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Written
& Illustrated by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko
Published in the west by Viz Comics (right to left), $7.95 (US)
max, available from www.amazon.com
or www.amazon.co.uk and
any other suppliers of Gundam books.
 Volume
Seven of Gundam:The Origin continues the trend (at this point
in the series) of a mixture of calmer scenes and enjoyable action.
I suppose having over one hundred and twenty pages to play with,
every volume, almost necessitates a balance between the two in
this kind of work. This is the point in the tale where Amuro returns
to where he and his father left his mother on Earth. He discovers
her working in a refugee camp, and his boyhood home and town taken
over by brutish Federation soldiers. The depiction of the rowdy
Feddies is basically the same here as the movies, and it doesn't
really work spectacularly in either. The effort is there - the
continued want to show that both sides of the war can behave as
awfully as each other - but it comes off too comically. I'm not
necessarily sure how it *should* be done, but I still have the
underlying feeling that it could be done better.
As if to make up for the lacking Volume Five, Yas returns to excellent
form with his colour work this time around. Colour brackets each
end of the book and it is lovely. The pages of the crew relaxing
in the sun really convey the heated, relaxed feel. The rear is
even better, with some beautiful work detailing the White Base
saving Amuro, Sayla and Kai. They're very evocative pieces of
work and really do mark a return to what I'd expect from Yas.
By comparison, the black and white work
in this volume is much more lack lustre. The drunken and arrogant
Feddie soldiers are terrible. They are skewed far too much towards
"high-larious anime faces!" for my liking (as a rule
I don't like that kind of thing anyway, but it's even more out
of place here than normal) and they really spoil the quality of
the work. Thankfully there are plenty of vehicles for Yas to portray,
and here he does his usual excellent work - particularly on Sayla
& Kai's APC and Ryu's Core Fighter.
The overall thread of this instalment plays
out much as it did in the movies (and I presume the series). However,
there are nice touches that skew it towards a more intelligent
audience. Having Amuro visit his mother in a jeep seems much more
likely than giving him a Core Fighter to play with, and the post-visit
battle between the White Base APC and the Zeon light ground vehicles
sits better (and makes for a great combat sequence). The exchange
between mother and son (Amuro and his mum) comes across as confused
on both sides (more the mum, obviously) as neither wholly believes
what they are saying (we know Amuro's not so clean cut as "I
fight because I must", based on his past and future actions,
and we know the mother is not stupid enough to think Amuro should
have let himself be killed in there).
A good volume and one that I enjoyed more than the equivalent
scenes in movie. If it wasn't a Japanese Gundam comic then I'd
have expected more dialogue between and exploration between mother
and son about the war, but I can live without that in this section
of the medium.
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