Sailor Moon 7 [Paperback]

I am loathe to give this manga a score as low as 3 stars. The quality of the story and art of Sailor Moon itself is fantastic, and in my opinion, Takeuchi produces some of her best work in this Arc and this volume. However, the continuous translation and writing errors consistently produced by Kodansha's translation is solely to blame for dragging down the score to a mere 3 stars.

Story & Art: Volume 7 covers the second part of the Infinity Arc. While I'll try to avoid going into spoilers, it highlights the return of a beloved character, and the rise of new powers, both good and evil. The story starts to get very intense in this volume and a lot of plot and background story revolving around Hotaru and Mugen Academy that was alluded to in Sailor Moon 6 is revealed here. Takeuchi's art is some of the most beautiful in this volume, and as always, there are several color images for the first few pages of the book. The fully-translated preview of Volume 8 is also back at the end of the book.

Translation & Writing: The translation itself doesn't seem to have any serious flaws like in some prior volumes. However, it does have serious typos which could have been avoided with a simple spell-check, or from being carefully read even once before being published. Multiple words in the book are missing spaces, causing two separate words to become one jumble; a "what" gets turned into "whatt", and letters are omitted ("Pease" instead of "Please"), "Sasanqua Camilla" instead of "Sasanqua Camellia", even though it's referred to as the "Christmas Camellia" in the very next panel. (It's a flower, not a Duchess.) What's upsetting about this is the fact that it's been happening since Volume 1 of this new release from Kodansha and very little is apparently being done with regards to quality control. This is especially discouraging since Kodansha is releasing later prints that correct the errors and have plans to release a box-set which presumably will also have these errors fixed. Good that they're fixing their error? Sure. The fact that 7 volumes in to this series, 1 full year after the release of the first volume that they're still releasing a faulty, typo-ridden product, however, is irresponsible and punishes the fans that eagerly await to buy the first release of each volume (and are more or less creating the demand that's resulting in reprints and box-sets) and frankly, is extremely unprofessional of a professional manga company. Many of us were hopeful that after the mostly-accurate and minimal-typo Volume 6 that these kinds of mistakes were no longer going to be an issue, but apparently Kodansha can't be troubled to skim, read, edit or spellcheck their products before sending them out to the printers.

Summary: Great story, great art, great series and you should read and enjoy it. You might, however, consider waiting for a later printing when Kodansha considers getting around to fixing their mistakes.

If you've been following along with the series as either a long time reader or a new one, you'll be pleased with this volume. It's really well done overall.

Translation-wise, I feel like I'm reading an entirely new volume. I admit to being a little vague on exactly how the original Mixx/TokyoPop translation read, but I can honestly tell that there's a difference here. The only thing I raised an eyebrow over was the statement that Uranus was both a man and a woman. This was probably intended to read as her having male personality traits as well as female ones, but it's a little vague and considering that for the longest time there were urban legends that Uranus *was* a guy in her non-senshi form, I wish that this was a little clearer. (Long story short, for a long time in the 90s and early 2000s there were stories that back in early Moon Kingdom times Uranus had a twin brother and that the reincarnated Uranus was a man in human form and transformed into a fraternal twin sister in senshi form.) Given Haruka/Uranus's infamous history where some have tried giving her a sex change, I felt that this could have used a note in the back of the book. It's a small quibble, but one that might confuse some readers as to the context. Read as-is it sort of seems like they're saying Uranus is a hermaphrodite.

Other than that, there aren't really any huge problems. I'm struck by how sci-fi the book is in comparison to it's overly shoujo anime adaptation, but it's all in good fun. I'm eagerly awaiting the next volume of this series, especially to see how the artwork looks. I believe I can see where there's been a lot of cleanup on the artwork, but even with that this artwork has aged rather well and is a style that manga fans should definitely look at!

A must have for shoujo and manga fans!

Sailor Moon Vol. 7 continues where Vol. 6 leaves off, and throughout the volume we discover that Sailor Pluto has indeed come to play and that there's also a Sailor Senshi we never wanted to see - Sailor Saturn. Saturn is the senshi of death and only awakens when the world needs to be `reset' - her awakening means the end for Planet Earth. When Usagi finds out who Saturn really is she refuses to allow Pluto, Uranus and Neptune to kill her before she awakens, insisting that there must be another way. As always, one of my favorite parts of the manga is seeing the differences from the anime that I grew up with, and it's really fun to see Mamoru continue to have uses other than just as a flower thrower - in this volume we see Mamoru use his psychometry to save Chibi-Usa. I also love the moments where Usagi simply tells Mamoru and Chibi-Usa to stay behind because a battle is going to be dangerous - unlike in the anime Usagi is not a weak girl who constantly needs a man to save her.

Volume 7 really explores what is going on with Hotaru and fills us in on her past, and with Sailor Moon finally getting a `power-up' and briefly transforming into Princess Serenity, we finally get an explanation as to just where the rest of the senshi have been all this time, and why they are making the choices they are.