Holiday Review: GOLOSSEUM

While some series approach world-wide disaster with irony and ennui, others approach it by going full edgelord and adding in some wrestling moves to boot.

GOLOSSEUM, by Yasushi Baba.  First published in 2015 and first published in North America in 2018.  

PLOT:

At the beginning of the 20th century, 3 strange records fell to earth.  To most they sounded like just noise, but for a select few they held the secrets to incredible power.  Decades later, the technology the records contained are used to create special bracelets that can enhance a person's strength and repel virtually every weapon save for physical attacks from other enhanced fighters.  The leaders of the world hope to use their own arsenal of super-soldiers to gain power, but all of them are on the hunt for the most powerful soldier of them all: Sasha, a Russian woman known as the White Witch.

STORY:

Golosseum feels like an artifact of the 80s and not in the good ways.  Despite the fact that it features expies of modern figures like Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton, and Hulk Hogan, this feels like a C-list imitation of the sleezier parts of Kazuo Koike of Ryoichi Ikegami's works.  There's an audience for this - after all, there's a reason that similarly toned works like Gantz, Baki the Grappler, and Terra Formars have gone on as long as they have in Japan - but it feels woefully out of step with the world despite only being a few years old.

This manga only has two modes: Tedious Exposition and Extreme Edgelord Wrasslin.'  The former makes up the majority of the manga, and most of it involves various world leaders conspiring against one another for pages at a time.  Each of them has all the subtlety of Snidley Whiplash and they are all too prone to explaining their plans out loud only for the sake of the audience.  It's an incredibly clumsy way to deliver exposition, and not even the additional of bizarre, fantastical elements like an immortal, non-evil Rasputin and gold records from space that give people superpowers can help.

The rest of the exposition is meant to explain the whats and whys about our ostensible heroine, Sasha.  It's too bad then that she's boring as hell.  She's cold and emotionless, and despite Baba's attempts to humanize her through her handle and a random Japanese girl she befriends, I cared no more for her than anyone else in the manga.  That's not even getting into how much it ogles her, despite the fact that she's meant to be 14 with an adult woman's physique.  That's also not getting into the casual racism that's sprinkled across the story like so many rat droppings

That leaves us with the action, and how thrilling you find will depend a lot on how much you get out of literally earth-shattering German suplexes.  The fights are brutal, but as they get more extreme they tend to get more ridiculous.  Worse still, the exposition doesn't even stop for them as the fighters continue to explain all their plans and power-ups to one another as they toss and punch one another around.  Never have I ever wanted a manga to simply shut up and fight the way I did with this one, just so it would be over sooner.

ART:

The Koike and Ikegami comparisons feel rather apt as like both of those men, Baba is clearly a talented artist.  He knows how to draw a good, straightforward bare-knuckle brawl and give each punch and slam a sense of impact.  He draws good faces, and is clearly capable of capturing celebrity likenesses in a way that avoids caricature.  Also like those men, he clearly spends more effort on drawing men than women, as both Sasha and her friend Rumi are drawn more for fanservice than anything else.  If only this talent was in use for something that was compelling.

At least the cover design is good.  It's purposefully evoking the look of B-movie posters and wrestling ads, which certainly fits the tone.

RATING:

Golosseum is a relic that's too hung up on explaining itself and shocking its audience to genuinely thrill them.  It's awkward, gross, and offensive, and thankfully it has already been forgotten.

This series is published by Yen Press.  It is complete in Japan with 6 volumes.  4 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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