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Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Jiro Suzuki. Released in Japan in two and 1/2 separate volumes as “Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Turn of the Golden Witch” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine GFantasy. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The Turn of the Golden Witch concludes, and takes a turn for the grotesque and humiliating. The cover chosen (at the last minute, if advance solicits are to judge) by Yen for the omnibus features Rosa, the last remaining Ushiromiya sibling, glaring suspiciously at the reader with her Winchester at the ready. Open the cover flap, however, and you’ll get a far more appropriate image: Beatrice leering in triumph at a naked Battler, bound in chains and with his naughty bits covered by golden butterflies. Until the very last minute, what happens here is nothing less than Battler’s complete defeat by the magic of the Witch and the power of fantasy.

The choice of Rosa as the adult viewpoint character, which was uncomfortable enough in the first omnibus, gets even more tortuous here. At least with Natsuhi in Vol. 1 we had someone we could root for and sympathize with, even if her haughty pride was all too visible at times. Rosa may be trying to protect Maria and the children, but it’s not nearly as noble. (Indeed, one has to be suspicious of why she alone survived, given all seven siblings and spouses were seen in the chapel the night before the “Happy Halloween For Maria”.) Her use of the ‘wolves and sheep’ puzzle is more or less an excuse to scapegoat the servants. It’s actually oddly surreal at the very end when she finally starts attacking the fantasy “goat butlers” who arrive to destroy everything in order to save her daughter – the scenes of her and Maria reaffirming their love for each other as everything goes to hell seems even more unrealistic than the flying stakes and light swords bandied about earlier.

As for the ‘meta world’ battler and Beatrice, Battler sometimes seems to gain an advantage – the Red Truth is rolled out in this volume (which Yen, like the Japanese tankobons before it, uses a different font on – colored inks cost money), and he’s very quick to figure out how to make it work for him. But the trouble is that his ‘proof’ is simply denial. There are no witches because I say so. Whereas the answer he’s avoiding is “There are no witches because someone I know and care about is guilty instead.” If you choose to treat Umineko as a mystery and not a fantasy, you have to assume that someone is killing everyone, and try to figure out why they’re doing it. Battler, who won’t even bother to find Who, certainly is nowhere near Why. This is why Beatrice subjects him to the ‘naked furniture footstool’ punishment, and parades him past an array of butlers (and a disgusted Bernkastel). It’s his low ebb.

This brings us to this arc’s Tea Party, which this time involves Rosa waking up and not realizing what’s going on. It has to be said, this is easily the most grotesque scene in the series to date – yes, it’s even worse than the Happy Halloween candy corpses – and reminded me a bit of the horror splatter films of Mario Bava. It’s easy to see why Rosa may say she hates her siblings and her daughter – she was physically, mentally, and emotionally abused as a child, and Maria is quite the handful. But much as she’s an abusive mother, and a spiteful sibling, deep down she really does love her family. This is why Beatrice’s waving their fates in her face is so grotesque – and why Battler is able to find the gumption to stop it. (Though I could do without his asking Maria to say ‘eat me’ to him in 10 years time – why does he always fall back on being a pervert?) Indeed, you’d almost think she did this on purpose just so that they could play another game…

Like Battler, the reader, to a certain extent, is rooting for the fantasy. The scenes with Kanon and Shannon battling the stakes (even if the stakes are, sigh, moe teenage girls) are really cool, and the entire sequence plays out in various ways as dramatic, tragic, and heartwarming. Reaffirming love and choosing to go out with a smile… there are some of our very best story cliches come to life here. That said, if the reader wants to continue to say ‘there is a realistic explanation for what happened’, this arc drops the most obvious way of figuring out what that is: don’t believe everything you see or read. Clearly, if this is realistic, some of what we saw here has to be imaginary. It didn’t really happen. So, what did happen? Did Rosa murder her siblings? I doubt she could kill all six of them without a fight. Perhaps the servants, who are highly suspicious throughout this? Aw, but they’re so nice! I don’t want Shannon or Kumasawa to be a killer!

This feeling of pleasure, intrigue and discomfort is what drives the Umineko series, and it drives Battler (and us) to play another game, so we can get closer to the truth. Even if that truth involves a witch. (Also, I want to read further to find out where the hell the Battler/Beatrice fans all came from… is it all hateship? Certainly Beatrice is at her most loathsome here…) Yen are taking a break until January, but then we’ll have two more omnibuses, and focus on a new family member – get ready to get inside Eva Ushiromiya’s head.

Oh yes, about the hidden tea party: 1) Lambdadelta seems to have the body of little Miyoko Tanashi (aka Miyo Takano) and her personality of Satoko Houjou. What a horrible combination. 2) Bernkastel basically doing Rika’s “mew” line further makes the listener raise an eyebrow at Ryukishi07 when he insists she’s not Rika. Certainly SOMETHING in her is Rika…

By Kazuma Kamachi and Motoi Fuyukawa. Released in Japan as “Toaru Kagaku no Railgun” by ASCII Media Works, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

It has been noted several times that Academy City, where the events of this series take place, is providing young teens with power development so that they can, in essence, become superheroes. They are ranked all the way from Level 0 (Saten falls here, as well as Touma, though he really doesn’t count) up to Level 5. And our heroine, Misaka, is one of seven people in the entire city strong enough to be a Level 5. Of course, we’ve seen a few other Level 5s along the way. Accelerator. Mugino, leader of ITEM. And we just met Misaki and her mind-controlling in the previous volume. And it has to be said: Misaka is easily the most down-to-earth, sensible, and normal of all these overpowered lunatics.

And part of the reason for that is that, unlike most of the folks I mentioned above, Misaka isn’t lonely and doesn’t drive people away. She has a social life. She has her best friends. Yes, OK, Saten teases her, and Kuroko wants to assault her every chance she gets, but they’re still her support system that keeps her going through the tough times. Note how she tried to limit contact to those three during the Sisters Arc, where she was contemplating a) murder, and b) suicide. Unfortunately, Misaki is shaping up to be the next big antagonist, and can manipulate people’s memories. And Misaka finds out what this really means when her friends… no longer remember her.

I give credit to Misaka for taking this in and then quickly dealing with it. She’s in the middle of a crisis, one of her sisters has been kidnapped, and while I’m sure she’d love to argue with Kuroko till she’s blue in the face, there just isn’t time. But her face as she accepts what’s happened is simply depressing. Luckily, Misaki hasn’t had a chance to get to everyone, and Kongou is able to help her and give her a few words of comfort… well, anti-comfort, really. Kongou says she’ll try to get information, but Misaka absolutely shouldn’t trust it, as she may be ‘gotten at’ by the enemy.

Kongou, by the way, has two friends that we met in the previous volume, who are usually referred to as ‘those two guys/girls’ by anime fans. They’re the friends of the person who actually gets the dialogue and situations, there to show that they have their own backup and support system. And Kongou’s friends are sweet, adorable minor characters. They even joke in the first chapter about how they have no idea what it’s like to be really angry. Except… why do those two minor characters have such a large picture on the cover? That’s right, this is foreshadowing. And there are no minor characters in Railgun, there are only a bunch of awesome women who will beat the crap out of you. Watching Wannai and Awatsuki get furious and hand the minor mook (who’s a sexist to boot) his ass is a joyous thing to see.

Things are getting quite complicated as we move further into the school festival. At first we thought Misaki might be behind everything, but now it transpires there are multiple groups of villains (a favorite tactic of the author in the main Index series). Will Misaka be able to rescue her sister, restore her friends’ memories, win the athletic competitions and speak with Touma without n blushing and stuttering? Well, we’re caught up with Japan, so you’ll have to wait till April to find out!

By Quin Rose and Mamenosuke Fujimaru, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Anniversary no Kuni no Alice – Tokeiya” by Ichijinsha. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

You would think that I would have run out of things to say about these volumes. Sometimes I have, when they’re particularly pointless – see last month’s batch of Bookshelf Briefs for my opinion of the Ace spinoff – but there always seem to be a few nuggets of interest to keep me going. It also helps that this volume focuses on one of my favorite of Alice’s romantic choices, Julius Monrey, the clockmaker. (In case you’re wondering about the ‘Anniversary’ thing in the Japanese title, it’s what they called the updated PS3 version of Alice in the Country of Hearts.)

The basic premise won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s read the previous spinoffs of this endless otome game series. Alice is trying to get away from an oppressive Peter White at Heart Castle, so she asks Julius if she can stay at the clocktower for a while. He agrees, and they gradually begin to open up to each other. As their relationship deepens, however, Alice has to not only deal with her own feelings, and the fact that her beloved is not the type to take the initiative, but also realize that Julius is hated by a large number of folks throughout Wonderland. Can she come to terms with what his job really entails? And what of her ever-present need to return to her sister?

Julius is a rarity in the set of Wonderland males that Alice runs into. He’s passive, introverted, and taciturn. He will happily stay in his tower for weeks, just working on clocks and sleeping when he remembers to. After several stories with Blood, or Ace, or the twins, or Eliot, or Boris, he feels like a breath of fresh air. He also causes Alice to need to be more proactive, rather than simply have the love interest be aggressive consistently until she gives in. There’s lots of adorable scenes here.

Also, he’s a mortician. Who can resurrect the dead. Only not really. Wonderland’s weird world, where everyone has clocks instead of hearts, and people can be ‘resurrected’ but aren’t quite the same people they were before, makes almost everyone uncomfortable, and that gets taken out on Julius. He’s clearly not doing this for fun, but it’s his role, and he regards it as necessary. But in a way, hanging out with him is keeping Alice in a constant shadow of death – something that I imagine makes Peter quite nervous, given what they’re all trying to make Alice not remember.

This one-shot also has an unusual ending in that, when Alice confesses her love, she chooses to remain in Wonderland and stop trying to return to her own world. Which she’s done before, but in this case the vial filled with people’s feelings that she carries around throughout the game is seen in the final shot to be shattered at her feet. It’s a striking image, showing that there’s no going back. I will admit I’m not entirely happy with the basic premise of the series being ‘if she remembers her traumatic past that makes it a bad end’, which seems to romanticize denial more than I’d like. Still, it does make for a good capper on what has been a fairly enjoyable, if slight, story.

There are also two Crimson Empire stories at the end. Luckily, they are shorter in length than they were in the Ace book. I say luckily as they were incredibly boring and tedious. Alas, you’re better off with Alice than Sheila.

By Shinobu Ohtaka. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

I like Shonen Sunday series a lot, and I wish they sold better over here, as I’ve noted before. Therefore, when a really good Sunday series debuts, I get a bit excited. Of course, like most really good shonen series, you read the first volume and realize ther4e’s going to be several volumes of setup before we get to the really good stuff. This one is clearly in for the long haul. That said, the worldbuilding is fun, particularly if you are a fan (as I am) of the Arabian Nights stories, which are used as the basis for this series.

The boy on the cover is Aladdin, one of the two main heroes we meet in this volume (we also meet a third major character, but spoilers). Aladdin is very much cut from Luffy stock (the author notes she grew up in high school reading Jump, which sounds like it was right about when One Piece hit it big, so this isn’t surprising), being naive, upbeat, and generally happy-go-lucky. Unlike Luffy, he also seems to have a thing for busty women, though he’s young enough that no one really minds all that much. He carries a flute with a genie inside, which is generally weak/strong depending on how much food he’s eaten, and gives him most of his cool powers.

The other main lead is Alibaba, who is also another common shonen hero. He’s been slightly trampled down by life, and is trying to make it through this world by being a cynical money-grubber. Sadly, he has a good heart and can’t stand injustice, so that doesn’t work out very well for him. It’s not helping that he runs into Aladdin, who frequently serves as his conscience when Alibaba is trying to drown out its loud voice. Alibaba does NOT have a genie who can grant his every wish, so has to get by on street smarts and some basic fighting skills. He makes an excellent contrast with Aladdin.

After the two of them team up, we hit what seems to be the other main feature of this world, at least in this early part of the series: dungeon crawling. Yes, gamers will feel sympathetic here. There’s a twisty maze of passages (all alike) that have to be marked as ‘bad’ by previous dead explorers. There’s hideous creatures, and deadly traps. And there’s also, allegedly, buttloads of treasure. Treasure that everyone seems to have been waiting for a kid like Aladdin and his genie to show up so they can use him to acquire it. As such, we meet, right near the end, the lord of the territory Jamil and his faithful slave (so faithful she returns to him even after getting freed by Aladdin) Morgiana. It’s not entirely clear if this will be our first bad guy or if his ways will be changed by our heroes’ goodness and niceness. I suppose we must wait till Vol. 2 to find out.

Again, there’s not much that’s original here. But it’s fun! Likeable characters, a lot of fascinating Arabian tropes, some cool fights, and a quest that can go anywhere. Magi is a big hit in Japan, with an anime under its belt already, so I’m very pleased that Viz is taking a chance on it. If you like One Piece or Toriko, give Magi a try.