MPD-Psycho vol. 11

Back in April when vol. 14 of “Eden:  It’s An Endless World!” came out, I went back and re-read the previous volume to refresh my memory and provide some context for this new one.  Not only did it give me a chance to re-read one of the better volumes in the series, that context came in handy for vol. 14.  With results like that, the logical thing to do here would’ve been to go back and re-read vol. 10 of “MPD-Psycho” in advance of this one. …But that would require me to care more about this series than I actually do.  This series descended into latter-season “X-Files” levels of conspiratorial murk long before it started enjoying multi-year-long waits between volumes and my interest declined accordingly.  It hasn’t become actively awful enough to get me to stop reading, and the previous volume even managed to be a decent somewhat self-contained read.  However, I freely admit that my main reason for continuing to read it is to show Dark Horse that there is an audience for the manga titles that they release on such an irregular basis.

As for the volume itself, it’s alright.  The story which runs through it, “Dead Man’s Galaxy Days,” is a flashback to a time before the series started.  So we get to see what detective Yosuke Kobayashi and his other personality, psycho scumbag Shinji Nishizono, were up to before their lives got even weirder.  Of course, we see here that they were plenty weird to begin with.  Cannibal rabbits.  Teenagers with desires to be cut into two.  Identical twins killing each other to determine who is the “real” one.  The personality of a crazed cult-killer hiding out in an unsuspecting man’s mind.  There’s plenty of intriguing weirdness here, along with some gruesomely creative killing rendered in artist Sho-u Tajima’s stylish art.  However, all of the revelations offered up by writer Eiji Otsuka fall flat mainly due to my apathy for this series and the fact that the volume-long arc lacks focus or a proper sense of pacing to keep the reader’s interest.  Maybe once the series sees its last volume released in English, it’ll stand revealed as a mind-blowing genre masterpiece.  At the rate it’s going, I won’t be able to find out the answer to that question until I’ve reached retirement age (assuming I continue to wait and read it through legal channels).  Instead, I’ll stick with Otsuka’s other irregularly-published Dark Horse manga — “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service” — as its episodic style is far more engaging and better suited to its release schedule.