Steel Ball Run Volume 4: A Crazy Journey

After Johnny and Gyro escape that crazy family, we are left with Mountain Tim being too much as usual and just going after our protagonists and not the crazy family… But no! It turns out that the crazy family was plotting something and trapped our group. The dumpster doesn’t have a compactor strong enough for the amount of trash this family is. Simply put, this family is suffering from main character syndrome to the max. And this image, thanks to them, will live rent-free in my head.

No context will help:

After this literary traumatizing couple of chapters, we finally get more casual tea to spill and learn about Gyro’s super shocking backstory, which just made me realize how everyone in this arc has a super tragic backstory, well, mostly. I don’t think an overuse of tragic backstories is the worst, but I wish we had someone who had a vibe. And then they were just like: Why don’t I do this race? Wishing, even though I know what’s next, for more variety. Though, I get why not, and you could say no backstory here is tragic as much as it is morally grey, reflecting human beings making mistakes or ones they see as such or moving on with life and seeing the race as a casual bow to set themselves free. Anyway, Gyro’s flashback shows some kid Gyro is trying to save and basically answers why he did the race: to save some kid from execution and the execution he was nearly forced to deliver.

Now, we have some terrorist we need to stop, and Mountain Tim literary just explodes on the job. And I do mean literary. Downright explodes his entire body, as now it is up to Johnny and Gyro to stop this terrorist before they are next. Though Johnny and Gyro decide to ditch it and run off, the terrorist chases them, and later Gyro gets sick of it and beats him with a good slap. A steel slapping. With a ball:

I really like the variety this volume has. We don’t spend the whole time, unlike how previous parts would, on some random, mediocre character that is only there to cause our characters problems. Mainly since these side characters are well placed and make sense as enemies since they are in a race against each other. Even better, thanks to this race, we get to see a variety of awesome locations Araki can draw that look fabulous, especially towards the end of the volume.

Through all that chaos this volume had, we got one of the greatest pieces Araki ever did. Just magical. (It makes me believe unicorns must’ve existed with this level of sustainable evidence.)