Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sgt. Frog: Volume 4: Frog in a Bender

by Mine Yoshizaki, 179 pages

An elite platoon of frog-like aliens has come to Earth to prepare the way for a full-scale invasion. The mission: perform recon, subdue the masses, and call it in. Unfortunately for Sergeant Keroro and his men, they set up their secret base beneath the Hinata household.

The boy, Fuyuki, is all right as a conquered minion, being an easygoing, geeky kid and lover of all things paranormal. But his grouchy, athletic superior (a.k.a. sister), Natsumi, proves more powerful (and more beautiful, to Corporal Giroro's mind) an enemy than they'd expected to encounter. And then there's the all-seeing, intimidating General (the kids' manga-editor mother).

Before they know it, the frogs find themselves the ones submitting, with irresponsible Keroro's list of assigned household chores growing longer every time he cooks up a cockamamie scheme to usurp control (or score some awesome new Gundam models). Keroro goofs around and blows their invasion budget on toys while super-soldier Giroro meditates as far away from his embarrassing fellows as possible, mad sadistic genius First Sergeant Kururu invents twisted weapons for his own amusement (and tests them on whoever's unfortunate enough to be at hand), and spacey Private Tamama tries to keep his dual personality (one sweet, one not so much) in check and skips after his beloved commanding officer. There's a fifth one, but the others have forgotten him, poor thing.

It's a New Year, and following a disorderly celebration involving model glue vapors and copious amounts of alcohol, Keroro decides to take over a weather satellite, make it snow, and then conquer the Earth in a winter invasion. Only he hasn't counted on snow being so cold, on frogs being pretty much naked, and on snowball fights being quite so diverting (and distracting...and likely to cause froggy frostbite). They don't make it past the front yard. Other shenanigans ensue, including miniaturizing the gang in order to combat the micro-aliens giving Keroro a cavity, Tamama having to hide the reality of the platoon's failure from an over-eager fan from home, and Keroro temporarily switching bodies with the clever Natsumi (with predictably weird results).

Sgt. Frog is mindless slapstick and fun in small doses. Pop-culture-addicted Keroro's selfish ineptitude amuses as his subordinates alternately confirm and then relinquish their allegiance to him and his "prisoners" try to maintain some affection for him while keeping his perpetually generated chaos as contained as possible. *kero kero* :P

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