manga catch up

I don't think I've talked about what manga I've been reading for a while.

The truth is that's mainly because a lot of what I've been reading has been the continuing volumes of series. These have included:

• Biomega 2 & 3 - Tsutomu Nihei's art continues to impress, but unlike Blame it's not really work for me. I think its because the sparse style doesn't really suit the type of story.
• Black Lagoon 9 - this finished up the Roberta arc, which has been okay. I like the story and love the artwork and characters still, but Rei Hiroe needs to take a leaf out of Nihei's book and reign in the word count. If these two ever both hit a happy medium between the extremes they seem to operate at, they could rule the world.
• Gurren Lagann is up to volume 5 - this volume was pretty good as it had some original stuff that wasn't in the anime. I mean, it's not a slavish adaptation anyway, but this volume has some properly new stuff, and it's another where the artwork continues to impress.
• Which isn't something that can be said about DMC, where I also have to admit the charm has started to wear a bit thin, as it keeps redoing the same jokes and lacks a longer story arc. There are hints that there may be a longer and more developed story coming up in volume 6, though.
• And Gantz's art continues to be a bit flawed, but with a brutal story that makes up with. It's a little more frustrating reading it at a more normal release pace (we're up to 11 volumes, I think), but I'm still enjoying it.
• I'm also still enjoying Bamboo Blade more than I expected to. It's up to volume 5 now and is still going strong.
• Ichigo 100% is at volume 13 and continues to do what it does - lots of fan-service and a main character who just kind make his damn mind up (pick Aya, you moron). If I didn't know this series ended in 6 volumes time I'd probably be thinking about dropping it by now, as it's getting a bit repetitive - a good thing taken too far.

And speaking of dropping, there are a couple of other titles I've been reading that I'm seriously considering dropping. I'm unsure because they're okay, but also I'm not sure I want to keep spending money on them as they're all ongoing series:

• Dogs: Bullets & Carnage - I really enjoyed the prologue "volume 0", but the ongoing series is not really impressing me. The arts nice, but gets confusing during the many fight scenes and the story just feels like a big old mound of clichés.
• Asu No Yoichi: Samurai Harem - the problem with this is it's a giant cliché. Everything in it is a recycled idea and if it wasn't for the hawtness of the chicks It'd probably bore me (and even that is tainted a bit by having a really young girl who's subjected to just as much groping as the older girls).
• Hayate the Combat Butler - this is the toughest one to drop. I still really like it, but we're already on volume 15 and there are apparently 24 released in Japan and it's not finished. That's a lot of volumes considering it's basically a gag manga where the story is going nowhere (deliberately, mind - it's not really meant to go anywhere).

What's most annoying, though, is that there also appear to be some series I'm following that seem to have been dropped. I say seem to have been because for 3 of them I can't find any official announcement saying they've been dropped, it's just that it's been ages since last volume came out, they're behind Japan and you can't pre-order any future volumes:

• Tenjho Tenge is the most annoying of these. They recently published volume 18 in English and Oh!Great and then CMX basically announced it was stopping publication, only for Oh!Great to announce the end of the series at volume 22 - so there were just 4 volumes left! And with the recent clampdowns on scanslations I've no idea whether I'll ever get to tread the end of the series.
• Kurohime is the second most annoying, not least of all because it's Viz. I always thought Viz just pumped out volumes regardless, but the last volume they did in English was 14 and that was years ago and it's on 18 in Japan, so I guess they've dumped it.
• Yozakura Quartet got to volume 5 and seems to have stopped (it's on 9 in Japan), although I'm not too fussed by this as, while the art was gorgeous, the storytelling was piss-poor.
• Similarly I'm not badly miffed that Princess Resurrection seems to have bitten the bullet at volume 7 (it's on 12 in Japan) as, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't anything spectacular.

Those last two are releases by Del Ray, which is a smaller company, but apparently prides itself on catering to the hardcore fan. That also seems to mean not really telling people what's going on, so I'm not hugely impressed, and I wasn't that big a fan of there's to start with.

But generally this is the most annoying thing with manga - anime, if someone picks it up you can be pretty much sure they'll release the whole series (it takes going tits up to stop them), but with manga they can just drop it, so where does that leave us fans?

Christ, I've wibbled on! And I've not even started on the new volumes I read, which was the point of this post, so more later.