Manga Thoughts: Gundam the Origin volume 1
Apr. 9th, 2013 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter everything else I'd already heard about it, I was quite interested to hear Vertical would be publishing the Gundam the Origin manga over here. As with Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's Evangelion manga, having the original anime's character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko draw the work seems to have placed it quite a cut above the usual quickly dismissed manga based on anime, and I suppose I was remembering seeing the old "album"-sized volumes Viz had published but not buying them; still, so far I know the complete manga wasn't released over here back then.
Once I had Vertical's hardcover, I found it compact in size but impressive in thickness, and once I was through the first colour "plates" I was surprised in a pleased sort of way to see the black-and-white pages were printed on the same coated stock. While I'd known beforehand Vertical was only producing a limited print run for even this first volume, they did seem to be going "all out" to appeal with production values.
Beyond the printing, of course, there's the art and the story. The Gundam franchise as it is nowadays seems to get summed up as "an oft-told tale"; telling the original story with its original characters once again might be the ultimate refinement of that. In the first "section" of this first volume, we get a change in the "RX-78-1" Gundam, the immediate predecessor to the "RX-78-2" everyone knows about, battling Zaku mobile suits added to those who first infiltrated the space colony, and I was tempted to think it one of "those" changes that "look cool but don't affect the unfolding story"; not that long afterwards, though, I did happen to think it shifts the proximate cause for the shooting starting from a trigger-happy, glory-hungry Zaku pilot. With that, I could see the modifications and shifted events that followed as deliberate re-evaluations of what had gone before, everything from "coming across the Gundam" to "clearing the way for the young characters to take over," and perhaps even began to appreciate them better. (Most of the changes to the story are summarized in a little essay translated at the "back" of the volume when reading in manga fashion.) At first, I had the perhaps odd impression the protagonist Amuro Ray looked more an "unphotogenic ordinary person," less an "anime character," but then I just got to wondering if he'd been drawn looking older than the fifteen years he still says he is. By the end of the volume, though, I was wondering in turn if he was getting to look a bit more like his anime appearance after having been drawn over and over. On the other hand, I did find myself thinking that Bright Noah looks rather less instantly confident and mature at first as a replacement captain.
With the story having been told in different ways before, I suppose it is sort of tempting to second-guess this particular translation at points. That was one thing I happened to notice in one of my tentative dips into discussion about Gundam, dips that always seem to end reminding me that, while reading this particular manga may demonstrate your refinement, I had liked on first seeing one of the oft-proclaimed "if you like this you are a bad person" series of the franchise, which does sort of maintain a distance between me and the fandom over here. Still, I'm certainly looking forward to the next volume.
Once I had Vertical's hardcover, I found it compact in size but impressive in thickness, and once I was through the first colour "plates" I was surprised in a pleased sort of way to see the black-and-white pages were printed on the same coated stock. While I'd known beforehand Vertical was only producing a limited print run for even this first volume, they did seem to be going "all out" to appeal with production values.
Beyond the printing, of course, there's the art and the story. The Gundam franchise as it is nowadays seems to get summed up as "an oft-told tale"; telling the original story with its original characters once again might be the ultimate refinement of that. In the first "section" of this first volume, we get a change in the "RX-78-1" Gundam, the immediate predecessor to the "RX-78-2" everyone knows about, battling Zaku mobile suits added to those who first infiltrated the space colony, and I was tempted to think it one of "those" changes that "look cool but don't affect the unfolding story"; not that long afterwards, though, I did happen to think it shifts the proximate cause for the shooting starting from a trigger-happy, glory-hungry Zaku pilot. With that, I could see the modifications and shifted events that followed as deliberate re-evaluations of what had gone before, everything from "coming across the Gundam" to "clearing the way for the young characters to take over," and perhaps even began to appreciate them better. (Most of the changes to the story are summarized in a little essay translated at the "back" of the volume when reading in manga fashion.) At first, I had the perhaps odd impression the protagonist Amuro Ray looked more an "unphotogenic ordinary person," less an "anime character," but then I just got to wondering if he'd been drawn looking older than the fifteen years he still says he is. By the end of the volume, though, I was wondering in turn if he was getting to look a bit more like his anime appearance after having been drawn over and over. On the other hand, I did find myself thinking that Bright Noah looks rather less instantly confident and mature at first as a replacement captain.
With the story having been told in different ways before, I suppose it is sort of tempting to second-guess this particular translation at points. That was one thing I happened to notice in one of my tentative dips into discussion about Gundam, dips that always seem to end reminding me that, while reading this particular manga may demonstrate your refinement, I had liked on first seeing one of the oft-proclaimed "if you like this you are a bad person" series of the franchise, which does sort of maintain a distance between me and the fandom over here. Still, I'm certainly looking forward to the next volume.