Yugo Ishikawa

As I feared last volume, the series is starting to go epic, introducing three new super powered children this time around. To keep up the Lewis Carroll theme, they are called "Wonders." The main events are a prison break to free one of the Wonders and a rematch with Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

We get another extended nude scene with a different 12-year-old, because . . . her powers don't work if she's wearing clothes?

I might have given up on the series here, but the last page announces that vol. 6 is the finale, so I'll probably see how this very uneven story resolves itself.… (mehr)

Alice and Yukko are separated for the first half of the book. Alice, a Georgian who speaks Russian, tries to get by on her own in Japan when she has no clothes and only knows a few words of the language. There's a silly and forced moment when the story shoehorns her back into an Alice in Wonderland costume, but her adventure is interesting. Meanwhile, Yukko gets pulled into a world of conspiracies, cover-ups, and paranoia as she falls under the thumb of the government.

Rather than run with these two stories for a while, it feels like the creator was forced to start falling into the typical story developments that manga editors seem to favor. Before too long we have a big battle scene that introduces more powered characters and starts to explode what was a gory and claustrophobic little horror story into a battle epic. To tie into the Alice in Wonderland theme, the new guys are based on Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I expect we'll be getting the whole Wonderland cast before too long. (But I'm hoping to be proved wrong.)

And of course we have to have some up-skirt shots, 'cuz fan service.

I keep going back and forth on this series, but the final pages make me happy I still have one more volume on hand.… (mehr)