[Phantom Stranger]

The more I read Mazinger Z, the less I want to.

I think this started right around the time Ashura's daughters showed up. Talk about gratuitous nudity for no other reason than boobs. Also gore, really disturbing graphic violence intertwined with sexual imagery. This would be somewhat fine if the goddamn tone could be figured out. Funny, horror, perverse, every panel is different, it's all over the place and the pacing is getting really bad. Everything that's set up is resolved in just a few pages, it feels incredibly rushed.

I'm also really getting sick of how Sayaka is being handled. She was so great and promising at the beginning of the series. Now she's just a plot device, a character that's sole existence is to give Koji a goal, for the villains to threaten and nothing more. Again, this problem mainly started around the same time Ashura's daughters were introduced. Later on She finally gets a new robot and I figure that maybe we'll get some scenes of her kicking ass, since she has something more up to par. Nope. As soon as she leaves we have her upside down chained to a crucifix with the mech's legs spread. Fucking. Subtle. But then I noticed a problem. The mech is Diana A. Diana A was not in the original Manga. Which means someone fucked up and at some point the volumes switched from the original Manga to the TV Manga. So now I gotta go back and figure out when the hell this happened. At the very least I know it was sometime after Ashura's Daughters ordeal. I'm really hoping that this is at least the reason for the most recent pacing and character issues, if not everything.