I started reading this series with the assumption that I might read one a week, interspersed with other graphic novels, and it would be a pleasure to revisit a comic which has been a big influence on me and finally read it from beginning to end. I actually half-expected to not find it as mind-opening as I did the first time I read it, or the bits of it I was able to collect, in fact I assumed it wouldn't be - there's been a lot of ink under the bridge since the days of Ummagumma Comics in the printer's shop on Father Matthew Street in Cork. But here I am, rushing through it. Well, not even rushing, savouring it, admiring the craft and the imagery and more-pertinent-than-ever themes of ecological devastation and the survival of humanity, but definitely suspending all other activities to keep reading it through to the end.

Nausicaa is lost inside herself, under attack from the dark spirit of the Emperor's brother while the Emperor himself has captured Kushana and extorted a marriage agreement from her, while he prepares to deploy the recovered God Warrior, one of the things responsible for the Seven Days Of Fire that destroyed civilisation hundreds of years before. The Sea Of Corruption might be part of the great flow of life, but it is Nausicaa and her love for those that are alive now that can keep humanity from annihilation.

But the biggest, deepest, most terrible tragedy of all is that it turns out I don't have Volume 7 and must wait a day or even two before i can get it from the library. Weep, oh humanity, weep!