Review by Ian Keogh

The Scavengers, always young teenage women, are ostensibly working for an organisation tasked with covertly retrieving items of value from the past, and these might not always be items we’d consider to have any worth. More recently, though, retrieval teams have been encountering the life-threatening danger of a form of Specter known as an Avenger. To this end the training of new recruits has been accelerated and as seen in Scavengers 01 veteran operative Toto has been assigned to mentor them.

It leads to a complete change of tone. Ryo Furube presumably intends to draw a contrast between the caution of veterans and the naivety of newbies, but the shorthand characterisation over the opening chapter results in some irritating personalities. It’s also presumed that all readers have absorbed the information of the first volume, as there’s no explanation during events as to how someone survives an appalling injury. It’s eventually provided as a text feature sixty pages later. In other places there’s care taken to provide explanations, such as noting how supplies are mysterious replenished in a medical facility regularly visited by the Scavengers.

The bulk of this volume concerns two different missions mixing experienced Scavengers with rookies after the discovery that there’s likely to be former Scavengers responsible for disruption and attacks in the past.

Furube’s opening volume varied the art, mixing standard manga styling of big eyes and few backgrounds, with some astounding detail, both on equipment and locations. Having established the protective suit warn by an operative named Hana, Furube ensures consistency, but otherwise there’s so little of the visual magic that made the first volume so rich, the sample art an exception. It’s all the more disappointing for the fleeting manifestations, such as a lovingly designed gun.

More world-building is delivered in passing, some of it very sinister, but it currently seems sensational ideas grafted on rather than items of substance for going forward. The cast is also comprehensively expanded. The benefit of widening the universe, though, is weighed down by the superficial personalities, and as Furube near enough admits at the end, he’s backed himself into a corner by using numbers no-one’s going to keep clear in their heads rather than names.

The opening volume was fresh, original and visually startling, but with this volume the series has rapidly settled for complacency.