at the end were pretty cool.  There is a lot less comedy in this volume too, and things are a lot better off for it.  The ending made a wonderful drama-tastic story.  There was lots of good stuff going on, it was just mired in a bunch of other stuff that was not so good, and it makes it very hard to read.

The last third of the volume is a one-shot story about a girl who tries to destroy the tree-nature-god on her island.  That one’s actually pretty well-done, and though it shares some of the same flaws as Go Go Heaven, it’s not a comedy and is handled a lot better than the main story.  Despite some confusion, I liked that one a lot.

How did I forget to talk about this one? That’s a bit troubling. I read it last week and picked it up because of the interesting plot summary. I thought it would go down good after finishing Bride of Deimos, because they have the same plot, in spirit (not really, but I really wanted to read Bride of Deimos and this was the closest thing on my shelf that I hadn’t read). This… this was not very good.

The plot IS good. A girl dies, but is saved by the prince of hell while she is being judged. Said character is just called Prince. He gives her 40-some days to put her life back in order or something before she has to go off on a final judgement, either heaven or hell. As she was, the main character was a soulless doll, but going back, constantly accompanied by Prince and his entourage, she develops personality.

The problem is that this personality is not significant. She is one of the weakest, most uninteresting crybaby heroines EVER. This is also a comedy, so a ton of stupid jokes are flying in your face the entire time. If the humor was toned down, I think the series would be a lot better.  There are some cool elements shining through, but everything from the characters to the subplots needs a LOT of work at this point.

Also, this isn’t something I usually notice either, but there’s too much going on in each page.  I have a hard time going from panel to panel in some of the chaotic layouts.  It’s not an issue like with Viz books where HUGE sfx retouch art will sometimes take up an entire page, there are just 500 panels per page with something confusing going on in each one.  Too much!

I want to like it, though.  I’ll keep reading it, because again, I like the plot enough to tolerate all the crap.  I finished the book with no negative feelings, which surprised me because it was really bad and I usually wind up finishing those types of books pissed.  It’s not a terribly long series, but I am curious to see what happens after the main character’s time runs out, which happens next volume.