Baccano 1710: Crack Flag

Baccano 1705: The Ironic Light Orchestra was one of the better books in the series; a tightly focused book with an unusually small cast for Narita: three characters, two we already knew, and one who clearly did not end up becoming immortal. Indeed, later books reveal that she died in 1710, so this book was always going to be the story of how she met her end.
Narita admits in the afterword that he found it incredibly difficult to kill her off, and declares that he will never do this again. It really sounds like he wrote himself into a corner he couldn't get out of. He doesn't seem to have had any actual story to go with what we already knew, so this book ends up like an insanely boring Cliff's Note retelling of something like two years of disconnected scenes that never add up to anything. It felt like the plot didn't actually gel till page 282, and it ended another twenty pages later. The embarrassing framing device involving this narrative retold by a poet drives home just how tedious and leaden the whole affair is, and the M. Night Shyamalan worthy series of bad idea shocking twists towards the end makes this the single worst thing Narita has ever written. Hopefully he knows it and will avoid ever forcing himself to write a book he has no interest in actually writing.

Dulalala!! x7

Naturally, Narita can't just do a short story collection. He's got to pull a Kadono, and have all the stories taking place at the same time. I wound up being pretty glad I read this right after the anime helpfully reminded me who some of the characters were; he clearly wanted to give some people who haven't played an active role in a while something to do.
On that note, the first story starts off with Namie and Mika having an epic bitch off; this eventually involves Namie dousing Mika with an immobilizing drug and attempting to pour acid on her face, while Mika cheerily reveals that she's got the entire cast's apartments bugged and their computers hacked and knows everything going on everywhere. Seiji eventually steps in and settles things as only he can.
Second story was probably my favorite, since it was cheerily out of Narita's comfort zone again; focusing on Akabayashi, one of the yakuza characters introduced in the last volume. He's such a monumental bad ass that he gets stabbed in the eye by Saika, rips his own eyeball out to stop the blade from infecting him, and falls in love with Anri's mom, who was wielding the sword at the time. All of which is a flashback woven through the story of how he uses his own Dollars membership to manipulate a bunch of low level drug dealing thugs into taking out a yakuza group that's trying to kill him.
Third story is probably the most typically Narita; as the rumors about Shizuo's activities in the last few volumes spiral dramatically out of control, a group of his victims somehow becomes convinced that Shizuo has a wife and kid, and tries to kidnap them...only to get the shit kicked out of them when the wife turns out to be the Russian assassin (now working with Toma and Shizuo) Izaya's crazy ass sisters, and yakuza kid Akane, who is still carrying around a stungun.
There's also a brief romantic interlude with Celty and Shinra, constantly interrupted by phone calls from characters in all the other stories, and a framing sequence in which Izaya, in the hospital, is visited by one of the suicidal girls he was toying with in the first volume (a bit they wound up not putting in the anime, since he drugged her and put her in a suitcase just to fuck with her head.)
And volume eight's out in June. And a new Baccano came out yesterday. It never ends!

Hariyama-san, Center of the World 3

Wandering in the bamboo forest one day, a boy runs into a girl in a make-shift cloth bikini fighting a panda that seems to dodge every one of her attacks with the greatest of ease. Mortified, she attacks the boy.
Fortunately, he is a ninja.
Welcomed by his ninja parents, the girl reluctantly admits that she is an alien lifeform grown inside a stalk of bamboo; intended to spring forth full grown and capture the hearts of the planet (for strictly information gathering purposes) she has instead popped out aged twelve on account of the ninja panda attempting to eat the bamboo she was growing in.
While she quickly settles into a role as a star performer in the ninja clan's ninja village amusement park, they do run into some trouble with the local men in black, a regular thorn in their side since the head ninja was kidnapped by aliens in the color pages to the first volume in Narita Ryohgo's increasingly batshit short story collection series.
The second story in here takes Narita well outside his comfort zone, pleasingly -- the story of a man who only wants to pilot a giant robot, and thus becomes a robotics engineer for the express purpose of building a robot for himself to pilot. Problem is, just as his life's work is about to be completed, the company is bought out, and the new president wants to replace him as the test pilot with a fourteen year old child actor. (Because: Eva. Not named, but Narita says, "I don't need to, do I?") Eventually the man's opinion changes when the child actor sneaks into the factory to sneak a look at it, and he finds the boy standing in front of the robot sobbing openly at how fucking amazing it is. (The boy even admits to acting cool about the idea on TV because that's what a robot pilot would do.) Also features Hariyama's high school aged daughter for the first time...in a small supporting role, of course.
The third story is another in his urban legend series -- this time focused on the men in black. A woman wakes up in a park dressed in a black suit. She has no memories, but slowly begins to piece things together...and realizes that she was part of a group of con artists posing as men in black to scam money of the bizarre shit that happens in town, but that they wound up falling prey to an actual group of aliens...that all wear black.
While there is no big cross over story this time, he does toss in a few page long epilogue which reveals that the ninja kid is friends with the robot pilot and that the alien kid from the third story is friends with the Hariyama boy.

Baccano! 1931 Another Junk Railroad

This is basically the source material for the DVD only bonus episodes that rounded out the Baccano anime; originally written for a CD drama not all that long after the original novels, Narita took this occasion to expand it into a full length book.
As such, there's a lot more in here than the anime actually covered; about half of it is dedicated to Chane's inner tumoil, and the other half devoted to retconning immortal characters created later on into the events on and around the Flying Pussyfoot incident. Apparently two of them were actually on the train, yet never interacted with the main cast.
Most of the additional flashbacks feel unnecessary -- almost like self-fanfiction -- so it is the core OAV story that proves the real attraction here. But I also have to give Katsumi Enami props here -- while the anime kept Rachel dressed in the clothes she wore on the train, Enami draws her in two different period outfits. This had the side effect of making her unrecognizable.
I also enjoyed the framing sequence, where Graham Specter makes the mistake of attempting to rob Carol and Gustav Saint-Germain.

Dulalala 6

Man, was this a long, intense churn. Narita is not the kind of author who generally goes for lengthy, character-arc focused writing, but in between all the sword fights and car kicking and parkour, Dulalala 6 boils down to a slow burn effort to shift Mikado's character from a passive to a proactive role in the series. Honestly, for a while there I wasn't sure he was ever going to pay it off. It's not until the last few pages of the book that the other shoe finally drops...and we have to wait till Dulalala 8 to find out where he's going with THAT. (Dulalala 7, out early 2010, is supposedly random side stories.)
While I think I tend to prefer Narita in his less ambitious crazy good time mode, I definitely dig it when he reaches a bit higher, and pulls it off.

Dulalala 5

If you're like me, you squinted at the shitty scan of this cover and wondered why Mikado was carrying a dagger; I assure you, the actual cover has him holding a ballpoint pen. Like a dagger.
So...the plan was to read this one and then go read another, but then this one ended on as many cliffhangers as possible, and I guess I'm going to have to read Dulalala 6 immediately.
For a book that seemed absolutely packed with events, it was someone surprising to realize the entire thing had just been set-up; in hindsight, it seems obvious, but there was too much going on to actually register that things weren't actually going to resolve.
Despite all the stuff happening I'm weirdly not sure how to describe it -- partly because each strand of the plot is driven by someone or several people manipulating shit behind the scenes, and a lot of them have yet to have the other shoe drop.
The most dramatic end of things is probably the attempted assassination of Shizo Heiwajima by a ten year old girl. Then a yakuza group hires the Headless Rider to protect the kid while also hiring a crazy Russian assassin to kidnap the kid and kill Celty. All of this while the remnants of the Blue Squares are picking a fight with a gang from Saitama using the Dollars name. I think the general plan is to force Mikado out of his passive observer stance and into a more active role, while also making Heiwajima into something more than violence relief. Both of these are good things. I definitely could have used more of Izaya's sisters, but hopefully they'll come into play in the second half.

5656 Knights' Strange Night

The one Ryohgo Narita series that never did much for me was the Etsusa Oohashi series -- set on a man made island in the middle of a huge bridge, abandoned shortly before creation. The place subsequently became a land without law, and would seem to have been an ideal setting for Narita's unique brand of madness...and certainly, there are great bits and characters in all the volumes. But he never quite balanced the fun with a desire to work in darker themes than his books set in civilization, and never quite managed to figure out how to make the darker themes fun instead of sort of upsetting.
5656 is a bit of a reboot, then; the original series finished several years ago, and this volume returns to the setting with an actual, consistent series title. Albeit a meaningless one. (If you pronounce it Goro Goro, it sort of sounds like the animal noises of the earlier volumes.)
Narita grabs a page from Kadono's playbook and tries a unique structure -- three chapters depict an ongoing battle to the death between two men that conveniently takes out a group making snuff films on the island in the process -- while the other two chapters branch off from this chaos to tell other stories happening in the same time frame.
A dead body that crashes to the ground between them, soaking the bullets they'd fired at each other leads to a long story that not only explains how this guy wound up getting thrown off a roof, but also filling in the back story on Li-Lei (麗蕾, I'm sort of guessing here, actual Chinese speakers feel free to correct) a yandere who spends all her time sleeping, hugging things she deems cute, and beating people to death with a iron pipe. A childhood spent blindfolded in captivity, iron pipe of death skills learned entirely on her own as a way of fighting her nightmares -- dark stuff, but gleefully fun. The story cross cut with this, an unreliable first person narration of a man obsessed with her, works less successfully, but there was a certain amount of entertainment when the other shoe dropped and he finally got around to admitting the full extent of his own 'good deeds.' Needless to say, they lead to him getting beaten half to death and thrown off a roof.
The other inset story is, apparently, Narita's idea of a romantic comedy. The fact that the participants are a serial killer, a sword wielding hit woman, a chainsaw wielding maniac, and one of the two guys involved in the volume long gunfight...is just what makes it HIS.
The snuff film element itself is the sort of thing that would have dragged the earlier volumes down, but here he handles it better, almost immediately giving way to the two gunmen both showing up to rescue the snuff crew's latest capture and blowing their own cover by shooting at each other, and the crew's latest capture turning out to be Li-Lei, undercover. More importantly, it allows him to have Li-Lei pluck out their eyeballs and juggle them without it seeming remotely excessive.
I was quite relieved to find myself really enjoying this volume; it make have taken a few tries, but it feels like Narita's finally got his thumb on what makes this series and these characters work, and I'm looking forward to it continuing. Once they let him write anything but Dulalala!! again.

Vamp! 4

Three years went by between Vamp! 3 and Vamp! 4 -- Vamp! 4 was originally supposed to be a short story collection, but the sheer amount of time made him go for something larger in scope. It's a transitional novel in a lot of ways; the primary thrust of the narratives is to make the villains of the first three novels into good guys while introducing new villains. While the old villains were notoriously wacky, the new ones are Pure Blood vampires, who are living, breathing stereotypes...well, not literally, being undead, but they're the sort of one note dicks that wind up with the heroes teasing them for not knowing who Christopher Lee is. They're little more than opportunists anyway...the real villain in this book is mankind. Collectively.
A small village in the mountains is completely wiped out. One girl survives -- a girl with two small scabs on her neck. Rumors spread -- first that the village was attacked by vampires, and second that the girl herself is a vampire. She and her guardian soon find themselves fleeing an angry mob, only to be rescued...by vampires. "Don't worry, I'm a vampire," is not a line many books would contain.
This is ambitiously cross cut with flashbacks into the past of several major characters, and a number of extra twists laid on top of the big twists from the previous couple of novels. It takes a while to get everything moving, but it definitely moves when it gets there.
I will, however, admit that the primary appeal of the Vamp! series is the crazy fucking shit he pulls. The previous volumes brought us the flower growing under a guillotine that was soaked in blood till it became a vampire, and the vampire watermelon. This volume brings us a vampire spider (who wears punk/goth fashions in case he forgets and flings an extra leg out one of the handy holes), a vampire Chihuahua who insists he's a wolf, a vampire wolf who can't convince anyone he's not a werewolf, a girl gamer vampire with a collection of magic swords and move names based on Atari gaming classics, and, best of all, a vampire T-Rex.

Dulalala!! x4

Something of a soft reboot for the series after the initial trilogy and the year of Baccano! novels, Dulalala 4 is a massive return to form.
Headless biker Celtie is surprised by a TV crew on the corner one night; they demand to no why she has no lights or license plate. Assuming they'll never be able to broadcast it, she explains that her bike is actually a horse, and it transforms...on live television. Oops. Before she knows it, there's a ten million yen bounty on her head, and every biker gang in the area is chasing after her...while she's got a dead body in her sidecar.
Meanwhile, a Russian hitman and a serial killer disguised as monster are fighting in a park when they accidentally piss off a man dressed as a bartender, who immediately hits them with a bench. The people that stop to help them recover from their wounds send ripples out through the plot, which covers the same time frame from four different points of view, all ending in the same car chase as Celtie's.
Particularly astounding is the introduction of evil strategist Izaya's deranged twin sisters, who proceed to deal with the bullies at their new school by weaponizing thumbtacks, stealing bras, and starting fires in bookbags, before going back to loudly reading porn magazines aloud in class.
Man, the anime version can't air soon enough.

Baccano 2002

Jesus Christ, this could not have been worse if he had been actively trying to torpedo his career.
The basic idea - Firo and Ennis on their honeymoon aboard a ship with the great grandkids of Jacuzzi Splot and Vino, while Elmer and the other surviving immortals are on a different ship going the other way as terrorists take over both ships - sounds awesome. Indeed, the first volume, Bullet Garden, is a blast - the movie loving chatty mask wearing villains, the Banderas style bad ass gunman, the hilarious goth-loli with a worryingly dark backstory...all great additions, and the the leader of the kids from the original novels framing sequence getting retconned as Jacuzzi's descendant while Vino and Chane are handily replaced by their own great-grandkids, a psychotic child star and her nearly mute stunt actor brother...not really all the far off the original characters, but still promising.
Blood Sabbath, however, is a nightmare.
The leader of the masked men is bad enough - a kid magician, he's Hughie and Monica's descendant, and trying to get revenge on Hughie who he believes killed Monica. Narita never once manages to make it remotely convincing that this is actually what happened, and without us buying that, his character is just obnoxious and emo. He's somewhat balanced by the awesome muscle bound crazy woman who talks like a dirty old man.
The book runs into serious trouble when it tries to bring the religion Elmer was rescued from out of a footnote in his back history and into a role as the central villains of the book. The idea of a religion that worships the pain of abused children and hauls around a group of blindfolded, handcuffed children chanting the writs of their order as they listen to the sounds of their own screams is a BIT too fucking dark for ANY book, and spending the first THREE HUNDRED FUCKING PAGES almost entirely on exhaustively explaining this shit to the hapless undercover woman they've brainwashed and 'married' to the cult leader basically is simply unfathomable. Why did he think this shit would work? Why didn't any of his editors stop him?
Possible scheduling. These two volumes came out just as the anime was ending, and by his own admission the second volume was originally supposed to be TWO volumes, which probably explains why three of the four hundred pages are devoted to meandering unfocused set up and then it abruptly lurches into a cliffnotes clipshow version of the climax, completely destroying the effect of any and all twists and neutering all the new characters added to the first volume, who now get only token, unsatisfying pay offs that entirely get lost in the horrible shuffle.
AS IF THIS WAS NOT BAD ENOUGH, the mother fucking epilogue tries to pull some sort of fucking M. Night twist and resurrect the motherfucker who tortured Chez all those years and who Chez supposedly ATE...but who Szilard ALSO apparently ate, and who is all through this book working for the masked men AND the cult AND fucking orchestrating the entire thing like a fucking puppet master JUST TO FUCKING WITH PEOPLE.
He clearly has ambitious plans to spin this plotline out into several other epoch hopping novels, and I suddenly have absolutely no faith in his ability to do so.

Baccano! 1705 The Ironic Light Orchestra

Echoes of Baccano 2002 here; definitely a Baccano novel but far removed from the main thrust of the series in time and tone.
And like Baccano 2002, that makes it all the stronger. The story of Hughie and Elmer's first encounter, back when they were both around fourteen or fifteen, The Ironic Light Orchestra quickly spirals outwards into a really fucked up mystery novel. While unpredictability has always been one of Narita's strong suits, he really topped himself here. With Elmer and Hughie's personalities not yet fully formed, their energies still raw from their horrible, horrible creation...myths, almost -- the focus initially seems to be on them, and the supporting cast just foils to illustrate that. But Narita's characters have a way of exploding in ways you don't see coming. One character here makes such an impact I'm seriously thinking about reading back through the series to see if she's been mentioned before.
Along the sidelines, the infamous samurai, Denkuro, mentioned in passing in any number of novels but never actually a main cast member, finally shows up; a few other major characters make brief appearances or are mentioned in passing, indications of the network that will eventually draw together and summon a demon. Although perhaps the most astonishing twist in this sucker was the minor bad ass who abruptly -- in the epilogue! -- turns out to be Maizer...which is apparently intended as an aural pun on Miser. Argh.
I sort of trapped myself here by not wanting to actually talk about the plot -- it was a bit too good to spoil even if the chances of many people other than me reading the series any time soon are super slim. So this ended up more incoherent than usual.

Hariyama-san, Center of the World

Far and away Narita Ryohgo's best series, the Hariyama-san series -- of which there are exactly two books, so far -- effectively consists of short stories in whatever genre he damn well feels like. Hariyama-san himself is an eternal supporting character -- never integral to the action, he is often simply mentioned in passing. He's just in all the stories.
Each volume also has a fourth story that ties all the previous stories together into one big mash-up climax.
The first volume kicked off with a girl spying an axe murdered under her boyfriend's bed and trying gently to ease him out of the place, while he desperately tries to keep her there because he just saw a man running around with an axe outside his apartment. That man had actually being trying to kill the girl, but snuck into a yakuza's apartment across the way by mistake.
Then we get an INSANE magical girl -- she's from the kingdom of magic, but has watched too much anime and is constantly breaking the law and going to Japan to fight evil. But when she attempts to take down some yakuza, they take pity on her, promise her she'll never be made to fight for anyone again, and adopt her.
And then fuck up the magic police who come chasing after her.
Meanwhile, on a distant island, a boy discovers that he's actually the evil overlord, and everyone else on the island is a hero destined to kill him.
Even his girlfriend.

Hariyama-san, Center of the World 2, which I just read, is even more awesome.
Kicks off with a horror story about a taxi driver who picks up the ghost of a murdered girl; she's just about to kill him when she realizes his taxi is from another dimension.

Then we get the tragedy of No. 37564, an ordinary minion in an evil organization...for the fifth time running. Every single time he gets captured and mad scientists finish altering his body, the organization winds up getting destroyed by heroes. Before he gets brainwashed. Consequently he has become the strongest man in the history of time. Fortunately, he has absolutely no ambition, and is content to serve the twelve year old boy who runs the evil organization just like evil organizations are run on TV because he's suicidal and wants to be killed by the heroes. Who No. 37564 keeps fucking terrorizing.

The Don't of the Dead
A hitwoman with a pathological aversion to human body temperature has her dream come true when she finds herself mixed up in a war between Science Zombies and Magic Zombies. The two children controlling the armies turn out be zombies themselves, and totally running the whole thing as a game because they plan to kill her and turn her into a zombie slave. She sort of turns the tables on them, has them make her into a zombie, and adopts them.

The Red Death of Kashiwagi Cross
Opens with a hero No. 37564 beat up cheerily explaining how great heroes are to a totally unimpressed policeman, who eventually points out that this really isn't going to help him plead insanity. Fortunately, Hariyama-san doesn't press charges. (When No. 37564 punched him, he landed on the roof of Hariyama-san's car.)
The heroic chant he constantly repeats turns out to be a product of his brainwashing; the awesomely named Genociders turn out to be working for a mad scientist who betrayed the evil organization No. 37564 worked for (they briefly had a giant robot named Big Massacre, but No. 37564 kicked it. Once.) and when he tries to rejoin them they kill him.
And then he gets turned into a zombie.
And then he gets possessed by the little dead girl from the first story.
And then everyone has a barbeque at Hariyama-san's house.

Dulalala!! anime -- from the same staff as Baccano!

So fuck yes.

Return of the Headless Rider

Dulalala x3!
While Baccano! is definitely Narita Ryohgo's best series, Dulalala! is damn near as good. Like Baccano!, it offers a berserk blend of random genre elements - the title being derived from the Dullahan in exile, working as a underworld courier, her headless mount disguised as a motorcycle. There's been a simmering plot through the series about exactly which evil group of mad scientists and otherwise psychotic puppet masters is currently controlling her stolen head, but this usually takes a back seat to Ikebukuro West Gate Park inspired gang activity. Only with evil swords that possess people. This one promised to bring things to a head; the Anonymous style internet based gang known only as Dollars, the hive mind collected created by the magic sword, and a traditional color gang are each collectively run by the three members of a high school love triangle, who hilariously have kept all this secret from each other despite the fact that their groups hate each other.
I was sort of expecting full on action, really, but it sort of wound up being heavily based on the color gang leader's angsty backstory, to the point where I got half way through the mammoth 440 page book and couldn't for the life of me figure out where all those pages had gone.
I generally think Narita is at his weakest when he's being serious, and this was quite a grim book - but this time around the serious stuff generally worked, and the wacky comedy subplot involving a mad scientist in a white gas mask generally fell totally flat as a result. I certainly missed the headlong enthusiasm that coursed through the first two books in the series, but perhaps it was necessary to resolve this set of plots, and let the Dullahan and other larger than life characters (one dude who gets shot several times, and goes to see a doctor on account of he might get lead poisoning, and then walks out the next day and picks a fight with a moving van) can fuck some shit up proper next volume.
Gosh, I sure get a lot more reading done when I'm riding the bus to work.

Garu Garu 2

The longer half, this wraps up the series and does manage to pop out some pretty bad ass final moments that justified some of the slog.
The killer's overclocked mind generally worked; the Warren Ellis wet dream surveillance hacker hive mind utterly failed; the likable characters generally wrapped up the way they needed to, but the two characters from Bow Wow! didn't work at all.
I got totally blind-sided when the dumb detective character suddenly reveals that the master of disguise villain has been disguised as her brother for two months. That bit alone made the climax, although the psycho killer getting to tag team the villain with the girl he loved (who totally just swings her sword, confident that he'll back flip over it) was pretty sweet as well.
I've occasionally argued that an author's failures sometimes help you to understand why their successes work so well, but I can't say I gained any useful knowledge from this series. I don't think I even managed a post that makes any fucking sense to anyone but me.
Time to read something good. Or time to dig into the pile of manga that threatens to overwhelm my coffee table.

Garu Garu! Dancing Beast Night (1)

This series simply does not work for me. Everything else Narita Ryohgo's done is the god damn bee's knees - even Vamp, which has an awful first volume, rocked pretty hard across the second and third.
And yet...
Bow Wow! Two Dog Night left so little impression on me I don't remember anything other than a vague impression of the main cast.
Mew Mew! Crazy's Cats Night, which, on balance, I quite enjoyed - largely because of crazy chainsaw girl - still failed to actually make enough impact for me to remember many details.
I initially went with a theory that the setting was so crucial here that the abject failure of the artist (Suzuhito Yasuda, of Yozakura Quartet fame) to even attempt to draw the fucker actively undermined my ability to visualize the place and get a sense of how cool it ought to be. (The series is set on a floating island in the middle of a giant bridge abandoned a few months from completion - it's become a lawless no man's land the government refuses to acknowledge.)
But over the last couple I've come to the conclusion that it just doesn't work. That he's essentially trying for a Violence Jack grim and immoral edgy tone that clashes with his comedic instincts and...and frankly, he doesn't have a knack for it, never quite hitting the unhinged glee that makes that sort of shit palatable. It just ends up unpleasant.
Like the detectives introduced in this volume - the girl is dumb as a post and in an Isaac and Milia style wacky comedy vein, while her brother is angsty and smart and looking after her while apparently feeling guilty about some half-assed incest theme. Which feels like an accident, and ends up being a giant wet blanket on every scene with the two of them.
The other main thrust here is the bridge's urban legend psychopath/serial killer falling in love with a girl I do not even remember existing. He works reasonably well - he can overclock his mind at will, and his lengthy attempts to rationalize all his behavior and logically prove to himself that he is still sane are mildly interesting, if not all that entertaining.
But it hits the problem I had with the first Vamp volume, and that exists with the wacky detective girl as well - it feels like he's deliberately playing a variant on something he's done before. He's done crazy man in love and played it as working out well...so this time he tries to make it turn out very badly indeed, and all he really finds is that there was a reason he had it work out well the first time. That there was a reason he had the wacky comedy character teamed with an equally wacky one.
Shit just doesn't work.
And Christ, this was largely setting up the longer second volume. Argh.
About the only thing I really enjoyed here was evidence of a writer artist feud - there was an extremely minor character in Mew Mew! that the artist apparently liked, since she featured prominently in three illustrations, far more than major characters. Her role here is non-existent, but Narita does off-handedly mention that she looks young but already has two kids. Interpreting that as his gleeful revenge was the highlight of the volume for me. Which probably means I shouldn't bother reading the second half.