#DRCL: Midnight Children vol. 6

Joe Suwa and his mechanical evil-detecting suitcase have been able to track down where the Undead King (of Pop) is currently residing.  Now, he just has to figure out how to deal with him and the mechanical monstrosity that is Renfield.  While this is going on,  Mina Murray goes on a phantasmagorical journey as the Count and his Brides seek to win her over to their side.  Doing so should be a simple enough task, given how she’s still a child and they’ve been at this for, what, centuries?  Yet Mina’s will proves far more resilient than they were expecting, and their attempts to entice her with power may have just given this girl the means she needs to defeat them once and for all.

Mangaka Shin’ichi Sakamoto’s visuals may be the main reason to keep reading this series, but even they struggle to keep my interest when they’re just propping up lots of random stuff meant to advance Mina’s story.  What we see happen to her in the first half of the volume is both abstract yet utterly simple from a plot perspective that it’s a relief when the story finally shifts back to the grounds of the Whitby School and the “Resident Evil” game it’s turned into.  Things do pick up from there, particularly in seeing how Mina, Arthur, Quincy, and Joe are finally united in their task even as the boys are clearly uneasy dealing with what this girl has become.

It all makes vol. 6 readable, but not exactly compelling.  Which is the level I think it needs to hit in order to not make me resent the price I’m paying for these hardcover volumes and their consistently stingy page counts.  Yet there’s something that may get me to commit to seeing this series through in spite of my issues:  It feels like it’s heading for a climax.  With everything that happens here, it doesn’t feel like there’s much more of the story to tell, so score one for the Sunk Cost Fallacy when the final volume arrives in either late 2027/early 2028!