This third volume of Dark Horse Comics' latest Gunsmith Cats re-release is arguably its most essential to long-term fans; it certainly is to me. Not only does it include the fantastic storyline “Mister V” which really acts as a de facto climax to the entire series (despite it continuing for multiple chapters afterwards), it also includes four rare Riding Bean manga chapters, previously only available in English in the very out-of-print and now stupidly expensive Gunsmith Cats Revised Edition volume 4 from 2008.

Sonoda clearly planned for his Riding Bean manga to continue for much longer, as the portion here ends abruptly with no resolution to its story, and an apology from the author that he planned to somehow publish a continuation at some point in the future. Sadly, this wasn't to be, as the Japanese magazine it was printed in (the short-lived left-to-right reading Comic Noizy) was cancelled in 1988. Riding Bean's manga was published to tie into the concurrently-released OVA of the same name, but when Sonoda subsequently left animation production studio ARTMIC, he was unable to take the rights to the name or character with him.

Eventually, his concepts for Riding Bean morphed into Gunsmith Cats (which far outshined its progenitor, eventually anyway), and in time Sonoda was able to bring Bean into this successor series. These short chapters give us a glimpse of what could have been, as the practically unkillable courier Bean Bandit finds himself embroiled in a case involving two young girls fleeing the mob. It establishes Bean's no-nonsense attitude and soft spot for kids. The prototypical blonde version of Rally Vincent, Gunsmith Cats's eventual lead, makes little more than a glorified cameo here.

In comparison to the later Gunsmith Cats chapters included in this omnibus series, the Riding Bean chapters are merely “ok.” Sonoda's art has a charming, rougher aspect to it that's all but erased in his clinically precise later art. It has much more of a 1980s vibe, unsurprisingly, but all of the elements that Sonoda enjoys are there from the beginning – gunplay, car chases, powerful men, and cute girls. As a bonus, the omnibus also includes a few pages of Sonoda's gag manga about the making of the Riding Bean OVA, starring himself as Bean! These Bean-related extras are interesting curios, but certainly not worth spending hundreds of dollars on to acquire the highly scarce 2008 edition. Thankfully, each of the new omnibus editions is priced very fairly – 650 pages for thirty dollars of (mostly) superb manga is a terrific deal.

Otherwise, the rest of the omnibus picks up where the last left off, with chapters 47 to 75, which comprise the original floppy comics from issue 48 onwards, from partway through individual volume 7 through to the end of volume 10, or the final third of Revised Edition 3 and the entirety of Revised Edition 4. All that's missing from the original 90s/early 2000s Dark Horse monthly floppy comics run is the single-issue Gunsmith Cats special, first published in English in November 2001. Don't worry, completists, I expect this to be reprinted as the opening chapter in the first of two omnibus volumes of the sequel series Gunsmith Cats Burst very soon.

As a result of splitting the series into three roughly equal-length omnibuses, the third volume starts in an awkward spot, partway through the complex “Kidnapped” story arc that had me a little discombobulated until I was able to get my bearings. It's one of those stories where everyone's plans and motivations keep shifting, and it's hard to keep track of what's going on without re-reading its initial three chapters. Moving those to this omnibus would have pushed the page count above an unwieldy 700 pages, so I can understand Dark Horse's choice here. It's a decent, twisty drama, though, even if it's not quite as exciting as Gunsmith Cats's other, more explosive arcs.

I can't say the same about the next arc, “Mister V,” which kicks off with multiple explosions, gravely injuring Rally's detective friend Roy Coleman, and it barely stops for breath from there. This storyline is worth the price of admission alone, as it finally gives us some backstory for Rally and why she does the job she does. It's hard to know if this stuff was all a retcon written on the fly, or if Sonoda was keeping this more emotional material for a point when he felt he'd like to wrap things up, but it's the most powerful arc in the whole series.

If you've ever wondered what happened to Rally's conspicuously-missing parents, you'll get your answer here, and the story is as tragic and bloody as you might expect. Add in the return of iconic antagonist Goldie, and it's an intensely dramatic tale with stakes higher than any other so far. My previously-mentioned caveats (in my review of the first two omnibus volumes) about Goldie still stand – she's the archetypal predatory lesbian who keeps drugged young sex slave girls as “pets,” and treats them as disposable. She uses Rally's human empathy for these girls against her on more than one occasion.

Goldie is improbably formidable, holding off multiple armed men not only with the power of her drugs but also with her sheer physicality. She's almost as comically indestructible as Bean Bandit. Yet it's her very nature as a larger-than-life threat that makes her a worthy opponent for the hyper-competent Rally, and the fact that she's motivated by a kind of twisted love, rather than hate, is quite interesting. A flashback to her childhood, where Sonoda bizarrely attempts to humanize her, doesn't quite work. She's still a monster. There's a deeply uncomfortable scene late on where she coerces another character into a gross sexualized act before almost succeeding in forcing Rally to do the same. For once, this scene isn't meant to be titillating; it's meant to be horrid.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of other scenes in the omnibus that only exist to provide cheesecake and eye candy. Sonoda never introduced a female character he couldn't find an excuse to strip naked for extremely flimsy reasons, and these story arcs may feature more random nudity than all the others put together. However, the nudity rarely occurs in explicitly sexual scenes – it's rare for Sonoda's art to feature any blatantly sexual acts. If anything, he often uses nudity for comedy or to enhance a female character's vulnerability.

The final story arc “Misty's Run” is a daft epilogue. It gives Rally and Bean some time to bond with one another, hinting that one day their relationship may even approach something similar to how it was depicted in the Riding Bean OVA. Misty Brown causes utter havoc, so Rally and Bean end up chasing her down to pick up the pieces of her poor decisions. It's mostly light-hearted and humorous, which is a big tonal shift from the previous high drama. The final chapter seems almost tacked on as a kind of coda, featuring various characters from earlier story arcs cameoing for a few panels each. If this was where Sonoda had intended to end Gunsmith Cats, it would have been ok… I guess. We're left without much closure from the revelations and conclusion of the Mister V arc, but thankfully Sonoda returned to the dangling plot threads seven years later with 2004's sequel series Gunsmith Cats Burst. I'm glad that's getting the omnibus treatment from Dark Horse this year, too, for as far as I'm concerned, more Gunsmith Cats is always a good thing.