america, but not as we know it

Recently I've been reading Gunsmith Cats: Burst, which is a sequel to Gunsmith Cats by Kenichi Sonoda.

The original Gunsmith Cats manga was one of those that just sort of stopped. By that I mean, because the series never had an overarching plot, but was instead a series of consecutive stories, there was no 'final wrap up' to the last story.

I liked the original GSC a great deal. It had a bit of warped view of America, but the stories were good, the characters generally interesting and the artwork very nice.

After GSC, Sonoda went on to do Cannon God Exaxxion. This was more of a SF show, but with the typical Sonoda touches. I also liked this series a great deal, but I guess it wasn't as popular as Black Horse basically pulled the plug on publishing it and I never got to read the end. To be honest, I've never really forgiven them for this, especially as they were just 2 volumes from completion.

Anyway, I guess Exaxxion was one of those 'I've got to get this story out of my system' sorts of things, because afterwards, Sonoda went back to GSC with Burst.

And to be perfectly frank, I'm not really quite getting it.

I dunno if my tastes have changed radically or I'm just not quite in the mood for it, but I'm finding GSC not to be up to the high standards I remember of GSC. I think part of the problem might be that it's so long since I read the original and this is a proper sequel.

There was no re-introduction of characters or gentle ease you in approach - I think it just picked up from where the original left of. And I don't remember where that was, so I've been a little lost.

What I'll probably do is dig out the old GSC and give it a read.

One thing that is definitely annoying me, though, is the errors in Burst. For example, there's one bit where Rally refers to a magazine as a "clip". Now for a normal person that's a perfectly okay excuse to make, but Rally is supposed to be a total gun-nut, to the extent that she owns a gun store.

There is no way someone like that would erroneously refer to a magazine as a clip. Now to be fair, that could be a boo-boo on the part of the translators, but I dunno. I mean, there's another bit where a huge error is made in relation to blanks, saying that a blank could never be used in an automatic as it wouldn't cycle the action.

This is clearly wrong - I mean, they don't constantly fire live rounds in films. Plus I know someone who was an army cadet and they use blanks all the time with no problems.

Now maybe there are different grades of blanks and some work and some don't, but that's not what it says.