Lupin III 4

As much as I like this series, it’s sort of hard to read, and I always forget that you have to sort of puzzle through it as you read to figure out what’s going on.  It’s been made even worse lately because it seems like nearly every chapter in this volume and the next starts out with color pages, which are just impossible to see.  Aside from that though, this series is still fantastic and very funny.  I even like the extremely unique art despite this flaw.

This volume’s notable because it has “Young Lupin” stories for a big chunk near the end of the volume.  We get to find out Lupin’s relationship with the original Lupin and how he was trained in the family business, we get to find out what Lupin walked away with for an inheritance, and we get a few more chapters at the end just about the youth of Lupin.  The technique was perhaps still a little rough, but the taste for women was fully developed, perhaps from birth.  We find out that this is indeed a family trait.  I didn’t like a lot of the stories at the beginning of this volume, but I wound up loving it by the end because of all the backstory.  Hooray for Lupin!

Lupin III 3

I LOVE this series. You wouldn’t think so, since I only get a volume once in a blue moon, but it’s so good. It’s really funny, there’s lots of sex, and I love the way the plots twist and turn in unexpected directions. My favorite naughty moment in this volume is when a lady spy, after laying Lupin, lets him know she wants him to smuggle out some microfilm. When he asks where it is, she says he already has it, then he looks down at his presumably naked manstuff and curses Monkey Punch for being dirty.

There’s lots of funny stuff like that, too. At one point, someone swears in a phrase like “Mother$#%^#$er!”, and below the panel it says “editor’s note: $#%^#$=FUCK” and they use that series of asteriks throughout the chapter liberally. There’s a couple of two-part stories, my favorite having to do with Fujiko being a slut, and we get to meet a very un-Goemon-like Goemon. But yes. I love this series. I think only buying a volume once a year makes it even better.

Lupin III 1

This is the last of the manga I read before leaving home and I don’t have with me. Something tells me there might be a few more volumes… but I can’t really remember them. This one will be short.

The first time I read this, I really didn’t like it…I like the truly different style its drawn in, and I like the stories themselves, and I LOVE Arsene Lupin. However, it’s often difficult to tell what’s going on while you’re getting used to the artwork (which is very MAD Magazine-esque, by the way), the character designs consist of “male” and “female” and everyone’s drawn the same (which takes something away from Lupin being a master of disguise), and there are some jumps in logic that take a lot of getting used to. Those things alone ruined it for me the first time through, but when I picked it up and read it again, I found that it’s really not that hard. Perhaps you just have to be in a patient frame of mind to enjoy it.

Each chapter is a little self-contained story, with one instance of two chapters telling the same story. The second story’s probably my favorite. The first is a great introduction to Lupin, and the inclusion of a red herring Lupin was a nice touch, but I think the second story, where a smug Lupin comes out on top, is more characteristic of the series, and it’s nice. After that… there’s a chapter that has a magician in it that’s pretty good, the one called “Zenigata Gets Lucky” is hilarious, “Crime’s a Disease” is good… and I really can’t think of any truly terrible ones, which says something about the stories.

I guess the artwork is ultimately its downfall, because for as cool as it is, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, who’s who, and sometimes what just happened (though the subtlety used in these cases is nice… upon another trip through, I found things that confused me the first time were mostly just things that I didn’t pick up on in the artwork). An oldie but a goodie, and it comes very highly recommended.