Inuyasha manga coverage on MAY

I’ve been thinking about it since I started this blog a little over a month ago, and I’ve finally decided that I’m going to do weekly reviews of the Inuyasha manga. First of all, it’s been my favorite series for a few years now, and it’s one of the only manga series’ I’m continually reading(I only have time for so much, and anime usually takes priority over manga for me =P) Also, I don’t hear anyone on Anime Nano(which MAY recently got listed on ^^) talk about it, even though it’s still ongoing like Bleach and Naruto. So I figured, why not? It’ll be something unique for my blog and since manga chapters are way shorter than episodes, my reviews will be short and easy to keep up. I know it’s kind of late to start reviewing it since the series is supposedly going to end soon, but better late than never I guess, and right in time for the 10th anniversary chapter too ^_^ I’m very interested to see how these final chapters will go =) Anyway, I’m going to use this post as an introduction to my Inuyasha manga coverage, and then follow up with an acutal review of the latest chapter 482.

So first of all, like pretty much all non-Japanese fans, I get the latest chapters of Inuyasha via scanlations from the dedicated scanlators at Freelance-Manga and MakiMaki. If, for some reason, they fall behind in their releases, I also check Inuyasha Sengoku o-togi Zoushi or Ear-Tweak though they’re usually very late with their releases and just provide scripts with only a few scans. So my coverage of the manga will pretty much depend on those sites getting the scanlations up. Also, probably the only image I will provide with each review post is the chapter’s cover page and not any actual pages with the English scanlations of the dialoge. The reason? I want to have a unique image with each chapter review, but I don’t want to feel like I’m posting someone else’s scanlations ^^,,, If you’re interested in reading the latest chapters of Inuyasha too, check out the links to the sites I provided above. Freelance-Manga and MakiMaki also upload their scanlations onto Tokyo Toshokan as well.

And one more thing I feel I should cover before I get on with the actual chapter review; I think I should probably make my recent opinion of the Inuyasha manga clear, which I did in my previous post, “Inuyasha: why there should be a new TV series.” But if you missed it, here’s what I have to say about the manga recently:

“…I don’t know if it’s just me, but since the anime ended, the quality of the manga just hasn’t been as good as it used to be. Now Rumiko Takahashi is an excellent story writer and artist, and she has such a talent for making well developed and appealing characters. But I think it was around when the manga volumes hit the early 40s that the series just didn’t seem as enjoyable as before. I think it started after Inuyasha got the Dragon-Scaled Tessaiga. Yeah, Inuyasha getting a new attack for his sword was cool and something we hadn’t seen in a while. But then, for the next 5 or 6 volumes or so, that’s pretty much all that was going on…right after the Dragon-Scaled Tessaiga, it was the Flame Tessaiga(which he hasn’t even used yet), and then the Youketsu. So for all those volumes, all we got to see pretty much was Inuyasha beating up on and getting beaten up by lots of youkai, trying to get one new attack after another for Tessaiga, while the others just looked on(Koga and Sesshomaru also got into the “get a cool new attack” trend too =P) Around this time, we’re also introduced to Byakuya, used to replace Kagura as Naraku’s subordinate, though unfortunately, he’s not nearly as interesting a character as Kagura was. But seriously, I couldn’t help but think that those chapters were a bit boring, even for a major Inuyasha fan like myself. Though they did have some good chapters, as a whole, volumes 41 to 45 had none of the character development and overall interesting story quality that all the previous volumes have had. As for why, I can only guess. Maybe for the 4 years that the anime series had been going on, Takahashi-san started getting some sort of inspiration from it. And since the anime has been over for a couple of years now, maybe that lack of inspiration finally began affecting the manga. Or maybe Inuyasha’s declining popularity as a result of the anime ending has also affected her inspiration. Or maybe she’s just plain running out of ideas and is having trouble wrapping up all the series’ loose-ends. But actually, recently the manga quality has been getting better and out of the decline it was in. Around the chapters when Kikyo died was when it started getting a lot more interesting. Not that I was happy about Kikyo finally dying for good(I think there was a lot more for her to do in the story), but I finally started seeing the return of the quality character development and story plots from the old chapters. The next arc with Sesshomaru, though a bit abrupt so soon after Kikyo’s death, was also high on character development(but I still think his mother literally came way too out of the blue. If anything she should have made her appearance back when he got the new attack for Tenseiga.)”

Since my writing that, the mirror arc where Kanna died was okay I guess, but still, I just haven’t been seeing the quality of the early chapters. This current arc seems like a standard “monster-of-the-week” story, but I’m hoping it’ll lead up to something better. But whether the chapters get better or worse, since I’ve followed the series this far(and since I’m such a hopeless Inuyasha fan =P), I’ll continue to read the manga till the very end, and hopefully keep up my reviews of it too ^_^