I was the first to post a review on this new edition, yet when I went back to make a small edit I found my review gone. How annoying...
Anyway, on with the review. Battle Angel Alita is an incredible story. Everything it does, it does amazingly well. Its dystopian future is brutal and fascinating, the characters are deeply engaging and either lovable, or delightfully revulsive monsters. The book manages to successfully lead you to believe/predict one thing before completely subverting your expectations. It powerfully endears you to its various characters, and there's a strong continuity of characters carrying over from former chapters to have significant roles (which will be more evident as the series goes on). Alita's puppy love is absolutely adorable and relatable, and her worries heart-wrenching (and also really damn cool because part of those worries is whether her cyborg super-strength would rip her crush to pieces). The comic is flawless, as far as I'm concerned. The story has been amazing for 28 years, and the art has always been incredibly detailed, expressive, cute, and horrifying (depending on the moment in question). The colored pages at the beginning of some chapters though are truly breathtaking in their lovingly crafted detail.
The point that the book cuts off and ends at seems very strange, ending right before any kind of resolution to the current arc. It flows fairly naturally in the original run of the comics, but as these Delux Editions are two books per volume, the effect is exasperated. You expect each of these volumes to cover one arc or one season of Alita’s life, and that is MOSTLY true. The first book covers her origins in the scrapyard, going from Doctor Ido’s adorable daughter/dress up doll to a hardened warrior and bounty hunter. The second book will cover her time in the Battle Ball arena, and the third book the arc after that. That’s why it seems so strange that this book cuts off before the resolution of Yugo’s story, which wraps up in the next volume.
I do have a few complaints, and it's about the new translation. I noticed immediately that they're no longer calling the floating city Tipheras, they're calling it Zalem, and that really throws me off. In the original run and all the way through Last Order, the English release always called it Tipheras. That's going to really throw off some readers who go from here to Last Order, so it was just a bad call. They changed other names to make them closer to the original Japanese, like switching Hugo for Yugo. One other reviewer pointed out that the general structure and wording of the dialogue was changed now, and it's far more clunky and less endearing now. That's very unfortunate and I wish they had just stuck with the original translation, but it's far from a deal breaker and I'm still overwhelmingly happy with this new release despite all that.
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Reviews with images
YOU GONNA LOVE IT!
Really enjoying to watch this piece of art. Kishiro is a real master of drawing and visual storytelling.The deluxe edition is what I expected for the price. The sheets are big and Couché, The Manga blacks are really deep black. The onomatopeia in Japanese are intact.The only flaw I see (and only reason why I give 4 stars instead of 5) is in 1 page...seems like they screwed the image linked in the Design composition and this was printed in super pixelated resolution (See attached photo).Besides that, I LOVE this manga edition and plan to buy the next ones for my library. :D
