Battle Angel Alita
By Yukito Kishiro
Battle Angel Alita
Originally published in 1991
·
The cover depicts Alita with angel wings despite
the fact she does not get any wings in the series. In fact, her name is that of
Ido’s dead cat as established early on.
·
A lot of terminology in the series requires use
of sci-fi captions as characters rarely dive into the nature of the world that
they live in. An example would be when Alita is appraised by Ido to have the
legendary fighting style Panzer Kunst (Page 28), which is never explained in
story yet there are captions forced into the gutters explaining to the readers
that it is a form of martial arts.
·
Alita is appraised as being a human being by Ido
in the beginning despite the fact that she is clearly cybernetic and that there
are no indicators that she is a cyborg or even organic early on in the story
(Page 8-9). This could mean that humanity has moved past the vanilla idea of
what constitutes a human by this futuristic story.
·
Alita’s dream sequence has it so she sees
herself as a child (Pages 86-88, 98) when Ido first found her which contrasts
with how we see her as the reader as a broken robot (Pages 1-11).
·
This whole segment of Alita being a discarded
robot with amazing fighting powers contrasts drastically with how Tezuka
portrayed Astro in Astro Boy, another robot child with super powers and a heart
of gold. In fact, the brutality of Alita’s world takes a greater toll on the
cruelty mankind can have on “lesser humans” than that even portrayed in the Astro
Boy series as (Pages 79-83) Alita and Ido are clearly on the verge of death and
yet the common citizens of the world care not for a bleeding man and his almost
completely destroyed robot child in a society where robots and humans apparently
become one in the same.
·
The brutality of the strong is made apparent in
Alita’s world with how people have their brains eaten easily by monstrous
cyborgs (Page 42) to how people pour acid into sewers where homeless children
live(Pages 236-238).
·
Ido is himself a shady father character who grew
up with handling the brutality of the world around him, as with the case of him
being a hunter of rouge cyborgs (Page 46-49). It should be noted that he does
not want Alita to delve into the world of violence she has been reborn into
(Pages 44-45).
·
The exact nature of the story’s history is never
made clear past that this takes place in the far future where people normally
are cyborgs. There was apparently a super war in space that happened as with
how Alita gets her Berserker body (Pages 92-97) which was a war machine that
was used by soldiers and found by Ido.
·
Overall, this series is a great read especially
when contrasted to the more kid-friendly Astro Boy. Battle Angel Alita was
clearly tailored towards an adult audience and touched themes not normally
presented in Western kids comics.
Bibliography:
Kishiro, Yukito. Battle Angel Alita. San Francisco: Viz Comics, 1994. Print.
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