Manga Review: ‘MSG: The Origin’ #4
Mobile Suit Gundam: THE ORIGIN, Volume 4: Jaburo by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko My rating: 5 of 5 stars The journey to Jaburo reaches its intense, dramatic, messy conclusion. Through its ups and downs, the crew of White Base seems to have found a sustainable equilibrium. But no matter how calm and complicit its crew, the vessel's fate has always been another matter entirely. Noa's familiarity and understanding of military protocol begets a suspicion of executive leadership's intensions for both White Base and the Gundam. Sayla Mass's recalcitrance is doing double duty in scrounging for answers concerning her brother's whereabouts while yet still hiding her true identity from her comrades. And Zeon's South American forces can hardly step beyond the reach of their intractable infighting to pluck the opportunity sitting right under their noses. Jaburo is ripe. But the plethora of egos pushing and shoving for glory may see the chance for victory spoil before long. MSG: THE ORIGIN #4 does what many of the best Gundam stories do: articulate and define the painful reverberations of armed military conflict on all peoples, no matter their birthright. Amuro spent the previous volume being a whiny little snot. In the current volume, he matures significantly and rightly perceives Jaburo as an opportunity to prove his worth to the Federation's leadership. Amuro himself scolds fellow crewmates, wrangles the kids, mourns those he has failed, and at one point, flat-out back-talks military men who seem eager to devalue the sacrifices of he and his friends. And on this point, there's plenty of sacrifice in this volume. The action isn't as grandiose as, say, the fight with Garma, but MSG: THE ORIGIN #4 does an excellent job of orienting readers to the mountainous and forested terrain of Brazil and all of the hazards that come with it. The manga's combat scenes are much leaner and clearer here than elsewhere, perhaps owing to the slower, more patient storytelling native to focusing readers' attention on a single location. For example, the pre-dawn conflict between Amuro and a band of mercenaries known as the Black Tri-Stars is wonderfully streamlined. The MS-09B Dom is a beast of a mobile suit, but Yasuhiko's artwork gives the machine a beautiful, almost terrifying grace. The battle's tragic conclusion burns with an energy that is impossible to duplicate. A separate battle in a narrow, rocky valley sees the vengeful return of Hamon, whose bad-end, however inevitable, is insanely intense. The woman earns help from a junior grade Zeon lieutenant who evokes the late Ramba Ral's name with an eye toward justified reprisal: "We will lose this war [..] A Zeon that expends men of Lt. Ral's caliber as mere pawns has no future to speak of!" (pp. 99-100). Again, one cannot help but weep silently for the manga series' handling of Ral; the man was a stronger and more engaging antagonist, by every discernable dimension, than any other character to cross paths with White Base thus far. Overlapping character development with the push to land at Jaburo ensures the reader is invested in MSG: THE ORIGIN #4 and its consequences. The book also includes a broader and more deliberate conversation on the nature of newtypes. Secondary female characters, such as Lieutenant Matilda Ajan, receive plenty of attention. Readers view more clearly the layered antagonism within Zeon's military ranks. And as death encroaches on the least ready of allies, one comes to view the qualities required to survive this feverishly compressed war are never consistently defined for a reason: This is an "age of reckoning," to use Char's words.
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