How To Sell A Contradiction

And so, back to Battle Angel.  Continuing its desperate quest to avoid falling into a rut, Battle Angel Alita volume 5 picks up two years after Motorball, with Alita retired from the circuit and living quietly... until Zapan from books 1&2 comes back to kick over the anthill.  The supporting cast takes a beating, the status quo gets blown up again, and most importantly, Desty Nova finally makes his debut.  His obsession with karma defines the series from this point on... but in hindsight, it's really just foregrounding themes Kishiro has been toying with since page one. 

Before I started rereading the series, I remembered this was where it went from a book I liked to one I loved, and it turns out a decade away hasn't changed my feelings. 

(Interesting that Viz went with some cross-promotion with ADV's anime release on the flopped release; that's a Nobuteru Yuuki promo piece for the anime, and with all the feathers and pointy noses, it's halfway to being Escaflowne art)

The big thing that struck me this time out is that the book starts out looking like an epilogue.  BAA is so defined by the quest for self-knowledge (by way of cyborg violence) that it's kind of shocking that Alita seems to have found whatever answer she was looking for in last book's fight with Jashugan.  I'd love to know how much of this series' constant reinvention comes from Kishiro or his editors; I remember reading a comment from him to the effect of "My editors kept asking questions like 'Can she be a cyborg instead' or 'can you work in some martial arts fighting?', and somehow it all turned out all right," but by the time of Last Order he seems willing to stick to his guns over even the smallest point of principle.

Regardless of whose idea it was, Alita's Motorball career seems to have gotten violence out of her system, and she's spent the last two years catching up on her reading, teaching martial arts, playing music at (New) Bar Kansas, and doing a little gardening.  If she had her druthers, she might have just done that for the rest of her life; at this point, she's actually spent more time at peace than fighting, as the gap between this book and the last is longer than the entire preceding series.  It didn't occur to me the first time I read this, but this volume is pretty much a Western, specifically the kind about the past catching up with a retired gunslinger. Maybe that's why it's called Kansas...

Shumira is still around too, waitressing at Kansas. Kishiro is pretty good about keeping tabs on minor characters' changing lives as they drop in and out of touch with Alita, which gives a very clear sense of time passing, pretty rare for a fight manga (see also baby Koyomi from volume 1 toddling around and talking).  This makes the fairly radical shifts in premise read more naturally, especially since every change in the status quo broadens the scope of the world a bit and makes it feel a bit more lived in. There were a lot of times earlier where I wondered how anyone managed to stay alive in such a ridiculous hellhole, but at this point the series has gotten downright domestic.  The Scrapyard feels more like Alita's hometown now... until she gets her ass tossed out when the neighbors who aren't unstoppable masters of space karate first try to sell her out to Zapan, then beg her to stop him.  Which is a dick move, but on the other hand, Alita is a little unrealistic in expecting everyone in the Scrapyard to stand up and fight the cybernetic monster head on.

In fact, she seems unusually contemptuous to people she considers her lessers, compared to the starry-eyed idealist who eagerly jumped into a pit to save Koyomi, but ultimately she does go out and fight Zapan for their sake instead of telling everyone to go screw.  The authorial voice seems to be a little more merciful than Alita's; Shumira despairs over her physical weakness, but is immediately comforted by the thought that she can still show strength through compassion and caring for the injured. BAA can be surprisingly sentimental at times, particularly in this volume, and the dialogue is never far from melodrama, but I kind of love it for that.  I want to talk more about the tone shifts in this series, but for now, I'll just say that Battle Angel is by no means a subtle book, but it's not a stupid one either.

Case in point, Doctor Desty Nova, both the series' most cartoonish character and most prominent font of philosophy. It's easy to gloss over his mentions of karma, and I kind of did in my original go-through, but it reads a lot differently now that I know more about Buddhism.  Like most mad scientists, Desty Nova is playing God, but the specific God he is playing at is Buddha.

In the Buddhist context that I (and I presume Kishiro) am most familiar with, karma doesn't really relate to sin or even morality; at base, it's a statement that actions do not occur in a vacuum, and the repercussions of decisions and events in the past inevitably affect the present day.  If you get involved with something, you get entangled by it.  That said, imperfect human nature makes it hard to avoid giving or receiving harm; it's kind of a film noir view of the universe... and one that crashes right into BAA's ongoing will-to-power theme.  How strong do you have to be to truly call yourself master of your own destiny?  Nova will apparently keep turning people into super-cyborgs until he figures that one out. 

The issue of karma is particularly interesting in a series about an amnesiac, someone with will and agency who is nevertheless (theoretically) a blank slate free of entanglement.  It's no wonder Alita becomes Nova's favorite lab rat, although really, this volume seems to argue against her freedom from the karmic cycle; she's lived mindfully and done everything as best she can, but Zapan still came back out of the shadows to claim revenge he thought he was owed.  Sometimes, life just sucks.

I don't have enough firsthand exposure to Nietzsche to talk out of my assspeak intelligently on that topic, but I think it's interesting that Kishiro seems to be contrasting the superman approach with the Buddhist compassion-based one, and honestly has been since the Alita vs Makaku fight in volume 1.  That said, it might well be a false dichotomy since this is a battle manga, and ultimately moral victory is always joined by physical victory, but at least it makes a more interesting than usual justification for the constant fighting.  The Buddhist reading is extremely relevant to my take on the series' ending, so we'll come back to this later.

As a usurper of the Buddha, Nova's nanotechnology lets Kishiro more explicitly play with reincarnation & rebirth motifs.  This volume in particular is all about metempsychosis; death and rebirth, transfiguration, all that kind of stuff.  Nova and his underlings just won't stay dead, Zapan, named after a demon (and marked by the cult of the blue oyster), comes roaring back out of Hell as a prog-rock-album-cover nightmare, cyberdog handler Murdock visibly "resurrects" from complete decrepitude once Zapan makes his comeback, and of course, Alita has been constantly reinventing herself since we met her, physically and mentally.  Actually, between the amnesia and the body-swapping, she kind of has a Ship of Theseus thing going on...

All that and I've barely even talked about the actual villain!  Zapan and Sara deserve their own post, so let's stop this one here.

Signal Boost

Sorry about the interruption of service; I was out of town for a bit, and when I got back I started agonizing over the next Battle Angel review, because it's my favorite volume of the series and I really want to do it justice. I'm tempted to just stay quiet for the next couple weeks and build up a posting buffer like I should've done before restarting.

In the meantime, I wanted to point everyone at Sarah Horrocks' blog.  I tend not to talk about art because I have pretty much no critical vocabulary there, so I'm really glad to find someone who does.  I especially love her posts on Blade of the Immortal, and this bit on Jiro Matsumoto is also choice, but it's pretty much all great stuff.

One last blast of psychic obstetrics

From Stone, of course.

Out of Context Theater Presents: The Arm Blessing

More Motorball loopiness from Battle Angel.

This was my second choice for Friday

From Stone, the community gives thanks for the bounty freshly ripped out of a monster penis-whale.

Happy Valentine's Day from the Department of Incredibly Literal Symbolism

From volume 4 of Battle Angel Alita.

Presented in Mangascope

DigiKerot's review of Hells during my hiatus reminded me that I'd been meaning to post about Shinichi Hiromoto's Stone since forever, but now that I reread it, I'm finding myself short on things to say.  There's something here, in these two volumes, let's see if I can put my finger on what.

First off,  that's a hell of a thing to put in the front of a book.  Stone is certainly a fairly low-calorie piece of pop genre trash (and I mean that fairly lovingly), but having your own publisher flat-out call it derivative is just too harsh.  That's what reviewers are for!  To be honest, I feel kind of bad even grading Stone on its story because I get the feeling everything about it came about because it would be cool to draw.  If I can accept the weirdness of Jodorowsky and Brandon Graham comics as part of the spectacle, I feel like Hiromoto deserves the same courtesy.  There's definitely some work and love put into this book, but it's fair to say that most of of it went into the visuals.

Hiromoto doesn't have much work in English (just the two volumes of this, and an adaptation of Return of the Jedi), and I actually don't know much about him, but he's got an interestingly sketchy, expressionistic art style.  For some reason it makes me keep thinking of Tsutomu Nihei, but maybe that's just because this book is full of industrial ruins, cross-hatched monsters, and people in leather jumpsuits fighting them.  I also feel like you can visibly see him improve as an artist; he has a consistently interesting eye for composition, but his storytelling starts out a lot shakier, he straight up just does not know how to do panel transitions or show motion until about three quarters through the first book.

The parts where Stone leans into its post-apocalyptic setup are the most fun, I dig the scenes with pockets of humanity living on the top floors of skyscrapers and beached aircraft carriers jutting out of the sandsea.  It kind of peaks early though, Volume 2 is mostly funky-looking pirate ships shooting at each other across seas of nothingness. The occasional boring background aside, Hiromoto usually doesn't skimp on the detail, and while perky young tomboy Zizi is front and center, he can draw a pretty good craggy old bastard too.

As far as the actual story...  There's a lot of attempted profundity kind of groping along under the surface that never quite comes together, most notably a fertility/fecundity motif-- we have the world covered in sterile white sand and a skull-face on the moon, contrasted with super blatant phallic and yonic symbolism, psychic bat mitzvahs, taboos about killing pregnant monsters, weird womb communion, and the whole thing ends with the birth of a child ending a gory war. Frankly it feels like this got cancelled, it ends pretty abruptly without really concluding anything.

Considered as a kind of crazy daydream, Stone is fun.  It's not great fiction, but I enjoy it as the trifle it is, and I'm interested in checking out Hiromoto's other work-- I actually picked up those Star Wars books of his, and I'm looking forward to seeing that movie refracted through his prism.  Speaking of which, I'd really like to know just how accurate this line is...

They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank/Fuel burning fast on an empty tank

Sorry this is late, but... I can't believe I ended up writing this much about Motorball.

Volumes 3 and 4 of Battle Angel Alita cover the Motorball chapters.  After last volume's heartbreak, Alita decides that caring hurts too much, and the series shifts gears again as she runs away from home to get involved in mechanized bloodsports, and ends up dueling the dying champion, Emperor Jashugan.  I recall this arc being a little divisive back in the the good old days before Last Order, when people complained about a mere two-volume-long fighting tournament...  Clearly we had no idea how good we had it. 

This arc is pretty much a sports manga, driven by the drama of testing yourself against worthy rivals, getting sponsorship, training under a hard-bitten, terminally ill coach, etc.  That said, since everyone competing in Motorball is a martial-arts cyborg on wheels, the rules are made up and the points don't matter, as it usually boils down to last mech standing wins, which means lots of lengthy fight scenes that don't advance the plot, which is why I'm covering both volumes in one post.  In hindsight, it's impossible not to read this as a dress rehearsal for Last Order's Zenith Of Things Tournament, what with the increasingly odd Motorball contestants calling out special moves and bragging about their martial styles.

Mind, the fights are beautiful; Kishiro's art was good from the start, but this is where the series starts looking exactly the way I remember, riots of motion blur and excessive levels of clean-lined detail on lovingly rendered cyberchassis.  The wordless eight-page-sequence in the final chapter with Jashugan just going to town on everyone is fantastic. I would hazard a guess that this is around when he started drawing digitally. 

We do get some important character development between fights, though... at this stage in Alita's emotional development, she's basically a young adult leaving the nest.  Leaving to find yourself is more literal than usual in a story about an amnesiac (while she does know that she practices a martial art from Mars, and recovers memories of training on a big red mountain, she does not put two and two together yet), and it's interesting that while she cut ties to the point of not telling anyone where she was going, and was apparently even willing to throw away her gender by taking a non-feminine body (which reflects interestingly on Sechs in Last Order), she does keep the name Ido gave her (even after recalling her original one; I didn't remember that happening this early).  Her relationship with Ido also evolves significantly; he acknowledges himself as her father and feels tremendously abandoned at first, but after some amusing pettiness from both of them he finally recognizes her as an adult and peer.

(also, without his hat it is incredibly obvious Ido is straight-up cosplaying as Rick Deckard, hilarious)

This arc also returns to the personally-affirming nature of violence (or at least, dedication to the martial arts, but this is a battle manga, nobody's going to learn kung fu without using it on someone), which is kind of odd, since last volume was fairly consistent about depicting violence as just a symptom of the Scrapyard's dysfunction, and in these ones Kishiro makes a point of showing Motorball as an unhealthy bread-and-circus spectacle.  Our introduction to the "sport" paints it as bringing a mediated catharsis to the masses (manifested literally, as virtual-reality connections to the fighters; Kishiro comes back to this in the Ashen Victor side-story, which I'll get to at some point), and just in case you missed it, at the end Ido explicitly says Tiphares bankrolls the whole thing to let the citizens blow off steam.  Which I'm not sure it's doing that great a job of, since violence breaks out in the stands more than once, and even Ido is moved to crack people upside the head just for being insulting.  Ido is actually striking me as a surprising hypocrite during this reread, but I don't think I can seriously talk about that until certain events much later on...

Anyway, even if Motorball is a corrosive force on the spectators, Kishiro seems to respect its effect on the racers (possibly symbolized by Alita quitting the sport, but keeping the Damascus blade her coach gives her as her signature weapon from here on).  This is also where the series starts to get spiritual, in its curiously materialist-existential way; on the one hand, Jashugan, his martial arts master, and apparently Alita's forgotten master are striving toward a sort of alchemical reification of the self, believing that spiritually, a metal body is just as worthy a container and conduit to the cosmic All as natural flesh (and Jashugan apparently attains this, right at the end), but in contrast to this notion of a purely spiritual awakening, the concept of chi has been analyzed and defined as a measurable and physical phenomenon. (also, compare this sudden holism with detachable-headed Makaku's personality being affected by the bodies he wore back in volume 1).  This kind of applied metaphysics becomes a hallmark of the series in later volumes, largely thanks to the still-mysterious Desty Nova, who finally makes a second appearance halfway through volume 4, once again in a shadowy flashback.  It's hard to believe he's basically not in half the series, considering what a scene-stealer he is. 

On a related note, there are actually a couple panels in here of cultists praying to Tiphares swaying overhead, which I did not remember and is really interesting given how very few characters in the series actually mention a specific belief in any god.  And I suppose at this point it's worth mentioning that the English title Battle Angel is more specifically religious than the original Japanese Gunnm (Gun Dream).  Under whichever name, the series gets increasingly spiritual pretty much as soon as next volume, but again, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's talk a little about race instead.  The Scrapyard seems to be a melting pot depository of everyone who wasn't cool enough to go live in space; at this point in the story we don't even have any confirmation that there IS anyone alive outside the Scrapyard or Tiphares.  I don't think we ever get a real answer on where the place even is; there's a bar named Kansas, but that doesn't mean anything, and interestingly, there's Korean text on one Motorball arena, and Arabic on another!  Nobody in the Scrapyard seems to have a clear ethnicity, either; going by names doesn't help much (especially since Viz changed a few), since a couple people have unmistakably ethnic Japanese names, but most go by unrecognizable fake future handles.  The Motorball arc is full of characters boasting about knowing specific ethnic fighting styles, but pretty much everyone is drawn with the usual manga lack of obvious racial markers (Ido and Zapan's prominent noses might be a specific indication of Caucasianness, but Ido's first name is Daisuke, so whatever)... and I really shouldn't let it pass without comment that the first notably dark-skinned characters in this series were a kingpin and his assistant, and the next three are a pair of professional athletes and one's little sister (also, I totally remembered coach Ed's weird character design as being way more Mr. Popo than it actually is).  I'm not going to say Vector and Jashugan are bad characters, but I can't really un-see this either.

Jashugan's sister Shumira, on the other hand, is a very bad character, embarrassingly so since she's only the second woman to appear in more than one chapter (Alita herself being number one).  She's pretty much just a teddy bear wearing short-shorts... and I really shouldn't leave it at that, since this series is actually nutty enough for that to be a character's literal physical description (once again, I am specifically thinking of something from Last Order). Shumira is sort of ahead of her time, tragically; she's a big-eyed little sister who can only speak in the third person, dresses revealingly, lives to cheer up her big brother (until he meets Alita, she is literally the only thing keeping him alive) and is either fixated on or manhandled by pretty much every man she meets.  It's actually to Ido and/or Kishiro's credit that Ido does not take Jashugan up on his offer to marry her, given his Henry Higgins tendencies.  Still, at least she gets a speaking part; Takie is barely a character at all, since she's pretty much just Grace Jones as Robocop.  For all the bagging I do on Last Order, I will say that it does end up with many more important women and/or brown people in it than the original series.

I also want to mention Jashugan's stereotypical American-comics-style promo poster.  Kishiro is one of the relatively few manga artists I know of with an evident interest in American comics; it's more prominent in Ashen Victor, which borrows visuals from Sin City and Sandman (and there's an even more, ahem, direct Frank Miller tribute near the very end of BAA proper), but the specific use of US superhero artstyle for propaganda purposes comes up again early in Last Order.

Moving to another recurring theme, in this arc Kishiro begins to stretch himself as an artist and lovingly depict certain brains from multiple angles, as opposed to his previous habit of devoting one panel to each specific brain as a sort of memento mori before it got smashed or the scene changed. 

Under this new regime, volume 3 contains 4 exposed brains, and volume 4 has 6 (one almost totally ruined).  This is after disqualifying any brain so totally liquified that no characteristic brain lumpiness is discernible; we're just counting nice clear gyri and sulci here.  As befits the king of Motorball, 40% of the brains depicted in these two volumes belong to Emperor Jashugan.  Uh... I actually can't recall if we've seen Alita's brain yet!

The flipped and unflipped printings' chapter counts finally synch up at the end of volume 3.  Hurray!  V3's unflipped extras are two pages on the rules and regulations of Motorball (which are totally irrelevant), but V4 sports a few gag strips, including one about Alita's cyberbody still needing to poo.  Essential content, surely.

So overall, Motorball actually isn't that bad!  Part of that was because reading two volumes back to back wasn't enough to outstay its welcome.  Will ZOTT treat me so kindly on the reread?  Tune in and find out, in, um, a couple months, at this rate.

Valentine's Day comes early

If I'd had any foresight I would have timed this for Valentine's Day, but I really do want to get cracking on the Battle Angel reread, so let's just pretend I posted this about a month later.

Alita's amnesia left her with a grasp on all the fundamentals of walking, talking, and so on, but her emotional development is pretty much reset to zero.  In volume 1 she relearned how to fight, and in volume 2 she relearns how to love.  Alita and local odd-jobs guy Hugo meet-cute during one of her bounty hunts, but can two crazy kids make it in a cyberpunk dystopia?

No, no they can't.

This volume is our first indication of how chameleonic Battle Angel will get; the series kind of shifts premise every so often (opinions may vary on how organic this is; I always thought the transitions were very natural) and this is a pretty surprising break from the sustained martial-arts violence of the first book; there's no big set-piece fight, it's much more about drama and worldbuilding. When fights do break out, it's not an acrobatic kung fu spectacle, just messy murder. It's hard to say Hugo actually deserves his fate, but he was in fact a clear and present danger to the public, being perfectly willing to mug random people and pry out their spines.

And yet, in the ridiculous dystopia of the Scrapyard, where life is so cheap Zapan kills at least two people for no other reason than feeling embarrassed by Alita, he's still more sympathetic than pretty much anyone but Ido.  Hugo lives in the gutters, looking up at the stars-- but Tiphares is blocking the view, literally and metaphorically looming over everyone.  We still don't know much about it by volume's end, but we do learn just how its policies make the Scrapyard the horrible place that it is.

Hugo's childhood didn't turn out so great, but Alita's second one is coming along all right. At this point we have zero idea what mental age she "should" have, and we won't get an answer for quite a while. Her amnesia really isn't a mystery to be solved, it's more a device to make the series a coming of age story, and it ends up covering quite a lot of character development. At this point, she's a love-struck teenager, sitting around sighing, and trying really hard not to come on too strong (literally; she has a whole Clark Kent routine going on trying to hide the fact that she's a combat-spec cyborg). It's worth noting that Kishiro dials back the detail of his style for the goofier moments in this volume; I don't remember him doing this again later, but then I didn't remember it happening here.

Speaking of character development, Zapan showed up briefly in the first volume, but he's much more central to this one.  Despite his petty, vicious thuggery here he actually ends up being one of my favorite characters, but I'll come back to that in a couple volumes.  For now, I just want to note that Kishiro is very good about unexpectedly making minor characters important. 

Let's close out with some random thoughts.  This lorem ipsum text appears to be in Hebrew, which is interesting considering the Jeru-Zalem naming scheme that the English translation replaced with Kabbalah.  I don't think now is quite the right time to talk about the religious references in the series, but while I'm thinking of it, "Zapan" is meant to be "Xaphan", I think.

The anime adaptation stops at the end of this storyline.  It's been quite a while since I watched it, all I recall are the changes they made to be more self-contained.  Poor Zapan is pretty much just a cameo!

The word "Lycanthropazine" has stuck with me ever since I read this volume.  (It also reminds me of a certain part of Samurai Flamenco...)

Exposed brain tally: 2 smashed, 2 intact (1 extra intact one on the unflopped's table of contents!)

Edition changes: The unflopped rerelease again has a handful of rough sketches, a page on the laws of the Scrapyard, and another one diagramming the law enforcement Netmen.  More importantly, it starts with the end of the Makaku battle, and ends on a cliffhanger, with one chapter of Hugo's arc still to come (a chapter which ends up missing quite a few sound effects that were in the flopped version, during the climb).  I pity anyone who came into this series late and ended up with a mixed set of books...

Unusual Honesty From Editorial

I can't quite believe that actually made it onto the back cover, that's up there with that volume of Blade of the Immortal that actually said "several major story lines [are] finally beginning to dovetail[...] is Samura's epic study on revenge and survival beginning to wind its way toward a massive, final confrontation?"

They are right, though.  The first volume of Knights of Sidonia very much reads like Tsutomu "Blame!, Biomega" Nihei thinking "Hmm, what do normal people like to read? I'll try that," but his attempts to add light comedy to his usual hyperviolence are still surreally awkward and weird because it's still written in his completely affectless style and filled with grotesquerie.  It's honestly not all that far off from that Blame! High School gag he did where all the gnarled silicon monsters were wearing sailor suits and giving each other love letters.

"Teenage mecha pilots vs giant monsters" is a pretty well-worn premise (though I actually can't think of too many manga, it's usually anime), so much so that I won't even go into the plot, but again, since this is a Nihei book, this first volume doesn't really establish anything so much as just hint at it.  Our main character is an alleged regular human in a world full of genetically advanced superpeople, who still seems to have the insanely high pain threshold and healing speed of all Nihei heroes (that Wolverine story really was the perfect choice for him, wasn't it?  Too bad it ended up so dull), which is excellent because even before he gets inside the giant robot he is surrounded with constant threats to life and limb.  His constant culture shock reminded me of The Forever War, though Nihei's trademark understatement means it doesn't amount to more than the occasional sweatdrop as all the mean posthumans in pilot school make fun of him for still needing to eat and excrete regularly, and he accidentally wanders into the girls' locker roomphotosynthesis chamber and gets slapped... not a cartoon comedy Love Hina slap, there are like three panels of his head striking the wall and blacking out, leaving a huge bloodstain and breaking his nose for the rest of the chapter. And eventually they fight a giant fleshy space monster that assimilates one of his classmates as everyone watches in impotent horror. Then after he passes out and vomits at her funeral it's time for a festival and pool party!

It's really hard to decide what to make of this book, largely because the goofy school antics are depicted in the same abrupt and tonally detached manner as the shocking violence they're constantly juxtaposed against.  Knights of Sidonia may be more approachable than Nihei's normal inscrutable action epics, but it's still pretty far afield from normal, it has that same outsider art quality as Mysterious Girlfriend X. I wouldn't call it conventionally "good" but I did enjoy its weird, hilarious awkwardness in the same way I do a David Lynch movie.  I feel compelled to continue.

Living in Yukitopia

Happy New Year, all.

Lot of exciting Yukito Kishiro news lately; the US release of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order finally finished its interminable, volumes-long Zenith Of Things martial arts tournament, the series is ending this month, and a sequel/spin-off has already been announced.

I kind of gave up on Last Order about, mm, six volumes ago.  The never-ending plot-halting ZOTT was so disappointing that it was making me wonder if the original series was really as good as I remembered, and this seems like the perfect time to scare up my old copies and check the whole thing out from the beginning. As it turns out, it's been just long enough that I'd forgotten most of the specifics, but I still recognize a lot of the little things that pay off later in the series.

And thankfully, it is really damn good, right from the very start.

Kishiro and his publisher had a falling out and the original nine volumes of Battle Angel Alita series are out of print (which is a shame, because Last Order probably makes even less sense without this context), so I'll go ahead and summarize a bit, with a little assist from Kishiro, Fred Burke & co. The series takes place in a future cyborg dystopia:

Back alley cyberdoctor Ido, digging through the trash for spare parts, finds a woman's limbless torso-- still alive, but amnesiac. Rebuilt and renamed, Alita discovers she has the "muscle memory" of a master martial artist and a conscience that can't ignore the cruelties of her new home, which leads her on a high-tech kung-fu hero's journey. In this particular volume, Alita explores her talent for violence, tries to provide a good example for her fellow citizens, and ends up in the sewer fighting a brain-addicted body-jumping severed head.

It's interesting just how quickly this series finds its voice; I know this wasn't Kishiro's first series, but it's still amazing how the series is pretty much fully formed right from the start.  The insanely intricate mechanical detail, the absurdity and gore (he sure loves drawing exposed brains, I count at least three in this volume, more if we allow CAT scans and not just actual exposed gray matter), the wild-ass character designs, they're all here. Check out the mecha-Celtic barbarian with a rampant steel boar-crotch.

Mind, the reason I remember this series so fondly is the strongly drawn characters.  BAA is unmistakably a fight manga, but one always driven by relationships and philosophy.  Alita's relationship with Doc Ido is particularly nuanced by manga standards; he's a generally nurturing figure, but definitely no saint, and his control-freak tendencies give their relationship an interesting Oedipal vibe right from the start.

On the other hand, the philosophy is pretty existential, sometimes even bleak (which is not surprising given the dystopian setting).  There is so much self-actualization through battle that this is practically a sports manga, it's probably the most macho story I've ever seen with a female protagonist. On the one hand, the series is clear that compassion is the difference between a hero and a monster, but it's equally clear about showing the weak being consistently at the mercy of the strong.  There is such an explicit will-to-power thing going on that it honestly might have felt outright fascistic with a dude espousing it. I'm reminded of Jodorowski's Metabarons, which is surprisingly similar to BAA in a lot of ways (including the relentless surreal craziness), but almost none of its (male) leads are at all sympathetic.

Now that I think about it, almost every villain in Battle Angel is male, certainly all the significant ones... actually, Alita herself is often the only woman around at all.  I'm gonna have to come back to this thought when Figure Four shows up (he's super macho, but still an underdog, moreso than any of the other fighters-- he is ass-kicking Krillin), and again with Sechs in Last Order. 

On the other hand, the male-vs-female dynamic works well visually, it adds a lot of contrast to have the pretty small character against the huge ugly ones.  Kishiro definitely loves the David and Goliath thing, to the point where it kind of takes over Last Order.  Even this early, a lot of these fights are right out of Shadow of the Colossus, Alita climbs all over Makaku like a jungle gym.  Like, his head is larger than her entire body, and he just walks around with a severed arm sticking out of his eye socket after she tries to blind him.

Also, because I am insane, I'm comparing the original larger flopped release to the newer (but also tragically out of print) unflopped tankobon-size rerelease.  So far the changes are trivial; dialogue is the same (which also means some of it still refers to the flopped-art orientation of things, whoops) but fonts and occasionally word balloon placement differs, and the new version has a handful of sketches and one or two gag strips in the back.  The unflopped does have nicer paper and print quality, though; the opening sequence, presumably in color in the original, is a much muddier BW conversion in the unflopped.  The color balance is also different in general; the flopped lightens many scenes and elements within scenes, maybe to make the linework pop more, but it does lead to a few panels looking a little washed out. Unfortunately, the smaller trim size of the unflopped edition isn't compensated for, and sound effects very often bleed right off the page or get lost in the book's spine.  On balance, the flopped version is superior, but good luck not paying an arm and a leg for it.  The flopped edition also includes the first chapter of the second unflopped volume, which both puts the complete Makaku arc in one volume, and makes sure a certain important character debuts in the first...

Overall, Battle Angel is a really engrossing mix of high and low, mingled constantly-- we go directly from high-speed cyborg fighting to verbal philosophical sparring to a crotch-mounted cybernetic scanner in the shape of a giant boar's head. It tickles both the base and low impulses.  It just all seems so primal.  And of course, it's also really nicely drawn, and Kishiro only gets more polished as the series goes on.  I'm really glad this first volume lived up to my fond memories of it, considering how badly wrong Last Order went, but who knows? Maybe I'll have a new appreciation for it by the time I get there in this reread.

The Hidden King

So I've been reading Nabari no Ou lately, and it's actually better than I expected. On a plot level it's not terribly ambitious (a sulky, androgynous teenage ninja goes on a magical McGuffin hunt), but it's got a few things going on under the surface that catch my eye.

The big one is that this is one of the surprisingly few ninja manga I've read that remembers that ninja are spies and liars. Every single character has ulterior motives (not all of which the reader is privy to), loyalties are often divided, and at least one triple-cross has been sighted. We haven't reached Death Note levels of plots-within-plots (at least not yet), but the constant simmering undercurrent of "I know you're lying to me, but I'll pretend to ignore it because I'm lying to you too" livens up things tremendously. I also enjoy how the "ninja villages" are metaphorical, updated with modern facades (I was amused that one poses as a temp agency). People still use swords and throwing stars a lot, but they also know what guns are.


I also like that these are Ninja Scroll/Basilisk style ninja whose cool esoteric techniques come with awkward drawbacks. As of volume 7 the number of total freaky mutants is pretty low (and even they're more sleek killing machines than misshapen monsters; this does run in the same magazine as Black Butler), but advanced ninjutsu either has morally questionable requirements or messes up the user pretty bad, as in "one of the main characters is quickly going blind and deaf".

Another pleasant surprise is that the women in this series have lots to do. Again, this runs in G-Fantasy, so the hero may well not have any interest in women, which frees them up to actually be supporting cast and participate in the plot instead of just motivating the hero by getting kidnapped or being part of his harem. Quite a few of the villains and walk-on characters from other ninja clans are women too. This pleasantly reminded me of Fullmetal Alchemist (both series also share a habit of randomly breaking the mood with cheap jokes), and I was not too surprised to find out that Kamatani is a woman.

On the other hand, I don't think this series actually passes the Bechdel test, because all the notable female characters I can think of are either trying to help or manipulate the main (male) character (discussing his mysterious powers still counts as talking about him, I think), or are motivated by their devotion to or hate for a man, and there's not really a lot of non-plot-related chit-chat.

I don't want to oversell this series too much; Nabari no Ou is still fundamentally a Teenagers Against Evil manga, with all the tropes and baggage you'd expect if you've ever read one of those, but I'm definitely enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. It takes a couple volumes to warm up, but once it turned that corner I started seeing some promise, and I'm willing to stick around and see how things develop.

One more label gone

So it looks like Bandai is doing the Geneon thing.

Lately I've been going through a lot of my old backlog to show friends who never saw this stuff the first time around, and it's been faintly odd to see all the logos for companies who are now long gone. And now one more.

Akira Kurosawa

Detective Dee and the Out of Context Clues

Don't have time to give Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame the review it deserves, but this is well worth seeing, Tsui Hark brings that old wire-fu magic yet again. The translation is good enough that I could follow the plot, but not SO good that I was denied classic HK moments like the above. Perfect.

Dazzling the stage!

Helldriver is the kind of movie where, while choking her daughter to death, a woman gets a hole blown clean through her chest by a meteor, and then without missing a beat, she rips out her daughter's heart and sticks it in the smoking cavity, where her other organs start healing around it.

As you may have guessed by the fact that I'm bothering to post about it, this is another one by B-movie hero Yoshihiro Nishimura (writing and directing this time), so that happens about ten minutes in, and is pretty much the tip of the iceberg of insane special effects and high-pressure fake blood antics that I'd be screencapping like mad if I hadn't just come back from a festival screening. As usual, conventional reviewing techniques are useless against him, but this is another one deep in the "deliberately ridiculous" zone, and actually relatively restrained in terms of gore effects per se; of course, "restrained" by Nishimura standards means "when zombies get chopped into bits you usually don't see recognizable organs".

The crazy SFX is much more constant than his last two projects; in fact, there's so much craziness going on in this one that it became a bit overwhelming by the end. That's kind of all there is in this one though; the lead character is a leaden cipher (I think she only has like ten lines of dialogue, and nowhere near the screen presence to pull it off), and there isn't so much a plot as a collection of chainsaw fights, zombie dance clubs, Imperial Japan imagery, Verhoevenesque public service announcements, dozens of ways to contextually translate "-chan", and possibly the coldest open I have ever seen. I'm still waiting for another one of these movies to have the same level of overall craft as Tokyo Gore Police (come on, Mutant Girls Squad), but I'd rank Helldriver above the faintly disappointing Robogeisha and Vampire Girl. It hits home video next month, so if this sounds like your brand of cheap thrills, buckle up.

King of RPGs Second Edition

King of RPGs volume 2 has fewer references to porno manga than the first, but since its ending seems like a suspiciously good break point if further volumes don't get greenlit, it seems like a good time for a closer look.

KORPG actually has some surprisingly complex structure given how broad the jokes are. I always get a kick out of structural metahumor; Thompson has a longtime interest in both RPGs and manga, and it's amusing how seamlessly he fits the conventions of tournament battle manga (childhood inspirations sparking lifelong obsession, villains almost more interesting than the heroes, each more powerful than the last, defeat means friendship) with the inside-baseball gamer humor of Knights of the Dinner Table, Order of the Stick, Darths & Droids, DM of the Rings, etc (satanic panics, LARPing, adversarial GMing, and some MMO stuff in volume 2). It's especially great when the two synergize, like referencing Death Note to emphasize the Game Master's control-freak nature.

The main idea of "Shonen Jump-style battle manga about Dungeons & Dragons" isn't a very pointed parody given that things like Yu-Gi-Oh and .hack have already played it completely straight, but this time there's the occasional undercurrent of absurd black humor from the tone clash of zany unrealistic plot elements uneasily butting up against the reasonably honest portrayal of the main character's emotional problems. It's either tasteless or ballsy to have the plot basically boil down to "Mazes and Monsters by way of Bastard!", but then Thompson always was fond of manga's transgressiveness, and "Jack Chick was right!" is pretty much the ultimate taboo in RPG circles.

And finally, there are lots of tiny throwaway jokes all over the place, from the blatantly referential to the obscure (like Shesh Maccabee's signature in-game weapon). The art's quite nice too; Victor Hao's got a nice, cartoony expressiveness that works well for the comedy and lends the proper flair to all the scenes and characters.

I'd be happy to see more of this, but frankly the odds seemed kind of against even getting as much as we have. I'm honestly not sure if you can fully appreciate King of RPGs without having spent way too much time both reading manga and playing RPGs (though actually we have a couple guys like that here on the blog), but if you are one of those rare no-life kings, you should definitely check it out.

Best news ever

This year being the 25th anniversary of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and the 30th anniversary of Araki Hiroyuki's career, I was sort of hoping we might finally get a kanzenban I can't afford but would buy anyway.
Instead, we get Jojorion/Jojolion, the eight Jojo series, and a package designed for me personally -- three Jojo's Bizarre Adventure novels.
Written by Kadono Kouhei, Nisioisin, and Maijo fucking Otaro.
http://www.araki-jojo.com/74/
Kadono's, in typically eccentric fashion, apparently features Purple Haze.

Out of Context Theater Presents: Trust The Cybercactus

From Splatter: Naked Blood, which is actually less exploitative and more disturbing than you'd guess from the title. It's very Cronenberg actually, with a very sterile-surreal medical ero-guro vibe going on. It's unsettling in the way I was kind of expecting Lychee Light Club to be. I found it quite harrowing to watch, actually, don't let this benign cactus-voyeur interlude lull you the way it did me. BuyerNetflixer beware on this one.

So-so Gothic & Lolita

After watching both Psycho Gothic Lolita and Geisha Assassin, it seems clear that Go Ohara is better at coming up with catchy, trashy titles than he is at directing the movies he puts them on. I'd hoped he'd avoid repeating Geisha Assassin's mistakes, but no such luck. In fact, I think this one may even be a step back.

Like Geisha Assassin before it, this is a revenge movie; our heroine wants payback, and spends just about every minute of screen time pursuing it. It's basically Kill Bill wearing more black lace, but unlike that flick, the tone is all over the place. The movie clearly wants to be goofy (like, there are cartoony zoom noises when severed heads go flying), but none of the gags are actually funny, or even jaw-droppingly tasteless enough to get laughs of disbelief. On the other hand, it also fails at being dramatic; it hits classic beats like the idyllic flashback shattered by violence, and the heroine confronting the monster that chasing revenge has made her, but those scenes are so lackluster that they don't add anything to the film besides putting another mark on the genre checklist. I'm not even going to get into the completely random twist in the final act, beyond saying that the nod to it on the cover makes it look much more central than it is.


Also, the budget is clearly super, super low. Certainly not a hanging offense, but it sure doesn't help either; at least one of the sets is very conspicuously re-dressed, and the splatter effects are pretty unimaginative despite being "supervised" by the mighty Yoshihiro Nishimura. There's a little wire work, but not only is it not very good, it's an integral part of what is hands-down the worst scene in the entire movie, a hellish combo of so-so action, mediocre special effects, and terrible, interminable humor. That scene is pretty much the entire movie's sins in microcosm; it tries to make up for its visual shortcomings with campiness, but it's not actually funny, so it just ends up being doubly painful. I'd actually prefer it if they'd just stayed sincere instead of trying to win audience sympathy with cheap laughs... which is actually what Ohara did in Geisha Assassin.

In the end, Psycho Gothic Lolita is a run of the mill B-movie, uninspired on every level and middlingly executed. There are crumbs of fun here and there (like the gunfighter who constantly talks on her cel during a running gun battle, and the multiethnic team of super acrobat delinquents), but this film is in dire need of a better script, direction, acting, and action scenes. I kind of hate to dump on Ohara, because he is clearly trying to make the kind of dumb-fun movies I like seeing, but I have flat-out been bored by both of his. I gotta recommend everyone avoid this one.

And speaking of cheap shots, I can never resist poking Media Blasters for their omnipresent typos. At least this time it wasn't on one of the menu options.