Golgo 13 1

This series is really not for me. I wound up with it because my roommate had been begging me for months to get it for him. He is the manly man for whom this series was written. I read it only because I bought it, and because it seems important to read the 2nd longest (and really, the longest-running, since the longest isn’t nearly as old) manga series of all time if it becomes available. I’m sure I wouldn’t like Kochi-Kame either, but if Viz somehow thought it would be a good idea to release wideban editions to catch us up to volume 150 or wherever it is now, I would curse myself while suffering through thousands of thousands of pages, but I would still read the whole damn thing for the novelty of it. I wound up liking this series a bit more than I thought, but the fact remains that I am not Golgo 13′s target audience.

I was surprised by the disparity between the two stories presented. The first one is quite long, and is about what I expected Golgo 13 was, a well-constructed story of international espionage where a problem that concerns thousands of people is dispatched with a single bullet. In this case, it was a weirdly relevant story about Saddam Hussein constructing a “supergun” to point at the US and fire on Washington D.C. Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, and many other people make manga appearances, which was quite novel.  It was full of… well, what I would consider Golgo 13 stereotypes.  I didn’t think all these things actually happened in every story, but apparently they do.  He really does reply to almost everything with “…”, there is only one bullet at the end of the story, he does use Duke Togo as a consistent alias, and he does have sex with a woman right before going on a mission.  I was hoping I would get to see one of these things this volume, but to have all three at once was a little overwhelming.

The stereotypes aren’t present at all in the second story, however, and neither is Golgo 13.  I actually liked the second story quite a bit.  It’s the older of the two (I think the format of the licensed “13 volumes of Golgo 13″ is one old story and one new story per volume), and features a mofia boss who falls to pieces as soon as he hears that the man who’s wife he killed in an accident has put out a hit on him, and the marksman is Golgo 13.  It was very, very cool, and much shorter than the first volume.

Yeah, I’ll read 13 volumes of this series.  It’s pretty cool in the manliest way possible.  And although I probably don’t enjoy it as much as I should, it’s got a lot of good things going on.  It would have to, I guess, it HAS been running since 1968 or so.