Toriko Gin – Go!Comi – 2008 – 6 volumes
The loss of Go!Comi is heartbreaking to say the least, since they publish a lot of things I like to read. This is my second favorite of the series they published, and I’m the most broken up about this one not continuing (I held onto the second volume forever as a good luck charm that Go!Comi would pull through the rough patch). In my secret heart of hearts, however, I am very relieved that the last volume of After School Nightmare came out before the company was forced to close.
The one problem with holding onto the second volume for so long is that this series has quite an involved story. It’s a good one, and well worth following, but I’d definitely forgotten all the details by the time I pulled this out. It took me a minute to re-orient myself, but it didn’t matter too much since the volume launched immediately into a lengthy flashback that told the story of the recent tragedy that wiped out a very large number of the bird tribe members.
As far as I remember, the first volume was about Hello and Jack, and about introducing the reader to the bird tribe in general, but this volume is more about the history of the bird tribe, its older members, and how it got to be as it is today. This flashback is interesting for several reasons, but my favorite part was the fact that their apocalypse was not immediately apparent.
This series excels at building a world for itself. It constructs the bird tribe’s culture, characters, and history completely from scratch, and goes into incredible detail with everything. And while we have these nice fantasy portions to enjoy, we also have to keep in mind that the human world moves alongside theirs, and that the bird tribe will more than likely need to deal with the harsh realities of the human war that is being waged not far from their borders.
I can’t praise this series enough. It’s got a well-developed fantasy world, excellent characters (you learn about nearly every member of the bird tribe in this volume), and a present-day plot that seems like it sets out to study problems in both the internalized bird tribe and the human world. Wonderful stuff, and it really is very much a shame we’ll never see more than this in English.
