Great series.įirst off, THE COVER! It is GORGEOUSSS!! I love the details, the saturation, the colour! I knew I had to pick this up from all the other manga I borrowed from my friend. Lag sets off with the strange young girl, who expresses a desire to become his "dingo".īits of commentary at the end hint at a rich and complex world, with the potential to turn into something far more intellectual than your average manga. Since the girl has insufficient postage, no one else will deliver her. First, however, he feels compelled to deliver a letter in the form of a young girl, to whom he obviously relates. 5 years later, he sets off for the capital in the hopes of training to become a Letter Bee. The boy, Lag Seeing, witnesses the bravery and tenacity of the legendary Letter Bee and is determined to become one himself. Volume one opens with Letter Bee extraordinaire, Gauche Suede and his "dingo" (a necessary companion for each Letter Bee), picking up a letter in the form of a young boy who must be delivered to a relative far away. What a charming and unique series! I love the concept: a world where there is only darkness and an artificial sun to combat it, where society is split by a rigorously enforced caste system, where sending a simple letter from one town to another is a death-defying mission that requires a strong heart to survive. It was a pretty good big boss bug fight, but not where the story was actually going. What is, in the manga, a mid-story crisis is in in the anime turned into a rather game-y big boss bug fight. Several of the side characters get very different roles, arcs and endings, none of which I liked as well as the more coherent manga versions. I don't totally mind the compression and rearrangement, different media 'n all, but the end result here may as well be two different universes. Anyone's guess how much of it the artist made up at what stage I don't know if the operatic ending was in his mind yet back in the Broccoli Forest years before, though some of the backstory had to be.Īs I figured, the anime ending is much changed from the manga, probably in part because the manga wasn't finished yet at the time they put it together. Complicated, decidedly WTF in places (so what else is new) but still keeping a grip on something solid at the core. The beginning is uneven as to tone and possibly imagined target age it takes it a ways in to decide that, yeah, this isn't going to be that silly a story after all, and by the time it gets to the end it's not silly in the least. World-building even more gonzo than usual, making no sense but psychological, and one of the goofier weapon systems in a medium sporting a long line of goofy weapons, although its implications do get explored eventually, so points for that.įinished the manga, all 99 chapters, and have decided I rec it. I see by the side matter that the manga writer started publishing in 1986, the same year I did, so he wasn't a kid when he penned this in the early 00s. I'm possibly reading more into it than intended, but he seems a pretty fair metaphor for how people change irrevocably with age and experience. I'm giving this one more star than I would otherwise for the especially interesting character arc of the normally doomed mentor figure, letter bee Gauche Suede. I suspect some major simplifications, although the anime did manage to hit all the beats, repeatedly till they stopped moving.Īnyway, as the plot moves on from it initial awkward beginning - the creators start training their audiences in pantie shots early, it appears from the underwear jokes - it does develop a strong cast of interesting older characters, all of whom get their moments eventually. I may end up reading all 20 volumes this winter to see if that holds for the ending, which these things commonly don't, as the anime creators struggle to wrap things up tidily in the requisite number of episodes (Season 3, in this case) whether the parent manga concludes or not. The anime tracks the first volume very well, as is common.
#Letter bee manga kissmanga plus
I recall I had seen a couple of episodes on disc from the library some years back, and bounced off it early on due to it seeming rather under my head, plus my then-increasing disinterest in mecha, but I had a lot of time to kill last week, and it was all right there, so. It's definitely aimed at the younger segment of the target audience, as one can tell by the 12-year-old protagonist and, early on, an action sequence taking place in the dangerous Broccoli Forest, obviously a place of terror for young readers/viewers.
As usual, I read this tracking back from the anime adaptation, which has lately popped up on Crunchyroll.
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