Book Review: Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, by Yukito Kishiro
The second Alita series lasted longer than the creator's inspiration did.
Warning: Spoilers for the first series
Battle Angel Alita: The Last Order follows the Japanese manga tradition of publishing massive tomes that go on for hundreds of pages with almost no plot progression. It is a very long series which follows the end of the previous nine-volume Battle Angel Alita series, which took us all from Alita's "rebirth" in the junkyards of the Scrapyard to her death, blown up by the nefarious Desty Nova.
It's long and meandearing and features Alita evolving and fighting interminable Dragonball Z-type "power up" battles, and also turning into a catgirl. It didn't have the same gritty, dystopian, cyberpunk vibe as the first series, but left the Junkyard and Earth behind to take Alita into space. It's frequently silly and at some point I think Yukito Kishiro just gave up on the story.
Vol. 1: Angel Reborn
Angel Reborn begins with Desty Nova rebuilding a cyborg body for Alita. He salvaged her brain, of course. From there, this long volume takes us to the sky city of Tiphares, and has Alita participating in a revolution between the Millennials and the Boomers (they aren't called that, but imagine a bunch of Millennials saying "Ok boomer" as they slaughter their parents), trying to find her old friend Lou, and becoming increasingly bitchy.
Yeah, this is not the sweet anime girl we met way back when Alita was brought to life by Doc Ido. She's had a hard life. She's seen a lot of friends die, she's had her body blown to bits more than once, and now she's probably never going to see any of her friends again. She's become a cold, callous warrior who only occasionally shows a spark of that humanity that made her so lovable when she was a cute little unstoppable death machine back on Earth.
Here, she is drawn into bigger and bigger spheres as we learn about the Ladder, and the interstellar government that has been ruling the solar system, oblivious to the affairs of the crawling ants who live down on the ground.
There's lots of action, Alita has to fight ever more formidable foes with her Panzer Kunst, and the volume ends with Alita still stuck out in space trying to figure out the politics of these crazy, super-advanced post-human Jovians and Venusians and other denizens of the solar system.
Omnibus Vol. 2
A FIREFIGHT ACROSS THE GENERATION GAP!
Nanotechnology made humanity immortal, and the resulting population explosion pushed the Solar System’s resources to the breaking point. As a result, new births are banned and even the planets’ disparate governments cooperate to annihilate any children already born. With the tournament looming, Alita and her comrades find themselves caught between a spacefaring refuge for young innocents and a bloodthirsty mob intent on killing the children for sport!
Volume two is more of a mess than volume one. The second series, as a continuation of the first, has taken Alita to space on her quest to rescue Lou's brain from a matrix, but she keeps getting distracted by side quests. Now on the sky city of Ketheres, allied with three of her old "clones," Sechs, Elf, and Zwolf, she joins a tournament called ZOTT, which is basically an excuse for a bunch of protracted fight scenes with bizarre foes, some of whom were apparently created by reader submissions. There's a kung fu master space vampire (no explanation for why suddenly vampires exist), a team of nursery school teachers who rescue the child soldiers sent to die in Ketheres' bloody wargames and are now doing battle to try to win a "nation" for themselves and their kids, and various other weird antagonists, each of whom presents some new challenge and gives Alita and her team new tactics and powers to overcome.
As a collection of zany sci-fi gladatorial characters, it's entertaining, but after the latest 600-page omnibus, we're not really much further along in the plot. Alita is finding out more and more about her past life as a Martian warrior named Yoko, but her personality keeps changing, and the tone of the comic keeps varying between comical and serious, moralistic, and gory. There's toilet humor and a teddy bear-hugging space queen mixed with Alita being haunted by a Nazi ghost while she tries to rescue toddlers from being turned into bloody soup.
Omnbibus Vol. 3
MEMORIES OF MASS MURDER
On her way to retrieve Lou’s brain, Alita encounters a ghost from her past-an old mentor whose revelations shake Alita's very identity. Meanwhile Elf, Zwölf, and Sechs fight their deadly - and creepiest-enemies yet as the ZOTT rages on! But will the ARs have the mental fortitude to resist the psychically altered leader of the fearsome Starship Cult?
As the second Battle Angel Alita series went on, I suspected that Yukito Kishiro was having problems stretching it out and started pulling ideas out of his ass. Hence in the middle of Alita's quest to win a bloody tournament on a dystopian space station, ostensibly to rescue the brain of her old friend Lou from series one, we suddenly get many, many issues (over half the book) devoted to a flashback to ancient history. In which we learn that vampires exist.
Yes, vampires. I have not seen such a jarring insertion of vampires into a sci-fi setting since David Weber's (very bad) novel Out of the Dark, in which Dracula helps fight off an alien invasion.
So about half of this volume is a load of backstory. We learn that 21st century civilization was destroyed by an asteroid impact, which killed the vast majority of humans on Earth. During the long global winter, we get flashbacks within flashbacks about the vampires who have secretly been living among humans for millennia, and who emerged to begin hunting the few surviving humans during the post-apocalypse. Thus we're introduced to a couple of vampire main characters, only one of which survives this long backstory, and which presumably Alita will meet at some point, though after nearly 600 pages we haven't gotten there yet.
I mean, this was all kind of interesting to learn how the sky cities and the Martian Union came to be, but it really felt like padding, and the vampires really mess with the cyberpunk setting. Technically, they are not "supernatural" vampires; there's a pseudo-scientific explanation about how they're actually mutants, and they don't turn into bats or get repelled by crosses, but otherwise they are still basically classic vampires.
Alita only actually appears in a handful of pages in this third Battle Angel Alita omnibus. She's still trying to pull off a hacking caper (which she started in the last omnibus) while her teammates are fighting ridiculous hypnotic clown cyborgs.
I wanted to power through and finish this series, but there was so much ridiculousness and increasingly juvenile character power-ups and Mortal Kombat fight moves. It had neither the heart nor the cyberpunk vibe of the first series.
Omnibus Vol. 4
MADNESS IN MULTIPLES
In the depths of Melchizedek, Alita inches closer to recovering her dear friend’s brain but not before she is greeted by Mbadi and a rather duplicitous Desty Nova doppleganger. Meanwhile, Sechs and the other members of the Space Angels make their way through ZOTT, where Sechs comes to face a universally renowned Space Karate master in a show of technique, toughness and…thumbs?
The fourth omnibus, comprising volumes 10-12 of the 20-volumes in The Last Order, also clocked in at over 600 pages. Yukito Kishiro was clearly milking the series while trying to figure out what to do and I got the impression that he's very much a seat-of-the-pants writer. Hence, in the last omnibus we got hundreds of pages with no Alita, just a post-apocalyptic story about vampires.
In volumes 10-12, fortunately, Alita is back. And the vampires have basically disappeared from the story. It's been a couple thousand pages now, but you might remember that Alita originally went into space to find the brain of her friend Lou, who used to be her "operator" when she worked for Tiphares. Well, Alita's quest to save Lou gets mentioned maybe once or twice, but first, we have more pages and pages of freaky transhumanist mortal kombat teams fighting in the ZOTT. You know, that outer space tournament that's been going on for the last half dozen volumes.
With Alita back in the fight, it gets more interesting again. Alita has been resurrected (again) in a brand new even more super-powerful cyborg body (again) and for some reason, she is now a catgirl with a cybernetic tail. Wtf, Kishiro?
Aga Mbadi, aka Trinidad, who's the Big Bad of this series (so far) finally gets taken down a peg, and we learn his origin (it's still a little incoherent). Desty Nova now has multiple clones, and they aren't all on the same side. Alita's rival (who's kinda on her side for the moment) is a hypermacho super-powerful cyborg space karate fighter named Zekka.
There is a lot of action. A lot of Alita kicking ass. But the series continues to be mostly an ever-escalating series of boss fights, with the writer occasionally remembering to mention the plot. There is a little bit of story advancement here, but at this rate Alita will have to fight the entire solar system before we get to the climax.
Omnibus Vol. 5
This is the fifth 600-page omnibus volume of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. Way back in volume 2, Alita arrived in space and joined the ZOTT (Zenith of Things Tournament). It's still going on.
Nearly two thousand pages so far have been devoted to a space battle between Alita's team and various other weird and wacky fighting teams, each of them with a new, over-the-top series of opponents with unstoppable powers. There are occasional digressions in which Alita zens out and discovers some new aspect of herself, or the other characters reach either peak enlightenment or another power-up, but mostly it's a bunch of fighting with characters whose punches leave impact craters and whose origin stories range from bizarre to gross.
This volume is the "final battle" of the ZOTT. The teams now are Alita (still sporting a catgirl body), Sechs (Alita's bratty male-persona cyborg clone), and Zazie (a soldier chick from Mars who's... really good at shooting things) vs. Zekka (a hundred-year old cyborg martial arts master), Toji (a giant blocky cyborg master of "electromagnetic karate"), and Rakan (a weird super-fast martial artist who's apparently also a super-rapist). They each fight one on one, giving us many, many pages of moves and countermoves and each of them cleverly trying to counter each other's powers, and guess what? By the end of the volume, it's still not over.
The original Alita series had a plot, at least, and some character development, though it went off the rails towards the end. The current series really feels like most of the time, the creator was just making up something to keep filling pages. If you like space superheroes punching each other across battlefields for hundreds of pages of fighting, it's entertaining enough, but even the occasional dips into personal histories or psychological introspection are too brief and meaningless to add much.
Despite all this, I retained enough affection for Alita to see this series through to the end, but it was a slog.
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 16
For some reason, the last four volumes of the series were not released in a sixth omnibus volume, but had to be read individually. So Volume 16 collects the issues following Omnibus Edition Volume 5.
And hey, guess what? The ZOTT tournament is still going on!
We're still reading one-on-one battles between Zazie and Rakan, Sechs and Zekka, and Alita and Toji, respectively.
The battle between Zazie and Rakan is finally resolved (good riddance, space rapist). Sechs and Zekka are still trying to out-machismo each other. And Alita's initial easy trouncing of Toji suddenly suffers a reversal as Toji's survival instincts kick in and he metamorphizes into something else which can suddenly kick Alita's ass. Resulting in Alita being "destroyed" except then of course she is "reborn" (again), this time as a winged catgirl...
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 17
KARMIC JUSTICE!
Caught in each other’s traps, the Martian markswoman Zazie and the despicable murderer Rakan begin to tear themselves apart, piece by piece! Meanwhile, Zekka’s distracted by the reappearance (or is that reincarnation?) of an old rival, whose presence may provoke the fiery death of millions in an antimatter explosion! Freedom, hubris, enlightenment and destruction as Alita’s saga reaches its climax!
Alita is reborn (this is like her fourth or fifth body) as a winged catgirl. The ZOTT battles are almost over. And Mbedi (the villain of the series, who's been orchestrating everything and tried to unleash a doomsday weapon on the winners of the ZOTT) triggers a rebellion against his power. Most of this volume is still just more fighting, but the long (long, long) ZOTT arc is finally wrapping up and perhaps we are headed towards.... a conclusion?
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 18
In the penultimate volume of Last Order, Alita once again only appears sparingly, in the first few pages. It's a flashback to explain how she came back from the dead (for the umpteenth time) after her last cyborg body was immolated in a plasma storm during the battle with the Space Karate forces during the ZOTT tournament.
Then we turn to Earth, and return to some characters who have been absent for a very long time. Figure Four, Alita's erstwhile lover, and Doc Ido, who I thought was dead but I guess he's just been chilling at a remote fishing village with his memories erased. We get caught up on what they have been doing while Alita was off in space, and there is a big battle in which yet another cult-like mob of cyborgs comes hunting for Doc Ido, thinking he is Desty Nova. Figure Four remains half-comic relief, half-slightly too serious caricature of machismo.
The story was actually fun and fairly straightforward, something that has been missing in some of the recent Alita volumes. Still, it felt like filler while the author figures out how to wrap things up.
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 19
Finally, the last volume of Battle Angel Alita. It ended... okay. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't great. After all these years we've spent following Alita into space, and the never-ending ZOTT tournament full of bizarre space martial arts battles, the story returns to Earth, and Doc Ido and Figure. Remember him? The musclehead "Fist of the North Star" parody whom Alita inexplicably fell in love with and married way back in the first series?
They haven't seen each other since. So a resurrected Doc Ido and Figure, along with Kaos and Koyomi, venture forth in search of Alita, eventually returning to the Junkyard, where the Sky City Tiphares has fallen. They find out that Alita is up in space, so they take a space elevator up into the orbital city of Ketheres. This leads to another confrontation with Desty Nova, the mad genius who's been a recurring villain through the series.
Alita does not actually appear on many pages in this final volume. Figure is kind of reunited with her, and Alita continues her adventures in space. There is obviously room for more stories, yet I kind of hope Yukito Kishiro is done, because it seems like he ran out of ideas and inspiration years ago. I have enjoyed the Battle Angel Alita series, but it's been milked long past its expiration date.
The denouement was a bittersweet, somewhat incomplete resolution. The payoff really wasn't enough for all those interminable thousands of pages of cyborgs, vampires, and genetically-engineered monsters punching each other. Alita coasted for a very long time on coolness, graphic violence, and kawaii. But it's a memorable saga, and while the second series does not measure up to the first, quantity, as they say, has a quality all its own, and the massive size of the second series makes it epic beyond the forgettableness of individual volumes. Would I like to see more Alita stories? Maybe, if Kishiro is ever inspired enough to actually tell a story, or if someone else picks up the threads he left dangling.
Still hoping for another movie someday, though.
Other Battle Angel Alita reviews: Battle Angel Alita and Alita: Battle Angel - Iron City
My complete list of book reviews.
Warning: Spoilers for the first series
Battle Angel Alita: The Last Order follows the Japanese manga tradition of publishing massive tomes that go on for hundreds of pages with almost no plot progression. It is a very long series which follows the end of the previous nine-volume Battle Angel Alita series, which took us all from Alita's "rebirth" in the junkyards of the Scrapyard to her death, blown up by the nefarious Desty Nova.
It's long and meandearing and features Alita evolving and fighting interminable Dragonball Z-type "power up" battles, and also turning into a catgirl. It didn't have the same gritty, dystopian, cyberpunk vibe as the first series, but left the Junkyard and Earth behind to take Alita into space. It's frequently silly and at some point I think Yukito Kishiro just gave up on the story.
Vol. 1: Angel Reborn
Angel Reborn begins with Desty Nova rebuilding a cyborg body for Alita. He salvaged her brain, of course. From there, this long volume takes us to the sky city of Tiphares, and has Alita participating in a revolution between the Millennials and the Boomers (they aren't called that, but imagine a bunch of Millennials saying "Ok boomer" as they slaughter their parents), trying to find her old friend Lou, and becoming increasingly bitchy.
Yeah, this is not the sweet anime girl we met way back when Alita was brought to life by Doc Ido. She's had a hard life. She's seen a lot of friends die, she's had her body blown to bits more than once, and now she's probably never going to see any of her friends again. She's become a cold, callous warrior who only occasionally shows a spark of that humanity that made her so lovable when she was a cute little unstoppable death machine back on Earth.
Here, she is drawn into bigger and bigger spheres as we learn about the Ladder, and the interstellar government that has been ruling the solar system, oblivious to the affairs of the crawling ants who live down on the ground.
There's lots of action, Alita has to fight ever more formidable foes with her Panzer Kunst, and the volume ends with Alita still stuck out in space trying to figure out the politics of these crazy, super-advanced post-human Jovians and Venusians and other denizens of the solar system.
Omnibus Vol. 2
A FIREFIGHT ACROSS THE GENERATION GAP!
Nanotechnology made humanity immortal, and the resulting population explosion pushed the Solar System’s resources to the breaking point. As a result, new births are banned and even the planets’ disparate governments cooperate to annihilate any children already born. With the tournament looming, Alita and her comrades find themselves caught between a spacefaring refuge for young innocents and a bloodthirsty mob intent on killing the children for sport!
Volume two is more of a mess than volume one. The second series, as a continuation of the first, has taken Alita to space on her quest to rescue Lou's brain from a matrix, but she keeps getting distracted by side quests. Now on the sky city of Ketheres, allied with three of her old "clones," Sechs, Elf, and Zwolf, she joins a tournament called ZOTT, which is basically an excuse for a bunch of protracted fight scenes with bizarre foes, some of whom were apparently created by reader submissions. There's a kung fu master space vampire (no explanation for why suddenly vampires exist), a team of nursery school teachers who rescue the child soldiers sent to die in Ketheres' bloody wargames and are now doing battle to try to win a "nation" for themselves and their kids, and various other weird antagonists, each of whom presents some new challenge and gives Alita and her team new tactics and powers to overcome.
As a collection of zany sci-fi gladatorial characters, it's entertaining, but after the latest 600-page omnibus, we're not really much further along in the plot. Alita is finding out more and more about her past life as a Martian warrior named Yoko, but her personality keeps changing, and the tone of the comic keeps varying between comical and serious, moralistic, and gory. There's toilet humor and a teddy bear-hugging space queen mixed with Alita being haunted by a Nazi ghost while she tries to rescue toddlers from being turned into bloody soup.
Omnbibus Vol. 3
MEMORIES OF MASS MURDER
On her way to retrieve Lou’s brain, Alita encounters a ghost from her past-an old mentor whose revelations shake Alita's very identity. Meanwhile Elf, Zwölf, and Sechs fight their deadly - and creepiest-enemies yet as the ZOTT rages on! But will the ARs have the mental fortitude to resist the psychically altered leader of the fearsome Starship Cult?
As the second Battle Angel Alita series went on, I suspected that Yukito Kishiro was having problems stretching it out and started pulling ideas out of his ass. Hence in the middle of Alita's quest to win a bloody tournament on a dystopian space station, ostensibly to rescue the brain of her old friend Lou from series one, we suddenly get many, many issues (over half the book) devoted to a flashback to ancient history. In which we learn that vampires exist.
Yes, vampires. I have not seen such a jarring insertion of vampires into a sci-fi setting since David Weber's (very bad) novel Out of the Dark, in which Dracula helps fight off an alien invasion.
So about half of this volume is a load of backstory. We learn that 21st century civilization was destroyed by an asteroid impact, which killed the vast majority of humans on Earth. During the long global winter, we get flashbacks within flashbacks about the vampires who have secretly been living among humans for millennia, and who emerged to begin hunting the few surviving humans during the post-apocalypse. Thus we're introduced to a couple of vampire main characters, only one of which survives this long backstory, and which presumably Alita will meet at some point, though after nearly 600 pages we haven't gotten there yet.
I mean, this was all kind of interesting to learn how the sky cities and the Martian Union came to be, but it really felt like padding, and the vampires really mess with the cyberpunk setting. Technically, they are not "supernatural" vampires; there's a pseudo-scientific explanation about how they're actually mutants, and they don't turn into bats or get repelled by crosses, but otherwise they are still basically classic vampires.
Alita only actually appears in a handful of pages in this third Battle Angel Alita omnibus. She's still trying to pull off a hacking caper (which she started in the last omnibus) while her teammates are fighting ridiculous hypnotic clown cyborgs.
I wanted to power through and finish this series, but there was so much ridiculousness and increasingly juvenile character power-ups and Mortal Kombat fight moves. It had neither the heart nor the cyberpunk vibe of the first series.
Omnibus Vol. 4
MADNESS IN MULTIPLES
In the depths of Melchizedek, Alita inches closer to recovering her dear friend’s brain but not before she is greeted by Mbadi and a rather duplicitous Desty Nova doppleganger. Meanwhile, Sechs and the other members of the Space Angels make their way through ZOTT, where Sechs comes to face a universally renowned Space Karate master in a show of technique, toughness and…thumbs?
The fourth omnibus, comprising volumes 10-12 of the 20-volumes in The Last Order, also clocked in at over 600 pages. Yukito Kishiro was clearly milking the series while trying to figure out what to do and I got the impression that he's very much a seat-of-the-pants writer. Hence, in the last omnibus we got hundreds of pages with no Alita, just a post-apocalyptic story about vampires.
In volumes 10-12, fortunately, Alita is back. And the vampires have basically disappeared from the story. It's been a couple thousand pages now, but you might remember that Alita originally went into space to find the brain of her friend Lou, who used to be her "operator" when she worked for Tiphares. Well, Alita's quest to save Lou gets mentioned maybe once or twice, but first, we have more pages and pages of freaky transhumanist mortal kombat teams fighting in the ZOTT. You know, that outer space tournament that's been going on for the last half dozen volumes.
With Alita back in the fight, it gets more interesting again. Alita has been resurrected (again) in a brand new even more super-powerful cyborg body (again) and for some reason, she is now a catgirl with a cybernetic tail. Wtf, Kishiro?
Aga Mbadi, aka Trinidad, who's the Big Bad of this series (so far) finally gets taken down a peg, and we learn his origin (it's still a little incoherent). Desty Nova now has multiple clones, and they aren't all on the same side. Alita's rival (who's kinda on her side for the moment) is a hypermacho super-powerful cyborg space karate fighter named Zekka.
There is a lot of action. A lot of Alita kicking ass. But the series continues to be mostly an ever-escalating series of boss fights, with the writer occasionally remembering to mention the plot. There is a little bit of story advancement here, but at this rate Alita will have to fight the entire solar system before we get to the climax.
Omnibus Vol. 5
This is the fifth 600-page omnibus volume of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. Way back in volume 2, Alita arrived in space and joined the ZOTT (Zenith of Things Tournament). It's still going on.
Nearly two thousand pages so far have been devoted to a space battle between Alita's team and various other weird and wacky fighting teams, each of them with a new, over-the-top series of opponents with unstoppable powers. There are occasional digressions in which Alita zens out and discovers some new aspect of herself, or the other characters reach either peak enlightenment or another power-up, but mostly it's a bunch of fighting with characters whose punches leave impact craters and whose origin stories range from bizarre to gross.
This volume is the "final battle" of the ZOTT. The teams now are Alita (still sporting a catgirl body), Sechs (Alita's bratty male-persona cyborg clone), and Zazie (a soldier chick from Mars who's... really good at shooting things) vs. Zekka (a hundred-year old cyborg martial arts master), Toji (a giant blocky cyborg master of "electromagnetic karate"), and Rakan (a weird super-fast martial artist who's apparently also a super-rapist). They each fight one on one, giving us many, many pages of moves and countermoves and each of them cleverly trying to counter each other's powers, and guess what? By the end of the volume, it's still not over.
The original Alita series had a plot, at least, and some character development, though it went off the rails towards the end. The current series really feels like most of the time, the creator was just making up something to keep filling pages. If you like space superheroes punching each other across battlefields for hundreds of pages of fighting, it's entertaining enough, but even the occasional dips into personal histories or psychological introspection are too brief and meaningless to add much.
Despite all this, I retained enough affection for Alita to see this series through to the end, but it was a slog.
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 16
For some reason, the last four volumes of the series were not released in a sixth omnibus volume, but had to be read individually. So Volume 16 collects the issues following Omnibus Edition Volume 5.
And hey, guess what? The ZOTT tournament is still going on!
We're still reading one-on-one battles between Zazie and Rakan, Sechs and Zekka, and Alita and Toji, respectively.
The battle between Zazie and Rakan is finally resolved (good riddance, space rapist). Sechs and Zekka are still trying to out-machismo each other. And Alita's initial easy trouncing of Toji suddenly suffers a reversal as Toji's survival instincts kick in and he metamorphizes into something else which can suddenly kick Alita's ass. Resulting in Alita being "destroyed" except then of course she is "reborn" (again), this time as a winged catgirl...
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 17
KARMIC JUSTICE!
Caught in each other’s traps, the Martian markswoman Zazie and the despicable murderer Rakan begin to tear themselves apart, piece by piece! Meanwhile, Zekka’s distracted by the reappearance (or is that reincarnation?) of an old rival, whose presence may provoke the fiery death of millions in an antimatter explosion! Freedom, hubris, enlightenment and destruction as Alita’s saga reaches its climax!
Alita is reborn (this is like her fourth or fifth body) as a winged catgirl. The ZOTT battles are almost over. And Mbedi (the villain of the series, who's been orchestrating everything and tried to unleash a doomsday weapon on the winners of the ZOTT) triggers a rebellion against his power. Most of this volume is still just more fighting, but the long (long, long) ZOTT arc is finally wrapping up and perhaps we are headed towards.... a conclusion?
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 18
In the penultimate volume of Last Order, Alita once again only appears sparingly, in the first few pages. It's a flashback to explain how she came back from the dead (for the umpteenth time) after her last cyborg body was immolated in a plasma storm during the battle with the Space Karate forces during the ZOTT tournament.
Then we turn to Earth, and return to some characters who have been absent for a very long time. Figure Four, Alita's erstwhile lover, and Doc Ido, who I thought was dead but I guess he's just been chilling at a remote fishing village with his memories erased. We get caught up on what they have been doing while Alita was off in space, and there is a big battle in which yet another cult-like mob of cyborgs comes hunting for Doc Ido, thinking he is Desty Nova. Figure Four remains half-comic relief, half-slightly too serious caricature of machismo.
The story was actually fun and fairly straightforward, something that has been missing in some of the recent Alita volumes. Still, it felt like filler while the author figures out how to wrap things up.
Battle Angel Alita - Last Order, Vol. 19
Finally, the last volume of Battle Angel Alita. It ended... okay. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't great. After all these years we've spent following Alita into space, and the never-ending ZOTT tournament full of bizarre space martial arts battles, the story returns to Earth, and Doc Ido and Figure. Remember him? The musclehead "Fist of the North Star" parody whom Alita inexplicably fell in love with and married way back in the first series?
They haven't seen each other since. So a resurrected Doc Ido and Figure, along with Kaos and Koyomi, venture forth in search of Alita, eventually returning to the Junkyard, where the Sky City Tiphares has fallen. They find out that Alita is up in space, so they take a space elevator up into the orbital city of Ketheres. This leads to another confrontation with Desty Nova, the mad genius who's been a recurring villain through the series.
Alita does not actually appear on many pages in this final volume. Figure is kind of reunited with her, and Alita continues her adventures in space. There is obviously room for more stories, yet I kind of hope Yukito Kishiro is done, because it seems like he ran out of ideas and inspiration years ago. I have enjoyed the Battle Angel Alita series, but it's been milked long past its expiration date.
The denouement was a bittersweet, somewhat incomplete resolution. The payoff really wasn't enough for all those interminable thousands of pages of cyborgs, vampires, and genetically-engineered monsters punching each other. Alita coasted for a very long time on coolness, graphic violence, and kawaii. But it's a memorable saga, and while the second series does not measure up to the first, quantity, as they say, has a quality all its own, and the massive size of the second series makes it epic beyond the forgettableness of individual volumes. Would I like to see more Alita stories? Maybe, if Kishiro is ever inspired enough to actually tell a story, or if someone else picks up the threads he left dangling.
Still hoping for another movie someday, though.
Other Battle Angel Alita reviews: Battle Angel Alita and Alita: Battle Angel - Iron City
My complete list of book reviews.