Thanks to barnesandnoble.com for the above cover image.

Sci-Fi/Action; Rated “OT” for “Teen-Age 16+”

In the anime series, “Burst Angel,” from the Japanese anime studio Gonzo (“Afro Samurai,” “Gantz”), a pastry chef works for a band of mercenaries.  The mercenaries ply their trade in a near-future Tokyo where the rise in criminal activity forced the Japanese government to allow ordinary citizens to possess firearms.  Angel’s Adolescence was a manga prequel to “Burst Angel,” drawn by Minoru Murao, and published in the manga magazine Dengeki Comic Gao!, before being collected in three volumes.  TOKYOPOP is publishing an English edition of Angel’s Adolescence, entitled Burst Angel.

In Burst Angel, Vol. 1, we enter a Tokyo sometime in the later 21st century, when it is a lawless zone of violence and crime.  In a sense being like the mythological American “wild” West, it is a place where the survivor relies on her guns and her skills.  Through Takeru, a bullied high school student, we meet Burst Angel’s two protagonists, Meg & Jo.  These young women are a team of hired guns called “Jack of All Trades,” and Takeru meets them when he discovers that they’re lying low in his apartment after Jo sustains a bullet wound.  Following this unlikely friendship, the girls brave a hail of bullets as they retrieve a stolen family heirloom, foil a kidnapping, and take on assassins.

THE LOWDOWN:  The art in Burst Angel has the amateurish or semi-pro look of art by Americans who draw comic books that are supposed to be like manga, but aren’t.  These comic books feature a drawing style that looks more like it was taken from the visual style of various popular science fiction and fantasy anime.  In the case of Minoru Murao, the artist of Burst Angel, his storytelling is good, and he is surprisingly good at producing panel layouts in terms of spacing and placing characters and objects in motion.  He’s weak, however, in composition, draftsmanship, and the technical aspects of drawing.

The plot/narrative is okay, and is mostly about shootouts.  Really, the writing is mediocre or pedestrian, if you want to use a nicer word.  A decent action comic, it is a darker kind of shounen manga, not exactly the kind of “boys’ comics” that marks the genre (Naruto, One Piece).

POSSIBLE AUDIENCE:  Readers of TOKYOPOP’s bullets-by-the-boatload action manga may want to try Burst Angel.

C+