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Reviewed by Park Cooper Aw, man. I forgot to review Dororo volume 3. I meant to. I swear. Let’s see how fast I can review: Once upon a time there was a baby born who was missing almost all of his parts. He had a mouth-hole, and a head, and a torso, and, like, skin covering everything, but that’s about it. How did he live nonetheless? That’s how you know the supernatural is involved, baby. They sent him in a basket down the river (y’know, like you do) and he was found (what are the odds? Insane. That’s how you know it’s FATE) by a guy who was the best prosthetic-parts maker in the world, who made him all his 48 parts, although of course they don’t work quite the same as real eyes and ears and so on. On the other hand, if you get poked with a sword in your fake leg, you don’t feel anything or bleed, if you get my drift. Little Hyakkimaru grew up to be a badass swordsman, and every time he kills one of the 48 demons scattered around Japan, one of the parts he’s missing grows in for real. His sidekick is Dororo, a little kid who purports to be the world’s greatest thief (Since Dororo gets into trouble constantly, you can’t help but think that there must be someone SOMEWHERE who’s a better thief, but Dororo isn’t bad at the pure thieving, really). I missed part one, so that’s all I got going into volumes 2 and 3, but that’s all you need. This final Dororo phonebook features Dororo and Hyakkimaru doing their demon-fighting thing some more, mostly running afoul of pirates who want the treasure to which Dororo’s late pirate-captain dad tattooed a map on Dororo’s back. This is complicated by the fact that the more demons Hyakkimaru kills, the less-invulnerable he gets. Along the way, our heroes run into a kid who has befriended a pair of demon-sharks, and so it’s high-demon-fightin’-adventure-at-sea. Even though the sharks are technically evil in the sense of being really powerfully good at eating humans... isn’t that kind of what sharks DO? And so you feel a sympathy about how the kid who’s their human friend feels their loss when they die. Because let’s face it, those evil sharks have gotta go. But yeah, that’s just the sort of playing-with-what’s-evil-and-what’s-sympathetic that the genius creator of Dororo, the guy who brought us Astroboy, Black Jack, and Buddha, loves playing with. And the end is just about as bittersweet as the stories from Buddha or sometimes Black Jack can be. If you don’t think you could read a bad-ass samurai type story where all the characters look like the guy who drew Astroboy drew them, seeing as how he did, well, this might be a bit of a challenge for you, but it’s worth it. As MangaLife staff member David Rasmussen often says, I recommend you go back and get this one from the beginning. And (as he usually means when he says it), it’s not because you’ll be confused if you don’t—it’s just that that’s the way you’ll get the most reading-pleasure reward out of reading it. --P Comment on this review of Dororo v3 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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