Fullmetal Alchemist: The Complete Four-Panel Comics [Hiromu Arakawa]

I’ve loved the world of Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa for an incredibly long time. And while I am not a massive manga fan and this series is basically the only manga that I’ve actually gone out of my way to get physical copies of. It’s one of few that I’ve spent the time reading. To date, I can say I’ve only truly finished two mangas. That said, by the time I started actually buying these books I was met with the unfortunate realization that the four-panel comics were not going to be included in the Fullmetal Editions of the series that I was buying.

Needless to say, that news was incredibly disheartening. Here I was trying to build and complete a collection and I was missing out on massive amounts of material. If you’ve ever looked into Fullmetal Alchemist and actually buying the complete collection, you’ll find out pretty quickly that it’s expensive. Thus, my collecting has been rather slow. Finding this gem made me feel a lot better about my choice to buy the Fullmetal Editions rather than the original translations.

I really enjoyed reading these. Even more so, I deeply appreciated the fact that they all were dated and categorized into where they came from, be it from the original mangas or even the film and tv show adaptations. They were enormously fun to read and added more to a story that I’ve been in love with for a while.

My biggest disappointment with Fullmetal Alchemist: The Complete Four-Panel Comics is the fact that it is, technically, not complete. And it’s just like, if you’re going to give it a title like that you should at least include all the comics that exist, right? Now, not everything that was excluded, I guess, technically does count as a “four-panel comic,” which I suppose was part of the thought process in excluding those. Still, what that basically means to me is that my collection will never be fully complete due to thsoe that are missing.

And that’s disappointing.

But, overall, I did deeply enjoy reading this book and I’m glad to have it on my shelf. So, really, it’s not the worst thing in the world that some stuff wasn’t included.

🦊🦊🦊🦊🦊