Ranma 1/2 (1993)

[らんま1/2]

Volume 24

Author/Artist: Rumiko Takahashi
Publisher: Shounen Sunday Comics

Synopsis:
When Ranma challenges Herb of the Musk Dynasty, he is locked in his girl form and must go on a journey to find the artifact that will allow him to change back.

Story/Characters:
The first encounter with Pantyhose Tarou was something of a warmup for the other two big battle epics in the series. I'm not entirely sure if I prefer the Musk Dynasty arc to the Phoenix arc. I might give a slight edge to the latter because it's the big climax for the series, but this is quite good too and you can see why stories like this became more of the focus in Inuyasha. Lime and Mint aren't great characters, but they do their bit as Herb's minions and Lime's fight with Ryouga has a lot of punch to it, no pun intended. Herb isn't terribly complex in terms of characterization, but he does make for a very formidable opponent for Ranma.

Art:
A battle epic wouldn't be complete without some epic fight scenes. As I said before, the Ryouga-Lime fight is particularly powerful.

Conclusion:
This arc is really good stuff. If the series focused on this, it'd likely fall into the common shounen trap of desperately trying to one-up the previous battle arc (which is a bad recipe for a long-running series), but because the battle epics are rare, they're that much better for it. This is one that's definitely worth having.

Rating:
Own It