The White Witch of Torumekia! (19)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, III by Hayao Miyazaki.
Chocobo of war
in triceratops barding
against the cannons.
At this point I think we can safely say I'm slightly obsessed with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, right? I don't know how to even say this, but this volume ratchets up the art a notch. Which is sort of like saying "Hayao Miyazaki's amazing, breathtaking, heart-wrenching art got better this issue," but here we are. Maybe it was the demands of having to draw so many battle scenes, maybe it was the fact that military uniforms provide excellent opportunities to differentiate characters, but yeah, yes. Torumekian horse-claws, metal airships & conical armor, Dorokian dog-elks, wooden monitors & segmented armor, & weirder angles like the Forest people in their ghillie suits & spit bubbles...all just carved out of Miyazaki's imagination. So great. This is an issue dominated by Nausicaä & Kushana, the latter of which really shines, as the leader of a doomed military force slowly turning incredible odds by sheer morale & cunning. Yeah, this is the real deal-- we're now pretty much entirely out from under the shadow of the cartoon; again, acknowledging that the film came after the manga. Seriously, though, eff yeah, Kushana. I'm curious now if Treize Khushrenda from Gundam Wing is explicitly named after her; they've got a similar cult of personality.
