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Reviewed by Park Cooper Well, I’m giving this an A-. It’s still the storyline which I famously call The Bugs That Wouldn’t Stop It, but we’re not only making more progress than ever toward making them bugs stop it, but also: --This volume is less silly than the last one, and, --We’re actually getting back into interesting story and characterization instead of just fighting a lot of ya-know-who’s-probably-gonna-win battles. Spoiler Warning: This review involves me talkin’ a bit about the content of this volume. End of Spoiler Warning. This one features the Guy-Who-Can-Control-The-Smoke-From-His-Giant-Pipe fighting a lion-creature... but it doesn’t take too too long. The real story here is mostly the King of the Bugs vs. the idiot-savant blind girl who’s the world’s game-we-invented-that’s-something-like-chess master (mistress). Basically, the King Bug felt like teaching himself and his super-genius mind strategy. So he tried chess, checkers, go, a couple of other strategy games, but stopped on this one, which I imagine to be a lot like a cross between chess, shogi, and maybe Stratego. He had the world’s best player, this idiot-savant blind girl, on hand, so he started playing her, figuring he’d kill her as soon as she’d taught him everything she knows (like he had with everyone else). She’s so good, it’s taking days and days. But THAT’s not a huge big deal... although it certainly helps Team Good Guy Hunters as they work their way carefully into position for a multiple assassination attempt against the top of the Bug ranks before they eat everyone in the land... No, what’s a big deal is that the King Bug is slowly learning something from this girl about honor and humility. Every time it looks like he’s gonna develop a soul, he decides that the lesson he should take away from an encounter from her is something evil like “Violence is the ultimate force in the world” etc. etc. And yet. AND YET... The more he plays her, the closer he comes to being as good as her... the closer he seems like what he’s really fighting is something within himself that’s becoming aware of the value of concepts like Compassion or Murdering People For Fun Comes With An Opportunity Cost or even just caring about something other than his own badass self. Like, to show the girl that he’s serious about playing, and about the stakes involved in his lessons... he rips his own arm off, as proof of good will to his promise that if he is unable to win, he’ll grant her any wish she wants—killing himself, if that’s what she asks for. And so his lieutenant badasses freak out and use their powers to sew his arm back on and heal it. Are we about to try to kill the King Bug just as he breaks through his own Existential crisis and realizes that Evil is Wrong all by himself? Or is it the PERFECT time to kill him while he’s a little off his game? Or is something entirely else gonna happen? Meanwhile, just the battle aura of King Bug’s lieutenant who so screwed up Gon’s friend Kite, scares a member of Team Good Guy so bad that he knows he can’t help Team Good Guy anymore. Will Gon be able to stand up to the face of such concentrated evil the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Ralph Richardson pointed out the dangers of such stuff at the end of Time Bandits? Who knows? Yoshihiro Togashi is askin’ the big questions this month here at Hunter X Hunter, folks, just in time for Viz Media to start pushin’ the anime series (more on that later, but I’ll say this now—I like it better with the audio in Japanese) upon North America. Gosh! By the way, thanks to that reader who wrote me to inform me... remember last volume or two ago when I mentioned that someone finally censored the extreme violence of the art in one of Killua’s battles? Well, a kindly reader mentioned to me that he or she had seen the original Japanese manga, and that those portions were censored there, too. So let us not blame Viz Media for being blood-and-guts-and-brains-and-Killua haters! They can’t run the art uncensored if it was censored in the first place! By the way, noble reader, if you ever want to write some stuff for me here at MangaLife, please let me know... --P Interested in writing for MangaLife? We're always looking for talented reviewers and columnists, so drop us a line! Charles Webb Editor-in-Chief, MangaLife.com |
1 September 2010
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