Story: 8.0 / 10
Characters: 7
Setting: 8
Prose: 6

Not nearly as good as the movie. ( )

I read the first three volumes of Battle Angel Alita back in high school, and I hung on to my second volume for almost 2 decades. Now, with the release of the movie (which is actually OK!), I was inspired to re-read the first volume.

This was pretty much everything I remember it being – cyber punky, gorgeously illustrated and with a headstrong female character unafraid to fight spectacularly gross and violent cyborgs in the sewer. ( )

First published in 1991. Has the Frankenstein, floating city with its dystopian support underneath it, and cute girl becomes super soldier tropes with some campy dialogue, but I love it. Gotta get the next volume!

Ooo! Live action film coming out in summer next year, 2018! I can't wait.

http://collider.com/battle-angel-alita-rosa-salazar/ ( )

Easily my favorite manga, this series - though I'm reading a translation from a few years back that I think may be a different edition. Much of what made the series for me was the quirks of translation - really excellent uses of modern (at the time) cyberpunk references, etc.

One day I'll have to find out if that was the official version. ( )

My first impression, re-reading this story years later, is that things move very fast. The extent of the story told in this could have been spread over at least twice the page count and three times the dialog. I'm not sure that would have made it any better, though.

I first encountered Battle Angel Alita in the early '90s, in both manga and anime forms, and it immediately captured my interest and imagination. I remember sitting down and creating an entire roleplaying game based on the concepts and contexts of the Alita story, called Tales from the Scrapyard, and while I lost the game I created years ago (and don't even remember anything about the game mechanics other than the fact I wrote them in obsessively neat letters on very small-grid graph paper) I'm tempted to start over and create a new game inspired by the story with the same name. I'll probably (re)read a couple more volumes before I decide whether to actually do so, though.

Re-reading did not disappoint me; only the fact I don't have the second volume handy, to continue re-reading what I read twenty years or so ago, disappoints me. I look forward to getting through everything I read back then, and the parts that were not yet published back then. ( )