Gunsmith Cats Revised Edition Manga Volume 3
ガンスミス キャッツ

–> Buy Gunsmith Cats Revised Edition Manga Volume 3 from Amazon!

And so we come to the 3rd adaptation of the bunkobon from Japan (originally tankoubon 5 & 6) of the Gunsmith Cats manga. As before, there are two story arcs to cover. The first is the “Bean Bandit” arc. While Bean Bandit has been in the manga for a long time, this arc is dedicated to the “driver” (I kinda like “transporter” better considering the movie of the same title) that has caused Rally no end of grief. Since she’s out of the bounty hunting business for a while thanks to her actions while under the influence in the last arc, Rally decides that Bean Bandit needs to stop bringing in drugs to the city. So she gets him to bet that if she stops his current delivery, he’ll never make another drug run.

This arc pretty much is standard Gunsmith Cats manga fare — lots of guns, blood, violence, shooting, and street chases. To be honest, I’m kind of surprised someone in Hollywood hasn’t turned these into live-action summer blockbuster movies. They have lots of what the popcorn crowd would love.

The second arc is “Smart” arc where Rally is tasked with taking the famous magician named Smart down as he jumped bail. Smart and his estranged wife are in a custody battle over their daughter Jeena, with the wife resorting to dirty tactics to get everything from Smart. Things get complicated when Jeena’s friends try to help young Jeena see her father and Jeena’s mother reports this as a kidnapping by Smart. Things get more complicated when the mafia uses Jeena to try to get Smart to do a job for them. Now the race is on to free Jeena and take care of the bad guys.

As before, this arc has the same elements, only a bit more nudity. However, I have to say that I liked this arc the best of any I’ve read so far. For starters, we start off with some character development for Rally and see how she obtained her interest in guns through her father. Further, considering how Rally and Jeena both wanted to follow their father’s footsteps rather than the path laid out by their mother, one can understand how Rally would take a shine to Jeena. Plus by having cute kids as the victim, one really wants Rally and company to kick bottom when dealing with the villains.

The only bad thing about this arc is that it just ends. Technically, everything is resolved, but it isn’t very satisfying. A few more pages to deal with aftermath would have been best but I guess Sonoda-sensei ran out of pages. Looking into the next book, I see that the new story arc begins so no luck there for an aftermath.

There are no extras in this volume. Dark Horse continues its “make it grittier” adaptation, which one is used to by now. At least nothing is edited out though as happened in the initial release from Dark Horse.

Bottom line: If you like almost non-stop action, guns, cars, and girls, AND you liked the other manga volumes, there’s nothing here to turn you away. Brownie points for a bit of character development for Rally in this volume as well. ^_^