The House of C

They’ve found the Stradivarius. Now to the hard part – getting it back! Of course, that is their job… and do it they must, even if it means once again going up against the mighty Protector, Ryudo Hishiki. The Protector is a big, burly, bone-crushing bodyguard with a serious beef to with our fearless heroes.

But when Ginji takes out the lights, the brave turns to the blind Madoka to get them out of the bind!

Volume 4 continues the adventures of the GetBackers retrieval service duo of Evil Eye-bearing Ban Mido and electrically charged Ginji Amano, with them this time around tasked with trying to retrieve a young, blind musician’s prize Stradivarius violin from a seedy underworld family.

To make matters even more difficult, the man who has stolen the priceless violin has hired a number of freelancers to protect it, including Shido the Beastmaster and Ryudo Hishiki, the unstoppable protector. What happens from here on out is one long struggle and fight as the boys and their charge face off against their adversaries in an attempt to reach the violin, before tackling the even more difficult task of getting back out again! And to make matters worse, there are a couple of hidden assassins also waiting in the wings to strike when the opportunity presents itself!

Writer Yuya Aoki, under the pen name of Tadashi Agi, is behind the adventure once more, delivering a volume that is full of action and suspense, brining in no less than six or seven big fights before the last page. As per usual there is a lot of clever use around the Evil Eye ability, and of course Ginji’s more mundane electricity generating abilities, and so to sum it up this volume is very much about the action.

However, apart from the very cool use of the Evil Eye ability, it is really difficult to get into and enjoy Aoki’s style of writing, which often feels very forced, over dramatic and sometimes over the top. It just doesn’t flow all that well and I found myself laboring to get through the book, despite the fact that is contains so many fight sequences which normally should fly by!

The art of Rando Ayamine is quite frankly inconsistent, bordering on terrible at times, with his biggest problem appearing to be putting heads on bodies. The way his heads often connect to their respective bodies are often quite ridiculous, and too many times do his hardcore characters of Ban and Ginji just appear to… well “girly”. Still, it is not all bad and he does capture a lot of the action sequences quite well, as well as present some fantastic horror sequences when it comes to the Evil Eye bits. Oh and his comedy switch up style is pre

Overall, I really didn’t enjoy this outing, and it’s a pity because I remember kind of enjoying the anime series (based on this) a couple of years back. I found it a chore to work through, and that is quite frankly never a good thing, meaning that I can’t really recommend anyone bother with this.

Ouch.

Related Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetBackers