Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 by Yukito Kishiro

It takes a certain flair to introduce a love interest who hijacks and rips peoples spines out for money, and the shifting moral universe that Alita/Gunnm has to navigate moves to centrestage at this point, driving character development and audience engagement for the rest of this collection. A story arc which comes across as painfully emo and irritating in the movie, is much more mature (and yes, darker) in the manga, the very ridiculousness and immaturity of the love interest driving the plot into more poignant, not less, territory.

The plot felt mostly like an excuse for fighting, and some of the more annoying manga tropes - a sexy female lead with no other women in sight, and a visual style that is all about whipping hair and big eyes, and world-building that seem unnecessarily weird, just annoyed me.īut from the second story arc, my infatuation grew. The first storyline of Gunnm left me yawning a little, and not terribly invested in this world. So it is genuinely with surprise that I need to report I fell for Gunnm *hard*, while the movie left me feeling pretty *meh*. I'm a graphic novel person, but I've never really gravitated to Manga before, other than a brief infatuation with Planetes, Volume 1. I loved Avatar, and knew that I wanted to see Alita: Battle Angel, so this was a no brainer.

I read this as part of a reading challenge, for which I needed to find a book that has a movie based on it coming out in 2019.

Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 by Yukito Kishiro