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Reviewed by Michael Aronson Er, uh, hmm. Yeah . . . this didn’t end very well. Here’s the wikipedia story: after Kishiro ended Battle Angel Alita, five years later he announced a new series called Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, “which skips the end of the last graphic novel and tells the story as he originally intended.” As it stands, Angel’s Asension spend its last hundred pages rushing ahead to tie up every loose end imaginable and reveal the fate of every remaining character, a sequence that really needed to be spread over three or more additional volumes. It’s a slapped-together atrocity that makes the last fifteen minutes of Matrix: Reloaded seem comprehensible. It’s about on par with the way six volumes of Akira were crammed into less than two hours of animation. Not good. But which part of this volume can we take at face value? Which part should we ignore completely? Even if the second half wasn’t done to Kishiro’s specifications, for whatever the reason may be, is it still a spoiler of what will happen in Last Order or just a completely hasty and bullshit capper? Whatever the case may be, it’s pretty easy to figure out at which point the story transforms into an illustrated synopsis. Before the travesty comes into play, the first half of the story is A- material. There’s a kicker of a revelation about what’s so special about Tiphares and why Ido was driven to take such drastic measures. It also gives greater context for Desty Nova’s experiments and the nature of Alita’s opponents thus far. It’s one of those shockers that changes the way the reader looks at all the characters – in a good way – and paves the way for what would have been a glorious raid on the sky city. Woulda, shoulda, gotta buy the sequel series. Despite this non-ending, Alita still remains a classic and a must-read. Like Death Note, even a painfully anticlimactic ending can’t rob the series of all the right beats it hits along the way, though the sour conclusion will surely hamper favorable memories and the inclination to read through a second time. Comment on this review of Battle Angel Alita v9: Angel’s Ascension on the Manga Life Forums. |
7 May 2008
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