Two episodes in, Sabikui Bisco is kind of mysterious on some level.  But it’s the sort of mysterious where you feel like you know exactly what you’re dealing with, even if the specifics of the plot are still a cipher.  This show is comfortable for me as a long-time anime fan, like a favorite old sweater you’ve worn for years but doesn’t get called up into the rotation much anymore.  And maybe the highest praise I can pay it is so far at least, it really doesn’t feel like a light novel adaptation.

Actually Bisco almost feels like something to tide us over until the inevitable Dandadan (it got nominated for the Manga Taishou this week, ROFL) adaptation gets announced.  There are lots of Kekkai Sensen vibes here too in addition to the obvious Gainax DNA, which makes sense as that was probably Bones’ most Gainax-like series (even RahXephon, Eva ripoff that it was, had a very proto-Bones sensibility to it) and Matsumoto Rie Bones most Gainax-influenced director.  That’s lofty company and Sabikui Bisco certainly isn’t anywhere near that level yet, but it has a real charisma to it.

Any show that gifts us with “The bastard released the damn hippos!” has got something going for it, that’s for sure.  So far this is mostly weirdness for its own sake and that has a limited shelf life, but it’s zany fun and we certainly haven’t reached it yet.  The hippo thing happens as Bisco and his mentor Jabi are riding around on a giant crab named Actagawa, dodging gunfire from the governor’s bunny-masked troops.  There’s also a take on a C-130 cargo plane called an Escargot, which looks like it has a giant snail on its nose and spews toxic green slime.  I’ve been to my share of Grateful Dead concerts, and I’m pretty sure the novelist’s love of mushrooms goes beyond the plot level.

While Panda-sensei got most of the oxygen in the premiere, this time around the focus is on the title character.  The whole thing progresses out of sequence time-wise, and nearly back-to-front, an affectation that I’m not sure added anything but unnecessary confusion to a rather interesting narrative.  Bisco (of course he was the “priest” at the border crossing) is effectively a terrorist but he’s clearly intended to be a sympathetic character.  It’s obvious that the government is lying about the rust disease and Bisco is cultivating shrooms to try and engineer a cure, and he certainly cherishes the old man.  As to all the people surely killed as he blows up about half the city with his arrows and fungi, that’s not dwelt on here.

Bisco and Miro has the makings of a fairly winning odd couple pairing, a classic old-school anime dynamic.  Jabi is suffering from advanced rust disease in addition to being wounded by the snail slime, so Miro is a person of particular importance to Bisco at the moment.  But it’s pretty clear that their long-term goals are aligned, and they’re going to be partners officially before too long.  One wrinkle in this will be Miro’s sister, who’ll probably have a much harder time accepting Bisco than Panda does.  But Panda needs a rust cure for her just as badly as Bisco does for Jabi.

It may just be that Sabikui Bisco is one of those series you don’t want to think about too much – just let the zaniness wash over you and enjoy it.  That’d be perfectly fine, but I’m hopeful that there’s an underlying wit to the writing that will elevate it beyond that level.  My track record with LN adaptations is pretty grim once you start getting past the first couple of episodes, but this series has a whiff of something different about it that makes me feel cautiously hopeful, at the very least.