Age Rating: 18+
Genre: Science Fiction
Price: $14.95
Sometimes I hear people say "What's the difference between a manga and a graphic novel?" and usually that is an easy question for me to tackle, until you get to the works of Shirow Masamune and Black Magic.
Black Magic opens like a graphic novel, heck, like a novel. Your left thumb is not in constant motion with the talky sci-fi epic intro. I am not a big fan of big explanations at the opening (Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. The year was 1977). Black Magic feel like a bit of a text-book future history lesson for the first several pages. A nevy of characters is introduced quickly, and this is clearly an opener for those that like their mecha-manga detailed.
What we know is there is a supercomputer called Nemesis (who would name it that?) that controls the "genesis project"-type plans on Venus. As we have learned over the years, any chance Central Computer Systems get to overpower their human creators, they will take. Nemesis is no exception (though I like the exectution of this theme in The Two Faces of Tomorrow a little better).
What starts out and heady and a little confusing with parallel stories of tank police, ESPer agents and the super-computer and her super-bioroid agents ends up as some real butt-kicking action that, thankfully, sheds the big terminology and talking heads and boils down to some man vs. robot battles that are often more intimate than epic.
And this is where Masamune really shines. The artwork has a lived-in tech style (think Han Solo's Millenium Falcon) and the character's talk over each other like a Robert Altman film.
Masamune is a mecha legend, and his sci-fi work in Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell is already considered classic. This reissue of Black Magic, though succint, is probably going to appeal more to Masamune fans more than casual readers. Which is too bad, actually. What opens up as a somewhat convaluted SF epic, in the end closes as a heart-thumping man vs. machine action thriller with a big (albeit artificial) heart.
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