GUNSMITH CATS BURST VOLUME 3

"KING COBRA" | "HOW TO AIM AND SHOOT" | "THE MONEY-SUCKING CAR"
"THE V8 FREAKS" | "THE DIRTY COP" | "TRAFFIC JAM"
"THE AMBUSH" | "RPG 7" | "THE STANDOFF" | "STALLED!"
Presented by Kenichi Sonoda
Translation and Lettering: Studio Cutie

The third installment of GUNSMITH CATS BURST opens with a few one-off chapters to fill space between last volume's Bean Bandit serial and this book's sequel to that story. We open with Rally getting a new car in the form of a Mustang "King" Cobra, and catching a bounty as well in the process. Then comes one of those "interesting" mainstays of the series, a chapter about Rally doing some teaching at a shooting range and allowing Kenichi Sonoda to have his characters blabber nonstop about guns, how to fire them, and how their internal workings function.

I will, however, give this story a little credit for bringing up one of my favorite subjects in serialized fiction: a timeline! At one point, Rally says that she's only been a bounty hunter for about two years -- which is approximately the amount of time covered by the original GUNSMITH CATS. I talked a bit about the series' timeline when I looked at the final volumes of the original run, specifically how certain facts didn't quite jibe with regards to characters' ages, how long Rally had been bounty-hunting, and when her father disappeared from her life. I haven't gone back to check those notes, but I strongly suspect this little tidbit doesn't really hold water either. Rally being a bounty hunter for only two years feels way too short, since she was already established in her profession when the original run of stories started.

Anyway -- after the gun range snoozefest ends, we move into the story which fills out the remainder of the book: Rally learns that Bean is entering an illegal street race, and that Bean has learned Detective Percy is entering the race as well. Bean makes no secret of his desire to see Percy dead and off his trail, but he tells Rally he won't murder the detective himself -- he does, however, plan to get Percy killed in an "accident". Percy, meanwhile, hires some terrorists and arms them with a rocket propelled grenade launcher, setting them up along a detour in the race and instructing them to kill Bean when he approaches. To make certain the race will follow this path, Percy leans on its organizer by threatening the lives of his wife and daughter.

Percy is an unusual character in the GUNSMITH CATS canon. He's a cop, and he does seem interested in upholding the law -- but he's also a total slimeball who, while we haven't explicitly seen him murder anyone yet, isn't above threatening to kill anybody in pursuit of his goals. Oh, and he extorts protection money from criminals, to boot -- so while he may imagine himself as a lawman to some extent, he's undermining it perhaps even more than he realizes by allowing certain activities under his watch (last volume, he made a deal to protect the drug runners who had hired Bean, for example).

So as I said, I'm not certain we've seen a character quite like this yet in the series. Certainly GUNSMITH CATS lives in the shades of gray between good guys and bad guys -- Bean is on the wrong side of the law, but is usually presented as a protagonist, and even Rally herself has done some shady stuff now and then (and sells guns will certain illegal modifications to boot). But event taking all that into account, good guys are usually good guys in this series -- they're rough around the edges but they have hearts of gold -- and bad guys are bad guys. Even the corrupt politicians that Sonoda loves to depict now and then are, when given enough page time, just outright bad people who are conscious of how immoral they are.

So to see a corrupt cop who doesn't really realize the extent of his corruption is actually refreshing in a way, since it's a character archetype Sonoda had never really played with before. Heck, I could be mistaken, but I'm not sure we've ever even seen an actual corrupt officer in the series yet. Corrupt commissioners, captains, etc. -- sure. But the uniformed officers and detectives up to this point have, unless I forgot somebody, been generally upstanding agents of the law.

Moving along, Rally enters the race to keep an eye on Bean, but when Becky learns through her information channels that someone is planning a terror attack on Bean, she informs Roy. (In these post-September 11th GUNSMITH CATS stories there seem to be a lot more references to terrorism than in the original material from the nineties, huh?) Percy's plan backfires spectacularly (Bean catches the RPG with his bare hand and holds it until the rocket dies down before casting it aside), the terrorists are killed, and Bean and Percy make a deal to hide the bodies and evidence, then live to race each other another day.

Rally and Minnie-May (riding shotgun for the race) are pretty much extraneous to this story. Except for Rally shooting the barrel of a shotgun in the hands of one of the terrorists to save Bean's life, she might as well have not been here. This is a straight sequel to the Bean/Percy material in the prior volume, and for now, at least, it brings that storyline to an end. The next book will begin an epic to span the remainder of BURST, as Rally takes center stage again when "Iron" Goldie returns to Chicago.