The story continues to get better. In general, refer back to my other (brief) reviews for earlier volumes. A few things stand out for this volume in particular:

There's reference to a character who only exists in flashbacks, and his son. All the hints and foreshadowing and so on suggest that the son is one particular character, except for the fact that twenty years have passed, which makes it effectively impossible for it to be that character, the way he has been depicted thus far. I guess I'll have to read the next volume to figure out what's going on with that.

Character development is even getting a fair bit of attention for characters who are long dead by the time this series began (in volume zero). I like this. Static, two-dimensional, trite and overused character concepts bore me; this series seems intent on developing characters well beyond that kind of facile stereotyping.

One female character who ends up bathing a fair bit (semi-gratuitous nudity) seems almost entirely immune to having her nipples show, which seems odd in the context of other nudity in this series. In fact, the majority of nudity in this volume involves that character, and there is basically only one page in the volume in which there's any real nipple in view -- and that's mostly a different character's nipples. I wonder if there's some kind of bias toward presenting the girl's "purity" in some way by hiding her nipples behind her hair, or maybe the whole series is just leaning more and more toward getting less graphic in terms of nudity. The contrast with the rest of the depictions of nudity and sexuality in the series is just a bit jarring.

I still enjoy it. I'll read more. ( )