Golgo 13 13

Takao Saito – Viz – 2008 – 13 volumes
The Viz edition is a 13-volume “Best Of” selection.  Golgo 13 is 148+ volumes

I was hoping that the last volume of the series wouldn’t disappoint, especially with an awesome name like “Flagburner,” and I wasn’t disappointed.  The title story, the second and shortest in the volume, was highly amusing.  It involved Golgo 13, the 2000 US Presidential Elections, the Florida recount, a disgruntled White House gardener, and Bill Clinton going in through the backdoor.  It was brilliant.

The first story was about the murder of an entire family, including parents and children, just after WWII.  The single daughter disappeared with the housekeeper, and the one surviving son was close-lipped on the murder and was eventually adopted by a distant relative.  The detectives on the case spend their entire lives wondering what on earth happened that night, and other odd things crop up over the years, such as a mysterious meeting between the surviving brother and sister that resulted in the complete disappearance of the sister, and the mysterious but too-far-for-sniping shooting deaths of two others connected.  It becomes clear fairly early on that this is a kind of Golgo 13 origin story.  It’s quite good, and takes up most of the volume.  Real hardboiled stuff, pretty extreme, and a good mystery, which is some of the best of what the series does.  The ending is ambiguous too, which I liked a lot.

The icing on the cake are the essays in the back, by both the Japanese editor of the series and the American editor, who is famous for the… thorough end notes in the back of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, among other things (the hilarious dialogue in the beginning of Banana Fish and all of Flowers and Bees, for instance, or perhaps the entertaining letters columns in the back of the new editions of Oh My Goddess).  Topics such as Golgo 13 boxers, how he encountered Golgo 13 at a young (“shotalicious”) age in an encyclopedia of international comics, and other amazing revelations come to the foreground in the final essay.  It blew my mind, and I couldn’t be happier with it as a resolution to the American editions, unless it started talking about how more volumes are in the works.  Which it doesn’t.  It does end with the comment about how people see and learn about Golgo 13 and never ask why he doesn’t look Japanese, which is something I’d like to staple to the forehead of at least three of my college professors.

There is a final footnote that mentions something about the Golgo 13 story “At Pin-Hole,” then makes the mature observation that the final word of the series is “hole.”