Manga Review: B. Ichi Volume Two

[Jason]

Title: B. Ichi
Volume: Two
Author: Atsushi Ohkubo
Originally serialized in: Shonen Gangan (Square Enix)
Licensed by: Yen Press
Genre: Shonen

At the opening of this volume, the youngsters Mana and Shotaro are traveling with Yohei. Shotaro is on a mission to find his friend Emine, another dokeshi, a person who has special abilities usually granted to them for doing one evil (or good, in Shotaro’s case) a day. They stumble across a young ogre whose parents were killed by humans and he needs to see not all humans are bad. Mostly it’s a set up to have Shotaro unconscious for nearly a day and in danger of not meeting his dokeshi requirements.

While Shotaro is running around like mad trying to do that, we break into three storylines: The Fear Factory line where the villains of the piece plot out their plan of attack which deals with conquering regular humans with robots and dokeshi abilities and on a more personal level, deal with Yohei, who has a history with them, while avoiding Emine’s group of dokeshi; Mana twisting Yohei’s arm to build her a robot to compete in the Happy Factory (i.e. Fear Factory’s alter ego)’s robot battle competition so she can fulfill her earning commendation fetish; Shotaro, in the process of attempting to do his good deal, ticking off Tool, an irritable kappa who just happens to be Yohei’s friend.

These storylines collide bringing Mana into the line of fire as she ignores Yohei’s warnings to avoid Happy Factory. Shotaro and Tool are still battling their way across town when things go south and Yohei runs afoul of No Fix, a dokeshi who is the ‘king of spin’ who has a very bloody history with Yohei. It leaves us on a cliffhanger.

The art is still bizarre and a bit over the top but that fits the quirky craziness of this story. It comes with a lot of good translator’s notes which is helpful; I wonder if some of the total strangeness of this series comes from getting lost in translation. For some reason almost everyone’s name is an in joke on various musical groups (mostly American) and several time I felt like I missed the joke. Odd or not, it does have a "full steam ahead!" take on storytelling, never lagging. If I wanted to complain, the one thing that irritates me is Yen likes to translate every sign in every picture and translates the SFX into phonetic Japanese then to English but they’re finally learning to do much of it out in the margins instead of inside the art panels so it’s less annoying.

Reviewed By: D.M. Evans
Proofed and Edited By: Jason Punda