Manga Notes: The Golden Sheep

After picking up on a complete-in-one-volume manga called “the gods lie.” by Kaori Ozaki pretty much because it had been published by Vertical and reading through what had first seemed a low-key story only to hit a wallop of a development partway through, I did take note a few years later of the company starting another series by the same author, “The Golden Sheep.” Its story of a guitar-playing high school girl returning to old friends only to discover things have been going awry since childhood still wrapped up in three volumes, ambiguously just before the area bookstore closed for the crisis (although aware of world-circling problems uniting us in isolation, I have to face how I’m still exceptionally fortunate without making that seem a boast). The characters were a little older than before, their problems a bit clearer, the artwork staying distinctive without quite standing above anything else. There might not have been any shocks comparable to the previous title’s, but the third and concluding volume of the story did contain a “one-shot story” with its own jolt or two.

A few months ago, when some manga series I’d fallen into “I’ll wait for all of it and read through it in a steady push” holding patterns did reach or even approach their concluding volumes, I picked up my manga-reading pace. Now, while not altogether out of stockpiled volumes, I’ve run those piles far down and am weighing the particular benefits and shared problems of “ordering print volumes online” versus “shifting to digital titles.” As I had to admit before, it’s a small problem.