Gunslinger Girl 2 (omnibus ed.)

Yu Aida – Seven Seas Entertainment – 2011 – 12+ volumes
this is an omnibus containing vols 4-6

Once again, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this series. The 3-in-1 format is also much appreciated. For me, who hasn’t read the series, it’s simply a good deal, but omnibus editions for the first six volumes serve the more practical purpose of rushing the content that’s already been published in English out to new readers, getting to the point where ADV left off in the translation more quickly so that older fans don’t have to wait through those first six books again.

What I enjoy most are still the shorter stories that serve to show the lives of the girls. There was definitely less of that in these three volumes, and there was a heavy emphasis on the politics at play for the bad guys that the girls are going up against. As much as I appreciate this (Aida does a wonderful job at establishing the setting and a convincing political situation), I found myself bored with just how much of it there was this time around. Volume 5 has almost nothing about the girls at all, instead focusing on the terrorists and what drives them to do what they do. This is somewhat balanced out by a fantastic confrontation between Triela and Pinocchio, one of the only action scenes in this omnibus and the most involved one the series has yet offered. The stories about the lives of the terrorists were quite good, and they were made much more interesting with some subtle parallels between their early lives and the lives of the handlers. But even so, it was strange to see so much story time that had so little to do with the girls themselves.

Aside from Triela’s fight, the highlight of the book for me was volume 6, when a new generation of cyborg girls is introduced. We meet the new handler, a very unusual gentleman named Ricci, and we meet the new cyborg girl both before and after she becomes a cyborg. Not only is she older than the other girls (she is a teenager, and made to look even a bit older than that), Ricci is not a military man, and uses deception and covert methods to approach his targets. His approach is so completely different from the other handlers that it’s hard to believe that the agency would condone such behavior. It makes for an interesting change of pace, especially after the story had been so light on the lives of the girls. I’m very curious to see more of those two in action.

And again, in case you missed my review of the first volume, one of the things I appreciate most about this series is how it takes a potentially creepy and unlikely premise (that little cyborg girls are trained as assassins and escorted around by older male “handlers”) and makes it truly interesting. It’s not a comedy. It’s not creepy in the ways that it ought to be. It’s genuinely unsettling what’s being done to the girls, and the story is good at contrasting their lives as everyday girls and their anxieties at pleasing their “brothers” (who are genuinely father figures in their lives and nothing more) and their “conditioning” as assassins. It’s a disturbing contrast, to be sure, and the story pulls no punches. And again, it does a really good job of splitting the time between vignettes of the girls doing little girl things as best they can and the political situations that form the basis of the missions that the girls are sent out on, mostly dealing with a specific group of Italian terrorists.

While my attention started drifting towards the middle of the omnibus, the focus on the new girl and the process of training the cyborg at the end of the volume really caught my attention again. And though I was less interested in the politics, I can’t say that they weren’t well-written. This is a wonderful series, and not one that I would have tried had I not been offered a review copy. I’m so glad I picked it up though, and I urge anyone who might be scared off by the premise to read a plot summary to see if might appeal to you anyway. I promise that anything potentially off-putting is truly negated, and on top of that, it’s extremely well-written and does a wonderful kind of justice to its bizarre premise.

This was a review copy provided by Seven Seas.