Happiness vol. 5

The bad news is that there’s not one moment in the art for this volume that gets me like it did in vol. 4.  There are some striking moments, however.  Gosho’s iron-willed determination to get out of a fiery situation late in the volume is impressively conveyed and followed up with the sequential art version of a match cut to show Makoto in a very bad situation.  Makoto’s drug-fueled hallucinatory freakout a few pages later is also pretty memorable.

Yet the majority of vol. 5 is concerned with two threads:  That of Makoto and Nora versus the organization out to get them, and Gosho and Sakurane trying to deal with Yuuki’s murder of his girlfriend and her family.  Mangaka Shuzo Oshimi does at least put some work into getting the reader to believe that these threads are going to turn out one way, when in fact they wind up going in the more familiar, expected route.  I still found the overall experience to be an involving read, even if it ultimately wound up hewing closer to convention than I wanted it to.

Then Oshimi quickly tosses the current status quo aside for the final chapter of this volume.  I’m still wondering if that was a good move because it happens when the drama in these two threads has reached their peak.  So I was left with this feeling of, “Why would you do this?!” before I started feeling uneasy about all the time that had passed for the characters and what that meant for them as a result.  Except for one character as we focus on this person to establish that they’re currently living a normal life save for one physical reminder of the time things in their life got really weird and dangerous.  Which is going to happen again as while this chapter makes for an awkward segue from the high drama of what has come before, it still manages to intriguingly set the stage for things to get crazy from here.