Creative Staff
Story/Art: Tomohiro Hasegawa
Translation: Paul Starr
What They Say
Third-grader Shota Aikawa’s pet beetle evolves from a larva to a pupa to a superhot human! The wacky adventures of the Aikawa family and the fabulous beetle who would be king now begins! You’re gonna LARVA this new comedy manga!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Moriking continues to find a pretty good way of doing its thing by slowly introducing the characters that our title character has to contend with. With Tomohiro Hasegawa avoiding adding them all in at once or making one of them the real major threat, we get a pretty healthy flowing narrative here that has room to breathe. It helps that we’re also not getting constant fight chapters and have some pretty good comedy ones along the way as well. I’ve read plenty of works similar to this so I had a general idea going in with what to expect but it’s managed to really find a good ground to operate out of.
With this chapter, we see how Shoko and Oka are enjoying their summer jobs working in the cafe as a way to make money but also be sociable. That’s not changing but they do have a new staffer joining on that introduces herself as Meo. It turns out she’s an Asian Giant Hornet queen that has come to challenge the other king-candidates. Meo’s got a pretty good look about her and she eases into things with Shoko and Oka easily because of Shoko’s knowledge of the candidates in general while Oka has found her place among the people easily. Meo’s only recently come here but we see that she’s had no real problems settling in herself, especially since she’s pretty and has gained a fan club, a model agency trying to recruit her, and a lot more guys that want to protect her.
Of course, because she’s come here to face all challengers, she’s actually on her way to a challenge right now with the others with her. That it turns out to be Moriking is no surprise but I love all the posturing she goes into and all the proper battle etiquette all while Moriking is just kind of standing there by the river. He’s not phased by much these days and is enjoying his time with humanity. The fight itself is pretty quick – which you can say about most of the fights in this series in general – and while it goes as expected it does leave me curious to see what Meo’s path going forward will be. Will she continue to attempt to fight, will she fall in with one of the groups, or will she stick to her own path separate from everyone else?
In Summary:
I’m still kind of surprised that I’m reading Moriking after fifteen chapters as I figured I’d check it out and it would fall into some uninteresting patterns pretty quickly. But Hasegawa has found a good path for it and I’ve been enjoying the character additions, the interactions between them, and the mix of action and comedy. It’s definitely more of a comedy series than an action one and it knows how to work the fights well when they do hit without it being a weeks-long event. With solid character designs and a good sense of humor, Moriking continues to be a pretty enjoyable series.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Shonen Jump
Release Date: August 10th, 2020
