BIG O VOLUME 2

"SISTERS DOROTHY" | “GHOST SHIP AND FALLEN ANGEL”
“NO NAME, NO MEMORY, NO FUTURE” | “TIEF IM SCHWARZWALD”
Story and Art by Hitoshi Ariga | Created byHajime Yatate

The second BIG O manga volume picks up where the last one left off, as author/artist Hitoshi Arita presents an adaptation of the anime’s second episode, “Dorothy Dorothy”, which means that good ol’ Beck is our villain for the fifth consecutive chapter. This time he continues his plot to rob the Paradigm City Mint while Roger does some deductive work and learns that Dorothy — full name R. Dorothy Wayneright — and the much larger Dorothy I megadeus were both built by Doctor Solderno based on blueprints provided by one Timothy Wayneright. But by the time Roger finds Timothy, the old man has been murdered by Beck.

Piloting Dorothy I, Beck makes another go at the mint, but is thwarted once more by the combined efforts of Big O and Dorothy. I'm the end, with both of her “fathers” dead, Dorothy comes to reside in Roger’s penthouse as his maid.

One thing I've always found odd about BIG O is how wealthy Roger Smith apparently is. He's ex-military police, so he didn't make his fortune there. He's Paradigm City’s “top negotiator”, but exactly how much does that job pay? I don't know what negotiators/mediators get in real life, but it doesn't seem like it would be enough to live in a palatial penthouse and employ a butler!

Anyway — with the opening episodes adapted and the status quo finally in place, Ariga departs once again from the TV series’ plots, going his own route even as he introduces more characters from the show. First up is the mysterious Angel, who debuts here in a chapter titled “Ghost Ship and Fallen Angel”. Angel introduces herself to Roger as “Casey Jenkins from the Ruins Research Group” and asks Roger to help her investigate a so-called “ghost ship which has been haunting Paradigm Harbor.

I like this chapter quite a bit. For the first time, Ariga captures a bit of the mystery which permeates the BIG O TV series. Thus far, he's treated the manga more or less like any giant robot serial, with little lip service paid to the fact that Paradigm City is weird. We know there was an “Event” forty years ago that cost the citizens their memories, and we know megadeuses and androids wander the city alongside humans, but it's all been played very matter-of-factly in the prior chapters. Now, however, as Roger and “Casey” head out into the foggy bay to check on the ghost ship, the eeriness is ratcheted up to eleven, and this becomes the first of the original (non-adapted) manga chapters to honestly feel like an episode of the TV show.

That feeling continues into the subsequent installment, “No Name, No Memory, No Future”, in which a cyborg wanders Paradigm, systematically killing several people who were alive prior to the Event. Roger eventually deduces that the guy’s programming had been dormant for forty years until something triggered it and restored his long-lost memory of a hit list to be completed. There's no indication of why he's killing these particular individuals, but that detail is really unimportant to this tale. The “why” is far less relevant than the “how” this time, as we readers (but not Roger) learn that the cyborg’s memory was unlocked when he found a megadeus hidden in catacombs beneath the city. But the behemoth remains inoperative for now, as this is the first chapter to not feature Big O battling any sort of giant monster — instead it simply helps Roger against the cyborg, who perished in the end before he can reveal any answers to our hero.

“No Name, No Memory, No Future” also introduces R. Instro, a robot pianist from the anime who is, for a time, Major Dastun’s prime suspect in the cyborg’s serial killings. Instro appears earlier here than in the TV series, where he doesn't make his debut until around the halfway mark. But while that episode of the show highlights him as a major character, his role in this manga chapter is strictly secondary.

Television characters also make their debuts in the volume’s final chapter, “Tief Im Schwartzwald”. Here, a month after the cyborg serial killings (which the military police is trying to keep secret) we meet Michael Seebach, a reporter for the Paradigm Press — and we also learn that the Paradigm Company essentially owns Paradigm City, functioning as “Big Brother”, editing and censoring the press to control the flow of information to the public. Also featured here, though not yet identified by name, is Alex Rosewater, Paradigm Co.’s president —and standing by his side, apparently in the capacity of secretary, is Angel — who was last seen in “Ghost Ship and Fallen Angel” stealing some sort of data from the ghost ship without Roger’s knowledge.

“Tief Im Schwarzwald” features a new mystery megadeus which randomly appears and vanishes, confounding Big O and the military police alike, as Seebach attempts to figure out its origins. Imagine his shock when he eventually realizes that he is the machine’s pilot, but his memories of operating it have been somehow blocked. He finally realizes his role in the thing’s operation during a battle with Big O which leaves him disfigured, after which he declares Seebach to be no more and names himself Schwarzwald instead, after a song he recalls from his childhood (apparently indicating that he has regained some of his pre-Event memories).

The TV episode which introduces Schwarzwald, “Underground Terror”, is one of my favorites. It's moody, mysterious, and chilling. “Tief Im Schwarzwald” doesn't quite match it in any of those categories, but it's a decent story in its own right, playing as it does with the idea that Seebach/Schwarzwald has some kind of split personality thing going on, which leads to a legitimate twist — and it has the distinction of showing us Michael Seebach before he becomes Schwarzwald, something the TV version didn't do.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that the mystery megadeus Schwarzwald pilots happens to be the exact same one that restore the mystery cyborg’s memory in the prior installment. One thing Ariga does here, which the BIG O anime tended not to indulge in quite so much, is to build his mysteries up chapter by chapter. The anime series, while it did feature certain plot point carrying over between a handful of episodes, was mostly a series of stand-alone tales. The manga, on the other hand, feels like a true serial even as its stories are mostly stand-alone as well.

Mind you, I find both these approaches equally valid and enjoyable. I love the BIG O anime precisely because it's less concerned with the overarching mystery in every episode, devoting more than half of its thirteen-chapter run to stand-alone stories. But just the same, there's something very satisfying about seeing Ariga lay seeds and pay them off in a way the TV show never did. (And again, I’m speaking specifically of BIG O’s original thirteen episodes. The second season from a couple years later is practically an entirely different show.)

All that said, now that Ariga has laid some groundwork for his ongoing plots, the next volume will go back to the “done-in-one” style for a few chapters, so we'll see how he handles that next week.