It's Not Fair!

Thanks to the guys on Comic Pants, I've gotten hooked on the Tokyopop manga series Battle Royale The basic premise is the standard bunch of people on an island who have to kill each other until one is left with a twist: the contestants are all relatively innocent high school students. The fact that none of the students wanted to be there really gives it an edge. The series also shares Lost's penchant for flashbacks, which works really well.

I asked for a couple volumes of the remainder of the series for my birthday. My Mom surprised me and bought them all. I've been parceling them out since, really wanting to finish the series but not wanting to rush through it. Last night, the rubber band in my brain broke, largely due to the Adventures in Sanitary Sewers I'm having at Fortress Zahler, and I decided to veg out and read the rest of the series.

I get to the last issue, and about twenty pages from the end, my Spider-Sense starts going off. Something's wrong. My fears are realized as I get to the end: This isn't the last volume. It's the second last, and Mom didn't get the last one.

Now, let's be clear, it's not my Mom's fault. Heck, I'm impressed she bought them at all. Mom's not a big comics person, and while she's absorbed a lot of comics knowledge from me, her buying specific comic series is like sending me to buy car parts. I only know what I have written down. There's no way she knew she was one shy. Heck, I didn't know she was one shy.

It's all good, anyway. It's nice to find a series that draws you in enough that you get upset you haven't reached the end. And I'll be buying the last volume off Amazon pretty soon, so I'll be set. But, as I'm avoiding working on anything large right now, I thought I'd share my pain.