Heart Gear Volume 6 by Tsuyoshi Takaki

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Following the rejuvenation of the previous instalment,  Chrome and the gang are now stuck with bodyguards who are guiding them to a mythical location that is also trying to kill them all due to a breakdown in their two-party bipartisan government consensus.  Tensions are high but Chrome is more powerless than ever, both because of his physical exhaustion and because he is not the only person Roue can rely on anymore.  He has to accept these strangers are better qualified for his role as protector and that Roue might be better off this way even if it denies him his own reason to keep living.  This is all established in 5 pages and is more meat than entire volumes have had in the past.

It feels like The Donkey Squad’s infectious optimism is even rubbing off on the author.  Giving up on some of his shading tricks in favour of a clearer art style and more relaxed tone.  The jokes are better, the pacing is snappier and it is all moving towards the hourglass-shaped Heaven Land. Speaking of hourglasses, the ghostly Reis is back in the fold finally acting as the primary villain of an arc after only being a background player in the past.  Alongside her newest assistant Mulberry, who looks like he’s on loan from Digimortal by Tsutomu Nihei.  Mulberry gets a decent showcase for his personality, a particularly dower belief that defying his self-preservation programming and seeking a noble death is the only way to give his artificial life value.  Reis gets far less material and she is one of many sacrifices the story is making at this stage.

I’d praised the competently executed but suddenly introduced internal conflict for Chrome last time. Heart Gear really just barrels past that turmoil and blitzs through the introspection stage to get to a point of clarity.  I can’t say I’m opposed to it. Volume 6, What You Want, raises the action higher and increases the tempo.  Everything rocketing faster and faster towards the ultimate finale.  Takaki still feels invested and happy to be here. He is however showing a firm commitment to ending this series sooner than later.  Even opening the book by blunting questioning the difference between man and machine so directly it feels like he is finally ready to reach some type of conclusion, instead of beating around the bush.

Resolving everything in the seventh and final volume will be difficult.  The size of the case has tripled so all of those characters needs resolutions of some kind.  Can Heart Gear pull it off? We’ll find out next time but the previous two volumes have been operating on a higher level so it  feels more likely that the final 8 chapters will pull it off.

Heart Gear Volume 5 by Tsuyoshi Takaki

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Following his weakest instalment with the best of the series, Tsuyoshi Takaki’s Heart Gear returns with palpable excitement and newfound confidence.  Starting with a more controlled and measured short story than any prior example;  Roue summarises the plot so far and highlights her existential dread of living in a world that has moved on and left her behind as the last living human. While her robot companions will endure she is now conscious that she is both the person that will draw danger to them and the only one among them who will not live forever. 

Unbeknownst to Roue, that danger is already on its way. With Heaven Land’s leadership divided on how to handle Roue it’s been decided they will make a game of it. Conservative leading R deploys her special squad to wipe out Roue and her companions while D orders his retrieval team to bring them to Heave Land unharmed. The future of the world is now just a test of strength and luck with Roue trapped in the middle.

My review for Volume 3 noted that Takaki’s approach to Science Fiction was barrelling towards becoming pure fantasy.  Volume 5 shows this does not have to be a bad thing as planting itself firmly in a different sub-genre and moving the action to plains and woodland gives the series a shot in the arm.  Takaki’s newfound freedom allows him to make Ash, the Chrome’s main enemy this go-around, dress like a an JRPG hero complete with sword the length of his body and a dragon (explicitly not a robot, he just has an organic dragon). Followed by the retrieval team’s commander cosplaying a samurai and the suppression unit featuring a mechanical mage.  With more fighters involved and actual strategy in plan the action is improving.  

Chrome has a personality now.  Two as it turns out.  His newfound doubts over his unicorn-themed berserker state do not feel like a natural extension of what has occurred previously, especially was his berserk state is barely more violent than he normally it, but I’ll take it. The combat robot frustrated with his own existence and how he keeps encountering other units who are content to destroy themselves for pleasure instead of finding reasons to live.  It took over 30 chapters but now both lead characters have some type of interiority besides genre cliches. Having an evil dark side threatening to take over your body is a cliche but it is a way of presenting internal conflict. And as sudden as it is Takaki presents it well.  

Time of Your Life makes a fitting title for Heart Gear’s Volume 5.  While the Valhalla arc dragged itself across the finish line out of obligation, this new Heaven Land arc has a real vitality and energy to it. Incongruous with past events, perhaps, but more engaging and exciting than before. 

Crazy Food Truck by Rokurou Ogaki

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A surprising amount was overlap with both Creative Burnout regular Heart Gear and personal favourite Soara of the House of Monsters. Like Soara it is bombastic and fantastical on household topic.  Like Heart Gear it is a road trip of two people (one knowledgeable human and the other a dumb superhuman) across an arid wasteland in the search of meaning. But Crazy Food Truck unfortunately lacks the panache to stand out. 

Baring a few action scenes and comedy beats the series never commits to anything. The cooking elements are extremely limited, both in the recipes presented and barely touching on the joy of  a good meal. The food truck drifting across the wastelands looking for customers never serves clients or aids them through the culinary arts. Arisa might enjoy Gordon’s meals as her drives his new mysterious and powerful partner around. But they never extend it to anyone else.

Problems are resolved exclusively through the main duo’s capacity for violence. And attempts to find hidden depths to them fall victim to either the author’s indecisiveness or haggard pacing. Faults that becomes incredible obvious the more you read and realise that Gordon’s flashback stories to his military past highlight the four people who shaped his current life as a cook very conspicuously stop talking about the fourth person because that was too much to handle. Arisa taking her shirt off is not enough to distract you from how Gordon’s past and the wider cast is actually becoming less detailed as it is explored further. Without any special quality of its own Crazy Food Truck unfortunately becomes a bland and unsatisfactory experiment that highlights how others have achieved far more with the same ingredients. Avoid.

Heart Gear Volume 4 by Tsuyoshi Takaki

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Completely surrendering to his monomania, General Wodan throws out all subterfuge and resolves to just crush his problems in a big robot.  With an insane general rampaging the responsibility of stopping him and ending his Valhalla falls to: a human girl, her robot protector, a living camera and an opposing commander with seriously bruised special shock-absorption padding.  

The first half of Volume 4, Born to Lose, is the conclusion to the Valhalla arc. It unfortunately suffered due to real-world circumstances. Takaki was seriously ill during this period so it is not surprising that the ultimate showdown with Wodan is underwhelming. Especially compared to Chrome’s pervious fight with Hildr. While perfectly understandable why this would be the case it is still a disappointment.  Especially as Wodan’s total abandonment of subtlety removes his only interesting traits in favour of just being a loud obstacle for our heroes, one that refuses to muster up the creativity to say anything entertaining as he fights. 

Takaki’s health issues also explain why afterwards the series slows down to softly reset before moving into a new arc. During this acclimatisation period Takaki’s discussions of artificial life focus less on abstract ideas and instead focuses on the possibility for humans to transcend the limits of health to become lifeforms able to pursue their ambitions forever.  The section feels a lot more personal and more keenly thought out than other debates in the series. 

This new arc introduces Heaven Land figures R and D (haha) who reveal they have split opinions on the 12-year old Roue, as the last human could reshape or destroy their community. Leading both of them to make her future a game: R deploys her Elephant Unit to kill Roue while D mobilises his Donkey Squad to escort her as an honoured guest.  

Regretfully the weakest volume of Heart Gear so far but still containing promise.  Both with a new suite of characters and with the author finally being able to articulate his bigger ideals as more than set dressing for action scenes.  Still featuring the author’s stylistic flourishes that make the journey interesting to look at; Heart Gear is hovering around the point where it will lose me but still has not convinced me to do so. 

Bloodstrike: Brutalists (2018) by Michel Fiffe

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Super-powered operatives Cabbot Stone, Fourplay, Deadlock, Shogun and Tag have all fallen in the line of duty.  Project Born Again has found a way to resurrect them as part of a government assassination program. Born Again seeks to run covert missions using dead men.  Defeat can mean death but never an escape.  Bloodstrike agents are condemned to eternal resurrection until their value is completely exhausted and the unseen power brokers order their charred bones will be cast aside for the next unfortunates.  Through a haze distorted memories and mounting contempt persisting into the next life, Bloodstrike won’t accept their rotten luck for much longer.

Much like his self-published series COPRA homages with John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad, Fiffe’s work on Brutalists has an undeniable and enviable passion for the project. He is enjoying himself immensely for this opportunity to contribute to this forgotten series with new stories. Bloodstirke originally ran between 1993 and 1995 as a spinoff book to the first ever Image Comics series Youngblood by Rob Liefeld. As with all early Image comics it is born out of some of the most popular Marvel Comics artists growing dissatisfied with the bosses they were making rich to go build their own publisher and handle their own books. Youngblood as Liefeld’s vision of a high-profile team of government-sanctioned superheroes who enjoyed all the glitz and glamour that came with superstardom. Bloodstirke was the grittier and meaner spinoff book about the operatives hidden in the shadows and deprived of everything. Everything except the mission.

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Heart Gear Volume 3 by Tsuyoshi Takaki

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Roue, the last human and her combat android Chrome continue their search for Heaven Land.  Their current goal is earning earn safe passage to paradise through victory in the combat arena Valhalla.  The pair have been split up as Valhalla’s ruler Wodan recognises their potential, Roue tucked away in the stronghold and Chrome smashing up foes in the Colosseum.  Soon or later they will have to contend with Hildr, a war general and Wodan’s main obstacle.  She might be the duo’s greatest ally… provided she and Chrome avoiding killing each other as part of Wodan’s scheme.

There are many way to capture an audience’s attention.  Takaki chooses to do this through explosive action and artistic flourishes.  From the heart-shaped shimmer in Roue’s eyes to the application of dotted screen tone for highlighting shadows and hair; this is the volume where I started to really appreciate the smaller details within this style.  An arena duel between rivals who both need to win but wish they could be teaming up to fight the real villain is the most straightforward plot an action series can have. While Chrome’s tin-man blandness remains an issue its Hildr’s stoicism that ends up being effective.  Outside their duel, Volume 3 is Takaki developing the divide between Hildr and Wodan as potential commanders of Valhalla.  With humanity gone these machines built solely for military leadership have to decide what that means.  More importantly they have to define what it means to live in a post-human wasteland.  Should they remain enslaved to meaningless goals in a changing world?  Should they strive to evolve and individualise beyond their core impulses even if could spell disaster later? The dialectic argument has more bite to it than most the ethical musings in the series as it is an actual argument fuelling the narrative.  Rather than someone bombarding the 12-year old Roue with questions nobody can answer.  

This is also where the science fiction aspects of the series get cast by the wayside.  As it goes along Heart Gear feels more and more like fantasy story that just so happens to have robots in it.  Science-Fantasy is a respectable genre,  but it does fell that Takaki needed to introduce cyberspace landscapes that impact the physical world to find interesting ways of framing conversations in his limited desert world.  Especially significant when his main creative obstacle is that his current villain doesn’t have a human face to emote with.  Things are getting more interesting but exhaustion is starting to set in with this series.  

ABARA by Tsutomu Nihei

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Tsutomu Nihei’s superhero blockbuster.  This 11-chapter series follows a young man called Denji quietly living in a city so vast and ancient its towering buildings are considered the natural landscape.  Denji’s routine is disrupted when an attack by a monstrous crustacean known as Gauna forces a shadowy government representative, Nayuta, to beg for his help. Exposed as a Human-Gauna hybrid, Denji’s brutal fight to protect his city makes him the target of a police investigation. while he is hunted by the higher-ups in Nayuta’s agency trying to maintain control of his unique power.  

An alarming amount of ABARA’s plot will sound familiar to those who have read Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man series. Fujimoto has acknowledged this as a major influence on his bestselling series and that alone makes it interesting to re-examine years later. ABARA’s story is sparse and the ending is naff.  However it is a strong showcase for Nihei as an illustrator.  In his previous series, BLAME!, Nihei gained notoriety for his landscapes and megastructures as his characters were dwarfed by the scale of their hauntingly bleak world. ABARA gleefully inverts the dynamic.  Powerful figures leap tall buildings in a single bound and treat this haunted and decaying world like their playground. Nihei fulling embraces this newfound freedom throughout.  Once you get into his rhyme the hypersonic action scenes become a delight.  Armoured titans leap through a stark necrotic city slicing off limbs and ripping each other open at impossible speeds. Nihei intelligently contrasts this with the quiet brooding and sudden bloodshed of the more human cast, ensuring that the violence never becomes weightless.  

While the grim beauty of his worlds has netted Nihei praise he has always been criticised for his people. Specifically their incredibly vacant facial expressions. Fortunately, the stoic professionals populating ABARA’s cast use this limited range of blank stares to great success as they process shock, rage or stonefaced confusion in ways that is either evocative or funny.  Showing that in the right environment an author’s biggest liability can become a benefit while enabling the greatest strengths.  Newcomers wanting a succinct introduction to Nihei’s style and long time fans desperate to see him cut loose on a straight forward action will find ABARA a perfect choice.  Just expect the sudden and unsatisfying conclusion and enjoy the ride.

The hardcover also includes the two-part story Digimortal. Noticeably more straightforward and far more goth than ABARA, Digimortal lacks the pulse-pounding action of the main feature. It does, however, benefit from just being a peek into a wider world of corporate religious rule, and the assassins fighting against it.  The more limited scope, combined with not having to have a definitive conclusion means it does come together quite well. A neat extra to a solid series that comes to an unsatisfying conclusion, that doesn’t really detract from its merit.

Punisher: Blood on the Moors

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Written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, Art by Cam Kennedy, Lettered by Jim Novak and Edited by Nel Yomtov and Richard Ashford. Published December 1991

Frank Castle is stumbling through an inch of snow in the Scottish Highlands, strung out cocaine and drunk on whiskey. He blames this predicament on Crime before promptly passing out. Until proven otherwise this is the greatest first page of any Punisher story.

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Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Manga: Volume One

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Capitalising on the Batman craze of the 1960s, Jiro Kuwata’s manga is a fascinating piece of work. Combining the charm of Adam West with propulsive action results in a string of exciting adventures for the Dynamic Duo. Dismissing this as camp would like a disservice.  The stories may show their age but as Kuwata’s depictions of death-defying heroism are as exhilarating as any modern Bat-Book. And his panache for dreamscapes and his ability explore Batman’s subconscious mind and subjective experience tap into ideas that have become foundational to The Dark Knight’s most cerebral and acclaimed sagas over the decades.

The dialogue is often declarative and interpersonal drama is non-existent.  At the same time it is punchy and direct, with possibly the most emotionally well balanced depiction of Bruce Wayne you can find. This is a Batman who books himself a vacation if he’s stressed after solving a case so he can unwind before getting back to work.  With a cheerful and confident Robin along for the ride the legendary tag-team are having a ball.

While their characterisations are extremely broad many of the villains debuting here are incredibly charismatic. The only weak link being Doctor Faceless with his unsatisfactory runaround plot. The series begins strong with Lord Death Man; the fiendish robber’s swaggering bombast makes him a delight to read while, his eerie cackling combined with Batman’s aforementioned nightmares regarding impermanent death ensure the man in a skeleton costume is a legit menace. He has since been plucked from obscurity to appear in more modern DC titles (recently in the 2024 Robin series dating the Boy Wonder’s grandmother), yet, despite Kuwata’s flexible approach to tone, Lord Death Man is not the best villain to appear in this 350-page tome. That honour goes to the mighty Karmak, who posses the unique quality of being a funny concept that becomes increasingly terrifying while still being a good laugh. If the later volumes can maintain this quality then the BatManga will have cemented itself as an overlooked classic. But this collection alone is worth reading both as a piece of transpacific pop-culture history and as well as just being an excellent superhero comic.

Soara and House of Monsters Volume 4 by Hidenori Yamaji – 

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Dwarf architects continue their adventures in domestic renovations with their human assistant and bodyboard Soara.  Volume 4 marks a sharp departure from previous instalments while still doing everything right. House of Monsters has playfully nudged towards a possible continent-wide crisis linked to our heroine’s origins before swiftly dismissing it. Always prioritising Soara’s self-discovery as she and the dwarfs encounter whimsical creatures in dire need of DIY solutions.  

Volume 4 opens a cloaked figure ambushing the party, forcing Soara into an explosive showdown. The monster battle she’s trained for her whole life but fought to protect her compatriots instead of a nation. While Soara herself is baffled by this new attacker the artisan trio are better informed due to events from their childhood. The book transitions into an extended refection on these past events through the eyes of their leading architect, Kirik. Sprawling out of Kirik’s chance encounter with the charismatic and lively Prince Leonidas of the Kingdom; their tale explores the Dwarf homeland, architecture, culture, royal family, even highlighting political disputes over trade routes. 

Pausing to dig up the past is often the exact opposite of progress for an ongoing story.  But Hidenori Yamaji ensures this flashback arc constantly resonates with his series’ core focus.  Kirik’s childhood determination to succeed in a career ill-suiting his weak muscles and small stature sharply contrasts with Soara’s lifetime of military training leaving her completely ill-equipped to handle the real world or find any identity in a peaceful kingdom.

Yamaji’s exceptionally charming artwork and adapt control of tone ensuring all develops feel effortlessly graceful.  Sadly there is a lack of home renovations in this Volume. The attempted compromise is lavish double-page spends detailing the various locations within the dwarf capital… yet illustrations of underground industrial-scale forges cannot replace a werewolf needing help managing his beachside property.  In spite of that absolutely nothing feels wasteful or unnecessary here. Much like Kirik’s hero, Prince Leonidas, Soara and House of Monsters continues doing whatever it wants with such confidence you feel compelled to follow along. Emphatically recommended.