Slightly Biased Manga

I’m kind of sad that I didn’t like this volume as much as the last one. On the other hand, there’s very little that I can think of that can top space sniping and… you know, the whole English job thing that was the second story.

I didn’t like the first story that much. It was mostly concerned with the Mob in… New York, I think? I’m pretty sure. There was a specific family that was being targeted by a politician, and one member in particular was seeking the politician’s head for a grudge. Golgo was sent in to make sure that the member succeeded. My roommate liked the trick shot Duke Togo pulled off at the end, but… it was kind of easy to see it coming as soon as you saw the belt buckle, you know?

The second story was notable because… well, they played Dungeons and Dragons. What the hell. Not just anybody though, people who I think were representing what is or was the EU around the time the Berlin wall fell. At one point during the game, Golgo was “hired” and his success was determined by the roll of a 100-sided die. The die came up 2 and the hit succeeded, because Golgo 13’s success rate is 99%. It was pretty awesome. Later in the chapter, Duke Togo is double crossed, so we get to see him retaliate. Always a treat.

My roommate would also like to point out that all the chapters in the second story are named after D&D spells, something I couldn’t have picked up on. Nice all the same.

There is, in the file in the back, a lengthy essay pondering why it is that Golgo 13 is never kicked in the balls for torture, and explains why this would be an absolutely devastating method of defeating him, citing examples and science and all that. I enjoyed it immensely.

I don’t know, it will be kind of hard to top this volume as far as insane stories go. But what do I know, I’d love to see something even more over-the-top than this.

In the first story, Golgo 13 is hired to snipe a satellite out of orbit. He is hired by the president, and wires one of the people in on the project before appearing in front of our own Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford and some generals tell Golgo that there is some sort of armed spacecraft that will fire on a Russian spacecraft unless it is knocked out of orbit. This situation arose after the US craft was damaged and all the crew aboard was killed combined with an insane system of fail safe devices approved by Kennedy during the Cold War. So Duke Togo is shot into space with a modified M16, specially designed to be fired in space, and gets one shot to snipe the craft out of orbit so that it doesn’t see the Russian craft.

In case sniping a satellite out of orbit was not quite intense enough for you, the second story features Duke Togo hired on by the English government (or something, I wasn’t too clear on this, maybe just a political party) to kill Dodi Al-Fayed. As you can imagine, things lead up to the night Al-Fayed was killed. Something new I learned about was an undetectable syringe that gets one immediately drunk.

Both these stories were so ridiculous and over-the-top that it was impossible to put this down. Duke Togo doesn’t meet with any pleasurable company this time around, but the same one shot for each job rule applies, along with a bunch of his other very eccentric rules. I was just amazed with this volume. Golgo 13 really does get himself into a little bit of everything. I was a little shocked that the Al-Fayed story appeared in the original magazine about 3 months after he died, because that seems like it would have still been a very touchy situation, but I guess it is only a comic book.

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.

I like finding series that my roommate and I can get into together.  The main problem with him though is that he’s not a girl, and prefers manlier series that I wouldn’t otherwise read.  Now, Golgo 13 has a few things going for it (it’s the oldest manga still running in Japan and the second longest), but it is still at its heart a kind of seinen political action-kinda series, and it’s not really up my alley.  My roommate begged though, so I caved.

He recommended the first story in the volume, which was about Tiananmen Square and involved some men from Tibet hiring Golgo 13 to make a kill.  It starts off a year after Tiananmen square, and then slowly, very slowly, goes through the few weeks before the protests were suppressed.  Mostly it centers around an agitator from Tibet who tries to let everyone know about what’s going on over there.  I didn’t think it got very entertaining until the very, very end, when Duke Togo appeared.  What his role is is extremely confusing until after the suppression, then everything is explained and it falls into place rather beautifully.  My roommate says this is the better story.  I think it’s boring.

The second story opened with a prostitute in Tiajuana trying to flag down Duke Togo as she was being assaulted by gang members so they could meet about the job she needed done.  Already, this one is a better story.  Duke Togo infiltrates the Corsican mob and sleeps with the boss to try and find out who their chemist is and take them out, the point being to lessen the drug trade from said mob.  Now, I think this story is awesome and not boring at all.

If you like slow political thrillers, you will inevitably enjoy the first story, while people like me who seek mindless action will like the second.  Golgo 13, it’s for everybody!

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.