You think I would be excited to read not just a new Gundam manga this year, but a spinoff to site favorite Gundam: The Origin. Alas, things always seem to end up a little cursed whenever Cucuruz Doan is involved.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN MSD: CUCURUZ DOAN'S ISLAND (Kido Senshi Gundam: Cucuruz Doan no Shima), based on the original concept by Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino, the original manga by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, mechanical designs by Hajime Katoki, and character designs by Tsukasa Kotobuki, with story and art by Junji Ohno. First published in 2016 and first published in North America in 2024.
PLOT:
Once, Cucuruz Doan was the commander of the Y-02 Platoon, there to test some of Zeon's latest prototypes in their efforts to win the One Year War. He was known for his ruthlessness and ferocity in battle...until the day he defected.
Months later, the former members of his squad have been scattered across the battlefields of Earth, thinking back on their commander and wondering how things all went wrong as one by one they confront the dreadful Gundam.
STORY:
This manga exists in a very weird place continuity-wise. It's not a retelling of the original episode from 1979, and it was made far too early to tie in with the much later, feature-length adaptation of that same episode. Based on its age and the fact that it credits Tsukasa Kotobuki, it's clearly made to tie in not so much with the Origin manga (which had been done for years by the time of its debut) but instead the Gundam: The Origin OVAs, which were still in production. The continuity issues don't stop there, though.
Coming into this I was hoping it would be something of a prequel, a story that would expand Cucuruz Doan as a character and explain why he defected from Zeon to his island full of kids in the first place. This manga was not that. Instead it's told from the perspective of various original characters who were formerly part of his platoon, as they reflect on better times and pine for his leadership as Zeon's Earth forces fall apart around them. In this sense, Ohno is trying to humanize these ordinary Zeon forces, to remind the readers that they are people too with dreams and minds of their own. That's always a dangerous approach as it's easy to turn it into outright Zeon apologia, but I don't think that's a problem here.
Why is that not a problem? Easy - the viewpoint characters are incredibly boring. We follow two of them in this volume: Vasily, a bland young man who is stuck leading the remnants of his squad across the desert, and Calca, a equally bland young woman who is serving as a lookout and sniper at the Zeon front near the mouth of the Black Sea. None of them possess any sort of insight or even memorable experiences with Cucuruz Doan All he does in their memories is stand sternly as he stares into the middle distance. He barely says a word to either of them, and yet more than once they will stand around and say something like "Man, remember Cucuruz Doan? Boy he sure was awesome! Wish he was still here being awesome." It's deeply uncompelling.
Ohno does not do a great job at keeping the timeline straight. This manga is constantly bouncing back and forth in time with only a solitary caption to tell you precisely when and where events are meant to be. He outright screws up the timeline as far as when Doan defected from Zeon. It's never 100% clear in either the original episode or the later movie, but it's always strongly implied that Doan left early in the course of the One Year War and had multiple months to gather up some orphans and set up a homestead on his remote island. This manga would tell you that he stuck around as late as October of 0079, meaning that all this happened in a matter of a few weeks (if not less).
You might ask "Megan, who would even care about pedantic timeline stuff like this?" The answer is "Gundam fans." These are the kind of fans who would know the timeline of the One Year War like the back of their hand and notice these sorts of incongruities, and they are 100% the target audience for this manga. So why did Ohno and the staff over at Gundam Ace magazine do this? By having Doan stick around so late and sticking his platoon in the middle of a colony dedicated to testing prototypes, they can have him interact with later, more recognizable Zeon mobile suits. It allows his squadmates to have dramatic encounters with the Gundam. It's all for the sake of cynical marketing, for people who see a Zaku and references to Odessa and clap.
ART:
Ohno certainly does an admirable job at copying Yasuhiko's character design style. He struggles a little with making them emote, but nobody here would look out of place in Gundam: The Origin. He also tries to recapture the paneling of the original, with its smart use of moody blacks and negative space. He's very good at drawing the mobile suits, which are always on-model and recognizable.
That's where my praise for his work ends, though. He lacks Yas's cinematic eye for mobile suit battles. Ohno doesn't have Yas's eye as a director, and because of that his mobile suit battles are not as grand in scale nor as easy to follow on the page because that was sacrificed for the sake of rendering the mobile suits more accurately. He also clearly uses digital tools for both drawing and coloring. There's nothing inheriently wrong with that, but it does make it clear just how much vitality Yasuhiko's use of actual ink brushes and watercolor brought to the art of The Origin. That's something you can't really replicate with a drawing tablet, and without that quality any attempt to copy its look loses a certain je ne sais quoi.
PRESENTATION:
There's a brief interview at the end with Yoshihisa Araki, one of the screenwriters for the original "Cucuruz Doan's Island" episode of Mobile Suit Gundam (along with a handful of other notable episodes). He talks about working with Yoshiyuki Tomino and the main creative staff of the show and some of his inspiration for the story itself. It's mildly interesting if you have any interest in the making of Mobile Suit Gundam, but feels weirdly tangential to the manga. The thing that stood out to me was how Kai Shiden's name was localized as "Kai Shi Den."
I do appreciate that Kodansha tried to keep the look of this book consistent with that of Vertical's original release of Gundam: The Origin. The volume itself is hardbound, and while it's smaller than those omnibuses it is published in a slightly bigger size than normal.
RATING:
This manga is published by Kodansha Comics. This series is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available. 2 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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