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.”

Golgo 13 12

Takao Saito – Viz – 2007 – 13 volumes
the US edition is based on a special “greatest hits” release of the manga.  Golgo 13 is 154+ volumes.

Oh, Duke Togo.  So serious.  So much fun to read about.  I like the stories better when there’s not a huge government conspiracy involved.  The first story starts out with some CIA line, but then quickly turns into a Golgo 13 versus a Russian counterpart face-off.  The second story is a personal vendetta, which are my favorite stories.

The first story was interesting because the first third of the story is Duke Togo catching up to someone who is clearly ahead of him and after the same thing, and then there’s a small segment where that man chases after Duke Togo, and then they briefly work together.  The motives of the Russian man are never made clear, and the story is interesting because you are waiting to see how one reacts to the other.  The ending was the most interesting part of all.  The plot involves busting up some sort of… poison/drug lab that serves several nations in secret.  Golgo 13 is hired because the CIA is in hot water and needs the poison disposed of immediately.  If they can’t use it, no one can.

The second story is about a man who hires Golgo 13 to take out the mayor of a certain town in Mississippi.  The mayor is hilariously racist, and he and his police squad use several slurs I’ve never even heard before.  The mayor catches wind of Golgo 13 coming to assassinate him, so we also get the slurs about Duke Togo being Japanese, and it only gets better when Golgo 13 teams up with a black resistance movement set on stopping the mayor.  It didn’t strike me as insulting since the portrayal is so over-the-top.  We are told immediately that the mayor is like this, and everything out of his mouth is some sort of slur, which pretty much means you can’t take him seriously.  Also, you know he’ll get his in the end, anyway.

Notably, Golgo 13 uses methoxsalen to darken his skin, knowing that the police will shoot any Asian man they see on site.  Also notable is the fact that Golgo 13 is shown with women in both stories, something that hasn’t happened in a long time.

The File 13 in the back is about Golgo 13′s income and expenditures.  It is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever seen, where the amounts he was paid from every story it was mentioned in are added up, and then any expenditure that is mentioned is taken away from this total, then things like averages for the jobs where pay isn’t mentioned are discussed at length, as are anomalies and other things about his finances.  I read the whole thing, and as impressive as it is… that’s ten minutes of my life I’m never getting back.

Golgo 13 11

Takao Saito – Viz – 2007 – 13 volumes
the US edition is based on a special “greatest hits” release of the manga.  Golgo 13 is 148+ volumes.

Hmm.  I wasn’t all that interested in the first story of the volume, which takes up about 3/4 of the pages here.  It was quite slow to get started and I had trouble wrapping my brain around the politics involved, which were Japan-centric.  The gist of it was pretty awesome though, which was that Okinawa had been getting the royal diplomatic shaft since WWII and a member of an old Okinawan aristocratic family, now in the military, is staging a coup to liberate the island from both the US and Japan (US military presence is apparently still very strong on the island, and apparently the majority of the Japanese SDF is also stationed there).

I can get behind crazy coups like that, and when I finally figured out what was going on, I was very interested, but by that time more than half the story had elapsed.  It also doesn’t much help that Golgo 13 doesn’t appear until the end, and his role is literally a baffling mystery until the very last pages.  He does take the shot though, which is really what I was looking for.  He also plays a very unorthodox role, which would have been more interesting if we had seen it in more than three panels.

The second story was a riot, but very short.  A traveling salesman in Chicago is mistaken for Golgo 13.  He has a very similar name (it might be Dave Togo or something like that), and was waiting for a client to pick him up across the street from where Golgo 13 was waiting to rondevous with his client, so Golgo 13′s people picked up the salesman instead.  He also bears a vague resemblance to Golgo 13.  He is baffled by his special treatment and all the great lengths the client goes to in order to make him happy, like setting him up with a nice hotel room and an expensive prostitute and all that.  His confusion about being needed as a salesman manifests itself in a few hilarious situations, like when he says “100% customer satisfaction” in response to a request for a summation of his work ethic.

And Golgo 13′s decision is pretty spectacular, too.

I wish this had been the long story instead of the one about Okinawa, but it’s probably better that it wasn’t stretched out for too much longer, because I think I would have enjoyed it much less if it had been padded out.

Golgo 13 10

After reading about Takao Saito in A Drifting Life and learning that Mickey Spillane changed his life and birthed Duke Togo, I couldn’t help but follow up with a volume of Golgo 13.  I’ve actually got a good balance going tonight, because Golgo 13 is one of the manliest manga I can think of, and I’m also going to write about Otomen, the girliest manga I can think of, so… you know.

Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed with this volume.  Most of the volume is taken up by a story about a nuclear power plant outside LA going through a crisis just before the Olympics.  This story isn’t bad… it’s actually pretty tight, but it just wasn’t to my liking for some reason.  I’m not sure why, because all the insane elements are there: the crisis starts when a political bigwig somehow has the power to override the safety inspector’s orders and open the plant when it wasn’t ready and several major repairs and tests still needed to take place.  It continues when a minor crisis flushes a bunch of honored guests out of the plant, including the governor and other politicians, and in the middle of the panic, Golgo 13 randomly appears and takes a shot.  It builds when the safety inspector saw Golgo 13 take his shot and finds him at a local decontamination plant and hires him by robbing a bank that had been evacuated because of the crisis.  Golgo 13 is needed to snipe a pipe in order to relieve pressure needed to cause a coolant system to engage.  The ending has some of the best dialogue EVER between Golgo 13 and the safety inspector.

Yeah, it’s one of those types of stories.  It just keeps building on itself, but I guess I was soured on it initially because the premise of a safety inspector being overridden so abruptly was less realistic than I would expect in Golgo 13 (which sounds weird, given some of the insane things that have taken place, but still).

There’s a strange scene at the decontamination camp where a woman is being tackled in order to get her head shaved, which needs to happen because “Mr. Geiger Counter” says so.  I think I found it more disturbing than it was intended to be.

The last story didn’t make much sense to either me or my roommate, but involves two assassination attempts and some Vegas mob-type stuff.  I don’t really have much to say about that one, it was a simple story.

The material in the back included an interview with Takao Saito, where he mentions some things that make what characters say about him in A Drifting Life sound potentially true.  Take that as you will.

Golgo 13 9

These two are both older stories from the 70s, which is a little unusual since most of the stories so far have come from the 80s, with one or two from the 90s and 70s slipped in.  Or maybe my memory is just bad.  Either way, it’s unusual for both the stories to be older.  They both have rad title pages.

The first story is unusual because it starts with a misfire.  Once again, Golgo 13′s reaction to something like that is pretty extreme and entertaining, though not as full-blown as the reaction when he missed.  Misfires aren’t his fault, but when it happened, he discarded the mission and asked for more time.  He hadn’t provided the bullets himself, so he began to wonder whether the misfired round had been a plant.  Apparently, before every mission, he selects a lot of 100 bullets and fires 80 of them, and if even one misfires, he discards the lot and selects 100 more bullets and fires 80 until he’s satisfied.  The mission this time is a disagreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians.  Many bad guys go after Duke Togo and meet their end, there is a bomb lighter involved at one point, they kill the woman he has sex with, et cetera.  It’s not the best story, but it’s pretty hard-boiled still, and is more about Duke Togo than politics, which are the types of stories I like.

The second story was this whole thing about a secret private intelligence agency trading in countries and surveilance.  When one man snooping around them finds out, he dies and his… foster father? avenges him.  Golgo 13 is called in.  I liked this one too, because I like the revenge stories as well, but I think I preferred the first, which had a lot more action.

The Golgo 13 file in the back was an analysis by Makoto Tezuka, last seen in the back of that volume of Pluto I just read.  He goes through and analyzes Golgo 13 from a filmmaker’s perspective, and a lot of the comparisons he draws are pretty accurate, like how the panels read more like a storyboard for a movie, how the series really hasn’t changed over the past 40 years, unlike any other series like it, things like that.  It was interesting stuff.

Golgo 13 8

Hmm.  I didn’t actually enjoy the second case in this volume that much.  There were a few notable things about it, though.  I liked that Duke Togo shipped his gun by carrier pidgeon to avoid the mob finding it.  I also liked the way the end of the story was handled.  It was a superb twist, come to think of it.  The contact had problems with a pair of brothers, but could only afford to hire Golgo 13 to kill one of them.  So… he has to take out the other brother himself, and the plan is quite perfect.  The situation itself, the reasons, and the characters all had me less fired up, though.

The first story was pretty amazing only because HOLY CRAP HE MISSED.  I mean, you sort of expect it sometimes, because such a big deal is made out of his 100% success rate.  But… that doesn’t mean it can’t shut your brain down when it happens.  There are reasons it happened, and Duke Togo seeks out a Yoga Master to teach him how to go up against the psychic that is foiling him.  Almost as important as Golgo 13 missing, the story somehow makes my previous sentence sound very plausible and normal.

The end matter was a little less exciting this time around, too, but I guess I have to read about big geek wars that are waged in the letters column of Big Comic every once in awhile to keep my mind in shape.

Golgo 13 7

Both stories in this volume were pretty good, though I liked the second one, from the 1970s, a bit more than the first story about spy satellites.

The first story basically features a really creepy, perverted old man who is extremely good at picking things off the sattelite films.  He spots a possible rondevous between the leader of the PLO (or some PLO bigwig) and… I think a Russian, I can’t quite recall, and he tries to finagle some power from Bill Clinton and hire Golgo 13 to kill the two.  He goes for a bit of a doublecross, and we know how that ends, though there’s an extra bit of… meaning attached to the payback this time.  I liked that the story opens with someone spotting a missile being loaded up in Saddam Hussein’s territory, and the main character dismisses it as a fake and something to get people stirred up.  Haha.

The second story was better because it involves a better doublecross that Duke Togo has to work his way out of.  He’s actually more involved in the story this time, which I like, and he also hooks up with a lady, which he hasn’t done in awhile, either.  Not that the sex scenes are neccessary, or even extended or gratuitous, but I love the implication.  His client wants to buy a “snipe” instead of an assassination, and I really liked his reasons behind it.  The victim was apparently involved in the Weather Underground, which I learned about recently just because a friend of mine is friends with the founder’s son.  Plus, you know, the dude’s been in the news recently with the elections and all.  I liked that the story was somewhat topical.

Verdict: Duke Togo is still cool.  I prefer the stories where he involves himself more, but he’s cool no matter what he does.

Golgo 13 6

Every volume of this series is perfect in its own way.  I don’t think I will like another volume as well as I liked the one about sniping the satellite and the Princess Diana conspiracy, but each one is thoroughly enjoyable in its own way.

There are two different types of stories in this volume.  The first one is the type where Duke Togo is hired to do his thing and then doesn’t show up again until the end of the story, and the second is the type where he involves himself in things so that what goes on actually involves him.

The first features an American Intelligence agency dabbling in soviet spy activity.  One of the men who got several spies killed is being held on murder charges (his spy background is not known to the public, he is in prison for killing his wife, basically so he could flee the country without any loose ends).  He is going to be executed, and the case is hotly contested by the public for the death penalty being cruel and unusual punishment.  Basically things are set up by the Intelligence agency so that the man can walk out of prison with a pardon, but someone outside the agency whose brother was killed as a result of this prisoner doesn’t really want this to happen.  The end to this story is just great, there’s a twist that made me literally yell out when I figured out what was going on.  Some of the details of the story are lost on me (clearly, since I can’t remember if the Intelligence agency is the CIA or FBI), but the plot and the cause and effect stuff that’s set up is all crystal clear.

The second case features Duke Togo being hired to figure out who is impersonating the pope and why, and what happened to the real Pope (in this case, Pope John Paul II, not Benedict or John Paul I or Paul).  Duke Togo initially declines the job, which is being offered by the Freemasons or something, but he takes it when it is phrased in a different way “I want you to find the fake pope and kill him, and then I want you to find out who is responsible for kidnapping the real pope and kill them.”  It was one of the most badass things I’ve ever read in a manga, and kind of unexpected in that circumstance.  Duke Togo is given an in via a cardinal who has been groomed for years to look like Togo for just such an emergency, and then he starts, you know, doing his thing.  I liked both stories equally in this volume… I would say I liked this story better plot-wise, but the twist at the end of the first story was just too good.

The extra content in this volume are copious notes on how many women Duke Togo has had sex with, what their nationalities and jobs were, and what positions were used during what years.  Plus an alarming number of articles speculating about his virility, his fondness for prostitutes, and the size of his penis.  God I love this stuff.

Golgo 13 5

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.

Golgo 13 4

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.