Review:

This installment picks up where the last one left off - The eraser Layafel, a former comrade of Tsukasa Amou (one of the 6 protagonists), tries to carry out an assignment to murder the "mind breaker" Mana Kirihara. Amou and Kaname intervene and stop the assailant and protect Mana through a massive fireball and some healing powers.

Still, while battle does come up in this volume, it seems more centered around character development - especially between Tsukasa Amou and Tomonori. The former is a member of the eraser faction with amnesia, while the latter is the priest/Wiz-Dom faction member who found him and took him in. Still, while their relationship develops it definitely begins to look more like something out of Lolita than a father-son relationship - a fact that the author himself points out on page 82. But non-explicit yaoi aside, the dialogue in volume two is an improvement; this can best be seen when the 6 protagonists gather together under one roof. Still, there are more than a few places where Gokurakuin simply can't gather the necessary tension to make his dry and somber parts stick. Also the focus on Tsukasa's amnesia as a plot vehicle can be traced right back to that post on RPG/Anime cliches. So the writing in this volume, while it's better than last time, continues to be plagued by the problems that were in the prequel.

The art is another area of improvement over the original. Gokurakuin manages to use some chibi to great effect in showing the characters' interactions with one another. Also, he begins to use slight modifications in the character designs to better differentiate them and give them a life of their own. While these improvements show the beginning of a developing personal style, they are in themselves pretty minor, so overall, it still looks much like any other manga.

This volume of Juvenile Orion really soes move the plot along, and even manages to introduce the main antagonist and her cohorts. My problem is that I could swear I've seen this little goth/lolita villainess about half-a-dozen times before. Still, this second edition was a solid improvement over the first; yet the hand of mediocrity still grips it tightly as it repeats the failures of the first installment. The end result is a so-so manga that's worth an in-store read if you are desperate for something to kill time in the local bookstore, but not much else.

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