Phoenix 11
Posted: March 2, 2008 Filed under: Phoenix Leave a comment »Honestly, I can’t imagine how Tezuka would have ended the Phoenix story any better than with this story. The main character alternates between a past and future self many times. I kind of explained things in the last volume, but this volume mostly consists of a war being fought in both time periods. The Wolf Man is a bit more of a key character in the past, but he is also the catalyst for the battle in the future as well.
If you were wondering, he gets turned into a wolf, of sorts, in the future as well. He is captured by a religious cult and forced to wear a wolf helmet (like on the cover) that pipes religious messages into his head 24/7. The mouth of the masks opens at mealtimes, which I thought was a nice touch.
The cuts between past and future become more and more frequent throughout the volume, until a transformation takes place in the past which separates two of the characters, then again in the future which reunites the characters once again.
The love interest, the action scene, the themes, everything about Sun was fantastic. Karma, Nostalgia, Sun, and both stories in volume 9 have all been the best of Phoenix so far, though I think Karma and Sun are probably on top just because they were both ambitious stories that succeeded. In Sun, we even get a reference thrown in to the “Strange Beings” story. Remember all those monsters the woman helped? They were fighting a war, friends.
One bad thing, though, is that the Astro Boy-like jokes from the early volumes are back with a vengeance. Tezuka sort of works these jokes and bad puns into most of his stories, but it was definitely out of place here, and some of them were just forehead-slapping stupid. It definitely stopped whatever was happening in its tracks whenever one came along, which was more than a handful of times here.
But I’m pretty happy with this as the ending point for Phoenix. I’m not that excited about the volume of proto-Phoenix stories coming up next, but I’ll probably like them when I read them.
