All-Rounder Meguru vol. 14

With this volume, Kodansha has now published as many volumes of “All-Rounder Meguru” as Dark Horse has of “Eden:  It’s an Endless World!”  Which is still something that I highly recommend EVERYONE who visits this blog to check out.  Especially now as comics emerge (slowly) from lockdown.

As for the volume itself, it’s another solid entry for the series.  We pick up with Meguru cleaning the clock of his latest opponent in a way that causes Maki to become just a little awestruck.  Will she ever get the moment or nerve to confess to him before the end of the series?  Almost certainly given the way romances in sports manga tend to go.  Not here, though.  Certainly not before Meguru gets to go up against Kyosuke Masuoka, a.k.a. The Leglock Lunatic.  That’s his signature move and he’s made plenty of fighters submit to it.  Our protagonist just happens to be the next one on his list.

I’ll give Endo this, he commits to the idea of making Kyosuke seem like a credible threat to Meguru in this tournament.  Which is all we can ask for at this point in the arc since, barring some surprise upset, it looks like it’ll conclude with the title character going against his childhood friend Takashi in the finals.  So while it’s nice to see Kyosuke try to put some pressure on Meguru, it becomes clear early on that he’s mainly here to show how much the main character has grown as a fighter by this point.  There’s some nice moments in the fight where we get to see Meguru display his now trademark on-the-spot ingenuity, though the fight as a whole is just aggressively fine.  That doesn’t make this a bad volume by any means, but I probably would’ve skipped writing about it if I wasn’t running out of stuff in my “to review” pile.