NoaIzumiManga Review: Gunsmith Cats
March 25th 2009 13:28
Rally Vincent (holding rifle) and Minnie-May Hopkins
Rally Vincent, bounty hunter. Minnie-May Hopkins, bomb freak. Together, they are the Gunsmith Cats, Chicago’s queens of crime-fighting.
I’ll say it right up front: Gunsmith Cats is easily one of the best action mangas ever written. To be good, an action manga has to deliver on the action, but to be great, it has to deliver on well-written plots and interesting characters. GSC does it all.
The action: Rally Vincent owns a gun shop, works as a bounty hunter, and drives a Shelby GT500 Cobra, one of the classic American muscle cars. That alone should give the reader an idea of what to expect. Add in a partner who knows everything there is to know about explosives, and a sometimes adversary, Bean Bandit, who makes his living being Chicago’s best getaway driver, and you’ve get action and thrills galore. The gunfights are very well done, and Rally has no shortage of worthy opponents, many of them in or connected to the Chicago Mafia. Rally’s gun skills do require a slight suspension of disbelief, as some of them do not seem humanly possible, but they are so much fun to watch, that’s never bothered me. Each volume also has at least one good car chase, often between extremely well-matched drivers Rally and Bean.
Chibi Rally, with her beloved GT-500
As for Rally’s adversaries, GSC handles them equally well. Bean Bandit is usually working on the wrong side of the law, but he respects Rally and helps her with certain jobs (for a healthy fee, of course). Bean also has a strong sense of honor and professionalism, making him a fan-favorite second only to Rally. The main serious antagonist is, fittingly, a woman. “Iron Goldie” is a mafia boss and controls an army of wiseguys and others with her brainwashing, and eventually set her sights on Rally personally. Her battle with the bounty hunter spans three volumes, and the last one (“Mr. V”) is the climax of the series.
Iron Goldie
The plot: With these characters, there’s really no way that the plots can’t be great. The storyline is slow at first, but really gets going around Volume 2 (when Grey enters the story), and doesn’t stop.
The coolest part of the manga, though, is the attention to realism and detail. Reading Gunsmith Cats is like taking a course in firearms and muscle cars. Kenichi Sonoda is a self-proclaimed car and gun freak, and he brings it to the work.
Gunsmith Cats was originally released in the United States in nine volumes, in the “flipped” form, the left-to-right format. Dark Horse recently re-released the series in a new omnibus version, with extras, and in the original right-to-left format.
Geeking out: In the story “Bean Bandit”, Bean meets his contact at a strip bar called “Hot Legs”, the same name as the nightclub that Priss and her band regularly perform at in the anime Bubblegum Crisis (which Kenichi Sonoda worked on as a character and mecha designer).
Great moments: One of the creepiest moments in all of mangadom is a flashback to Goldie’s past when she has brainwashed a boy into shooting his mafia underboss father, and then the boy is so grateful to Goldie because she helped him kill the alien that took his father’s form and now his real parents can come home.
Summary: Brilliant. Great action, likable and dimensional characters, wonderful storylines. Do not miss. Grade: A
Age rating: Fan service, nudity, sexual situations (including one non-explicit fellatio scene), allusions to alternative lifestyle (Iron Goldie is a lesbian dominatrix in her spare time), gun and knife violence. 16 and up.
Omnibus edition, first volume
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