"Shuttered Factories Find New Life as Setting for Atmospheric Encounters," in The Big O vol. 4, Chapter 14, by Hitoshi Ariga (writer/artist)
I only ever bought one volume of this 5-volume manga series. I don't remember why I bought it, other than I enjoyed the original 13 episodes of the anime. Thought clearly not enough to buy any of the other volumes. You might reasonably wonder why, if I was only going to buy a single volume, I went with volume 4 instead of, oh, I don't know, volume 1? Or even volume 5, under the thinking I wanted to see how it ended. Well, I can't remember what my thinking was behind that either, so we're all in the dark.
It's the same general story, Roger Smith piloting one big robot against a bunch of other big robots in a city where nobody supposedly has any memories beyond 40 years ago. Except clearly people have some memories since there's a whole story in here about a pair of scientist twins kidnapping the poor folks who live in the slums and using a device to try and pull out whatever memories they have. This volume does have the big showdown between Roger and the former reporter Michael Seebach, now calling himself Schwarzwald. "Black Forest" is a pretty cool name. Maybe that was why I bought this volume, I always liked that character. Kind of crazy and theatrical, you know?
The heavy shadows, the stark contrasts between black and white Hitoshi Ariga uses really work for this. Very good at creating an atmosphere, at making things seem ominous or looming. There are deserted sections of the city that are this stark, plain white, and deep shadows here and there, and it makes things feel desolate and empty. I'm not sure it works as well for the giant robot fights, but that's mostly just because it's hard for them to really feel like giant robots on such small pages sizes. The mechs usually take up an entire panel, and typically even that isn't enough, as parts of them are out of view, but you don't really get the sense of scale, or power of the attacks they're throwing at each other. If the earth should be trembling from a series of punches Big O is landing on the opponent, the art doesn't really reflect it.
The heavy shadows, the stark contrasts between black and white Hitoshi Ariga uses really work for this. Very good at creating an atmosphere, at making things seem ominous or looming. There are deserted sections of the city that are this stark, plain white, and deep shadows here and there, and it makes things feel desolate and empty. I'm not sure it works as well for the giant robot fights, but that's mostly just because it's hard for them to really feel like giant robots on such small pages sizes. The mechs usually take up an entire panel, and typically even that isn't enough, as parts of them are out of view, but you don't really get the sense of scale, or power of the attacks they're throwing at each other. If the earth should be trembling from a series of punches Big O is landing on the opponent, the art doesn't really reflect it.
3 comments:
I love The Big O and I never knew there was a manga, so I've learned something today!
Yeah, the manga came out at least a decade ago, pretty sure I've had this that long). I really liked the first season, 13 episodes, whatever you call it of The Big O. The second half, the part they did after I guess enough fans clamored for more, not so much.
Although I did really enjoy that episode where Roger gets captured and Dorothy has to be the Negotiator on his behalf.
Yeah, it's a bit of a mess, caught between the show being popular enough to get a second series, but not quite popular enough to get a third, so you get lots of build-up with no real payoff. It's such a shame as it's so good otherwise.
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