Publisher: Dark Horse
Issues: 9/9 (1 Volume total, Complete), OOP but not hard to find
Seinen
Genre: Hard Scifi, Scifi, Romance
Summary: A satellite has malfunctioned and will crash soon into a residential area of Japan. The police are evacuating the city, but three people are still inside the crash zone: a wanted fugitive, Machida, the cop chasing after him, Watanabe, and Chiaki, a young housewife. The fugitive Machida tries to half-heartedly take the young woman hostage to escape but she runs away, deep into the evacuation zone. Machida and Watanabe run after her, and then the satellite crashes right on top of them! It soon becomes clear the satellite crashed due to a hitchhiker of alien origin as the technology detaches itself from the burning satellite and attaches itself to the three of them!
The story then jumps to 10 months in the future as all three of them seemingly vanished without a trace. The fugitive gives himself up to the police, tells them where to find the missing woman who is safe but remembers nothing, and tells an incredible, unbelievable story of what happened to the missing cop.
Review: It’s an unusual and obscure little Hard Scifi and Cyberpunk gem of a story that’s very Akira-inspired in art style. Unfortunately it was so unpopular back when it was released in the 1990’s that it was never collected into a printed volume, only 9 chapters that were published in single comic issues.
As the story starts, the three of them soon discover themselves to be traveling at super fast speeds as the super fast alien technology binds to them and speeds them up in time pockets in order to communicate and observe them at it’s own natural speed. Everything in the explosion from the crashed satellite appears to be frozen in time. Things take on a bit of a role reversal as the Alien AI that initially attempted first contact with the Cop, Watanabe, messed up and burnt out his brain, turning him into a crazy killer. Machida and Chiaki find themselves in a dilemma as they try to stop Watanabe from killing them and trying to be the sole representative of Earth. A further twist reveals a romantic subplot as Machida and Chiaki actually used to know each other some years ago.
Even though this story overall was much better than I expected for an obscure one volume story, I felt kind of unhappy about how the mangaka decided to leave a couple of major plot points ambiguous including the conclusion of the romantic subplot. While some stories can pull off an ambiguous ending, I felt like this story was basically a straightforward story that just has a couple major pieces missing.
Recommended: Overall this Scifi story might be of interest to those who might enjoy a hard scifi/cyberpunk short story with a side of romance. But it’s also nothing particularly special even though it has its moments.
Age Rating: Older Teen, for violence
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