Battle Angel Alita 1 by Yukito Kishiro
Disgraced cyber-doctor Daisuke Ido discovers an odd discovery in a dump in the lawless community of Scrapyard, deep beneath the enigmatic space city of Zalem: the severed head of a cyborg lady who has lost all of her memories. He gives her the name Alita and gives her the fierce Berserker body. Alita has no recollection of her previous existence, but in a moment of desperate need, she is reminded of the famed martial arts school known as Panzer Kunst. Alita makes the decision to become a hunter-killer, hunting down and eliminating those who prey on the weak in a world where there is no justice other than what people create for themselves. Can she maintain her humanity as she starts to enjoy her bloodlust?
Battle Angel Alita 1 by Yukito Kishiro
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In a cyberpunk future, Zalem, an elderly doctor, visits a junkyard where all the trash from the upper-class world is stored. A cyborg’s head and torso are among the rubbish. Since the doctor’s daughter passed away, he feels somewhat connected to the deceased cyborg girl’s body. He fully transforms her back into a cyborg. She begins to explore the world and experiences flashbacks to her previous life, gradually realizing that she was a Martian cyborg created particularly to annihilate Zalem in a war.
The doctor who found her is hiding that he is a bounty hunter who kills criminals for money, which she learns a lot about through her new love interest. She turns into a bounty hunter, learns that her partner is heavily in debt, and tries to help him out by killing the loan sharks, but things don’t work out very well.
The narrative of Battle Angel Alita is amazing. It does everything it does very well. The characters are utterly fascinating and either likeable or delightfully repulsive creatures, and the dystopian future is terrible and fascinating. The novel does a good job of getting you to believe or guess one thing before totally defying it. It effectively makes you care about all of its characters, and there is a strong continuity of people returning from earlier chapters to play important parts (which will be more evident as the series goes on). Alita’s fears are heartbreaking, and her dog love is adorably sympathetic. According to me, comedy is perfect. For 28 years, the tale has been fantastic, and the artwork has always been extraordinarily intricate, expressive, adorable, and terrifying. But the coloured pages at the start of several chapters are very stunning in their meticulously made intricacy.
