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krpalmerIt’s some kind of record to post about a volume in a manga series I’ve read sixteen previous instalments of before without often getting to the point of setting down my thoughts about them. The thought “could I manage one more post before the end of the month?” had something to do with that, but so too did finding myself reading faster and faster through the latest adventures of A Certain Scientific Railgun.
After some wrap-up and recovery from a plot arc more or less concluded as the volume began, things plunged into a flashback perhaps only implied by the tagline of the back-cover blurb, if pointed out by great quantities of grey screentone between the panels. There’d been flashbacks before in A Certain Scientific Railgun. This one seems longer already, set when Mikoto Misaka was just starting out at her elite girls’ middle school. She has a first encounter with a vending machine established throughout the story and sets up her “railgun” special attack on the spur of a moment, although it doesn’t work perfectly straight off. The arc meant lots of new characters showing up. Despite the nagging sense of whether I ought to recognize just a few of them as somewhat younger versions of established characters (even as I did recognize a few others that way), it might have escaped a certain weight of “am I starting to lose track of things?” that had begun scratching at me in volumes just previous, much less a sense of the hard sell “surely this franchise is so satisfying when you take in everything that it can displace other properties from your affection and purchases!”
As for something beyond mere novelty, this piece of the story seems to be setting up conflict among “school cliques” at Mikoto’s school, simple enough but appealing in that specific way. It’s not quite a matter of “clique leaders deploying minions,” and some of the new characters are becoming interesting. How far this will go I don’t know; I do have a sense this might get away from “getting closer to a concluding point in the main story.” For that matter I don’t know when the next volume will show up; from the copyright date in the back this now depends on the manga being collected in Japan. I at least hope I’ll be able to get back up to speed when that next volume does appear.
After some wrap-up and recovery from a plot arc more or less concluded as the volume began, things plunged into a flashback perhaps only implied by the tagline of the back-cover blurb, if pointed out by great quantities of grey screentone between the panels. There’d been flashbacks before in A Certain Scientific Railgun. This one seems longer already, set when Mikoto Misaka was just starting out at her elite girls’ middle school. She has a first encounter with a vending machine established throughout the story and sets up her “railgun” special attack on the spur of a moment, although it doesn’t work perfectly straight off. The arc meant lots of new characters showing up. Despite the nagging sense of whether I ought to recognize just a few of them as somewhat younger versions of established characters (even as I did recognize a few others that way), it might have escaped a certain weight of “am I starting to lose track of things?” that had begun scratching at me in volumes just previous, much less a sense of the hard sell “surely this franchise is so satisfying when you take in everything that it can displace other properties from your affection and purchases!”
As for something beyond mere novelty, this piece of the story seems to be setting up conflict among “school cliques” at Mikoto’s school, simple enough but appealing in that specific way. It’s not quite a matter of “clique leaders deploying minions,” and some of the new characters are becoming interesting. How far this will go I don’t know; I do have a sense this might get away from “getting closer to a concluding point in the main story.” For that matter I don’t know when the next volume will show up; from the copyright date in the back this now depends on the manga being collected in Japan. I at least hope I’ll be able to get back up to speed when that next volume does appear.