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Reviewed by Park Cooper The storyline Barb and I call THE BUGS THAT WOULDN'T STOP IT continues to not stop... but this one was a little better than the previous volume. For one thing, the action moves back to our main protagonists, Gon and Killua, instead of half of it being on the Phantom Troupe, like last time. For another, we're getting a little more strategy-based in our fighting, rather than just showing a bunch of different little battles like last volume... One thing that really is interesting is that this volume is the one (with its opening fight with Killua vs. bugs) when Viz finally decided they had to censor the violence... at first sort of vagueing it up with little tiny latticeworks of bubbles stuck in front of the horrendous violence, and soon with just entirely blacking out the horrible bits. Why? Because, unlike Tokyopop's Battle Royale, Hunter x Hunter is for Older Teens, not for Mature. As Barb wrote in her article on the subject recently, HxH makes you think it could be for Teens, and then it grows increasingly hardcore... And they can't have it be for Older Teens for 22 volumes and then suddenly just cut 16 and 17 year olds off who've been reading... so, censorship was the way Viz pretty much had to fly. Rare for any manga or manga company, in this crazy wacky world where "community standards" _normally_ means that we can get away with almost anything in America that they can get away with in Japan as long as it really did originate in Japan... Anyway, this volume features: --Killua doing some things to evil bug-beings that you can't show American 16- or 17-year-olds... --Killua literally being used as a dart-board by an evil bug guy... LITERALLY. Very, very literally. It could hardly be more literal. Not a metaphor at all. Seriously. --Gon meeting the guy who was tailing him last volume-- a bug-guy with a grudge against his own kind, who has a special power that's very, very interesting from a strategic point of view... --The king of the evil bugs decides to master strategy... he beats and kills the local chess champion... the local go champion starts losing and later kills himself before the next match can start... but HxH's creator invents yet another new game for us that's like a cross between checkers, chess, and Stratego... and the blind idiot-savant girl who's the champion is so good that she impresses even the king... will she manage to teach even him a little caution/humility? All this and a little more delivered to you in the storyline that is gonna take quite a while to finish up even though you'd think it might be in its final stages, as I realized from the table of contents that the individual chapters of this storyline are in a countdown... "8" is here from parts 2 through 7, and then "7" is here in its entire 2-part entirety, and four parts of "6" conclude this volume... at this rate (and we have no guarantee that it will stay at this pace), it'll easily take 3 more volumes before anyone will be able to make these Bugs Stop It. --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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