No Love, No Life
Creative Staff:
Original Story: Bones
Art: Sung-Woo Park and Redice
Adaptation: Masafumi Harada
Translation: Christine Dashiell
Lettering: Anthony Quintessenza
What They Say:
Space’s biggest idiot is also its coolest cat!! Dandy and his crew navigate the galactic expanse in pursuit of new alien life, liberty, and the next big rack. But their heroic adventures are not without a few bumps along the way. Getting hurt, laughing, screaming, throwing a few punches, turning into zombies, and falling in love are all in a day’s work! Dandy delivers one last round of passion, courage, and perversion before the Aloha Oe soars off into the sunset!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
For a series like Space Dandy, which is incredibly fluid in terms of keeping a continuity, you’d think a manga adaptation would be willing to take more liberties with the source material and come up with new and different situations for the cast to get themselves into. After the previous volume took the time to introduce the core and secondary cast, I was fully prepared for the manga to delve into some new brands of wackiness. And yet for this (final!) volume in the series, we’re treated with nothing more than re-treads of story premises already told in the anime two years prior, as of this writeup.
But is that necessarily a bad thing?
While a good chunk of this volume’s chapters feel like lesser versions of their anime counterparts (the new take on the zombie storyline was pitiful, and the re-telling of the Adelie storyline was horribly tame), the times they do nail the adaptation really make an impression. Of particular note is the robot QT’s story as he falls for a female coffee machine. Having already established that he can experience human statuses like getting sick (er, “zombified”), seeing the humble robot bumble about in his first romance while his shipmates encourage him from the sidelines is just as endearing as it was in the anime. Furthermore, you can really tell that the artists were having fun while drawing out the two-parter, from QT and Miss Coffee Maker’s date stargazing, to the more over-the-top scenes involving robot incinerators and Pyonium Guns. It was a nice, dynamically expressed story that was able to tug at your heartstrings at the same time—something only the better Space Dandy stories can do.
Of course, this also being the final volume of this manga, some time had to be spent on the actual overarching plot as well. However, in this case, the final chapter’s focus isn’t on Dr. Gel and an explanation on the lack of continuity between each story, but rather the relationship between the crew members of the Aloha Oe itself. And again, while it’s yet another story pulled from the anime, it’s told well enough as you really see the bonds of friendship formed among the unlikely trio as they’re each presented with a better (or in Meow’s case, worse) life than their current one and immediately become grateful for what they have.
In Summary:
The final Space Dandy volume is a mixed bag. And while the handful of stories told well indeed shine bright, it doesn’t change the fact that the majority of its stories are fall flat in comparison to their more experimental, atmospheric, and overall more fun anime counterparts.
Content Grade: B-/C+
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: September 27, 2016
MSRP: $13.00
