Thank you NetGalley and Viz Media for this arc!!

5 / 5 stars

I am absolutely loving this series so far! I opened this volume up tonight thinking I'd just read a chapter or two and oops I read all 480 pages in one sitting 😂 Marin and Satoru are such sweet kids in love, and they love their robot friend Monroe - but being kids with parents that belittle and control them they unfortunately put too much faith into what Monroe tells them. I am so glad these are getting translated; I love the art style and the story, and I honestly desperately need to know what happens next I'M CONCERNED

CW: suicide

In this second volume of what continues to be a slow-burn sci fi series from manga great Kazuo Umezz, it becomes much more clear what's at stake: humanity. Not, to be clear, its ultimate fate, or at least not yet, but rather what happens when people don't listen to each other or are taken in by what machines tell them. Marin and Satoru, the children who began teaching manufacturing machine "Monroe" in the previous volume, have fallen madly in twelve-year-old love, but none of the adults believe them. This takes them to some dangerous places as they desperately try to validate their feelings, but when they ask Monroe for help, the machine gives them something very, very dangerous. These aren't children who slipped through society's cracks; they're kids who are clearly loved, but they need more from the adults in their lives, which is what leads them to seek it from each other and Monroe. It's a dangerous journey, and one they may not come back from.

This still isn't going to work for everyone, and I think that's actually more true of this second volume, because it gets into some very fraught territory. The science fiction elements are growing a bit stronger, but right now the base story still feels like it's primarily about people looking for connections, possibly in the worst places. It's well done, but what it's doing is still a bit unclear.

This volume really ended on that kind of cliffhanger. Thankfully, there are more coming, but I had a moment of no, that can't be the end. From where we last left off, life isn't going so hot our young friends, and their mechanical arms named after American actresses. Monroe is still center here, and I love how the art depicts digitization. The story also takes and interesting turn as the children's' lives start to crumble around them, the art slowly becomes more unsettling.

The path of travel of a robot gaining AI intelligence had already been intimated in the first part of My Name is Shingo. Although not yet named as such, the implication is that Shingo started out “life” as 'Monroe', a construction robot at the factory where Konma’s dad works. Since the workers there know little about computer technology, Konma has helped Monroe develop self-learning capabilities. Perhaps not as much as he thinks when he starts playing with the programming, but at the same time although those changes are taking place gradually at the start of this second Perfect Collection of the series, there is clearly a long way to self-awareness yet. Funnily enough - though not if you are familiar with Umezz, his young children protagonists are embarking on a similar journey.

There is a bit of a setback for Konma at the start of Volume 2, when Marin's diplomat father takes the family to England. Monroe is also behaving erratically and the factory, as might have been foreseen, has laid off all its workers including Komna's father. This makes access to the robot difficult for the young boy, not to mention stirring up further trouble at home, especially as Marin has left a coded message that only Monroe can translate. It's clear however in the development of Umezz’s striking artwork, that little by little those mechanical circuits are starting to developing and make unexpected connections and turning into something organic, or perhaps that's just metaphorically how Umezz's abstract visuals depict it.

Nothing however is ever predictable about the twists and turns that can happen to children in the dark horror of Kazuo Umezz works. The artist seems to take up the altered or naive perspective of a child who finds the ways if the adult world threatening, and both Konma and Marin face very different challenges from within their own families and feel like outsiders to everyone else. How they react to these challenges however is anything but conventional. Umezz does not take the external adult objective view, but sees it through the eyes and imagination of a child. And the children here have a way of creating their own subjective realities that have nothing to do with the objective reality.

Without going into unnecessary spoiler territory then (although clearly there is a long way to go in the series yet), while the conventional route would be to show the children's developing relationship with the robot, Book 2 takes a surprising focus on the unusual and strange relationship between Marin and Konma that, like Baptism, looks to be heading into mildly uncomfortable taboo territory. The outside world reflects their turmoil, certainly in as far as it is detailed in Umezz’s expressionistic artwork. Storms, beating rain, lightning striking trees might be familiar indicators of emotional reactions reflected in the world outside (though rarely as explosively depicted here) , but the ‘language’ of the computer response to their relationship is also vital to the purpose of the artist's vision.

The art style is more detailed and elaborate here than in The Drifting Classroom, but it wholly reflects the unique character of Umezz's own original style. The strange bizarre detailed full page illustrations of children in surreal horror situations at the opening of each chapter seem to be leaking gradually into the real world, or at least the distinct worldview of Konma or even Umezz. His depiction of the inner workings of the computer brain waves so to speak is imaginative and spectacular. And when you are talking about this particular artist/creator, you can be sure that, despite having been given some indication of the direction this is heading, anything can happen. And as there is a long way to go yet, you can expect this to be as shocking as much of the artist's other work.