A comiXologist recommends...
Yukito Kishiro’s BATTLE ANGEL ALITA
There are a handful of comic series that had a huge impact on me in my adolescent years. (I've written about a few of them already.) The problem with coming back to books like this is that oftentimes you end up disappointed; either they haven't aged well, or your tastes have matured and you all-of-a-sudden realize that maybe they weren't as good as you thought they were back when you were fourteen years old.
And then sometimes you go back and realize that the book that you loved so much has not only aged perfectly well, but is still just as impressive and gripping and thought-provoking as the day you picked it up twenty years ago. These are books that have rightfully earned the moniker “classics,” and Battle Angel Alita is absolutely such a series.
More than any other comic, Battle Angel Alita is a series that I have always been a giant nerd over. (We're talking teenage fan-fiction, a Geocities fan-page, embarrassing cosplay, the works.) And going back to read it as an adult, it still manages to blow me away.
The story begins in a dystopian future city known as The Scrapyard, located in the shadow of a mysterious floating utopia called Zalem. The Scrapyard is built from, well, scrap—which falls from the center of the floating city—and its factories have been put to work producing supplies that are sent up to Zalem via a tube system, but there is otherwise next to zero communication between the two cities. Nobody in The Scrapyard knows what happens in the floating city above.
The Scrapyard is a rough and violent place, and in order to survive there most of its inhabitants have had to replace their bodies with cyborg parts. One day, a cyber-doctor (part surgeon, part mechanic) named Daisuke Ido is searching the scrap pile for spare cyborg parts when he finds the cybernetic head and torso of a young girl. The girl's brain is intact and alive, but has been in hibernation for centuries and has left her with no memory of her past. Ido gives the girl a new body, and a new name: Alita.
It's a simple premise for what becomes an epic tale. Alita has no memories of her past, but when she is attacked she finds that she does have incredible martial arts abilities, apparently from a lost cyborg fighting style developed on Mars centuries earlier. With fighting as her only link to discovering who she was, Alita embarks on a journey of self-discovery that is violent and action-packed but often touching and always very, very human. The series features absolutely amazing action sequences, but what elevates it to the level of a true classic is the masterful storytelling and character development as we see Alita mature and learn about herself, her past, and her surroundings from volume to volume.
While I worry that this review may be starting to ramble a bit, it would be a crime not to comment on Yukito Kishiro's absolutely mind-blowing artwork. The Scrapyard and its surroundings are rendered with beautiful and moody detail; the characters are as expressive as any I have ever seen in any comic, their faces portraying complex and nuanced mixtures of emotion that really make the drama hit home; the action sequences are not only balletically choreographed but also masterfully depicted on the page. Complex series of acrobatic martial arts moves are laid out with amazing clarity, so that every beat of each fight can be followed by even a reader with very little experience with action manga or even comics in general.
Battle Angel Alita is a series that I have been wholeheartedly recommending, for decades at this point, to anyone expressing even the remotest interest. Even friends who've told me that they don't like manga in general have finished reading the first book and immediately asked me for the second. The printed volumes I picked up years ago have been through so many hands—as I have lent them out to innumerable friends and co-workers—that they are literally falling apart. That the series has been unavailable for so long is a tragedy, but one that finally reached a happy conclusion this week with the comiXology re-release of the first three volumes. Go read this! If you're a comiXology Unlimited subscriber, you've got absolutely nothing to lose. If you aren't, they're still more than worth the asking price, or could be a great excuse to finally try out CU.
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Mike Isenberg is a Production Coordinator / Technical Account Manager at comiXology, and the co-writer of First Law Of Mad Science (which is also available on comiXology Unlimited). He lives in Harlem with his cats, Tesla and Edison.
