So my friends over at Giant Robot FM claim this is the best of the Gundam Wing manga they've read, but can this humble one-shot manage to rise above the rest?
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM WING: BLIND TARGET (Shin Kido Senki Gundam W: BLIND TARGET), based on the franchise created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yatate, written by Akemi Omode with art by Sakura Asagi. First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2001.
PLOT:
In the months following the end of OZ, the boys of Operation Meteor try to settle back into civilian life. This fragile peace is shattered when Quatre is nearly killed by assassins. It seems that the remnants of Treize's White Fang faction want to overthrow Relena's government in the name of space colony independence, but they need the Gundams to do so. Thus, the five former Gundam pilots must find a way to stop them before they start a new war.
STORY:
Well I'll be damned. This IS one of the better Gundam Wing manga out there! Admittedly, the bar for that is low considering the titles we've looked at previously were retellings of the original story, tangential backstories, or what-if tales to tie together the show and Endless Waltz. Technically speaking, Blind Target falls into that last category, but it's one of the better examples of its kind.
A big part of why it works is that Akemi Omode already had plenty of experience with the material, having served as screenwriter for 11 episodes of the show. Thus she already had a good grasp on the cast with all their myriad motivations, personalities, and factions. She's also pretty even-handed as far as giving most of the Wing boys a chance to shine. Well...maybe not Wufei, but having him grumble about justice on the sidelines while being forcefully dragged into the plot is itself an accurate representation of Wufei. She even manages to mine some actual emotion out of Relena and Heero's weird quasi-romantic dynamic, something the show itself often struggled to do.
While it's better than your average Gundam Wing manga, that doesn't mean Blind Target a perfect one. This is an adaptation of a radio drama, which means this story is light on mecha action and heavy on political scheming and endless conversations. As much as I appreciate that somebody remembered that factions like White Fang actually existed in this continuity, Omode does very little with them. The Wing boys don't even have to try all that hard to stop them! This wanna-be rebellion basically falls apart on its own after two of its members get lectured into switching sides, making the whole book feel like much ado about nothing. There could have at least been more physical fights or gunplay!
Another major problem is that Relena ends up spending the entirety of it on the sidelines, despite being the target of this ad. Admittedly, this is an issue I also have with the latter half of the series as well as Endless Waltz. I miss the Relena who willingly threw herself in front of mobile suits, the one who tried to gun Lady Une down in cold blood in revenge for her father, the one who stared down her own fascist captors and turned their followers into pacifists. Admittedly, as a teenaged politician she would have to be a little more responsible for herself, but I feel like it would not be out of character for her to be more active in her own rescue. Instead, the most she does her directly is forgive her own traitorous personal assistant. It's a very underwhelming response, but then 'underwhelming' is pretty much the name of the game here.
ART:
Sakura Asagi is definitely one of the more talented mangaka to ever work on a Gundam Wing manga. First and foremost, she nails the look of Shukou Murase's original character designs. It's not just that she replicates the characters from the show well, but that the new characters she creates fit in just as well. I wish she were a little better at making these characters emote, but there's only so much anyone can do with the likes of Heero and Trowa, who never met an emotion they couldn't suppress.
She also tries to bring some drama to the page through her paneling (since the story itself doesn't bring much with it). She uses lots of small, angular, layered panels to fit in as many reaction shots as possible, keeping her focus tightly on her cast. It's a busy look, but not so busy as to be difficult to follow. It also allows her to largely skip over backgrounds, which don't appear to be her forte anyway. It's not hard to see why she got brought back not just for the manga adaptation of Endless Waltz but also why her former boss Katsuyuki Sumizawa brought her on as the illustrator for his infamous sequel novel Frozen Teardrop.
PRESENTATION:
There's not much to say here beyond the fact that this would be among some of the last titles Viz would release flipped (getting an unflipped edition just two years later) and that I smiled wryly at the inclusion of an ad for Viz's short-lived release of Gundam: The Origin.
RATING:
This book was published by Viz. It is currently out of print.
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