Murcielago vol. 25

I won’t lie:  It’s kind of hard to remember what was going on in this series when I reviewed its last volume just over a year ago.  Fortunately, this has never been a very plot-heavy series, so when the focus winds up being on a fight between an empowered version of Celine, the Perfumer, and ostensible series protagonist Kuroko Kumori, that winds up being easy enough to get behind.  This is because you’ve got a newly empowered protagonist fighting against the effectively unkillable protagonist and seeing how that fight shakes out has enough interest on its own.  Particularly when it winds up being decided by the involvement of perpetually frivolous series hanger-on Hinako and her magical plot-specific powers.  Except it’s not over yet – not by a long shot!

I’ll give mangaka Yoshimurakana credit:  This is definitely one of the most bonkers volumes of the series we’ve seen in a while.  The decision to pit two unkillable characters of the series against each other is actually novel in this series and results in a genuinely entertaining battle.  It’s actually one of the more entertaining fights in recent history for this series due to its over-the-top nature.  That would definitely be a good thing if it indicated that “Murcielago” was working towards any kind of a climax as a result of this current storyline.

Except that it’s not as the series shifts into a new arc about a painter depicting ladies as the representations of the seven sins, with an eighth sin promised here.  So far, so standard, but after 24 previous volumes, I was actually hoping that this title was building towards a climax with this most recent arc.  That it appears to be serving up more of the same after 25 volumes feels like Yoshimurakana is trolling their readership at this point.  Yes, I do feel some obligation to seeing how things are going to turn out after all this time, but if the mangaka is just going to keep stringing their readership along, I’m starting to think I should just cut and run before this takes up even more space on my shelf.