Blood Blockade Battlefront vol. 5

This title occupies an interesting liminal space on my reading list.  It’s not quite good enough that I’d miss it if it went on “hiatus” like other Dark Horse manga, yet it’s not quite bad enough that I’m tempted to stop reading it.  Whenever I see that a new volume is solicited, I pick it up, read it, generally get some enjoyment out of it and then go on to read more engaging work.  Mangaka Yasuhiro Nightow is clearly enjoying himself with this series as its premise of a New York intersecting with the realm of the supernatural allows him to channel the most outlandish aspects he likes from Japanese manga and American comics.  Yet all he winds up doing is providing amusing, occasionally incoherent riffs on things that have been done better on both sides of the Pacific.

Take the opening story, “Don’t Forget to Don’t Forget About Me,” which has the most “normal” member of Libra — the secret group tasked with protecting the city from the greatest supernatural threats — Leonard Watch crossing paths with a hamburger-obsessed mushroom creature without a skeletal system called Nej.  This happens after Nej gets hit by a truck while racing towards the hamburger-carrying Leo.  Feeling sorry for the poor thing who is being taken advantage of by two deliverymen due to his love of fast food, Leo offers to get Nej hamburgers in the normal part of town and the two strike up a friendship.  It’s a friendship that’s put to the test when the deliverymen find out that Nej sends out an amnesia-inducing gas when threatened, which strikes them as the perfect cover they need to rob the right people to pay off their debts.

Things play out just about as you’d expect with the requisite ending that’s supposed to tug at your heartstrings for its bittersweet nature.  Or at least, it would if the ending for a story involving a character who expels an amnesia-inducing gas while threatened wasn’t so obvious.  I can appreciate the over-the-top gusto with which Nightow attacks the material and how he can clearly delineate between action that represents “violent slapstick” and “just plain violent.”  Seeing the little chain of circumstances that led one of the deliverymen to discover Nej’s ability was also clever and well-constructed as well.  These things allow the story escape the contempt of familiarity, yet they don’t make it all that endearing either.

After this we come to the story that makes up the bulk of this volume, “Zap’s Longest Day.”  The “Zap” in question is Zap Renfro the requisite smart-aleck member of Libra who has the ability to manipulate his blood into sharp objects and set it on fire.  How did he come by this ability?  Well, he had a teacher of course.  We wind up meeting said teacher in this story as an escaped Blood Breed makes his way into the city in two parts.  Zap winds up having to deal with the thing’s lower half in the first part, in addition to proving to his master that he’s good enough to not be dragged back for further training, while the thing’s upper half makes a dramatic entrance by flying a plane into the city in the second.

This story is about as predictable as the first one, yet comes off better due to the fact that it doesn’t try to engage in anything resembling sentimentality and doesn’t take itself too seriously.  We get to see this best in scenes where Zap’s master makes his student translate his skittish demon-speech.  This results in Zap having to savagely trash talk himself and his friends while trying to explain his actions at the very same time.  The character’s moment of glory at the end of the first chapter manages to be both badass and ridiculous at the same time thanks to his visible erection at the time.

As for the rest of the story, it involves the cast making split-second saves against the demon’s attacks, while unleashing some fearsome techniques of their own.  Nightow’s work here is undeniably stylish as always — it’s not everyday you see someone bodyslam the cockpit of a plane — and he’s got some great designs for the supernatural beings as well.  The problem is that he just about always puts stylishness ahead of storytelling.  As impressive as some of these action scenes are, it’s very hard to follow most of them panel-to-panel.  This has been a problem since the first volume as the mangaka generally has good ideas regarding what makes a cool fight scene, but needs to work on tying all of the individual moments together.

There’s also the fact that Abe Sapien shows up in the second half of the story to join in the fight and then become a member of Libra.  Yeah, he’s called Zed O’Brien here, but any reader of “B.P.R.D.” will be able to see that he’s a thinly-veiled take on the organization’s aquatic humanoid.  I can’t say that his inclusion really rubs me one way or the other, but I’m willing to accept Zed’s presence as an “homage” rather than a “ripoff.”  Ultimately, I guess that defines my feelings towards this series as well.  It doesn’t really excite me one way or the other but it does just enough to get me to like it rather than dislike it.