Week 10

This week, I read Battle Angel Alita “Last Order” Volume 1, #1-6, by Yukito Kishiro. While reading this comic, right away I noticed that it contained a lot of graphic violence, blood, and gore. I usually don’t mind the violence and a little bit of blood, but severed limbs flying around and people’s heads exploding with their eyeballs flying out, isn’t usually my cup of tea. Despite these complaints, I did read through all the readily available sections of this comic from the course resource page.

I have always been a fan of sci-fi and fantasy stories, so that could have been what kept me reading.  Despite the gore, I somewhat liked the story and wanted to figure out what exactly was going on in this dystopian world. I found it interesting in the way that action scenes were drawn, the way that the artist used long sweeping lines to portray how fast the characters where kicking, or swinging a sword; It really helped to add to the action and create intensity in the scenes of combat. One other thing that I noticed while reading this series is that crazy people in manga are always stuffing their face with junk food at random, and usually inappropriate times. The mad scientist near the beginning was eating flan while creating the cyborg girl, then the scientist’s assistant is seen throwing popcorn in his mouth while discussing the death of his companions, as if he doesn’t care about them at all. I paralleled the food eating concept to that of “L” from Death Note in that he always is seen eating junk food, and also comes across as strange and not normal. I found the comic easy to read, already being somewhat familiar with reading right-to-left in Japanese comics such as this. Overall, I liked the artist’s style in how he uses shadows and silhouettes. His characters were easy to read in the way that the artist drew their gestures and facial expressions.