Dai Dark vol. 2

Zaha Sanko, the most wanted man in the galaxy, got his ship upgraded in the previous volume.  Now it’s time to find stuff to furnish it with!  Fortunately his ship’s minibot, Moja, knows that the best place to do this is at the nearest Marutech Shopping Ship.  They’ve got a lot of stuff on their shopping list and only 12 hours to get it all.  Why only 12 hours?  Any longer and the ship will interpret their presence as an attack and self-destruct, of course!  This doesn’t seem like a problem, until Shimada Death shows up and tells Zaha where he can get some good bones on the ship.  Nothing can go wrong there!  Right?  Or maybe just less wrong than the time Shimada led some kidnappers onto Zaha’s school ship back in the day?  Or less wrong than the existence of one Hajime Damemaru (English name:  First Failson) who’s also on the run from the Photosphere corporation and is having a worse time of it than Zaha?

With vol. 2 of this series, it becomes clear that you’re not reading it for its clever plotting or compelling main storyline.  Every storyline here can be summed up thusly:  Zaha gets into trouble and has to kill either a whole lot of people or incur a whole lot of property damage before he’ll be able to get out of it.  What makes “Dai Dark” enjoyable so far is how much fun and/or weird mangaka Q Hayashida has things get along the way.  Seeing Zaha team up with Shimada to sneak into the literal bowels of a ship to get bones from lobotomized flesh-slaves promoted as robots to the general galaxy in a metaphor for the cruel excesses of capitalism (I think)!  Or seeing Zaha go berserk as his mind is taken over by the still-living remains of an exploded individual!  This series is also pretty gross, too!  That’s a plus as it’s the oozing biological gravy on top of a series that delights in showing me sights I haven’t seen before.