The character designs/artwork that I’ve seen for Gunparade March, and more specifically the anime, have always intrigued me, so, when Big Brain Comics started a huge manga sale a couple weeks ago ($20 for as much manga as you can stuff into a bag, the source of much of my backlog), I jumped at the chance to grab a few volumes and check it out. Let’s see if it was worthwhile…

World War II, 1945, the war ends not with nuclear warheads, but with an invasion, as “Phantom Beasts” arrive in huge numbers to wreak havoc and drive humanity towards extinction. Jump to the turn of the century, after a particularly brutal battle wipes out over 3/4s of the remaining JSDF, the age of conscription is lowered to 14 in order to refill the ranks as quickly as possible, with no more than 6 months of training before shifting to active service. This gives us our excuse for a squad of teenagers, but at least its a fairly reasonable one given the sitation. But then they go and give our stars some new, top of the line, mecha, rather than letting the vets have it, ah well, there goes the grounded logic. To be fair though, they initially train with older models, giving the suggestions that there’s a number of them out there, so it could be normal in this divergent timeline.

However, it looks like its rapidly becoming something of a harem series as well, filled with an improbable number of cute girls of various stereotypes, and the lead female’s emotions running wild whenever the lead male does something with one of the other girls. Still, while the characters themselves are (so far) fairly bland in and of themselves, Sanadura manges to provide some nice interactions between them. Particularly, the moments where they stop working against each other and put the groups interests ahead of their own were really nicely done. Additionally, it was nice to see that by the end of the volume the male and female leads actually figure out they’re interested in each other and make it known, which spawns possibilities down the line.

Art’s nice and crisp, lots of variety to the character design(though I was getting mixed up with the males from time to time, the lead seems to vary in height…), and a promise of nasty military vs monster fighting. The mid-sized mecha are a bit generic, but I like the lines on them, and there’s something about them when they’re that big, a certain something that sparks possibility in their use/application. There’s some potential with the series, kind of hard to tell after one volume, its not great, but its not complete trash either, sitting somewhere in the middle. The best thing I can say about it is that its doing some stuff that brings Valkyria Chronicles to mind, particularly the overall focus of their status as a squad with people covering various roles. Between that and the character interactions, I’m cautiously optimistic about the next volume, will have to see about that.

Hmm. Seems that Sanadura also keeps a blog with a decent amount of sketches mixed in with other postings. Digging through a few pages, it seems to be a worksafe affair, though it seems that he(she?)’s also done some ero-doujins that are somewhat prominently linked to at the top of the site, so there could be some surprises popping up as you dig through the site. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.