Yes, I'm still reading Bleach, even though I haven't bothered to write it up for some time. Most of it has become pretty formulaic, with the good guys having to beat up on piles of more- and more-badass bad guys. There have only been a few scenes that would have been worth writing up: the Orihime-Rangiku girl-talk confessional, and Yumichika's reaction to Ikkakku's fight with Edrad Leones (lower left panel; be still, my shippy little heart!), and some of the Vizard stuff.

Then along comes this volume, with much, much awesomeness. The trouble is, I have seen people's complaints about things that happen further along. Oh Kubo-sensei, you nasty tease ... you're just toying with me, aren't you?

The rest is going under a cut - there's not much to say about the plot that won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't been keeping up.

So now that it's officially autumn (or will be, this afternoon, I think), here are the icons I've been working on ... .

Previews:

With the help of the semi-crazed, ultra-buxom rocketry expert Kukaku Shiba, teenaged novice Soul Reaper Ichigo Kurosaki and his motley crew arrive not-very-subtly in the Soul Reaper city on their quest to rescue Rukia Kuchiki, the Soul Reaper who inadvertently lost all her own powers to Ichigo in the first volume of the series. As you may recall, Rukia's actions in the living world have resulted in her being sentenced to death, and so the story becomes a race against the clock to rescue her.

The party is split up before they hit the ground, and these 11 volumes trace their assorted paths through the city as they attempt to find each other and rescue the young woman who became their friend during her sojourn in our world. Along the way, they win the grudging approval or dire enmity of various members of the Soul Reaper guard companies, and we learn more of the backstories of both the original party and their new acquaintances, as well as a lot about Soul Reaper society, training, and politics. Something is very rotten near the core of the Soul Society, and Rukia's situation is just one move of a sinister power game that some of its members are playing. Volume 20 wraps up the story arc with a dramatic showdown that involves just about all of the most interesting characters we've met thus far in the series.

I really had to do this, because I may be able to get hold of volume 21 this weekend, and I desperately wanted to be blogged up to date on at least one more series!

I've been having much too much fun with my icons. At first I felt very protective and parental and didn't want to let any of them go, but now that I have lots of them, I don't mind so much ... and it's very warm and fuzzy to see them show up in other folks' posts.

Samples:

If there's another one I use regularly that you'd like to have, you can always ask ... (the ones I still feel the most protective about are the Yukimura ones I use regularly), and I love making them by request too.

ETA: And I meant to put all the disclaimers: no hotlinking to my poor Earthlink account, please credit, etc. etc.

Or, for when I'm feeling a little nastier:

(By the utterly irreplaceable telophase)

Actually, at this point I've read the entire Bleach opus currently available in English. I didn't intend to read through the series so quickly, but the Mr. got into them. Whenever he got stuck on the other side of town because of a lousy rush hour - which is probably half of the time - I'd get these calls: "I'm at the bookstore. Exactly which volume of Bleach are we on?"

So that tells you something right there: Bleach, the manga series that the whole Cho family enjoyed enough to read it in 3 weeks flat.

However, I'm not going to blog them all at once - I started to do that, and the write-up just got too blessed long. So there will be another post for the remaining volumes.

Ichigo Kurosaki is more or less a normal high school student - except that he had orange hair and can see ghosts. (So can his fraternal twin little sisters, although they don't see the spirits so clearly. Their widowed father, a doctor who runs a clinic, is the only one in the family who can't.) Suddenly, one night, Ichigo notices that there's a girl in samurai-style gear in his room. She's Rukia Kuchiki, a "Soul Reaper," and she's hunting a type of evil ghost called a Hollow, which was probably attracted by Ichigo's psychic powers. When she becomes too injured to carry on, Ichigo agrees to take on some of her power to carry out her mission and save his family. Unfortunately, somehow all Rukia's power drains into Ichigo. Now she can't get back to her home - and she can't carry out her remaining missions in our world. If Ichigo's family, friends, and town are to be protected from Hollows, he must learn become a proper Soul Reaper.

In related news, telophase has created a nifty little online toy that lets you create your own zanpakuto - these are the nifty spirit-powered weapons used by the Soul Reapers: