Final Crisis

Golgo 13 Vol. 13 (of 13): Flagburner



Basically, it ends as it began.

I don't mean that just in terms of plot, although English edition editor Carl Gustav Horn has been thoughtful enough to arrange a little symmetry, in that the very last story of this newest, longest, VIZ-published run for Takao Saito's nearly 40-year old creation specifically references the first story from way back in Vol. 1, which saw superassassin Duke Togo head off to Iraq during the presidency of Bill Clinton to foil a supergun plot.

Flagburner, in contrast, takes place in the twilight of the Clinton years, and chronicles Duke's manful effort to clinch the 2000 election for George W. Bush, at the behest of a disgusted White House gardener who's hell-bent on restoring dignity to the Oval Office. Can Golgo 13 sabotage the Florida recounts? Preferably in a manner involving outstanding use of a sniper rifle? Moreover, will there be a non-explicit but unequivocal panel of Bill Clinton 'in action'? The answers, dearest reader, are inside your heart.



It's not much of a story. It weighs in at only 39 pages, with no chapter breaks. Apparently, it ran as a one-off in the March 17, 2001 issue of Big Comic, making it the newest story of the VIZ run, even postdating Saito Pro's heretofore omnipresent numbering of its G13 inventory. It reads like an especially rushed current events tie-in; nearly everything about it is cursory, filling in the requisite storytelling blanks with avalanching exposition and the unfettered, predictable awesomeness of Duke Togo.

The plot makes no sense (er, that's less than usual), hinging entirely on characters identifying the most crucial stack of ballots in the state of Florida, in spite of several concurrent recounts. I don't even think the history is completely sound -- wasn't Bush's margin of victory over 300 ballots at the time of the recount halt? -- and the requisite factoids become grating over such a short span of pages. In sum, it's a formula lump, though probably not without interest to US readers, for the obvious reasons.

And it brings these 13 books around in a rather neat circle.



But that's not all this last volume does. Two new backmatter essays are included, offering different inside perspectives on the very being of Golgo 13. Former G13 editor Takashi Fukuda (who also wrote The Orbital Hit, from back in Vol. 4) provides a rambling, somewhat tongue-in-cheek short essay, eventually arriving at the metaphorical suggestion of bunkoban manga collections as prayer books for bored commuters, and suggesting that the aloof, nationally disinterested adaptability of the Duke Togo concept originates with the Japanese detachment from organized religion:

"If the main character of Golgo 13 was an Islamist, his actions would be severely limited, and there would be instances where the story could not proceed. The same thing would apply were he a devout Christian. Having no religion isn't the same as having no nationality, but it certainly wouldn't help to be thus limited in the turns the plot could take... if I were to summarize, I'd say cultures with a Christian background probably do not give birth to heroes other than those who take pride in brute strength."

Horn himself pens the second, longer essay, a fine tour of his history with and interest in the character, juggling mentions of Mack Bolan, The Day of the Jackal and Mr. A alike. Due tribute is paid to Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Comics, Studio Proteus founder Toren Smith, the anime-heavy sci-fi BayCon '86, and Osamu Dezaki's 1983 Golgo 13 anime movie, mentioned at last. We learn of Horn's custom underpants, gifted by the aforementioned Mr. Fukuda. He invites us to consider him when he was 'shotalicious.' We do. And what of the motives of Duke Togo? How does he select his missions? What are his inner workings?

"He reduces complex moral questions to black-and-white... this reduction is not a consequence of his worldview as such. Rather, it is like that of a chemist or a distiller, in which he begins with the raw materials of a world in spectrum, this color and that pleading their mix of history, reasons, and rationalizations before him. Should the mix in turn make it through the hidden complex pipework inside him, the cold twists of probabilities, risks, angles, and tactics, he will accept the job."

Like a machine, then. Makes sense.



But it's not the only means of making sense. Duke Togo may be an often incredibly blank character, but he's appeared in so many comics over such a long time that countless 'readings' of him might exist. What of Saito's own suggestions, from the bonus sections of earlier volumes? Or the words of various commentators? Or the stories themselves? Often times, that last group does a fine job of saying nothing at all.

Which is the other way Vol. 13 wraps in the way Vol. 1 unfolded: there's not much G13 in these stories, although his presence is undoubtedly felt.

No more is this evident than in the last 'big' tale we'll get for a while, The Serizawa Family Murders (Story #100, November 1975), a 148-page first-in-English example of a specialized form of G13 saga: the 'origin' story. The scare quotes are there for a reason. Remember that old Superman thing, the 'imaginary story' where we'd get differing visions of the cast's futures? That's kind of what's going on in these tales, although Saito & company are looking backward, and have taken to heart Alan Moore's admonition that all these stories are imaginary; thus (if this one's a representative example), the Golgo 13 'origin' story has someone uncover something that might be the One True Origin of Golgo 13, although we never quite know for sure. All the better for a character that, by all rights, ought to be well into his 60s by now.



This one's among the more unique G13 yarns we've seen, focused entirely on the domestic and ambitious in its scope, leaping around from the the post-war ruins of 1946 to the 1961 cusp of the economic miracle, then beyond toward the stable then-present of 1975. The plot follows a pair of hard-luck police detectives who encounter a strange quintuple murder. A father is dead, along with four of his sons; oddly, none of them seemed to have served in the war. The mother is soon found floating in a nearby river. The daughter and a servant are missing. All that's left is a young boy, who won't talk, and is soon taken under the guardianship of a distant relative, a master sniper.

The detectives are doubly shamed by their inability to crack the case, and the obvious derision the occupying Americans view them with. Time passes, and the boy grows into something else, a cosmopolitan Japanese for a revitalized modern Japan; one of the detectives becomes obsessed with uncovering his secrets, especially after the missing daughter and servant reappear with their own mysteries, but the boy's too slick, too... awesome.

If this all seems a bit Frank Castle, don't worry - Saito and company have an especially devious background developed for their young maybe-Duke, and a bombastically nasty coming-of-age. It's entertaining as a story, in spite of plentiful obsessive detective clichés and a distracting (if time-saving) reliance on the ol' Xerox machine, but its fascinating as a grimy pop cultural parable, crystallizing the end of the WWII imperial drive as the death of ancient loyalties. The growth of Golgo 13 is presented as the rise of the New Japan, one slick and deadly, an international force to be feared, beyond the constrains of old moralities. An anti-hero for a new, troubling, exciting age.

Of course, that might all be bullshit. Saito and company say so. There's a perfect little ending in here, suddenly cranking the familiar Duke Togo tropes into gear, and punctuating our little cultural fable in the only appropriate way: with a perfect, between-the-eyes shot of ambiguity. He's still got a Republican to put in office afterwards, but I prefer to consider the bigger story the end of this current series. We'll know more at a later date; we've learned a lot already. But the big picture of stony Duke Togo is still obscured, maybe for everyone by now. Four decades is a long time. There's a million perspectives, and one very storied character at the center.

And he's not talking.

To Have and Have Not

Golgo 13 Vol. 12 (of 13): Shadow of Death

You might have gotten word by now that this year will see the debut of a Golgo 13 television anime series, although there's few details out beyond the fact that the project's actually happening. That'll be enough to stoke anticipation though, since even a modest endeavor of the sort will nonetheless constitute the most extensive adaptation of the material to a filmic art - the current total stands at two live-action films (Golgo 13, 1973 & Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment, 1977), one anime film (Golgo 13, aka: The Professional: Golgo 13, 1983), and one episode of an anime OVA (Golgo 13: Queen Bee, 1998). Unless you count those comics on video.



It can seem odd that there hasn't been more, considering the enduring popularity of the character and the seeming ease with which the concept might fit into a one-off or ongoing project. But a hint might be found in creator Takao Saito's own displeasure with filmic adaptation:

"Whenever there's talk about making a movie, I always oppose it. Because if my concept can be done in a movie, then there's no need to draw it as a gekiga. Gekiga and movies express things in a completely different way. Gekiga are not fit for movies."

That's from his interview in the back of Vol. 11 of this English-language series. It's not a common attitude to run across.

But then, it's not common to see a direct heir to the gekiga tradition still kicking and shouting today, after what will very soon be 40 years of uninterrupted publication. Perhaps the anniversary prompted Saito and company to look around at the very faithful recent adaptations of Osamu Tezuka's works, and opt to finally give it a shot. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect these television episodes will be close translations of manga stories, as I believe was the case with the 2004-06 Black Jack television anime. Yet, with roughly 500 manga stories published and no end in sight, there will still be an element of choice at play. If this new anime indeed goes the route of direct adaptation, it will be something to see which stories make the cut.

For example, the current VIZ-published North American run of the manga, which is compiled, edited and adapted to English by Carl Horn, has leaned heavily on tales steeped in factual, political detail specific to the times in which the stories were created; I doubt many of those will make the cut to anime, if only because a continuing television series (as opposed to a winking survey of a long manga series) would otherwise have to confront the fact that its lead character is somehow not in his 60s as of the present day. It would be sort of interesting if Duke Togo aged over the course of the series, actually, but I think everyone involved would find it much easier to set the show in a specific time period, or (better yet!) just do away with historical specifics entirely.

But even that leaves a ton of wiggle room. If I've learned anything from reading thousands of pages of this comic, it's that a lot of different tones can come through, and not all of them will be conductive to anime airing.



This particular installment of the current VIZ run, released just the other week, illustrates the conflict. I very, very much doubt that the upcoming anime will see anything like the book's second story, The Dark-Skinned Sniper (Story #83, April 1974), if only for the sake of market sense. The plot concerns Duke's hiring by a desperate Vietnam veteran for the purposes of wreaking havoc on a powerful Mississippi politico, who ruined the man's POW buddy over signing some anti-war documents at the behest of the Vietcong and -- even worse! -- commiserating with a black man.

The target happens to be holed up in the most racist town in all the United States of America, so Duke opts to fall in with ineffectual local minority radicals while catching rays and popping Methoxsalen (of Black Like Me fame). Meanwhile, the police run around barking racial slurs, tossing black informants down flights of stars, shooting an innocent Japanese auto rep to death and covering up the murder, and generally being racist boobs. An important plot moment centers around Golgo 13 showing everyone his penis, and the mercenary nature of Our Hero is affirmed in that he leaves the racist structures and legal inequities of the area in place as he leaves.

This is just the sort of story I think can only come from a popular culture unconcerned with international reaction. Oh, Saito and his writers are willing to study the situation, sure. They always are. But there's also a distinct air of Visit Exotic America about the story, one that glamorizes its purported danger to non-whites in certain parts of the US - look at that poor Japanese soul, shot to death without a second thought! The Japanese reader is invited to live through Golgo 13, bedding a black woman and 'becoming' black for a while -- and even showing those tragically impotent black radicals how it’s done while remaining stoic, man! -- all while (kinda) standing for justice without having to fuss over the details of living in the area.

It makes sense, for a bit of Japanese escapism steeped in a comics solitude. Could Saito Pro have thought very much about Americans reading this stuff in 1974? That's unlikely. Today, what with the dates carefully positioned at the ends of the stories, and the backmatter happily logging all of the money Golgo 13 must have made over his 40 years of jobs, fully aware of the character's almost absurdly long life, we can read this story as a grabby selection from a long manga history.



But the anime will be beholden to the present, and it will exist in a time of no solitude at all. The Japanese anime industry has become increasingly reliant on foreign licensing fees and the like for sustenance, with attention paid to action-heavy co-productions with US entities, like The Animatrix, Afro Samurai, Highlander: The Search of Vengeance, and the upcoming Batman: The Dark Knight. This isn't to say that ideas critical of the US wouldn't be considered -- you'll hardly find a more anti-US anime plot than that of the semi-recent Queen Bee -- but I suspect as touchy a subject as race in America, particularly when tackled in as indelicate a manner as Golgo 13 dressed in sophisticated blackface to shoot da baddies, would be quickly deleted from consideration. There is history in presentation, but there is immediacy in adaptation.

No, I think broader, more political stories will be considered (again, if direct adaptation turns out to be the way), material like this volume's Shadow of Death (Story #105, March 1976). It's a pretty arty piece for a Golgo 13 exploit, from the early pages of a CIA bigshot's head kept constantly obscured by word balloons or put just off panel to as to emphasize his powerful distance (oooh, just like Chris Ware does!), to the climactic philosophical conversation held between Duke and a KGB doppelgänger he unwittingly follows to a chemical weapons facility in Palau, a place with US/Japanese history. As the two walk, they find bones of Japanese soldiers lining a once-sealed cave, and discuss the nature of their jobs; while the KGB man is fascinated by death, Duke's heart is only set on accomplishment, whatever the result.

It's a familiar approach -- confronting your lead character with a mirror so as to draw out his traits -- and it mixes well with Saito's uniquely positioned, amoral character. It also clings to the political character of the story, casting its critique of US treaty-breaking dirty work as the catalyst for a showdown between the ideologies of killers, the passion and the dispassion. It's this sense of abstraction that lets the content land quietly; it would be prime material for adaptation even without its copious mood or ready-made suspense. Expect more of that on your screen in the months to come.

Beauty secrets for men, in this post.

*So, I'm going down to SPX on Saturday with Chris Mautner of Blog@Newsarama, and naturally I want to try and sort out what's going on at the show, and pick out my loveliest gown and everything, and I just realized there's a lot of stuff going on. Like, I can probably spend most of the day just sitting around and watching panels and stuff. It's a good lineup. The full schedule is here, but this is how it might look for me:

12:00: Kim Deitch - a talk on many Deitch-related topics

1:00: C(hris).F(orgues). Q+A - Dan Nadel asks the Powr Mastrs creator things, and others ask him things too

2:30: The Generic and the Particular - Tim Hodler moderates a panel on 'genre' comics with Gilbert Hernandez, Jon Lewis (of True Swamp), Frank Santoro (of Cold Heat), and Matt Wagner

4:30: The State of Comics Criticism - Bill Kartalopoulos moderates a comics criticism panel populated by editors of/contributers to The Comics Journal (Gary Groth), Comics Comics (Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler), and The Savage Critics (Douglas Wolk), so you know it's got my seal of approval, which is what everyone everywhere desires most

I don't know if I'll actually go to all those events. That last one's pretty much a lock, though. Maybe I'll see you there, after having picked up the final copy of a minicomic you really wanted, thus leaving our interactions lightly pained.


Golgo 13 Vol. 11 (of 13): The Wrong Man

God, we're really nearing the end of VIZ's big Duke Togo push, aren't we? Just two years ago you had to scrape around for this stuff in English, and now there's 2000 pages of it in bookstores across the US. No word on what might be coming next. I don't recall reading anything about how this series did for its publisher in terms of sales. Will G13 vanish again? Heaven knows there's countless thousands of pages waiting after these are all gone. I'd like to see more.

I'd also like to see more stuff along the lines of this volume's File 13 bonus section, the second half of a short but fascinating 2000 interview with creator Takao Saito, conducted by excitable superfan Kunio Suzuki ("When I read Golgo 13, I get so excited I sometimes feel like turning around and punching the person behind me."). It could be that Saito might only want to have an interview with someone who'd gleefully claim to have re-read the 118 volume entirety of the series beforehand in preparation, but god I'd like to see a level-headed, career-spanning chat with this guy.

For what we're shown, there's still a lot of interesting tidbits. Saito identifies Duke Togo as the impossible ideal of his personal philosophy ("I believe that being stoic is the epitome of male beauty."), discusses his opposition to film versions of the character ("Gekiga and movies express things in a completely different way. Gekiga are not fit for movies."), goes through some personal inspirations, lays out what makes a manga artist a pro, and reveals that he has every panel of the 'final' Golgo 13 story planned out in his head, although he denies rumors that the stuff's locked away in a vault somewhere, presumably to be cracked open upon his death.

As for the stories in this volume, both hail from 1996. First off, there's the 120-page Okinawa Syndrome (Story #350, January 1996), which jumps off of the infamous 1995 abduction/rape of a young girl by a pair of US Navy sailors as its historical flashpoint kick, but quickly becomes an extended meditation on Okinawan identity in a modern Japan that sometimes seems to have traded the prefecture away for the stability of the nation. Yep, it's one of the 'serious' G13 epics, providing a kaleidoscopic view of protestors, capitalists, aristocrats and revolutionaries, everything just slightly larger-than-life, the centerpiece being a lengthy hypothetical on how a charismatic leader and a small fighting force might bring the place to its knees and hold two nations hostage.

As you might expect, it's as info-dense as anything we've seen from Saito Production. Indeed, the first 50 or so pages are so stuffed with discussion of military history, trade restrictions and post-WWII yen rates, that some readers might find their eyes watering. Even after Duke shows up (in one of his most impressive entrances yet), there remains a certain intellectual distance that's absent from other well-studied, text-heavy G13 episodes, enough so that even the 'surprise' ending isn't so much a plot twist as simply unexpected in how it affects the ideas Saito & company are exploring.

Still, there's a peculiarly emphatic tone to this set-in-Japan lesson, conjuring notions of individuals beaten down by the many, only to be exploited by the powerful when they overcompensate with revolt. When a dying man questions why Duke (who is awesome) won't choose a side to put his warrior soul behind, you can feel Saito's words from last volume: "He's not a passionate man, but is trying very hard to be so."

The second story, The Wrong Man (Story #360, December 1996), is a total change of pace from not only the story directly before but from everything we've seen in English so far, in that it's an outright comedy. Cocky traveling salesman Tony Togo bears a striking resemblance to Our Hero, enough so that he's mistaken for the hired gun by a gang of mobsters who've ordered a hit on a well-guarded rival. It's pretty much nothing more than an excuse for Saito Pro to have a Golgo-looking character grin and leer and really enjoy the typical Golgo 13 fixtures of luxury and sex, only to panic magnificently through a parodically generic impossible hit.

Even at only 45 pages, the thin, one-joke premise comes perilously close to wearing out its welcome, and it's not aided by an annoying 'clever' ending that feels mostly like everyone ran out of better ideas a few pages early, but it is kind of nice to see the studio loosen up a little, especially now that we're far enough along in the series that most English-language readers can follow along with the G13 tropes as they're trotted out for fun. Hell, even the art winds up getting away for a while; the requisite sexy female character is drawn in an off-model, almost anime-sleek style, as if some girl-crazy specialist was allowed to cut loose for a few panels as a treat. Or maybe the time crunch was on.

Who knows what secrets are buried behind the scenes as Saito Production? I'd be happy enough to start learning more about Saito himself.

At Saito Pro, they draw 44 pages in six days flat.

Golgo 13 Vol. 10 (of 13): Wasteland

“We’re the best socialist nation in the world. We’re somehow a socialist country that doesn’t think we’re socialists. Because we never acknowledged this, we never had to have a revolution.”

That's creator Takao Saito himself on the state of his nation, from this installment's big bonus feature: part one of a 2001 interview conducted by critic Kunio Suzuki, who starts things off by declaring "Golgo 13 was the textbook of my life." His enthusiasm actually gets kind of infectious; as with all of the recent, 'critical' supplements to this series, a number of interesting ideas and notions are raised without much space to really explore them in, but Suzuki's obvious interest in the work (and Saito's apparent comfort with his interrogator) results in a higher rate of neato tidbits than usual.

Saito makes reference to his early years in the gekiga rental book scene, declaring that the famed Nikkatsu Action films ripped off his style. He chats a bit about working on James Bond manga adaptions for Shogakukan, and how Golgo 13 was actually meant as a departure from that approach (as has been written before, G13 is essentially a translation of certain samurai ethos to a covert action setting). He insists that Duke Togo is "not a passionate man, but is trying very hard to be so." A biographical timeline is provided, revealing that Saito was a bully as a child, and shared studio space with Yoshihiro Tatsumi and other gekiga artists for a year in the late '50s, and that Golgo 13 has never skipped an issue of the Big Comic anthology since its 1968 debut. And yes, such prolificacy does involve cranking out an average of one 44-page G13 chapter per week, although I suspect there's quite a lot of hands at work.

It's a lot of information, most of it quickly stated and tossed aside as the next thing comes up. It'll really make you wish for an extra-long, career-spanning interview in the style of The Comics Journal, since Saito is an articulate, opinionated man, and thoughtful about his work. He's obviously seen a lot in his career. It'd take some Japanese-fluent Golgo 13 superfan with a solid grasp of manga history, and a willingness on Saito's part to actually do it, but he'd be a prime subject for such treatment.

One topic that is covered in some depth is politics. Suzuki is endlessly impressed with the sober attitude the comic adopts regarding touchy subjects, especially since the series rose out of the inflamed student protest Japan of the late '60s. Saito characterizes his true political message as one urging personal responsibility in regimented Japan; in this way, it's easy to see Duke Togo acting as a constant symbol for individual action, one that often prompts other individuals to act on their own in trumping moral authority. One could be tempted to brand Duke Togo himself an anarchist (specifically the ultimate in anarcho-individualism), but Saito's work strikes me as
disinterested in ascribing exact political philosophy to his creation; just as the continuity is kept light enough that nearly any Golgo 13 story could be your first, the metaphoric thrust of the character is broad and basic. The stories are individuals too.

(and oooh... maybe one of you crazy college kids might be up for putting together a paper on Osamu Dezaki's Golgo 13 theatrical anime acting as a covert liberal critique of its source material, amping up the self-obsession of the title character to monster levels of cruelty - I'll accept a special thanks credit and your unyielding devotion)

But something tells me editor Carl Horn may have been saving this volume's first story, Wasteland (Story #213, July 1984), especially for coupling with the Saito chat, as it's replete with themes of personal responsibility and individual workings in society. The plot concerns a spanking new nuclear power plant just about ready for opening in Port Hueneme, California. The President is going to be in nearby Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, and pressure is high to get the place up and running at a politically helpful rate. But poor Miguel, safety director for the place, has been clashing with his evil boss (pointy mustache = evil) about important issues! No matter - the joint fires up, and soon everybody gets to confront the threat of LA being rendered uninhabitable for 25 millennia. But as luck would have it, Duke is in town to murder the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Miguel heroically enlists him to avert a full-scale plant meltdown... by shooting it.

I sometimes joke about Golgo 13's sense of sophistication -- the series being all about a dude who assassinates people and has sex a lot and shoots nuclear reactions to death -- but I am serious when I say that sometimes there's some handsome visual metaphors and narrative flourishes at work. This particular story begins with the image of a pipe being bumped in the under-construction plant. It soon becomes evident that the pipe may muck up the entire operation of the plant - given that the whole story is about individuals screwing up sophisticated machines to awful effect, I think it's fair to view this image as symbolic of the story's ongoing theme, which completes itself upon another individual's decision to marshal forces and repair the ruined system.

There's a running joke about a plant official who keeps getting angry with people who don't understand how nuclear power works (on the whole, the story probably errs on the side of info overload - perhaps Saito and company felt a nuclear-adverse Japanese audience needed extra clarification on the ins and outs of such things?), but in the end he makes a big gesture of personal responsibility, arguing for the safety of nuclear power, while the story gently undercuts his impact through its own uncertainty about the will of people to stand up against deadly systems. Surely Duke appreciates action - his role in the story concludes with a gesture of such over-the-top, damned near transcendent manliness, you'll be willing to follow the icon wherever the fuck.

There's some technical things going on in this volume too. I noticed an odd reproduction problem with my copy, which made certain parts of the first story fade in line detail, with several small details being obliterated - maybe the source materials for the story weren't the best? Or was it an error on VIZ's part? It's also worth noting that the second story, Route 95 (Story #249, April 1987), dips into the Author's Selection edition of the gigantic Best 13 compilations of G13 stories, which likely shuts the door on that puppy making its way to the US in the near future.

That second feature's a shorter tale, only 40 pages long, and very heavy on atmosphere and silent assassin attitude, as Duke finds himself at the scene of a murder mystery out in Nevada, an arid environment that quickly becomes the stage for gunmen thinking about irrelevance. It's probably a bit closer to something like Hotel Harbour View than Golgo 13 usually gets, and it's maybe a little revealing that Saito values the piece as one of his personal favorites - he and his team don't have the lyrical ability of a Jiro Taniguchi, but their stony portrayal of men confronting greater men carries some inky pulp impact regardless. Maybe Saito prefers the nation's medicine go down as sweet as he can mix it.

Eternal Granite Features

Golgo 13 Vol. 9 (of 13): Headhunter

There's an interesting (if characteristically brief) essay in the back of this latest volume, from Makoto Tezuka, active filmmaker and son of a certain famed manga artist. The occupation is pertinent, since he analyzes creator Takao Saito’s approach to comics in terms of film.

That may initially sound a bit dull, I admit, since comics are often evaluated in filmic terms, but Tezuka actually has some relevant comments to make on Saito and company’s dogged adoption of straightforward film grammar -- apparently to the point of simulating the use of appropriate lenses for various ‘shots,’ despite obviously not having to worry about things like keeping focus -- as a means of keeping the reading experience as easy as possible. I don’t think I buy Tezuka’s assertions that Golgo 13 as directly translated to film would prove “experimental” due to the excessively taciturn nature of the title character (after all, the comic itself spends half its time working around such narrative limitations), but I definitely dig his notion that Saito’s almost spooky devotion to total narrative stoicism and wholesale evasion of conceptual evolution qualifies as something of an artistic statement - certainly it serves the stony Duke Togo well to star in a comic that gets it done in such an unassuming (yet effective!) manner over the decades.

And thank heavens that someone else is willing to draw parallels between Golgo 13 and Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack! Even if it had to be Tezuka's literal son. And the director of a Black Jack movie.

Curious that this material would show up in the back of this volume, since the lead story, Accidental (Story #61, August 1972), is from early enough a point in G13 history that the presentation isn’t quite as steely as it’d eventually get. Sure, the plot is a simple and effective play on the Golgo 13 concept: Duke’s client-provided hardware misfires during a hit, causing Our Hero to leave no stone unturned on a perfectionist assassin nerd rampage to find out who fucked up his stuff. Who cares about politics when you've got a reputation to maintain? Certainly not this character, he and his eye of God.

But little things are amiss in the Saito style: we’re privy to Duke’s thoughts a bit more than usual, the page compositions are unusually constricted (which may be a reproduction issue, actually), and Duke even expresses -- gah! -- mild agitation at the sight of a sympathetic character meeting their doom. The details are a bit rougher and dirtier than we're used to seeing, with more of a lurid, men's magazine, Kazuo Koike-type vibe (actually, Koike himself was a writer on Golgo 13 in its early days - maybe the tonal similarity isn't coincidental), the sex guiltier and the killing less studied. But the story’s still well-formed in the Saito Pro way, with a web of period Sinai Peninsula intrigue fluttering to bits before the steely testosterone majesty of two hard men left to evaluate one another’s hardness. It’s in plastic wrap, folks!

The second story, Headhunter (Story #204, October 1983), is farther along enough on the timeline that it can relax in the established groove of the series - the art is simultaneously more elaborate and occasionally dashed-off, and the story’s all hopped up on international trickery and faintly nonsensical melodramatic struggle. While Golgo 13 never quite 'develops' much as a concept, it zigs and zags within its confines enough that it doesn't seem repetitious, which is probably how Saito has managed to provide for his statement's longevity.

It’s also one of those stories where Duke pops in only twice, when matters need resolving, so much of our time actually being spent with a determined old warhorse, founder of a renowned corporate ‘headhunting’ firm, who must use all his skills to uncover the secrets of America’s shadowy private intelligence industry, big-time spy companies buying out whole nations, a moist ‘n fatty metaphor for ‘80s corporate expansion. Frenzied skullduggery, breathless factoids, occasionally jarring humor (I’ll give Saito and company cultural crossover credit for whipping up a credibly daffy pulp version of Big Business in the US, but I made The Uh-Oh Face after the second comically nervous black character in a row appeared), and off-kilter moments of grace follow, telling lines rattled off casually, as glimpsed through that fixed, Almighty vision.

"Well, it'll be warm where we're going."

Oh, no doubt. We know who runs the cosmos around here.

Japan: Nation of Zesty Fever

*Genius Party Dept: Jog, when will you stop writing about Genius Party?! When it's out, folks. And now it's looking like the forthcoming Studio 4°C anime anthology film has gotten so big that it's being split into two films. More info at the link, including the great-looking soundtrack lineup. Vol. 1 opens on July 7 in Japan.

*And getting back to comics -

Golgo 13 Vol. 8 (of 13): Gravestone in Sicily

This isn’t out yet in comics stores, unless Diamond sent it to certain stories without putting it on its shipping list, but the chain bookstores have it.

As is usually the case with VIZ’s Golgo 13 books, the more interesting of the two included stories is not the one that provides the volume’s subtitle. Sure, Gravestone in Sicily (Story #139, November 1978) is a perfectly workable little Duke Togo caper, in which the super-assassin (in natty late ‘70s black suit/white tie attire) attempts to sneak onto an island that’s fallen totally under the control of a pair of American Mafia siblings, obtain a weapon in a place where literally every gun is accounted for, and evade an Italian lawman he’s apparently tangled with before. There’s plenty of high fashion (I guess the Wolverine hairdo was ‘in’ for Mafioso in ‘78), paranoia, and old country decadence (whippings - right in the parlor), complete with a wholly predictable yet largely satisfying finale among the graves. Typical workmanlike Golgo 13 stuff.

But then, there’s Telepath (Story #184, May 1982), which is one of those Duke Togo adventures. You know the type.

The saga begins with the greatest tragedy the world has ever known: Golgo 13 misses a shot. Two actually! It’s neither dream nor imaginary story, so there’s only one obvious conclusion to draw - Duke has been bedazzled in the head by a KGB psychic operative. Yes, beautiful young Anna is part of a secret Soviet program (which we naturally learn all about), an infernal experiment that’s already influenced the course of WWII, with the ultimate goal of transmitting documents across the land via mere thought, striking crippling fear into entire enemy installations without entering, and yes dear readers, conquering the mind of Ronald Reagan. Sadly, that little subplot is never brought up again after it’s mentioned, cruelly robbing us of a thrilling finale in which Duke rushes to save the Gipper from Communist telepathy. Maybe in a future story?

Actually, that’s not the only bit of story that’s merely suggested, rather than being acted upon. Telepath is possibly the most haphazardly constructed of any Golgo 13 story yet released in English, more a loosely-connected sequence of cool events and infodumps than a carefully constructed plot. Not that all of it doesn’t seem worth it as Duke pursues several means of defeating Psychic Communism, hooking himself up to a brain wave-reader and shocking an impressible technician (“What? You jumped from Delta to Beta wave activity in less than a second!”) or barging into the New York Yoga Association Center in hopes of paying his way to Samadhi in a single day. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter sequence originated with some Saito Pro staffer reading a book on yoga and chattering to everyone at the office about how it all totally reminds him of Golgo 13 - the whole story has a sort of anything-goes vibe that probably allowed creator Takao Saito’s people to work off much accumulated research on dreaming and psy ops and such, without quite worrying if it all adds up in the end.

It’s not completely random, mind you. It’s really a cute gag about how the consummately awesome nature of Duke Togo has somehow allowed him to grasp a type of enlightenment. Same goes for his adversary, sauntering around in the USSR’s finest early ‘80s tracksuits and rejecting the temptations of the flesh (“Penis! Penis, penis!! Men make me want to vomit!!”). Needless to say, Golgo 13 becomes her ultimate dream man for the only kind of romantic activity she’s interested in - psychic murder sex. This also doesn't really amount to anything by story's end.

There’s also the alleged 'main' plot about a recalled KGB agent that Duke has to assassinate, but rarely have actual plot details been so obviously unimportant to Saito Pro - this one’s all about the title character reinforcing his own awesomeness, right up to an abrupt ending that demands from the reader a certain attention to detail for any of it to make sense, while leaving them scratching their head over how simple it all seemed.

Also on hand is a pair of short essays in the File 13 bonus section. One is an amusing if highly superficial account by Kentaro Takekuma (co-author of the great Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga) of a 1982 letters page skirmish between manga critic Tomoyoshi Go and various Golgo 13 readers over a critique titled Readers Are Stupid. The other is an even shorter, but oddly effective ramble by writer Masahiko Katsuya on Takao Saito’s use of Manchuria in Golgo 13, how the Japanese history surrounding the place carries much symbolic value, and how Golgo 13 symbolizes a pre-WWII attitude of Japanese culture. Oddly, both pieces refer to stories not presented in any Golgo 13 release in English - I don’t think we’ve ever actually seen Saito’s handling of Manchuria.

But isn't that how it usually is with that character for English audiences? Once we think we've got a handle on him, he slips away yet again.

I have returned from my meditation in the desert.

*Key enlightenment: a scorpion is not a housecat, and should not be treated as one.

*Follow-Up Dept: I’ll put this right up top since I know you’re all still teetering on the edges of your seats over the cataclysmic Golgo 13 mystery journey of the other week. Chris Butcher (as I’m sure you all know) was at the NYCC last weekend, and, well -- since the people from VIZ were there and all -- the answer to the million dollar question is that editor Carl Horn is indeed hand-picking all the material in VIZ’s current Golgo 13 run. So I guess Dan Coyle gets a million dollars, which he can contact the United States Department of the Treasury about (this site is huge with the Treasury, trust me). Thanks Chris!

*52 Dept: Ah ha ha ha haaa, that fellow got his entrails eaten! Detailed in three delicious panels, one of them a full-page splash, with a special bonus coda panel of drippy plasm oozing from diner's jaws! I am willing to presume the red hues were intended to moot the impact of the sequence, though I got quite the opposite effect, actually. Combine that sequence with the bloody 'giving birth to HORROR' passage and the pervading thematic migraine of killing's power trip, and this week's 52 is pretty much a half-dozen exposed genitals and 1700 extraneous words away from being an issue of Faust. I'd better see Black Adam belting out James Brown lyrics whilst sawing Egg Fu in half in a couple weeks.

These things don't bug me so much on all-ages funnybook morals level -- I know damn well I'd have been going apeshit over this when I was 14 -- but they're collectively another telling illustration of the running 52 conflict between the silly bits of the DCU and the (sorry) gnawing darkness that's been around for an awfully long time, members of the writing team seemingly conflicted between the two impulses and the series reflective of that tumult. It almost makes me hope that this issue's big revelation is merely a certain character falling under the influence of greater approaching forces rather than being one of those forces incarnated - it'd make for quite a fine illustration of this series' macrocosmic tug-of-war, though it'll be damn tough to beat last week's image of Ralph Dibny putting a magical wishing gun to his head and firing. I mean, shit - that's pretty much the thrust of the thing right there, as jarring as it might be on other levels.

Thank god for implications, eh? At this point I'm interested enough in how the writing team is going to resolve all this (if anything is truly resolved, although 52 does have a pretty big out in that department - it has to stop at One Year Later, which relieves it of the burden of feeding onrushing continuity that something like Civil War has to shoulder these days) to stick around till the resolution, even when confronted with superhero angst as warmed-over as this issue's Osiris material. At least that seems to have concluded...

*Enough for tonight. More tomorrow morning.

The Perfect Machine of Stupid

*Well, I’m a real idiot. This will teach me to assume anything, because this time I have truly made an ass out of u and me.

You see, I reviewed the new volume of Golgo 13 yesterday. For a good long while, I’d been going on the assumption that stories included in VIZ’s 13-volume series were a combination of a pair of Japanese volumes, the Best 13 series, one collecting the 13 favorite stories of readers (released in 2001), and one collecting the 13 favorite stories of creator Takao Saito (released in 2003). Thus, 13 + 13 = 26, enough for a 13 volume series of books with two stories in each. Just like what VIZ is presenting to the US. Easy, huh?

Except, just this very morning, reader Pedro Bouça (aka Hunter) wrote in to tell me that the French-language edition of the Readers’ volume of the Best 13 series, a big, thick 1328-page monster released in 2006 by Glénat (god, I hope I at least got that right) to match the big, thick 1330-page version released in Japan, did not contain either of the stories I described in my review of Golgo 13 Vol. 7, a volume that presumably would ‘switch over’ from Saito’s favorites to the readers’ favorites.

Well, that got me thinking.

And you know what? I've been completely fucking wrong for a while now.

So now, having utilized Babelfish to navigate through Japanese publisher Shogakukan’s official pages for both the Author’s and Readers’ Best 13 volumes, plus Saito Pro’s own (incomplete) database of G-13 stories, I can say, with confidence, that VIZ’s current release of Golgo 13 is not based on either of the Best 13 collections. Indeed, it doesn’t appear that they share any stories at all, though there‘s room for error, giving what I’m working with (free translators and the official site). I’m now willing to bet that the French-language book Hunter has been reading features tales involving wild monkeys and Okinawan independence and hijacker sniping and the like. Moreover, Saito's picks should have been involving stuff like diamond bosses and people held in cages and international banking. That's not the stories we've been reading.

In addition, The Golgo 13 Gaku, which is listed in the legal indicia of most of the VIZ volumes as “First published by Shogakukan Inc. in Japan as…” appears to actually be a 344-page Official Handbook sort of thing, almost certainly the source material for the File 13 bonus materials seen in the VIZ books, rather than a compilation of stories as originally suspected. Tellingly, no mention of the Gaku is present in the indicia of the new Vol. 7, in which editor Carl Horn imparts information of specific interest to English-speaking audiences.

So where are VIZ’s stories coming from? No clue. Maybe VIZ is just picking things they think will appeal to English-speaking audiences. I don’t know. But I do know these stories aren’t being culled directly from the Best 13 series, nor is the current VIZ release a split up version of those two huge volumes. So thanks for tipping me off, Hunter.

This may seem like a minor background detail, but minor background details bug me, and I hate to think my background information led anyone astray. So there it is. Me am wrong. That's why I plopped in language like "unless I’m grievously mistaken" at the top of the review - sometimes I am.

*And, er, that's going to have to be my post for the day, since I spent all my time studying Golgo 13. See ya!

Wow! Multimedia special!

Golgo 13 Vol. 7 (of 13): Eye of God

Volume 7 is book of changes for the current Golgo 13 series. Unless I’m grievously mistaken (EDIT: which I am - see here), it marks both the last of creator Takao Saito’s 13 favorite stories and the first of a group of 13 Japanese fan-selected stories. I’ve heard that the fan-favorites gravitate less toward the studied quasi-history of Saito’s predilection, and more in the direction of sex and violence and giant eagle wrestling and the like, so we should be in for some fun.

This volume also sees a shift in the bonus material, as suddenly File 13 entirely drops its treatment of super-assassin Duke Togo as a ‘real’ person, and English editor Carl Gustav Horn addresses the reader as himself to impart some English-specific information on the live-action Golgo 13 films. You know, all two of them. A bit more space is devoted to the earlier, 1973 film (titled simply Golgo 13), directed by Junya Sato and starring Ken Takakura, probably because few English-speaking people have actually seen it - it’s never been released on dvd, even in Japan, though Japanese vhs copies are apparently floating around. Horn has seen it though, and imparts some great historical information on the picture’s Iranian setting, a would-be swinging scene friendly to both the Japanese and film production, and home to some sexy domestic stars that would find themselves squelched by the Islamic Revolution of just over half a decade later.

The later, 1977 film (Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment, although it's also sometimes called simply "Golgo 13"), directed by Yukio Noda and starring Sonny Chiba, is readily available in the US on vhs and dvd, and Horn’s coverage is far lighter and picture-adorned. There is a minor factual error, possibly due to deadline issues, which it is nevertheless my duty as a nerd to correct - in addition to the dub-only 2004 Kill Chiba box set that Horn identifies as the film’s sole US dvd release, there is also the more recent 2006 Sonny Chiba Action Pack, which actually presents the film in its original Japanese with English subtitles, an English dub optional.

(on a side note, be aware that both of the aforementioned Chiba packs also contain the 1975 Sato-directed feature Bullet Train, which actually teams both Takakura and Chiba in an action/disaster story that supposedly inspired the 1994 film Speed - the Chiba Action Pack contains as its third film the 1980 Kinji Fukasaku medical sci-fi epic Virus, which the title star has little more than a cameo in, while Kill Chiba sports 1974's The Executioner, a Terou Ishii-directed thing with Chiba killing the shit out of folks)

Ok, so how about those comics? Despite this volume’s two stores being (apparently) culled from two separate lists of favorites, there’s actually a single, unifying theme running between them: no man can make Golgo 13 their puppet.

The better of the two is the second, 1977’s Far from an Era (Story #126), which sees Duke hired by a wealthy California businessman for a curious assignment: he must deliberately miss a shot at the man’s wife, a pretty young thing with secret, scandalous ties to the Weather Underground, putting some fear of god into her by merely nicking off her tiny left earring, thus hopefully convincing her to sever those radical connections. But everything goes horribly wrong when a mysterious second assassin actually kills the woman at the moment of Duke’s shot, leaving the irate client to summon the police after our off-guard anti-hero.

In many ways, this is as basic a Golgo 13 story as you can find: an assassination, complications, a mystery, a little historical flavor, Duke standing triumphant as his foe sputters that he… he couldn’t possibly have made that shot… not in this wind… on a boat! There’s even a gratuitous sex scene with a lonely woman whom Duke shacks up with while on the run from the police, though I guess you can call it an extension of the story’s ‘trust vs. distrust’ theme, if you really feel like it. The story’s main pleasure comes from its sleek propulsion, its wonderfully tense finale, and its ultimately hilarious look at Duke’s superhuman vanity. It’s not that he’s particularly pissed that the police are after him, or even that he’s clearly been set up by outside forces - what’s really got him mad is that he’s been made to look like he’s missed a shot, and that little misapprehension will have to be corrected no matter what.

Also on tap is 1993’s Eye of God (Story #319), a surprisingly dense little package of cheeseball metaphors that doubles as a covert surveillance saga with the Israel/Palestine conflict as its backdrop. The real lead character is Augustus James Belmeyer, a brilliant satellite data interpreter and lecherous voyeur, a man who’s vital to US national security because of his preternatural aptitude for picking up tiny nuances and subtle suggestions in spy satellite footage, and then heads home to greet his library of nudie pin-up art with a hearty “I’m home, everyone!” before settling down to snap secret photos of the showering ladies in nearby buildings.

He’s also gone a bit mad, and is orchestrating a plot to gain total control over the US’s shiny orbital KH-13 spy satellite (note the number, ho ho) and become the world’s undisputed master of surveillance, a man with the eye of god. There’s another man with the eye of god out there, of course, and Belmeyer decides to manipulate G-13 into a position of powerlessness, exposing even the greatest covert assassin as merely a man who can be watched, for no apparent reason other than to prove his crazed superiority.

In contrast to the other story’s ‘Duke as vain superhuman’ motif, this one sets Our Hero firmly in ‘angry god’ mode, another of his default characterizations. Amusingly, Saito and his anonymous Saito Production workers set both random Act of God weather occurrences and Golgo 13 against Belmeyer, as if the man has pissed off every god that might be in the immediate area, and fully deserves what’s coming in the Grand Guignol ending. If there’s any real problem with this story, it’s that a sense of inevitability sets in a little too far from the actual ending; better stories, like Far from an Era, don’t clue us in to the exact means of Duke’s triumph until we’re nearly out of space.

But as always, there’s great moments, like the recurring image of Golgo 13 staring into the sky, one god gazing directly at another, and neither eager to budge from their superiority. Even when we know which one has to win, it's still compelling as all hell.

"I don't tolerate impersonators."

*Links With Little Comment Dept: You know what every blog needs? PURE CINEMA.

(why yes, I did hear they're making another one of these...)


Golgo 13 Vol. 6 (of 13): One Minute Past Midnight


“It should not be inferred from the above that Golgo’s penis is completely normal from a non-Asian perspective. Separate from physical dimensions is the is the issue of rigidity; in the regard, the Asian member is sometimes known as the ‘metallic cock,’ in supposed contrast to the less firm nature of the European erection.”

- from the redoubtable File 13


I think the best part of this volume isn’t just that the bonus section is devoted entirely to the title character’s sexual peccadilloes, it’s that this isn’t the first time the issue has come up. But while we may have learned all the way back in Vol. 1 that globetrotting super-assassin Duke Togo “[l]ures all the women in the world to the ‘height of ecstasy,’” we haven’t gotten two solid pages of charts and graphs breaking each and every one of the character’s sexual encounters down by time period, position, partner ethnicity, and other important factors (apparently, Golgo 13 has never once slept with a Japanese woman over the decades - escapism, you see). Many delightful illustrations from adventures throughout the years, most of which would be entirely unbelievable if not for the fact that the long-running Golgo 13 is one of the only comics in the world that can actually back every one of these random tidbits up with citations to actual storylines.

We’re still on Vol. 6, which means we have, by my estimate, about one more of creator Takao Saito’s favorite stories to go before we’re plunged into the readers’ choices, which I’ve been told tend to fall more along the lines of Duke disguising himself as a black man and showing his penis to the police of Mississippi. As opposed to the two stories in this volume, which often seem to be desperately restraining themselves from going too wild. There’s no need for restraint; this is Golgo 13! Let’s have him wrestle a giant eagle in the desert soon.

By far the most entertaining of this volume’s two stories is Zdrowas Maryjo (Story #179, December 1981), in which Duke is hired by the international Freemason conspiracy to track and kill the villains that have secretly kidnapped Pope John Paul II following a contemporaneous (and, of course, real) attempt on his life. Apparently the Pope has been switched with a sinister double, who’s bent on sabotaging an upcoming conference on interfaith reconciliation, so Duke winds up taking the place of a pious double of his own (groomed for that specific purpose for years by the Freemasons, who obviously think ahead) and brings world religions together via gunshots to the head. It’s the expected mix of bloody violence, briefings on historical topics, somewhat strained motives by geopolitical players, and panels of serious men in suits solemnly delivering dialogue like “We have to find him before the Christmas Mass.”

Less interesting is One Minute Past Midnight (Story #377, September 1998), which is one of the series off-and-on attempts at mostly serious spy melodrama, this time concerning the affairs of agents and double-agents left out in the world after the close of the Cold War. Basically, a Soviet defector has evaded his chaperones on a quest to murder an ex-CIA on death row for the crime of orchestrating his brother’s death. “You know what he’s capable of. He’ll fly a plane filled with Semtex into that prison if he thought it would make absolutely sure.” Obviously, Duke gets involved for a somewhat predictable surprise ending that might have landed better if the mechanics of Duke’s plan were explained before the end of the story.

The infodumps are thicker than usual here, though Saito and Co. (as usual, Golgo 13 is largely constructed by teams of anonymous individuals working collectively as Saito Production) do manage a pretty great sequence with a nervous Georgia official giving reporters a tour of their lethal injection facilities (“That there is for ventilation. Ah, on occasion there will be an incontinent incident on the part of the prisoner…”) in between bouts of lukewarm espionage opera. Oh, for an acid trip or something!

I mean, it’s lovely that we’re getting this much Golgo 13 in the US, but the bonus section has been tempting us with treats that Saito doesn’t seem entirely willing to give us himself. Next volume ought to be the switchover (13 of his, 13 of theirs in total), and it’s probably come right in time. Study is fine, but it’s time for a little less work and a little more play.

The new Drifting Classroom was also very good, if truly exhausting what with all the running and yelling.

*I loved how the evil lunchman seemed to be a self-portrait of writer/artist Kazuo Umezu. Also, his double-page splashes are better than anyone's I can think of.

*Hmmm, I think I will link to this nice Hope Larson interview by Chris Randle that’s up at the Comics Reporter. Yes, that is what I will do.

*Recent Cinema Dept: There’s really no good reason for The Departed to have been close to two and a half hours long, and I can’t remember the last time Martin Scorsese got this cheesy with the symbolism (there’s this one bit where Leonardo DiCaprio sees his reflection in wind chimes and it fragments because *gasp* he doesn’t know who he really is, and then it reforms into the reflection of Matt Damon, who’s essentially his thematic ‘double’ in the movie, and around then I had to slap myself to keep my eyes from rolling all the way over), but I’m not gonna lie - this is exactly the sort of goofy, over-the-top crime movie horseplay I’ll happily sit through every time without substantial complaint, especially when it’s as nicely crafted as this. Lots of vivid, larger-than-life performances (Mark Wahlberg’s cartoonishly mean undercover police chessmaster was my favorite, and quite a crowd-pleaser too), gory violence (there’s so many headshots in this thing it rises to the level of recurring motif), and crazy, crazy plot twists and double-crosses, over and over. More comedy than expected too, which is great - these things need a sense of humor as far as I‘m concerned.

It also helps that the environment of the picture instantly appealed to me: hard-scrabble tensions between Irish and Italian-descended Catholics in a half-thriving, half-depressed area. Boston ain’t the only place like that, let me tell you. I enjoyed the construction of several volleys of scenes (often its more like vignettes) around anchoring framing scenes - I’m pretty sure DiCaprio’s conversation in the shrink’s office wind up spiraling out into a whole bunch of tangents and mini-scenes, many of which throughout the film emphasize the doubling aspect of the characters, not to mention the mirror environments of crime and law enforcement, how both feature their own little gangs and troubles and overachievers. Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen even provide contrasting father figures for both protagonists, and, typically, the ‘good’ one’s hands aren’t totally clean and the ‘bad’ one has a certain special take on how to operate within the law. Very well designed from almost any angle (the pacing, as I’ve mentioned gets screwy), and it does have a really great final scene; the cheesiest of all symbolism pops up there, but by that point it’s silly enough to work in the film’s gregarious universe. Maybe some of it came from Infernal Affairs, which I've not seen. Still, if you like this sort of thing, you'll like this.

*Also of note in the theater: a new 300 trailer, and since it was on the big screen I had the chance to spot an interesting detail - Lynn Varley is credited as co-author of the 300 graphic novel. Very interesting, and much-deserved.

Golgo 13 Vol. 5 (of 13): Wiseguy

Only in the pages of Golgo 13 could you possibly run into anything like what’s in this volume’s File 13 bonus section: a short essay by Horibe Masashi, “founder of the Hakukotsu School of Japanese Martial Arts,” devoted entirely to the physiology of being kicked in the nuts. Seriously; you’ll learn the science behind what exactly happens in the body during an assault on the family jewels, some fun facts about testicles in Japanese folklore, and even the secrets behind a legendary lost karate skill of temporary bollocks retraction. But don’t get the impression that sensei isn’t a devoted reader as well:

“I personally would like to see a scene where Golgo 13 gets attacked in the testicles, and squirms in anguish, or is attacked but is shown to have some sort of protection against it, allowing him to get through the biggest pinch of his life.”

Oh Golgo 13, you have the best letters column ever! The same temperament extends to the entirety of this particular File 13, which is devoted exclusively to torture and the title character’s godlike endurance thereof. As usual, there’s a billion citations to Duke Togo adventures past, enough so that it sort of adopts the feeling of one of those fake vintage comics supplements that Alan Moore or Geof Darrow or someone might draft, chock-full of increasingly outlandish titles and references to zany adventures that we the readers will never get to see. We’ll probably never get to see many of these Golgo 13 adventures either, but they derive a certain added effect from actually existing. You can practically hear the unnamed File 13 compiler cackling with glee while typing out lines like “NOTES: The day after the torture, Golgo was released into the desert, and forced to fight a giant eagle bare-handed.” And you can read that with pride, knowing that, at some point in time (actually in 1981, Story #171, since they all have cites), Duke Togo actually did battle a gigantic fucking eagle with his bare hands in the desert, and that you could really find that comic and read it if you tried extra hard. No other comic on the stands today can give you that feeling.

It’s too bad there’s no giant eagle fighting in this particular volume’s stories; VIZ’s current release of Golgo 13 is based on The Golgo 13 Gaku, a collection of creator Takao Saito’s 13 favorite stories, and an additional 13 favorites selected by readers via polling. We’re going to be into Saito’s favorites until mid-way through Volume 7, and it’s understandable that the old gekiga hand might favor the especially studied episodes, those that fit tightly into real-world concerns. I’ve heard that the readers’ choices tend to gravitate more toward giant eagle material, and I find myself waiting more and more for that to kick in.

I mean, it’s nice to see a story about Duke lurking around the fall of the Berlin Wall (Germany is One, Story #288, August, 1990), and there’s certainly some interesting flourishes at work -- the bit with representatives of the EU sitting around to play a tabletop RPG as a means of blowing off steam and sussing out one another’s diplomatic inclinations is funny, and quite inspired -- but in the end there’s not an awful lot to set it apart from other G13 epics save for the particularized setting. There’s none of the cockeyed pulp emotion of Power to the People (Vol. 3, Tiananmen Square Massacre) or the damn-the-torpedoes engaging with controversy of England’s Rose (Vol. 4, death of Lady Di); I liked the characters, and the studious examination of then-current political tensions is as well-presented as ever, but it’s starting to feel a bit dry after this many consecutive run-ins with history.

The book’s other story, Way of the Wiseguy (Story #301, October 1991), is more successful in that Saito and company (as usual, there are no credited writers or artists on Golgo 13 - all is accomplished by Saito and his rotating teams of specialists at Saito Production) basically produce a political chamber drama involving an aged mob leader, his loyal, ambitious son, a hot-blooded friend of the family, and a sinister Senator with one toe still dipped in his own father’s rival crime syndicate. Duke pops in for a cameo shooting (an especially berserk one) that wraps up the plot, but really it’s an opportunity for Saito and pals to wring some character drama out of a concept that allows for the lead character to stand around off-page if need be. If he’s not fighting massive birds, maybe sometimes it’s better he doesn’t do much of anything, lest the weight of history start to numb us poor fans.

Today's theme is: old mutant superhero comics brought up while talking about other things.

*52 Dept: Remember back when I said I sort of liked the resurrection cult plotline because it reminded me of something I might have seen in X-Statix? Well, the bits this issue involving Lex Luthor’s rockin’ superteam also reminded me of Peter Milligan’s and Mike Allred’s work, only completely stripped of anything interesting, witty, playful, attractive, or surprising. I’m going to hold off on ‘original,’ since X-Statix was hardly the first to tackle the whole superheroes-as-media-stars thing, but a strong execution of an old idea and a capable sense of how to temper your themes to the current cultural climate goes a long way toward making a book seem fresh, regardless of anything else. The Luthor’s Freedom Toastmasters Brigade plot, meanwhile, has now provided perhaps the four most uninspiring pages of 52 thus far.

That leaves us to the tender mercies of Lobo, who shows up to conclude(?) the Planet TERROR plotline and whisk the cast away to something else. I recall Grant Morrison commenting a while back that he found Lobo to be surprisingly fun to write - given that all of Lobo’s word balloons are left blank this issue, I now have to wonder if Morrison was telling a joke, though I presume that the character’s purported religious conversion will provide some sort of fresh dimension to future participation (all of this is providing that the story doesn’t get bounced around between writers like the Steel plotline apparently has; and isn’t it cute how I presume the breakdowns are telling the truth, what with their occasional tomfoolery!). I did enjoy Starfire’s shutting down of Animal Man’s explanation of the truth behind how the universe works as terribly depressing, once you think about it from the perspective of comics characters.

Also: Red Tornado. I’ve heard he’s so awesome...

Golgo 13 Vol. 4 (of 13): The Orbital Hit

The first thought in my head upon reading Dirk Deppey’s review of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation:

“Wow, it sounds like Golgo 13!”

I didn’t only think that because Takao Saito’s beloved creation deals in all the loud sound effects, declarative sentences, tense politics, and pulpy posturing suggested by Dirk’s review; I’m also utterly convinced that very few subject matters are so touchy that the anonymous worker bees at Saito Production might not want to transform it into fuel for another bullet-in-the-head manga epic.

For example, this latest installment of VIZ’s Golgo 13 greatest hits reprint project places invincible antihero assassin Duke Togo at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I don’t mean there’s references made to the event, or that it ‘happens in the background’ or anything - I mean Duke rides alongside the limo on a motorcycle, shoots someone in the skull, then witnesses that infamous vehicular smash, the reader’s eye happily guided inside the wreck for a few panels of Her Royal Highness slumped over in the back seat. Oh, Saito Pro restrains their collective enthusiasm a bit - Dodi Al-Fayed’s name gets changed to Ahmad Al-Farid, and Lady Di is scrupulously never mentioned by any name at all, though it’s so bleeding obvious who she’s supposed to be that VIZ just straight-out calls her "Princess Diana" on the book’s back cover. It’s almost rendered more stunning for Saito Pro’s resoundingly unconvincing attempts at adding a gloss of fiction to the involved parties.

But then, maybe a US comics fan finds it a bit more stunning than average due to our pop fantasy industry’s own little dalliance with the topic. Getting back to X-Statix - everyone remember Milligan’s and Allred’s original plan to revive Princess Di and have her join the mutant superhero team for a storyline? Hey, superheroes suffer dramatic deaths only to come back from it all the time, and if the series truly sought to position superheroes as analogues to modern celebrities, why not have celebrities behave the same way? The concept looked to fit in quite marvelously with the book’s running themes, but pressure came down. Some of it from fans - oh how I recall the message boards buzzing with how beloved a figure dear Di was, and how dare a superhero comic tarnish her memory with its satirical hi-jinx and, oh gracious that awful Bill Jemas has finally gone too far and must be stopped before he kills again. There were other considerations at play behind the scenes as well, I’m sure. Tabloids commented. I expect someone thought of the Hollywood money. Some even believe Milligan and Allred and Marvel themselves never really planned to use Diana in the comic, and merely played at the idea (to the point of producing finished art, I guess) as a means of drumming up publicity for their flagging book. Regardless, the story never happened in its announced form. Many feel it was a blow X-Statix never recovered from (it had been headed downhill for a while already, in my opinion); some even consider it the end of the Bill Jemas era of Marvel as a whole.

And now here’s Duke Togo. Shooting one of the principal players in the drama. In an 80-page story entitled English Rose (story #369), published in November of 1997.

Less than three months after the event itself.

I’m sure some of it’s cultural; Japan isn’t nearly as attached to English affairs as the US, and Saito & company could easily have seen all the attention surrounding the event and simply thought it would make a neat comic. And for my money it’s fascinating to sit down and ride through a researched (albeit thinly fictionalized) view of events from a detached, thorough, non-Western perspective, one seemingly devoid of emotional or political concern with the actual events. They certainly did their homework, as they always do - the story is rife with both popular conspiracy theory (was Di pregnant with Dodi’s baby?!) and careful attention to detail (the limo struck the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel!). It’s plainly aware of the criticism heaped upon paparazzi, as it takes a somewhat sympathetic view of them.

No, the true villains here are the conservative elite of England and the money men behind the news; a star chamber of high-powered political and business officials, including a media mogul named Mr. Margate, head of noted tabloid The Orb, are terribly pissed over Diana’s liberal stances and massive popularity, so they hire an aging, retirement-ready English secret agent to utilize neat gadgets in pumping the limo driver up with alcohol and making it all look like an accident. Meanwhile, MI6 hires Duke to nail the Dodi character, since they feel he and his father are threatening to make serious inroads to English power and money. “Frankly, I don’t see why he can’t leave England alone, and just go to America where respectability is more of a straight cash affair,” laments G13's weary contact.

In some ways it’s an oddly self-referential story; Duke observes the English agent at one point, musing “A longtime assassin for MI6. He seemed to recognize me too.” Saito Pro, of course, used to produce James Bond manga in the mid-‘60s; some view Duke’s very existence as owed to the loss of that lucrative license. Needless to say, it’s the British killer that delivers the obligatory moment in the story where Duke’s inherent awesomeness is affirmed by some other character: “Quite a compliment to have Golgo 13 sent as backup on one’s very last job... bit of an ego boost, that.” Indeed. But the story’s really about conflicting ideas of honor, and rancid money-grubbing cloaked in national pride, though none of that takes the edge off the story’s sheer bluntness, its gaze as icy and unblinking as that of its lead character. But even if the carefully-rendered panels of a downcast Charles, William and Henry smack of bad taste, at least regions above the mouth appear to be in operation as well.

This volume’s other story, 1978's 126-page The Orbital Hit (story #137), can’t help but dim in comparison, though it does feature a bit more of the zany G13 antics we’ve all come to know and love. A US nuclear doomsday space thingy has run into trouble, and is now threatening to crash the big Apollo-Soyuz link-up and ruin the world forever. President Ford decides to summon Duke Togo to launch into space and literally shoot the danger away, though the assassin has been filled in on the mission before even arriving via his bugging of the Oval Office (“Y... you... you were listening in on us?” “Well, this is Washington... it happens all the time.” OH SNAP). Duke is then handed control of seemingly all US armed forces for his mission, much to the chagrin of a racist military official, and even gets to have one of those scenes in the action movies where the rebel hero throws all the learned experts out of the room to bring in his own crew to really help him out. Meanwhile, a sleazy reporter is lurking around, we all learn the truth about America’s top-secret second space program, and there’s an ending wonderfully similar to that one story Steve Ditko did with the Question where the villain ultimately isn’t as much stopped as intimidated into the depths of shame by the righteousness (awesomeness?) of the story’s hero.

It's ok. One suspects someone at Saito Pro got the image into their head of Golgo 13 aiming his sniper rifle while floating around in space in full astronaut gear, and convinced everyone to build as serious a story as possible around such a ridiculous notion. You will learn how a gun might operate in zero gravity. You'll also learn about all the different weapons Duke likes to use in the 11-page File 13 bonus section in the back, sample story appearances of every deadly thing cited in full by name and number, as if a brief is being filed in nerd court (to borrow Tom Spurgeon's phrase). But not much of it will stay with you, so potent remains Duke's encounter with touchy things. You may feel, here in our impossible action comics entertainment world, he really can go to impossible places.

The many ways to shoot them down.

Golgo 13 Vol. 3 (of 13): Power to the People

In a delightful attempt to strip me of what little money I have at the moment, VIZ elected to roll out no less than three new installments this week of manga I’m reading: Naoki Urasawa's Monster Vol. 3, Death Note Vol. 6, and this new slice of Golgo 13 (none of ‘em are out in the Direct Market yet, by the way). But I don’t have the money for all of that, so choices had to be made. And we know what comes first on this site, eh?

Yes, it’s another pair of exploits for Japan’s favorite super-assassin, Duke Togo, though this particular installment is a little different in several ways. For one, the stories are not taken from disparate points on the G13 timeline, as they usually are - instead, we get a pair of tales completed but three months apart in 1994. Also, this is the first book in this new series that puts Duke squarely in the ‘main character’ position for the purposes of both stories, rather than leaving him to lurk as a permeating force in at least one. And most interestingly, both of the stories here highlight sides of Duke’s character that don’t always come to the fore - his sense of personal honor, and his instincts for self-preservation. One of the stories doesn’t even involve an assassination, opting instead to focus squarely on what the infamous Golgo 13 does when his personal space is breached.

That’s handily the best story in here, the second one, titled A Fierce Southern Current (Special Story #39, April 2004 - not to be confused with the regular run of G13 adventures). Duke is contacted by an old client; already this spells trouble, as Duke treasures his privacy and independence, and is loathe to perform multiple services for a single contact. But the old client has news rather than a mission: a mysterious independent party has set up a $20 billion investment fund to be committed to whichever nation happens to establish legal title to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Those big rocks are very oil-rich, and their ownership status has long been a bone of contention between surrounding governments, bodies that would simply love a cool $20 billion to drop out of nowhere (providing for none of the loss of political capital that borrowing such funds would inevitably cause) to bolster their sucking out of copious valuable resources. Already China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan are scrambling to make their case, hook up with US oil giants to sell of exploration rights, and stock up on weapons for a now seemingly inevitable clash.

Oh, and the investment fund is called the ‘G Fund.’ And there’s not many private parties in the world with that kind of money to throw around. But an enormously successful assassin, prone to charging tall sums for the toughest jobs, one who doesn't really take much interest in money beyond its use to facilitate the success of tougher hits - that kind of person might have the cash sitting around in Swiss accounts.

Except, Duke didn't set up the fund. Although it's plain that someone wants all the right people to think he has.

This will not do.

Thus, Duke sets off on an international journey of interrogation and kidnapping, all to determine who's screwing around with his reputation. Yes fans, he does bust out one of his cunning disguises. Interestingly, the writers of Saito Pro (the ever-shifting collective of people, headed by creator Takao Saito, who actually write and draw this stuff) really play up Golgo 13's status as something of an urban legend here - someone you might hear about from people, though only a certain few would know how to actually contact him, the results of his activities always easily chalked up to more believable causes. It's a bit like what some writers try to do with Batman, though it frankly works better with Duke, as he'd never devote so much of his time to one location.

Anyway, it's an entertaining story, stuffed with info on the history and politics of the Spratly Islands (as usual with G13 stories, an awful lot of it is fact-based), yet eventually giving way to showing off some interesting facets of the series' main character, especially when he discovers the conspiracy at the heart of it all. It's kind of like Syriana crossed with a Carl Barks duck short, one that focuses on how rich Uncle Scrooge really is, only it's 78 pages long and features a man knocking a helicopter into the ocean with one shot.

Less interesting is the 86-page Power to the People (Story #333, July 1994), which sees Duke summoned to South Africa by his former prison 'buddy' Nelson Mandela ("I didn't come here to accompany you down memory lane" hisses Our Hero) to quietly obliterate a camp of anti-government radicals, so as not to upset the tender state of the nation. That sounds awfully promising from just one sentence, but the story itself kind of just wanders around as Duke infiltrates the camp and sets about destabilizing them from within, taking down legions of men to the amazement and disbelief of all observers (that Duke, isn't he awesome?!?!). That's kind of the problem inherent to putting Duke at the head of any one story - if things aren't balanced out very carefully, the whole thing kind of gets tiring. Still, there's some good moments, history is again employed to provide a plot twist, and we see that Duke is always willing to help out those who help him without seeking anything in return, if only to 'pay them off' for later. He really is like Uncle Scrooge!

As a bonus, there's another installment of File 13, this time focusing entirely on Duke's beloved weapon of choice, the M16. There's history, and comparisons of different models, and even analysis of how realistic Duke's sniping posture is. All of the material cheekily treats Golgo 13 as if he was a real person, so we also get (real) advancements in weapon optimization 'credited' to Duke Togo's influence. And no, there isn't any... sensitive information this time out. Sometimes, a gun is just a gun.

The hits keep on coming.

Golgo 13 Vol. 2 (of 13): Hydra

Arriving without warning, much like the title character himself, this new volume caught my eye by chance as I stumbled around Borders with one of those 25% off coupons they keep sending you after you sign up for that Borders Rewards card - the ADV selection at Borders (at least the two locations by me) tends to be skimpy, so I haven’t even seen Anne Freaks or the newest Cromartie High School, but those $7.50 manga keep me coming back to that particular chain, which is obviously the point of thrice-monthly coupons (and next time I also get a free cookie if I buy a drink - wheeeee!). Do note that vol. 2 of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster is also out now at Borders, since that and Golgo 13 appear to have become release date best friends via VIZ’s scheduling. Duke Togo always comes first on this site, though.

For those still puzzling over the oddly limited G13 presence in the debut installment of his big US revival, there’s a bit more of the title character to be found here. The stories are also more even in length, both running roughly 90 pages. They still remain greatly spread out through time, however, and serve to run the gamut of possible approaches to a Golgo 13 story - creator Takao Saito and the anonymous rolling script/art crews of Saito Pro(duction) haven’t sustained this series for over 35 years by just doing the same thing over and over, after all, and part of the beauty of working with as stripped-down a main character as the emotionless Duke is that he allows for easier attention to be paid to everything else going on around him. He can be plugged into all sorts of situations, so free is he of the incompatibilities that rise from depth or shading, and so broad is his ultimate mandate - killing people for money, the end.

Therefore, there’s room for things like this volume’s first story, The Deaths of June 3rd, which is basically Saito Pro’s consideration of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The story is dated October 1990 (#290 in the great G13 bibliography), placing its completion little over one year after the 6/3/89 event itself; unlike the current Punisher MAX story I mentioned yesterday, letting Frank Castle loose on an Enron-like corporation through the distance of nostalgia, this is a fairly direct artistic response to the killings, with few names changed. And feel free to query whether a storyline in a super-assassin comic is necessarily an appropriate venue for paying tribute; I asked myself the same question as the tale began and the intent became obvious, but I think it’s pulled off with about as much grace as one can reasonably expect from something that must also operate as a Golgo 13 adventure.

An awful lot of G13 stories are stuffed with historical information and general trivia (early Saito Pro writer Kazuo Koike tends to do the same thing with his books, like Lone Wolf and Cub - I wonder if it’s the chicken or the egg that came first?), and this tendency is marshaled to good effect here; basically, we’re given a documentary-style ‘countdown’ of the days and weeks leading up to the event itself, the story’s viewpoint bouncing between various locales and characters. The cast includes assorted Chinese students, a radical advocate for a free Tibet, an undercover agent of the Ministry of State Security, an elderly MI-6 operative retired to London, and an exiled head of the Tibetan government, who has hired Duke Togo to travel to Beijing for reasons unknown. Speaking in G13 terms, it’s a classic set-up - suspense is created from our not knowing what Duke is doing, though we always know he’ll succeed in whatever his mission is.

But in a wider sense this story is all about the politics and emotions flaring around the situation, as glimpsed through various characters, and Saito Pro does a pretty good job of it. There’s an admirable amount of subtlety to be found in the motivations of the undercover agent and the Tibetan radical, particularly in their ultimate feelings toward each other, and there’s little demonizing of the military-sympathetic characters - there’s no doubt as to where Saito Pro stands on all this, but they trust the ultimate power of the event itself (and maybe a few well-chosen direct quotes, provided via caption) is enough to lay blame on those responsible, with anything more threatening to veer over-the-top. Duke himself offers no comment on the situation (“…..” pretty much sums it up), existing outside the boundaries of morality and nationality as a whole; his presence is so rarely glimpsed, yet so charged with inevitability, he seems like almost a supernatural figure here, a mythic god descending from the sky to usher mortals along in their tragical play. Fitting then that the story ends on a bloody, meditative note, considering the futility of religious peace in a world so charged with murder. It’s downbeat, even depressive work, yet genuinely effective in adapting its well-honed suspense mechanisms to something of greater weight.

The second story, Hydra, is very much different. Hailing from October of 1974 (storyline #88), it’s a first for this new round of G13 books: a story in which Duke is actually the primary character. Perfectly straightforward stuff, as Duke is hired by Mexican drug enforcement officials to travel to Marseilles and kill someone by the name of ’Doctor Z,’ who’s developed a type of super-heroin that threatens to hook the world. Needless to say, identities are assumed, shots are fired, crosses are doubled, Duke strolls around in his tighty-whities after sex with a crime boss, and miscellaneous mayhem ensues. I won’t spoil too much of the batshit insane acid flashback-as-deus ex machina finale, teetering on the very brink of incomprehensibility, but let’s just say it embodies the spirit of the more typical Duke Togo exploit - action stirred with nonsense into a compulsively drinkable refreshment.

The book closes with another installment of the entertaining yet somewhat frightening File 13, presenting eight big pages of completely obsessive trivia and background information. “Golgo’s erection is so powerful that he has been observed to maintain it even when interrupted by the police mid-coitus.” Too much information in every sense of the phrase, yet I’m somehow glad it’s here.

Pre-release review (Direct Market division)!

*By which I mean this is only a pre-release review if you’re looking to get it in a comics shop; if you’re a chain bookstore shopper, you might as well start scouring the shelves now, since they’ve got it all ready to roll.

Golgo 13 Vol. 1 (of 13): Supergun

I’ve written a bit on this series in the past. Begun way back in 1969 and still ongoing today, Golgo 13 follows the exploits of Duke Togo (the title is his codename), world’s greatest assassin-for-hire, as he travels the globe performing amazing feats of killing, usually via a single sniped shot from his custom M16. He is beholden to no nation nor political affiliation - he kills for pay, though money doesn’t really seem to interest him. All that matters is the quiet satisfaction of pulling off the most complicated missions; he is amoral, utterly intent, and perfectly willing to kill total innocents who happen to witness one of his exploits. He has virtually no personality, he rarely speaks (“…..”), his character does not ‘develop,’ and (much like Superman or Batman) he seems perpetually locked into the present day while never himself aging. There is occasionally some measure of continuity maintained between stories, though every adventure stands alone. And there’s been a lot of adventures, as you can surmise from the dates provided above. In all, Golgo 13 is one of the seminal manga series, and the title character’s likeness has graced everything from Pachinko tables to official condoms. And of course, there’s the place where so North Americans like myself first caught wind of his presence - the 1987 cult classic NES game Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode (or maybe its lesser 1990 sequel, Golgo 13: The Mafat Conspiracy).

And yet, despite the character’s immense, enduring popularity in his native land, the actual Golgo 13 comics have never quite caught hold in the US. I explain things further at the above link; for purposes of brevity, I’ll simply note here that this new series from VIZ, part of their new VIZ Signature line, is the fourth attempt (and VIZ's second in a row) at releasing parts of the original Golgo 13 in the US, and perhaps the most openly ambitious of them all - a localization of a Japanese release collectively known as The Golgo 13 Gaku, this thirteen-book series strives to offer an overview of the character’s standout excursions, skipping back and forth through time as only a compilation of cherry-picked standalone stories can. “13 volumes of Golgo 13’s greatest hits!” screams the back cover, proving that some puns are just too much for anyone to resist. But the actual set-up of this particular book will be familiar to those who’ve had experience with the very first Golgo 13 release in America, Lead Publishing’s original four-book set: as with that prior release, VIZ’s book features two stories, one long, the other short, from divergent time periods. The new book is lacking the original color sequences that Lead would present, and there’s nothing in the way of dustjackets or anything, but otherwise it’s quite a cozy set-up.

It’s also a very smart book in other aspects of its presentation - if you click on that link up top, and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find me thanking Carl Gustav Horn, who made a few extremely information-rich posts on the AnimeOnDVD message boards that I used for the purposes of placing stories with dates. That same Mr. Horn serves as editor and English adaptor for this book, and things are just as organized and in-place as one would hope - apparently, each and every story in the Golgo 13 library has been numbered and dated, providing for easy indexing and cross-referencing, just the touch that a series of this breadth needs.

Even the cover displays a careful touch - note the “Created by Takao Saito” credit. Nowhere in this book will you find a “Script by…” or “Art by…” credit, though you will note the legal indicia’s mention of Saito Production (which is sometimes colloquially abridged to ‘Saito Pro’). This is evidence of creator Saito’s approach to comics creation; obviously, many manga artists employ uncredited assistants to aid them in completing their work, but Saito takes things a bit further by heading an extensive staff of writers, researchers, and artists. Likening himself to a film director, Saito guides the production process and retains final creative say over everything, but sometimes provides very little original story or art contribution to the completed work (Frederik L. Schodt notes in his Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics that Saito’s direct contribution sometimes consists only of story discussion and the penciling in of character faces). All of these staff members go unnamed, crowded under the Saito Pro banner - still, it would perhaps be inaccurate to credit Saito himself with story and art, and thus we have the entirely correct “Created by…” notice.

As for the stories themselves, well, first, I should note that I have no idea if VIZ was bound to conform to some sort of story-by-story release pattern as per their license of the Gaku material, so it could be that the actual ordering of the stories here was out of their hands. But nonetheless I found it a bit striking as to how little the title character appears in this book, which is after all the debut edition of his latest reintroduction to the North American comics world. Quite a low-key return, though it’s understandable in two ways. First, it gives the new reader a good idea of how exactly the series has lasted for nearly forty years with a largely static, nigh-unstoppable lead character: often, stories are more about how other (more pliable) characters react to Duke rather than what Duke is actually doing. Or sometimes, stories immerse themselves in historical detail and globe-spanning intrigue, tense conversations in boardrooms as vital as battlefield confrontations. And naturally, there’s always the friendly old technique of throwing Duke into increasingly impossible, even ridiculous situations, and seeing how he gets out. These options are not individually exclusive: the best Golgo 13 stories I’ve read feature all of the above, in careful proportion.

The first story here, The Gun at Am Shara (Story #364, May 1997), is quite heavy on the middle option, the historical detail. Weighing in at 126 pages, it spends a lot of time on scene-setting, political maneuvering, and history-loaded backstory for some of the major players (both real and fictional). This does lead me to the second understandable reason as to why this book is what it is, however - the plot deals with the US government hiring Duke to head into Iraq and foil Saddam Hussein’s fiendish scheme to fire a rocket out of a Supergun (see the book’s title), with the projectile soaring all the way from Iraq to the US, the White House itself the target.

“The margin of error… is about fifty or sixty yards… that may not sound impressive, but from 6200 miles away… you might as well call it a sniper rifle, Mr. President…” So says Presidential advisor and exposition specialist Professor Doskin, drawing a cute parallel between predator and prey. But this is more than mere comics tomfoolery - Hussein really did pursue the development of an ultra-long range cannon, it really was called Project Babylon, parts really were shipped from the UK, and UN inspection teams really did dismantle the whole thing in 1991. This story (which takes place in the then-present 1997) acknowledges some aspects of those historical events, and moves other bits farther up in the timeline. It also substitutes both a fictional scientist, Mikhail Volto, and his sinister protégé, Izumi Murai, for Gerald Bull, the actual engineer who developed the applicable technology - Bull died under mysterious circumstances, with rumors of hired assassins abounding, thus pretty much locking in the material as perfect fodder for a Golgo 13 epic.

I mention all of this to highlight the level of research that often goes into the longer stories, and to make plain the appeal (curious or otherwise) that this particular saga might hold for a US reader. There’s even a sequence in which characters anxiously discuss what the possible American reaction might be should a US landmark ever be taken out by a foreign enemy; they settle on nukes flying, which perhaps adds an additional layer of fascination to the piece, given both the intended audience (adult Japanese males) and the ultimate course of recent history. However, the story maybe errs on the side of detail, with page after page of confidential meetings, the drawing of things on chalkboards, and jets flying around. It was ok with me, as I like this sort of thing, though some readers (especially new ones) might get antsy over the fact that the title character appears rather briefly (if at nice, constant intervals). Whenever Duke is on-panel, however, he does indulge in all of his famous activities: wearing world-class disguises (aka: fake mustaches and hats), leaving the ladies satisfied (here, an American field agent who really serves no other vital purpose), commandeering vehicles (a canoe), and pulling off one of those amazing feats of marksmanship, to the appreciative exclamation of some minor character. I call that last bit the ‘Duke is awesome’ statement, and there’s at least one in every story.

“…all he needs… is one shot.”

A little dry (my favorite Golgo 13 stories tend to revel in absurdity, with Duke hijacking airplanes, or undergoing intense training in ludicrous surroundings, or dropping chandeliers on aphrodisiac-plied targets), and the art gets kind of sloppy at times (not only is the Bill Clinton caricature rather poor, it often wobbles in simple visual consistency), but I was still fundamentally pleased. Better is the second story, the 45-page Hit and Run (Story #144, April 1979), which is basically a story-length ‘Duke is awesome’ statement (as some of these shorter works have been in the past). A cruel mobster strikes a private eye’s girlfriend with his car, killing her. He thinks he’s above the law, but when he hears Duke Togo has been hired to take him out, his life falls to bits. So awesome is Duke, the mobster becomes uncontrollably nervous and paranoid (Duke never misses!). So awesome is Duke, none of the mobster’s connections will do business with him (any man Duke is after is as good as dead!). So awesome is Duke, the mobster’s henchmen abandon him en mass (no mere gunman can stand to Duke!). It’s a fun tale, loaded with vintage ‘70s interior design and those rad bullseye-pattern tones for facial close-ups. I’m not totally sure if such a story is a bad or good pick for the first volume - it nicely conveys the depth of the title character’s impact, and transmits a lot of his appeal, though there’s still very little actual on-panel presence by Golgo 13. It could go either way.

Also included is eight pages of exhaustive trivia and background detail, styled like a dossier. There’s long lists of fake names that Duke has used over the years (though 'Duke Togo' itself isn’t his real name), indexes of things like which hits have involved pigeons over the years, multiple theories as to what the codename ‘Golgo 13’ actually means, and certain instances of way too much information in the Physical Observations section: “Lures all the women in the world to the ‘height of ecstasy’; at any rate, an amazing penis.” But too much is rarely enough when Golgo 13 is involved, and even the possible shortcomings of this particular volume leave one certain that more, much more, will soon be arriving.