One Piece Volume 54

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By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

This is a landmark volume of One Piece, in many ways. It begins the epic Impel Down arc. It’s continuity-heavy, bringing back many old characters in newer, sometimes more sympathetic guises. And as for the other landmarks… well, you’ll have to wait a couple more volumes for those.

After briefly seeing Hancock smuggling Luffy on board a marine ship bound for Impel Down, the volume begins by showing us where the rest of the crew got off to after Bartholomew Kuma sent them away from Sabaody. Some seem quite appropriate (Nami on a weather island), some rather cruel (Robin just cannot catch a break), some laughably cruel (oh Sanji, I shouldn’t laugh as much as I did), and some are just laughable (Zoro and Perona, the perfect odd couple). Drink in these brief scenes of the cast, by the way. It’s gonna be a long time before we get back to them.

Meanwhile, we arrive at Impel Down and begin what amounts to a giant melee brawl that lasts the rest of the book. We’re introduced to a few new characters, of which the most memorable are Magellan the poison-loving freak of a warden, Hannyabal, his ambitious underling, and Sadie, the security chief whose personality is exactly as her name applies. (Her sensual moans whenever she delivers any line are the closest One Piece will get to sex in this volume – well, that and Hancock’s over-the-top one-sided love for Luffy).

The best part of the volume, though, is the reintroduction of two villains we had forgotten, and frankly thought of as too comedic for a serious rescue arc – Buggy the Clown and Mr. 3. They’re both imprisoned in Impel Down, but Luffy frees them in return for them leading him down to the lowest level, where his brother is imprisoned. Needless to say, neither of them has any intention of doing so, but events conspire against them, and things only get crazier with the addition of Mr. 2 a level down. Yes, to make up for the lack of Straw Hats, it’s old-home-week for villains in One Piece. There’s even a hint, in a few scenes showing the floor where Ace is kept, that we may be seeing an even bigger villain again soon.

There’s not much to review here – it’s a bunch of fights – but as always with One Piece, Oda makes the fights interesting, and inserts enough fun humor that it never feels like it drags. One wonders about Ace’s reluctance to be rescued, however, and why he wants Luffy to stay away. And now that we’ve finished the One Piece catchup (sort of – we’re still about a year behind Japan, but that’s better than the 8 we were at this point last year), we’ll have to wait for October to find out.

George

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I was at work when I first saw the news on my Google Reader. George had a massive heart attack and was in critical condition. 5 minutes later, I was getting the news that he’d died.

I turned to my co-workers and said “George is dead.” Half of them – the ones who were not Yankee fans – said, “George who?” They thought I meant a work colleague, or maybe an actor. But my fellow fans needed no clarification. GEORGE was dead. There was only one George who needed no last name.

I was born in California, but moved to Connecticut at a very young age. It’s a divided state, with half the fans supporting the Yankees, and the other half being Red Sox fans. (Theoretically there must be Met fans too, but in Connecticut, there are those two teams and all the others as ‘and the rest’. Liking the Mets here is the same as liking, say, the Pirates.) I was a Yankee fan for as long as I can remember. I still am.

I was, admittedly, born at the right time. I was first conscious of baseball when I was about 3-4 years old, which was right when the Yankees were winning pennants again. The Yankees of 1976-1978 may not have been the nicest guys in the world, but they brought the World Series back to the Bronx after a huge, huge drought. And the reason they did this was that George owned the Yankees, and he wanted to win. More than ANYTHING, he wanted to win.

When I was 6 years old, the book The Bronx Zoo came out, written by Sparky Lyle. It was a diary of the 1978 season, one of the most contentious in Yankee history. It pulled no punches, telling exactly what the players, coaches, and especially manager and owner were like. I read this book when I was 6. You could probably argue I should not have been reading a book with such language, but generally I would read literally anything and as long as I could, I did. I seem to recall my mom wincing as I quoted various swear words to her. (Likely the same thing happened when I read Ball Four when I was 7.)

And easily the most fascinating things about the book were Billy Martin and George. Two people who could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, fought constantly, disagreed on everything… except winning. And this was instilled into the Yankees. YOU. WILL. WIN. It hit their fans, too. I’ve always felt, regarding Yankee games, the way George did. My favorites are the ones where we score 10 runs in the first and then slowly pull away.

Not that this was easy. Being a Yankee fan in the 1980s was very difficult. George kept buying expensive veterans. They kept underperforming. George would trade away quality rookies in a fit of pique. It’s no coincidence that the two times the Yankees returned to form were also right after the two times George was suspended from the game.

So I think George was a bad hands-on owner. But, he was a terrific force of nature. George was the Yankees, from 1973-2007. Not Reggie, not Don, not even Derek. The Yankees were George. The sheer pride in the franchise was one fostered by George. Yes, rival teams said that the Yankees bought their championships. Damn straight. George poured money into the team. There’s a reason that even more than Boston, Yankee fans hate the Kansas City Royals. They are the anti-Yankees. Their owner wants a profit first, and then perhaps a good club.

George had not been well for years, and his death is not a complete surprise. Likewise, the Yankees are now being run by his sons. But the legacy has only just begun. I’m seeing a lot of stories mentioning George’s philanthropy, where he would give money to needy people quietly and with zero publicity. Which is a wonderful thing, and should be remembered. But what will be remembered more than anything is the larger than life, most famous owner in baseball. The man who fired Billy Martin 5 times. The man who created the Evil Empire. And the man who made the Yankees, once the most storied franchise in baseball, add on to that with even more stories, and even more championships.

On the day he died, the Yankees were World Champions, and owned the best record in baseball. I think George would be proud. And then tell the team it means nothing unless they win this year. :)

Stepping on Roses Volume 2

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By Rinko Ueda. Released in Japan as “Hadashi De Bara Wo Fume” by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Margaret. Released in North America by Viz.

In my review of the first volume of this series, I noted that it had an absolute ass as the hero, and wondered if the writer might be doing a parody of those sorts of stories, where it turns out that the right guy for the heroine actually *is* the nice guy after all, and that the jerk is just a jerk. I imagine those readers who have read further on in this series were pointing at me and laughing. Of course, it’s nothing like that.

No, Volume 2 arrives and we get exactly what I should have expected. The jerk turns out to have a softer side that he’s hiding from the heroine, and is trying to avoid getting close to her so that he can keep using her to further his own ends. This is made difficult by the heroine’s pure shininess. Meanwhile, the nice guy I mentioned in Volume 1 is giving every sign that he’ll turn out to be utterly psychotic, possibly as early as Volume 3.

No, much as I’d like it to be otherwise, this manga is a shameless potboiler. Every scene is designed to make you wince, realizing what Sumi is about to go through next. And Soichiro has settled into his own little cliched box: he is the guy who is being cruel against his own heart, and will end up being the best guy in the manga for her simply as everyone else will turn out to be much, much worse.

Having said all this, I did still find this enjoyable. Unlike other series of this nature (coughBlackBirdcouch), I get the feeling that the artist knows she’s creating a horrid Barbara Cartland scenario, and sometimes the manga reads like she dials it up to 11 for her own amusement. I just can’t take it as seriously as I should. And that’s good, as when it’s not taken all that seriously this is a fun, fast read, filled with twists and turns and people shouting emotionally at each other about love and commitment.

I said in Volume 1’s review I’d read it till it became the cliche. Well, it is now. But I think I’ll keep reading anyway, as there’s a certain style to this romance manga that keeps me wanting more. And that shot of Nozomu’s hands gripping the rose bouquet? That was first rate. You can tell that Rinko Ueda is no newbie artist. She knows just how to drag us through this morass she has created.