off the boil a bit

Last night I was re-reading the latest Air Gear volume (the latest translated into English this is) and it occurred to me that Oh! Great's (OG's) stuff has gone off the boil a bit.

As well as Air Gear, OG does a manga called Tenjho Tenge. They're both very much in a similar vein, although TenTen is a bit more adult that Air Gear. Both are essentially that speciality of boy's manga - fighting/tournament series.

I won't go into too much detail as I've reviewed both over at trismugistus.com, but basically TenTen is about people properly fighting fisticuffs style and Air Gear is about skating teams who use special powered skates called Air Treks.

There are still plenty of things I like about both series. The artwork is amazing - OG's stuff seems to just get better and better. Going along with that, the echhi fan-service is also pretty top notch. OG's girls are pretty damn hot and there's plenty to enjoy on that front.

Also the way he draws the fights and battles is good and generally speaking I enjoy the characters. I have to admit that slightly oddly I tend to prefer his supporting characters to the main characters, but then to some degree these are ensemble series.

The problem is that both appear to be disappearing up their own backsides.

In TenTen there was a part where it flashed back to show you the recent history of some of the characters. We're not talking far - a couple of years, back when they first joined the high school.

Now this was a double-edged sword - he seemed to get really carried away and this flashback went on for loads of volumes. So may that when we got back to the present it was like he'd gotten bored of his original story and decided to bugger about with it.

Unfortunately this meant a flashback even further to Samurai times. One of the big problems here was it was involving all sorts of new characters who'd never been explained to us before. I think the main problem is that many of these were characters from proper Japanese history, and, never having studied it, I got completely lost. Plus it involved a hell of a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo.

And unfortunately this story is essentially now that the manga is back to the modern day. So we've not only got the original threads and the first flashback threads, there's now this mystical mumbo-jumbo thread.

And it's this mystical mumbo-jumbo-ness that is also making Air Gear a bit naff too.

Part of the problem here is that I hate what I think of Dragonball-type stories. In these, a new, more powerful enemy keeps appearing and in order to beat them, the hero must learn a new technique or otherwise "level up". I find this sort of thing predictable and rather tedious.

Now fair enough, Ten Ten and Air Gear have both always had that sort of aspect to them and I've just lived with it.

The problem now is that OG has gotten a bit carried away with it all. So where previously the hero might have had to simply practice a lot to learn how to jump high and build up his muscles, now he has to learn something that's mumbo-jumbo-ish about, I dunno, controlling the flow of chi or walking on air pressure or some other nonsense that OG has read in a book and made weird.

Now if this was just once n a while it wouldn't be too bad, but it seems to have gotten to that Dragonball Z stage where it's happening all the damn time.