About a decade ago I saw a part of the "Hellsing" anime and enjoyed it, so as part of my recent graphic novel binge I decided to read the Hellsing manga. Admittedly I missed volumes 4, 5, and 6 because the library doesn't have them, but returning to 7, it seems the only thing Kohta Hirano cares about is stylish black-and-white bloodspray - 185 pages of it. It looked like the only bit of detail I may have missed in those intervening volumes was that Alucard's protégé Seras Victoria found a man to love. In any case, logic really isn't important to Hirano - and in fact characters aren't important either. Or perhaps they are, but they're intensely ludicrous (and that's okay with him). All he cares about are the images, and man, they're glorious. Over-the-top, certainly, but a lot of his drawings are magical. So much so that I stumbled through seven volumes (it would be ten, if you can get the whole series) of a non-sensical story about Alucard (the greatest vampire who ever lived - see, that's "Dracula" spelled backwards, so clever ...), the Hellsing organization (super-secret British government operation that manages Alucard), the fifty-years delayed invasion of Britain by a Nazi army of vampires and werewolves, AND the Holy Roman Catholic Army (or whatever he called it). And let's not forget the awful, awful use of bad accents and slang to let us know that these people are ENGLISH, GERMAN, and in one case FRENCH. I kept reading because a single book can be consumed in 30 minutes (that's all the content it's got) and it was free (from the library). But ... it was more stylish and successful when the full-on bloodshed was interspersed with people and less bloody action, as in the earlier books - before he started to reveal how little sense his full story arc made.

Did I mention the bloodshed?