Gosh darn it if ninjas aren't the breakout stars of the G.I. Joe franchise. You've got members of every branch of the US military. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard. There's probably a TSA agent on the team nowadays. On the side of the baddies, you've got swamp rats and punks, iron clad aristocrats, and robots. And just who are the more popular characters of the series? It's the freakin' ninjas!
Their popularity is all due to the godfather of G.I. Joe, Larry Hama. He was tasked with creating an interesting background for a Hasbro cost cutting measure and out of his bag of tricks, Hama gives us Snake-Eyes. Hama pulled from his Japanese heritage to give a rather bland looking all-black plastic 3.75 inch action figure an awesome background story. A veteran of the Vietnam war, Snake-Eyes is injured in a helicopter crash. Having lost his ability to talk and basically looking like a full-faced Two-Face, Snake-Eyes trains to become a ninja of the Arashikage Clan which is kind of a big deal since Snake-Eyes is a white guy and ninjas are supposed to be extinct.
That's pretty much where we come in with this Manga G.I. Joe story from Devil's Due Publishing imprint D3. Snake-Eyes, along with Scarlett are summoned to Japan by former Joes Jinx and Nunchuk. An ancient scroll thought lost for centuries has been stolen. This parchment, hidden since the fall of the ninja, speaks of amazing powers that can make a ninja invisible in daylight. In the hands of an evil force like Cobra it can be destructive to world peacekeeping efforts. For the few remaining members of the Arashikage clan, it's personal.
I'm not known for being a fan of manga. But I am an established fan of G.I. Joe. I've read the complete Marvel run. I'm close to complete ownership of the other Marvel Joe supplemental series. And I am slowly getting the Devil's Due and IDW runs. Thus I felt when I found this book a couple of years ago, I couldn't pass it up.
I didn't sit on this book because of any attempt to get the rest of the Devil's Due run. In fact, I didn't know that D3 was in any way related to Devil's Due. No, the reason I waited a while to read this is because I was looking for Volume 2. Guess what? There is no Volume 2! As with a lot of non-Japanese manga publishers in the 2000s, D3 went defunct soon after the publication of this here Volume 1.
The story by Joshua Blaylock (Mercy Sparx) was very confusing. There's a bunch of names of clans, historical characters and Joe characters that I wasn't familiar with. That's because even though this is a one-shot manga, Arashikage Showdown was tied-in to the regular Devil's Due comic. Technically, it's also tied into the original Marvel Comics series.
Keep in mind I haven't read any of the Devil's Due books. There's a character in this manga called Kamakura. He's Snake-Eyes apprentice. I had no idea who this new ninja Joe was. That was until I Googled him and learned that Kamakura is actually little Sean Broca, all grown up! (Don't remember Sean? Surely you'll remember Fred Broca, the Crimson Guardsman who is later replaced by Wade Collins!)
I think if I hadn't had Google at my beck and call, I would have hated this book. The artwork was decent. It didn't look all that very Manga-like. Well, until we had that very clunky looking ritual performed by Snake-Eyes. Over the span of several pages! Then the artwork got more emoji than emotional and it started to look less like something that was my thing and more of the interest of fans of anime would like.
A saving grace for this book was the 4-page ending. It was powerful. It was deep. It was so good I re-read that segment twice. And it helps to save my review of this book!
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment