chomiji | Bleach, vols. 1-9 (Tite Kubo) (Reply)

Actually, at this point I've read the entire Bleach opus currently available in English. I didn't intend to read through the series so quickly, but the Mr. got into them. Whenever he got stuck on the other side of town because of a lousy rush hour - which is probably half of the time - I'd get these calls: "I'm at the bookstore. Exactly which volume of Bleach are we on?"

So that tells you something right there: Bleach, the manga series that the whole Cho family enjoyed enough to read it in 3 weeks flat.

However, I'm not going to blog them all at once - I started to do that, and the write-up just got too blessed long. So there will be another post for the remaining volumes.

Ichigo Kurosaki is more or less a normal high school student - except that he had orange hair and can see ghosts. (So can his fraternal twin little sisters, although they don't see the spirits so clearly. Their widowed father, a doctor who runs a clinic, is the only one in the family who can't.) Suddenly, one night, Ichigo notices that there's a girl in samurai-style gear in his room. She's Rukia Kuchiki, a "Soul Reaper," and she's hunting a type of evil ghost called a Hollow, which was probably attracted by Ichigo's psychic powers. When she becomes too injured to carry on, Ichigo agrees to take on some of her power to carry out her mission and save his family. Unfortunately, somehow all Rukia's power drains into Ichigo. Now she can't get back to her home - and she can't carry out her remaining missions in our world. If Ichigo's family, friends, and town are to be protected from Hollows, he must learn become a proper Soul Reaper.

Bleach, vols. 1-9 (review)

As previously mentioned, my first manga series was Samurai Deeper Kyo. This is a very long, involved sword-and-sorcery saga with a large ensemble cast, involving themes like loyalty to your friends, becoming stronger for them and for yourself, and choosing your own path while still having a home base of family (often adoptive in SDK) and friends to which to return. Once I started poking around on the Intarwebs to find out about popular manga series, Bleach struck me as the one most likely to appeal on the basis of its similarity to SDK. Bleach, with its huge cast and similar themes, has less angst and family/clan politics (thus far, anyway) than SDK, probably because it's written for a slightly younger audience. But it's still very appealing to somebody like me, who never visualized herself as the hero or heroine, but instead always preferred the role of the best friend who comes through in the nick of time.

The first mini-arc of the story involves Ichigo's learning about his new powers while still in our world. Despite the fact that this is basically a whole series of little ghost stories - some of them pretty scary (the one involving Orihime's brother was the most affecting to me) - there are still lots of laughs. This section serves to introduce us to Ichigo's family and classmates, as well as the mysterious owner of the Urahara Shoten store - supplier of Soul Reaper gadgets and drugs, nicknamed Hat-and-Clogs by Ichigo - and his staff. This comparative idyll ends when Byakuya and Renji - Rukia's adoptive elder brother and her childhood best friend - show up to bring her back to Soul Society for judgment (near the end of vol. 6). It turns out that the transfer of Soul Reaper power to a human is a grave offense, and Rukia has been sentenced to death for it.

Looking back over this section now, I see where this series is weaker than SDK from my viewpoint: this last situation should have been a great source of all sorts of angst for all three participants. We do see some of this on Rukia's part, and eventually on Renji's, but as of vol. 19, there's been hardly any feelings from Byakuya. Potentially, Byakuya is exactly my sort of character - meganbmoore pinpointed this, to my surprise, when I had barely realized it myself - but he's not being tormented by the fact that he's bring his adoptive little sister in to be killed because she betrayed their clan's ideals. Maybe this happens later - but in the meantime, for me, Bleach is fun, but not on the level of SDK, Saiyuki, or even Furuba in terms of emotional involvement. This isn't a judgment of the quality of the series, mind you - just a personal quirk of mine.

Once Ichigo shows up, trying to rescue Rukia, the ensuing sequence - where Ichigo proves surprisingly strong against Renji but is absolutely no match for even a small effort from Byakuya - goes from exhilarating to pathetic (in the old sense, of eliciting pathos). The final scene (in vol. 7), where Hat-and-Clogs (i.e., Kisuke Urahara) shows up with his umbrella, looking silently down at the fallen Ichigo, is really touching. Ichigo's training scenes with Urahara aren't bad either, especially the later ones where the spirit of his zanpakuto, Zangetsu, shows up.

The scenes in Rukongai, the rather scuzzy city surrounding the inner core inhabited by the Soul Reapers, are mostly sketchy and comedic, with some bits just completely throw-away: for instance, why do Ganju and his thugs ride pigs? Presumably, they do it just because it's funny. And it's never mentioned again, IIRC. As for Kukaku ... well, I love the basic concept of the character. And I know that enormous hooters are a shounen manga staple. But the combination here put me off completely, and I couldn't take Kukaku seriously as a character at all.

As for the other characters introduced thus far - most of them are pretty good. Among the minor characters, my favorites are Ichigo's brave, goth-y little sister, Karin, and Orihime's tough friend Tatsuki, the karate champ. I actually came to like Don Kanonji, the blowhard TV show exorcist, too: he hung in there really well even after discovering how truly dangerous things were. As far as the important folks go: I've actually known people whose brains were as much on another wavelength as Orihime's - and she won me over completely when she cartooned her "future self" as a battlebot with rocket-propelled boobs. Uryu badly needs a chill transplant - he's so tightly wound, he makes me look like a surfer chick in comparison - but he's a tough little obsessive-compulsive nutjob, and he understands loyalty. And Urahara is just way cool.

We've had a lot of fun with these!

In related news, telophase has created a nifty little online toy that lets you create your own zanpakuto - these are the nifty spirit-powered weapons used by the Soul Reapers:

Chomiji's Zanpakutō:

Chomiji carries Ecstatic Stinger, Shadowed Spider sealed into the form of a fountain pen. At the command "Scatter, Ecstatic Stinger, Shadowed Spider!" it transforms into a light, segmented surujin with an oversize weight. It produces small insects that the wielder can direct and can see and hear all that the insects do.

What's Your Zanpakutō?