the chaos that is the bastard manga

[Petezilla]

I'm talking about the manga so huge spoilers ahead


I used to love this manga waiting eagerly for every volume to come out the artwork progression is really huge.

But plotwise Hagiwara goes downhill(and so went my eagerness to read the following volumes).
from the moment that allmighty Anthrax is destroyed things stop making sense. I wonder what that incident at the airport had to do with the story. DS facing satan(the leather guy) fighting porno dian and suddenly we are warped into the future the world is a mess no old hero's remain and we are left to wonder what happened in the past.
While the fight between DS and our fallen angel dude will seem to take forever Hagi throws in some old manga he had lying around in his basement just so he could let us wait a little longer to know what will happen next.

This is pure hell it seems that there is only one bastard released a year(sometimes longer) and if he wants to explain everything what happened and is going to happen I'm afraid that by that time I'm already going to be a grandpa or buried deep underground.

[Doku-beibi]

I know what you mean, brother.

What the fcuk is with the angels, anyway? Why can't it just go back to the swords and sorcery tale it used to be...

If you notice, the thing in the airport is directly linked to the old story Hagiwara recently stuck into the tankokuban novel. It's just a really early version of the characters. Apparently, the boy and his sister are all with the hooplah and the cuddling...and don't you think he bears a resemblance to DS? And she to Sheila (or possibly Arshes, but more like a Sheila...not so much Yoko)? And the girl with the short hair in the airport, quite stunningly like Yoko...and let's not even mention the blonde bimbo who is the very spitting image of Michael. But...I think it's tied in with the DS story.

Somewhere along the line we are given to believe that there was "a fall of man"...probably first referring to the Adam and Eve incident. And now, this "Lilith" girl *...evil Yoko...* is being led by Beezlebub in Hell to call DS "Adam". But, there was another fall of man, and I believe this referrs to the Anthrax destroying the world bit, which is set in the manga for when...sometime right about 2000-2050? The airport bit takes place in 199X, and this DS-like boy is visited by an angel. That's all we know. Later, when Anthrax destroys the world, we see that DS was present even then, in some mechanical mumbojumbo. Possibly, could he be that boy, taken by the angel (or a devil in angel guise...let's remember that all the important demons have been shown in their angel parts so far, and that angel silhouette is something much like the angel of Beezlebub) and sucked into this universal scheme of good and evil?

Of course, this is all a bunch of guesswork and head-scratching by a person who, while being able to read some Japanese, isn't the most fluent reader. While DS may have been chosen to be the next Adam and whatnot, he's clearly not human now, and probably hasn't been for a long, long time. Well over four-hundred years, now? One important step that regular readers missed in the story is the break between volume eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen was released, Hagiwara lost his publisher and had to produce several doujinshi books to continue the story. It's continued some, but I don't think we ever really see the end of the Porno fight. So just what the hell IS Hagiwara doing...? Damned if I know, but I want the ol' bastard to hurry up and let us in on it.

My worst fear, friend, is that he'll die before he finishes. If that happens, I'm going to learn how to raise zombies. Can't you just see it? A rotting corpse that was once the great Hagi still dilligently drawing the story, with a zombie master forcing him to do it all on a deadline, with so little in the way of fresh human brains for compensation...


Um. I'll shut up now.