Giant Robo


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Giant Robo - The Day the Earth Burned

ジャイアントロボ地球が燃え尽きる日

 

Giant Robo is the greatest anime of all time. This is simply a fact, and absolutely not open to debate. If you do not understand this simple truth, I will feel sad for you, but I will not be angry. Simply sad. How dead your soul must be.

Japan must have a lot of dead souls, then, since Imagawa Yasuhiro has been completely unable to convince anyone to let him make more. (Everything he did in between Giant Robo and Tetsujin 28 sucking balls probably didn't help.)

But, of all people, Akita Shoten and Champion Red have come to our rescue. Fucking nothing of interest is published by this company - they seem to keep solvent by republishing Black Jack every few years and doing manga based on hit anime. I think I have exactly two books that ran in this magazine - the Battle Royale II manga by the author of Alien 9, and gutsmeister Yamamoto Kenji's awe-inspiringly trashy Chaotic RunES. Neither of them exactly the pride of my collection.

Somehow Imagawa talked them into letting him do a Giant Robo manga, and they gave him the artist they'd previously used for the s-CRY-ed manga, about which the only thing worth saying is that his art had more energy than the lifeless anime. His style is all the hell over the place here - Daisaku is cross-eyed half the time, he did a beautiful design for Ginrei and then somehow decided to draw her like a Rumiko Takahashi heroine instead, and the other characters veer wildly from "walked right out of Yokoyama Mitsuteru's manga" to "Did Araki Hirohiko break into the studio and draw a few pages?"

All of which does not matter in the slightest, because this is hideously, hideously, awesomely fun. Hot Fuzz fun. It pretty much takes the energy and anything can happen batshit feel the OAV only reached in the last couple of episodes and starts like that, completely ignoring any continuity established in the anime in favor of a completely new story. Things are so different that he deliberately lets you assume something is the same as it was in the anime, only to pull the rug out from under you and have it be something totally different. Ginrei's last name? Murasame. The Big Bang Punch Silent Chujo would never use? Uses it in chapter two. Giant Robo's dark secret? Nuclear power? Nope - he is destined to destroy the world, and Servantes the Illusionist has been traveling parallel world, desperately searching for one in which Giant Robo did not go berserk and leave Daisaku dying in Big Fire's arms.

Imagawa can write this thing for the rest of his life and I would be overjoyed. Let's hope the twelve people that read Champion Red think so too.

Andrew Cunningham