I Really Should Read This 8: Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

1990's, deluxe edition 2017

I've lived in Japan 18 years, and I love comics, but I've had a pretty small appetite for manga in that time. In 2020, I tried to remedy that with deep dives into Kentaro Miura's Berserk and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. After finishing Akira, I told a friend I was going to get Ghost in the Shell next, and he suggested Battle Angel Alita.

This book collects the first two Alita books in an oversized hardcover package. It's a good looking collection with strong production values.

I bought it, and left it up on the shelf for months. I didn't really want to read it. On the outside, it seems a natural companion to Ghost: sexy robo-woman with a gun, a futuristic sci-fi setting, and coincidentally both had big budget Hollywood flops within a few years of each other. I'm just wary of sexy lead characters in books made by guys these days. I read a lot of that stuff in the late 80s to early 90s.

I read Ghost a few months ago, and while I could appreciate it, it felt like a book that I had to be reading at the time to really get its impact. It's visually incredible, but the complicated story is buttressed by an excess of footnotes and jargon. It's a dense book told in a single volume (with later sequels) made up of short stories. Alita is really different in execution. The focus is much narrower: there's Alita, her savior Dr. Ido, and a third character is introduced in the second book. And the story is manga paced, meaning there is relatively little story in its 400 pages. Fights can last 100 pages. At the end of the collection, the characters have been fairly clearly established, but not a whole lot has happened.

What year is this?

What's good in here? The art is exceptional. It's tight and clear, but you can see the human hand involved in most of the art. It doesn't suffer from the mechanical lines of manga that often turn me off.

My favorite thing in the book is the rendering of her leather suit. It looks like it was done with Sharpies 

While there isn't much of a story, it's interesting nonetheless. Akira and Ghost are established to take place on a future Earth, but Alita is much closer to a fantasy world. Probably it is future Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, and it isn't relevant to the story as of yet.  They live in a dark, industrial place called the shipyard, with a massive floating city, Zalem, above them. They never go there, and people talk about how nobody goes there, and that is something I want to see. If I read more, that's the hook for me: I want to see what life on Zalem is like. Kishiro builds up the world really well as it is so that Zalem is a mystery.

There's a lot of this

There's nothing about it that is bad, but some of it is merely perfunctory. Most of the first book is a long fight scene with a super cyborg, and calling it a story would be generous. The character Yugo introduced in the second book would have had more narrative weight if he'd appeared in the first book. All the arcs are pretty standard tropes of sci-fi/fantasy. But, it was an enjoyable read.

Ultimately, this story does what it's aiming to do really well, and lays just enough groundwork to make me interested in the larger world. My worries about the sexiness of it were pretty unfounded. Alita is attractive, but this isn't a cheesecake comic.  I'm looking to pick up the second deluxe edition when I can.