A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Wild Adapter 6: Tokitoh gets kidnapped, Kubota gets mad. The same plot as one of the earlier volumes but with less emotional interaction between the two and a comedown from the genius that was # 5, though a good solid noir when considered independently. I had a hard time placing this chronologically-- does anyone know when in the timeline this volume occurs?

Silver Diamond 2: I am grateful to Tokyopop for preserving the color front leafs, as the banquet of flowers is gorgeous in color and not half as much in black and white. This volume doesn't have the amount of cool discovery of the world as the first, but the ins and outs of the plot and the sweet character relationships are progressing nicely.

Sand Chronicles # 1: Delicate, touching story about a city girl who moves to the country because of her mother's illness. Tragedy, first love, and growing up ensue. What makes this special is the emotional honesty and specificity of the events and characters, and the poignance of the central metaphor of the hourglass and the fact that the whole thing is told retrospectively: a woman looking back at her life as a girl. Lovely.

Rure 1-2: An excellent prologue and interesting set-up, involving rival sisters who are heirs to a mysterious island in the real world, gives way to generic girls-in-fantasyland action hijinks. I got bored.

RIP (Requiem in Phonybrian): I am just not that into Mitsukazu Mihara (Dolls) though I like the starkness of her blacks and whites: her storytelling is either one-note "people are mean and doomed, isn't it ironic" or one-note emo loligoth.

This one-volume manga, in which an angel rescues an undertaker who committed suicide so together they can redeem lost souls, in one-note accidentally hilarious emo. The undertaker's real name is Phony Brian. His girlfriend thought her love was distracting him from his music career, so she committed suicide by ripping out her IV when she was in the hospital and drinking it.

Oh my God, you guys, it's the flashback volume! The one that tells what happened after Kubota and Tokito first met! I knew it would be fantastic, since Minekura is consistently brilliant at extended flashbacks, but it's even better than I expected!

I think this works best if you've read the entire story up to this point, but if you tried the first volume and didn't like it, it's worth jumping in and giving this one a try, since chronologically it follows immediately after that.

A fatalistic gangster named Kubota doesn't care much about anyone or anything, though he has a soft spot for animals. One day he finds a young man unconscious in an alley, and takes him home as if he's adopting a stray cat. The young man, Tokito, has amnesia, and a monstrous hand which links him to a mysterious drug called Wild Adapter, which makes its users turn into werewolves and then explode.

The series explores the odd but strong bond between the two men as they investigate the source and nature of Wild Adapter, and assorted cops and criminals go after them. Each volume is narrated by some outsider whom they come into contact with; the tone is noirish but the characters are more realistic than archetypal; and despite the various plot-puzzles, the mystery which gets the most focus and is most beautifully and slowly unravelled is how people adapt, survive, and love each other against the odds.

In this volume, the surprising choice of outsider-narrator provides a poignant counterpoint to Kubota and Tokito's story; the art is almost unbearably sexy; there's a manga-within-the-manga that is not only the best thing ever all on its own, but is also relevant to the themes; the psychology of loneliness and emotional damage is painfully dead-on; it's heartbreaking and heartwarming and beautiful, and the best single volume of a manga I've read in quite some time.

Warning for possible spoilers in comments.