I was utterly surprised and delighted when Our Kingdom 6 showed up on my LT "Connections" page as I thought the series had ended with volume 5. So, of course, I just had to order it for myself. In this volume Akira, Rei and the rest their classmates are participating in the school athletic festival which attracts a great deal of spectators, including Uncle Yuji and someone more sinister. Although the sinister character/plot kind of gets left hanging I expect that they might catch up again in the next volume. We also get to see what the "big secret" Tamaki has been holding over Hiyori's head is which has been alluded to in past volumes. As usual, I have to do a lot of double takes to figure out who is who, as many of the characters resemble each other, but thankfully they all have their own personalities so with a little effort it can be figured out easily enough. My only complaint is that we didn't get to see any together time for Shigure and Okumiya who has been a favorite couple of mine. On the yaoi content aspect there is a lot of kissing and one non-explicit "consumation" scene but basically it is all pretty tame, especially compared to volume 5, which works well for me.

I was surprised when I received the manga to see that June has made some production cut backs. Gone are the sturdy dust covers and the paper itself both for the cover and the inside pages seems to be of a slightly different grade. Size wise the manga is still bigger than the usual size, but slightly smaller than my other June editions. Although this was a little disappointing I can understand the need to cut production costs in today's market and consider it a necessary evil. ( )