Subject: Manga Reviews: Who Fighter with Heart of Darkness | Author | Messages | Billy Aguiar
Posts: 84
 | Posted: 9/4/2007 9:40:07 PM | Who Fighter with Heart of Darkness
Dark Horse Manga
$11.95, b/w, 208 pages, Available Now!
By Seiho Takizawa
Reviewed by Billy Aguiar
2 1/2 stars
There is actually three stories in this single volume, though the third one, Tanks, is very short and is more a mediation than an actual story. Who Fighter is set in the waning days of World War II, when American B-29s were roaming at will over Japan. Foo Fighters were the nickname given to glowing balls of light that were assumed by pilots to be secret weapons of some kind. The pilot Kitayama is testing a nighttime airborne radar that could be used to hunt the B-29s but has a close encounter with a Foo Fighter and manages to shoot it down. The next day as he and his team are trying to understand the strange damage to his plane, an Army intelligence group impounds the plane and begins a slow investigation of Kitayama. The intelligence officer believes that the Foo Fighter is a secret American weapon, while Kitayama gradually begins to believe that it is something more. Finally, the story Heart of Darkness claims to be an adaptation of Joseph's Conrad novella of the same name but actually owes more to the film Apocalypse Now, which is based on the same novella (along with borrowing from several other sources.)
The downside of having several works in a single volume is that sometimes one work can negatively affect the rating of the others. In this case, I feel that Heart of Darkness is only average. I admit I haven't seen Apocalypse Now, so perhaps there are some allusions or parallels hidden there, but despite the story's effort to speak about the darkness within the hearts of man and the barbarity within civilization, those attempts don't seem really to connect. Who Fighter is the gem of the volume; it has the same quietness and a gradual rising intensity of the weird that is outside of people's understanding which the early X-Files got right and the later seasons got so wrong. I especially like the touch of how the Intelligence Officer was shown the truth and just wasn't prepared to accept it. If it was just Who Fighter and Tanks, I would have easily given this 3 stars, but with Heart of Darkness merely being average I have to give the volume as a whole 2 and 1/2 stars.
This is a weekly manga review here on the CBG site, but don’t forgot to check out my other review site, Prospero’s Manga for more manga reviews.
www.darkhorse.com
Vol 1. ISBN: 1-93316-408-5
| Billy Aguiar
Posts: 84
| Posted: 10/27/2007 3:45:20 PM | Whoops. Wrong ISBN. Here is the correct one.
ISBN: 1-59307-626-6
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