Golgo 13 3
January 12, 2008
The first story in the volume was really, really great. Nelson Mandela hires Duke Togo to take out the guerrilla terrorists who are stirring up a civil war and/or revolution in order to revive the apartheid government. One of his only lines in this chapter lets us know that Duke Togo is horribly racist. Maybe his line can be taken a different way (it’s spoken to white men, if I remember right), but it seemed pretty blatant to me.
Other than that, this chapter was great. As he enters the country, Duke Togo is detained at the airport when the guards find that his “drill” can be assembled into a submachine gun. He kills the guards and escapes, then after a barfight where he knocks out ten men, joins the guerrilla movement. He singlehandedly kills… well, probably around 30 men in this chapter in various ways, some of which involve rocket launchers, others of which involve machetes or something. Some deaths are quiet. Others are explosions. We also find out that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned with Duke Togo in Robben Island, and it was Mandela who helped Togo escape. How about that. This has probably been my favorite Golgo 13 story so far.
I was a little disappointed that this volume contained two stories from the 1990s, separated only by a year or two. The second story was pretty good, but it was a little confusing for me. A sum of money is involved, something like 20 billion dollars, as well as claims to a small group of islands that may be oil-rich. There was some scheme that was set up involving a security supposedly fronted by Golgo 13, and the chapter is all about Golgo 13 tracking down the fake “G.” Though I was a little hazy about what was going on a lot of the time, his revenge is suitably intense at the end of the story.
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