Jonathan L. Switzer
May 6, 2004, 04:43 pm
<a href="http://robotechcomics.50megs.com/_blog/seedvol1.jpg"><img src="http://robotechcomics.50megs.com/_blog/seedvol1_t.jpg" align=left alt="Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Vol. 1"></a>Reviewer: Jonathan L. Switzer, captainjls@animejanai.com
Quick Rating: Above average.
Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse ...
Art: Masatsugu Iwase
Created by: Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino
Translated and Adapted by: Jason DeAngelis
Lettered by: Studio Cutie
Boy, was I not looking forward to this one.
I'm not sure why I wound up buying this first volume of the manga adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED television series. Perhaps it was a shipping mistake. That's gotta be it--Diamond shipped a copy too many of the book to the store, it wound up in my pile, and I just obligingly bought the thing. Or maybe I just felt forgiving and curious when we were writing up the comics order for this month. Probably one of the two. Yeah. At this point I've watched sixteen episodes of the SEED series, and have little love for it; I hate the character designs, hate the way it blatantly swipes its storyline structure from the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam TV series, and hate the overall manufactured feel of this sub-franchise--like the folks at Sunrise told character designer Hisashi Hirai and mecha designer Kunio Okawara to create the most marketable designs they could, and the studio would figure out how to use them ... eventually.
Strange, then, that I don't feel much venom against Masatsugu Iwase's manga adaptation of the show. Sure, it has some glaring deficiencies, but it certainly surpassed my expectations.
The storyline of SEED goes something like this: It is the year 71 of the Cosmic Era calendar. The human race has become bitterly divided along clear cut lines--genetically engineered Coordinators, living largely in space under the banner of ZAFT ("Zodiac Alliance of Freedom Treaty," one of several awful acronyms in this series), are at war with oppressive Naturals, largely living on the Earth. In order to turn the tide of the escalating war, ZAFT employed a weapon called the Neutron Jammer, which nullifies nuclear energy, radio waves, and radar. With this deployed, ZAFT sent legions of Mobile Suits, humanoid battle machines that operate rather well on a warfront without such things, to Earth. Their plan worked; the tide did, indeed, turn in their favor.
Eleven months into the war, the Earth forces have crafted their own new set of prototype weaponry--five powerhouse Mobile Suits and an assault ship to carry them. Unfortunately, ZAFT has discovered this is going on--at a supposedly neutral space colony no less. And wouldn't you know it, a group of civilian kids get caught up in the middle of ZAFT's raid on the colony, chief among them young Kira Yamato, a peaceful science ace who happens to be a Coordinator. ZAFT forces make a bid to steal the Earth's Mobile Suits, and manage to snare all but one; Kira becomes the only person the devastated Earth forces can turn to to pilot this last Mobile Suit, while a childhood friend of his, Athrun Zala, is revealed to be one of the Zaft soldiers that have seized the rest. Not only is Kira forced to fight his own kind, but against his one-time best friend as well--ouch!
Anyone familiar with the Gundam mythos can see where SEED is drawing from here--bits and pieces of the old '79 series bolted at odd angles, with a shiny Gundam Wing pretty boy/themed Gundams veneer painted over it. However, the stories adapted here--the first three or four episodes, if I recall right--are good enough, with solid setup, relentless pacing, and a real sense of danger in the action. I believe the formation of the character arcs that sweep across the series are a little more vividly rendered here than they were in the TV series, too. It's probably the static nature of the artform that draws them out more pointedly; for instance, Kira's attraction to his popular classmate Flay Allster, which gets him into some trouble later, seems better telegraphed to me than it was in the hustle and bustle of the TV show. However, Athrun's bishonen teammates--fiery Yzak, demure Nicol, and ladies' man Dearka--barely get any attention or characterization, just the same as in these TV series stories. I hear it takes about half the TV series for them to get any decent amount of personality or screen time, which seems a waste given that they pilot three of the title battle machines. Remember what I said about Hirai and Okawara being told to make cool designs and Sunrise deciding they'd figure out how to use them eventually? There ya go.
I was actually impressed by how little was left out of the storyline in this manga adaptation. I've read some truly awful and superficial Gundam adaptation comics in the past--the Gundam Wing adaptation TokyoPop released in English leaps to mind--but this hit pretty much everything dead on, only a couple of times compressing and removing unneccessary scenes to move the story along, such as a sequence that would have been in chapter 2 where the Strike Gundam is equipped with the Aile flight pack for the first time. Nothing seemed to be missing on the first pass; it was only on second thought that I remembered that scene wasn't there. We'll see if it can keep this level of clear trimming up. I think Iwase can manage for a bit, given that not much of consequence happens in most of the subsequent episodes of the first story arc.
The art I have mixed feelings on. Iwase renders the mecha of the series--the Mobile Suits and warships--with great ease and fantastic detail. He has some trouble with certain poses like the sword-equipped Strike Gundam rearing back for a slash, but everything looks just spot-on right, and the pacing in the action scenes, especially in Kira's early fights within the space colony, is just perfect; if I have any complaints about the mecha stuff, it's that during the space sequences Iwase draws too many of the wonderfully shaded mecha at too far a distance to be clear in a reproduction at this digest page size. The shots probably worked just fine in their original serialization, but here they just look small and fuzzy.
The characters, however, he has some trouble with; Hisashi Hirai's pudgy-faced, fish-like character designs are smoothed out in Iwase's renderings, sharpened and made somewhat more uniform--too uniform. When wearing their space helmets, I could barely tell the beautiful young pilot boys apart; the faces all look the same, and I had to rely on differently styled bangs to discern who was talking, which becomes really problematic when the speaker is just some flunkie that Kira's going to kill in a few seconds time.
It's also kind of jarring the way Iwase has de-aged the older members of the cast, twentysomethings like cool, thoughtful ace pilot Mu La Fraga and de facto Archangel captain Murrue Ramius. When I'm having a hard time telling the twenty-six year old Lt. Ramius from the teenage Flay Allstar in close-ups, something is obviously very wrong. More frustrating is that in the pages of Iwase's early stabs at Hirai's designs in the back of the book, he nails both designs just about perfectly.
Worse than the bungling of those designs, though, is the amount of trouble Iwase has with the odd, somewhat awkward face shapes that seem to be the chief hallmark of original designer Hirai's style--there are a handful of profile shots where facial features seem to be oddly spaced and distorted, and the spacing of the super-huge eyes at certain angles seems to shift from panel to panel. In short, the level of exactitude present on the mechanical end of the art is distressingly and distractingly rare in the characters' faces.
This being one of Del Rey's first wave of manga releases, I didn't know what to expect in the way of additional material or presentation. They put together a pretty decent package overall, providing a brief explanation of Japanese honorifics to start--these are the suffixes like "-san," "-kun," and "-chan" that you see anime fanboys and fangirls often use in regards to one another. When used properly, they provide extra insight into either the closeness between characters or how they relate in their social strata. Usually I'm not fond of seeing Japanese language honorifics in the English versions of works that don't have a strong Japanese flavor--for instance, I hate how they crop up in Dark Horse's English release of the space western Trigun--but if Del Rey is intent on keeping this consistent across the line, I don't think I'll fault them for it, and a clear explanation of what the honorifics mean is a perfect idea to start off their first wave of books. In the back of the book they give us a few pages of polished character and mecha sketches, Iwase's first cracks at drawing Hisashi Hirai's character designs and Kunio Okawara's mecha designs, along with notes by Iwase. The portfolio is followed by a very brief history of the Gundam franchise by noted Gundam expert Mark Simmons, who has helped Viz with their Gundam releases in the past. A couple of creator profiles follow that, including one for original Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino--a little odd, since Tomino didn't actually have a personal hand in SEED, and inaccurate to boot, claiming that Brain Powered is his most recent directorial effort when he followed that up with Turn-A Gundam in 1999 and Overman King Gainer in 2002. Finally, we get a few interesting translation notes and a preview of the next volume, slated for September release, sans English translation--clever, and I must say the art looks a little better in the pages showcased, like Iwase is starting to hit his stride. My one fault with these bonus pages is a strong lack of any sort of graphic design--after the portfolio pages, which are obviously adapted from the original Japanese edition of the book, we get no underlines, no dividers, and sparse illustrations. It gives these pages a sort of tacked-on feel; some sort of graphic design, even a subtle one, would really help the book feel more cohesive.
Did I enjoy the first volume of the Gundam SEED manga? Yeah, I guess so. It's certainly not as awful as I feared it would be, and compared to prior Gundam adaptation manga it's well paced and thoughtfully constructed. Alas, it succombs to one of my biggest quibbles with the SEED TV series, unappealing and sometimes sloppy character art that sorely detracts from my enjoyment of the series as a whole. The feeling of having been here and done that all before with much simpler, more appealing designwork doesn't help matters much either. If you're a fan of the series or are curious about the latest installment of the 25 year-old Gundam franchise, I think this is probably worth your time. If you're just looking for a good mecha fix, though, there are far more interesting and well-crafted examples of the genre on the bookstore shelves.
ART:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drhalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
STORY:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
Visit the official website of the Del Rey manga line. (http://www.delreymanga.com)
Visit Bandai's official Mobile Suit Gundam website. (http://www.gundamofficial.com)
Quick Rating: Above average.
Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse ...
Art: Masatsugu Iwase
Created by: Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino
Translated and Adapted by: Jason DeAngelis
Lettered by: Studio Cutie
Boy, was I not looking forward to this one.
I'm not sure why I wound up buying this first volume of the manga adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED television series. Perhaps it was a shipping mistake. That's gotta be it--Diamond shipped a copy too many of the book to the store, it wound up in my pile, and I just obligingly bought the thing. Or maybe I just felt forgiving and curious when we were writing up the comics order for this month. Probably one of the two. Yeah. At this point I've watched sixteen episodes of the SEED series, and have little love for it; I hate the character designs, hate the way it blatantly swipes its storyline structure from the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam TV series, and hate the overall manufactured feel of this sub-franchise--like the folks at Sunrise told character designer Hisashi Hirai and mecha designer Kunio Okawara to create the most marketable designs they could, and the studio would figure out how to use them ... eventually.
Strange, then, that I don't feel much venom against Masatsugu Iwase's manga adaptation of the show. Sure, it has some glaring deficiencies, but it certainly surpassed my expectations.
The storyline of SEED goes something like this: It is the year 71 of the Cosmic Era calendar. The human race has become bitterly divided along clear cut lines--genetically engineered Coordinators, living largely in space under the banner of ZAFT ("Zodiac Alliance of Freedom Treaty," one of several awful acronyms in this series), are at war with oppressive Naturals, largely living on the Earth. In order to turn the tide of the escalating war, ZAFT employed a weapon called the Neutron Jammer, which nullifies nuclear energy, radio waves, and radar. With this deployed, ZAFT sent legions of Mobile Suits, humanoid battle machines that operate rather well on a warfront without such things, to Earth. Their plan worked; the tide did, indeed, turn in their favor.
Eleven months into the war, the Earth forces have crafted their own new set of prototype weaponry--five powerhouse Mobile Suits and an assault ship to carry them. Unfortunately, ZAFT has discovered this is going on--at a supposedly neutral space colony no less. And wouldn't you know it, a group of civilian kids get caught up in the middle of ZAFT's raid on the colony, chief among them young Kira Yamato, a peaceful science ace who happens to be a Coordinator. ZAFT forces make a bid to steal the Earth's Mobile Suits, and manage to snare all but one; Kira becomes the only person the devastated Earth forces can turn to to pilot this last Mobile Suit, while a childhood friend of his, Athrun Zala, is revealed to be one of the Zaft soldiers that have seized the rest. Not only is Kira forced to fight his own kind, but against his one-time best friend as well--ouch!
Anyone familiar with the Gundam mythos can see where SEED is drawing from here--bits and pieces of the old '79 series bolted at odd angles, with a shiny Gundam Wing pretty boy/themed Gundams veneer painted over it. However, the stories adapted here--the first three or four episodes, if I recall right--are good enough, with solid setup, relentless pacing, and a real sense of danger in the action. I believe the formation of the character arcs that sweep across the series are a little more vividly rendered here than they were in the TV series, too. It's probably the static nature of the artform that draws them out more pointedly; for instance, Kira's attraction to his popular classmate Flay Allster, which gets him into some trouble later, seems better telegraphed to me than it was in the hustle and bustle of the TV show. However, Athrun's bishonen teammates--fiery Yzak, demure Nicol, and ladies' man Dearka--barely get any attention or characterization, just the same as in these TV series stories. I hear it takes about half the TV series for them to get any decent amount of personality or screen time, which seems a waste given that they pilot three of the title battle machines. Remember what I said about Hirai and Okawara being told to make cool designs and Sunrise deciding they'd figure out how to use them eventually? There ya go.
I was actually impressed by how little was left out of the storyline in this manga adaptation. I've read some truly awful and superficial Gundam adaptation comics in the past--the Gundam Wing adaptation TokyoPop released in English leaps to mind--but this hit pretty much everything dead on, only a couple of times compressing and removing unneccessary scenes to move the story along, such as a sequence that would have been in chapter 2 where the Strike Gundam is equipped with the Aile flight pack for the first time. Nothing seemed to be missing on the first pass; it was only on second thought that I remembered that scene wasn't there. We'll see if it can keep this level of clear trimming up. I think Iwase can manage for a bit, given that not much of consequence happens in most of the subsequent episodes of the first story arc.
The art I have mixed feelings on. Iwase renders the mecha of the series--the Mobile Suits and warships--with great ease and fantastic detail. He has some trouble with certain poses like the sword-equipped Strike Gundam rearing back for a slash, but everything looks just spot-on right, and the pacing in the action scenes, especially in Kira's early fights within the space colony, is just perfect; if I have any complaints about the mecha stuff, it's that during the space sequences Iwase draws too many of the wonderfully shaded mecha at too far a distance to be clear in a reproduction at this digest page size. The shots probably worked just fine in their original serialization, but here they just look small and fuzzy.
The characters, however, he has some trouble with; Hisashi Hirai's pudgy-faced, fish-like character designs are smoothed out in Iwase's renderings, sharpened and made somewhat more uniform--too uniform. When wearing their space helmets, I could barely tell the beautiful young pilot boys apart; the faces all look the same, and I had to rely on differently styled bangs to discern who was talking, which becomes really problematic when the speaker is just some flunkie that Kira's going to kill in a few seconds time.
It's also kind of jarring the way Iwase has de-aged the older members of the cast, twentysomethings like cool, thoughtful ace pilot Mu La Fraga and de facto Archangel captain Murrue Ramius. When I'm having a hard time telling the twenty-six year old Lt. Ramius from the teenage Flay Allstar in close-ups, something is obviously very wrong. More frustrating is that in the pages of Iwase's early stabs at Hirai's designs in the back of the book, he nails both designs just about perfectly.
Worse than the bungling of those designs, though, is the amount of trouble Iwase has with the odd, somewhat awkward face shapes that seem to be the chief hallmark of original designer Hirai's style--there are a handful of profile shots where facial features seem to be oddly spaced and distorted, and the spacing of the super-huge eyes at certain angles seems to shift from panel to panel. In short, the level of exactitude present on the mechanical end of the art is distressingly and distractingly rare in the characters' faces.
This being one of Del Rey's first wave of manga releases, I didn't know what to expect in the way of additional material or presentation. They put together a pretty decent package overall, providing a brief explanation of Japanese honorifics to start--these are the suffixes like "-san," "-kun," and "-chan" that you see anime fanboys and fangirls often use in regards to one another. When used properly, they provide extra insight into either the closeness between characters or how they relate in their social strata. Usually I'm not fond of seeing Japanese language honorifics in the English versions of works that don't have a strong Japanese flavor--for instance, I hate how they crop up in Dark Horse's English release of the space western Trigun--but if Del Rey is intent on keeping this consistent across the line, I don't think I'll fault them for it, and a clear explanation of what the honorifics mean is a perfect idea to start off their first wave of books. In the back of the book they give us a few pages of polished character and mecha sketches, Iwase's first cracks at drawing Hisashi Hirai's character designs and Kunio Okawara's mecha designs, along with notes by Iwase. The portfolio is followed by a very brief history of the Gundam franchise by noted Gundam expert Mark Simmons, who has helped Viz with their Gundam releases in the past. A couple of creator profiles follow that, including one for original Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino--a little odd, since Tomino didn't actually have a personal hand in SEED, and inaccurate to boot, claiming that Brain Powered is his most recent directorial effort when he followed that up with Turn-A Gundam in 1999 and Overman King Gainer in 2002. Finally, we get a few interesting translation notes and a preview of the next volume, slated for September release, sans English translation--clever, and I must say the art looks a little better in the pages showcased, like Iwase is starting to hit his stride. My one fault with these bonus pages is a strong lack of any sort of graphic design--after the portfolio pages, which are obviously adapted from the original Japanese edition of the book, we get no underlines, no dividers, and sparse illustrations. It gives these pages a sort of tacked-on feel; some sort of graphic design, even a subtle one, would really help the book feel more cohesive.
Did I enjoy the first volume of the Gundam SEED manga? Yeah, I guess so. It's certainly not as awful as I feared it would be, and compared to prior Gundam adaptation manga it's well paced and thoughtfully constructed. Alas, it succombs to one of my biggest quibbles with the SEED TV series, unappealing and sometimes sloppy character art that sorely detracts from my enjoyment of the series as a whole. The feeling of having been here and done that all before with much simpler, more appealing designwork doesn't help matters much either. If you're a fan of the series or are curious about the latest installment of the 25 year-old Gundam franchise, I think this is probably worth your time. If you're just looking for a good mecha fix, though, there are far more interesting and well-crafted examples of the genre on the bookstore shelves.
ART:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drhalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
STORY:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/drnone.jpg
Visit the official website of the Del Rey manga line. (http://www.delreymanga.com)
Visit Bandai's official Mobile Suit Gundam website. (http://www.gundamofficial.com)