It's time for yet another Old School Month here at the Manga Test Drive, and we're digging deep into the Dark Horse library to dig up a forgotten story from one of manga's most legendary creators.
THE LEGEND OF MOTHER SARAH (Sara), by Katsuhiro Otomo with art by Takumi Nagayasu. First published in 1990 and first published in North America in 1996.
PLOT:
In the future, nuclear devastation has driven humanity to space stations in low orbit. A civil war broke out between those who wanted to stay in space and those who wanted to use an experimental bomb to reboot Earth's ecosystem and were unafraid to bomb those space stations to prove their point.
Only a small portion of humanity made it back to humanity, struggling to survive in this post-apocalyptic world. One of those survivors is Sarah, who wanders the world in the hopes of finding the children she lost during the evacuation. In the process, she finds herself in a mining town ruled by a tyrant. There, water is just as precious as gold and there are plenty who would fight to control them both.
STORY:
While it came many years afterwards, it's not hard to see The Legend of Mother Sarah as Otomo's attempt to riff on Fist of the North Star (which of course was itself a riff on Mad Max). You've got a lone hero, travelling in search of loved ones while helping those they encounter along the way from the warlords who would oppress them. Sure, nobody in this story is breaking out any martial arts or making heads explode, but it's not hard to make the connections. The setting is fairly standard fare for this sort of story: a dusty, run-down ruin of a city in the middle of a seemingly endless desert, full of dirty, hard-working people, inequality, and secrets.
It's also not exactly Otomo's most complex work. Once you make the choice to outfit your villains in Nazi-style military uniforms and give the big boss a literal Hitler mustache, nuance has been pretty much thrown out the window. What nuance can be found is mostly at a small scale, like the farmer boy-turned-soldier struggling between his youth and morality and his desire to be seen as a proper, powerful man. I guess there's also the ongoing struggles being those aligned with Epoch and the other survivors, but we only get a couple of glances at that and Sarah mostly does her best to rise above it all while trying to survive.
Sarah herself is also something of a mystery. We know her motivation, but not much more about her. How did she get so competent at everything from fighting to detecting water? How did she end up with a solid steel plate over one of her breasts? Maybe that's unfair to hold against her. After all, Mad Max is often a bit of a cipher himself, a foil to the larger personalities and conflicts going on around him, and that's certainly true of Sarah. It's just that if she struggled a little more for the solutions to her troubles in this book, maybe she would feel a little more human and the stakes to her struggles would be a little more compelling.
ART:
Curiously, Otomo didn't draw this book. That job went instead to Takumi Nagayasu, a manga artist who has been working since the 1960s (albeit with only a handful of original titles to his name). He was apparently inspired by the works of Tetsuya Chiba and claimed Otomo as an influence, and you can certainly seem some of Otomo's style in some of the more heavily stylized characters in the cast.
If I had to guess Nagayasu's biggest influence at this time, though, it would probably be Ryoichi Ikegami. Much of the cast have the sort of handsome, hyper-realistic looks he tended to favor throughout the 80s. The same can be said for the backgrounds, where everything from the vast voids of the desert to the squalid ruins of a skyscraper basement are rendered with incredible care and detail. Nagayasu is clearly no slouch, something that's most evident in the action sequences. He draws and panels a desperate fight between Sarah with the precision of dance choreography, and that same precision and time is just as evident in the volume's climax. Nagayasu may not be as well-known as Otomo then or now, but clearly the two were peers as artists.
PRESENTATION:
Like so many older Dark Horse manga releases, this was both flipped and initially released as floppies. They published two more story arcs over the years, but this single volume (representing the first seven issues) was the only collected volume ever released. Also like so many older Dark Horse releases, this was localized by Studio Proteus, so the translation and lettering are quite good and have aged incredibly gracefully.
RATING:
This manga was published by Dark Horse Comics. This series is complete in Japan with 7 volumes available. 1 trade collection and 16 other chapters/issues were released; all are currently out of print.
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