MYTHCOMICS: "FALLEN ANGEL" (BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, 1994-95)

In CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT.3 I wrote:

To date, I still have not re-read all of ALITA, but it occurs to me that when I do, the entire series might qualify as an "episodic novel," and thus as a mythcomic in itself. If I made that judgment, then the fact that KILLING ANGEL lacked a certain level of concrescence would not affect my judgment of the whole series, any more than a mythically-weak chapter of (say) MOBY DICK would affect my judgment of the whole book.

Thanks to this site, I was able to easily reread the entirety of the initial episodic novel featuring BATTLE ANGEL ALITA (later followed by two sequel narratives). And my verdict is that, as good as the entire ALITA is in terms of the kinetic, dramatic and didactic potentialities, the entire narrative doesn’t quite excel in terms of the mythopoeic narrative, in contrast to such novel-like manga-works as HELLSING and DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND.

In previous posts, I’ve treated two other arcs, IRON MAIDEN and KILLING ANGEL, and I regarded the former as mythpoetically rich and the latter rather less so. And of the arcs immediately following KILLING ANGEL, most of them display only fair mythicity. Alita encounters a new romantic interest, quixotically named “Figure Four,” who takes the place of her lost love Hugo, and meets a centaur-cyborg, Den of Barjack, who leads an uprising of Earth-forces against the tyranny of Tiphares. But the only mythic character Alita meets in these middle-range adventures is the mad scientist Desty Nova (“new destiny,” maybe?). Like the cyborg-girl’s adoptive father and re-creator Daisuke Ido, Nova is a denizen of the sky-city Tiphares. But whereas Ido left the sterile city to be closer to earthbound humans, Nova wanted to be able to use humans as fodder for his genetic experiments. And since Nova is in every way the obverse of Ido, it’s fitting that he’s indirectly responsible for Ido’s demise. Thus all of Alita’s earlier drives—to learn the nature of her earlier existence, to solve the secret of far-removed Tiphares—are rendered secondary to her mission of vengeance—though she eventually learns that in his way, even the fiendish Nova is a victim.

The sequence I term “Fallen Angel” lasts from parts 50-56. Prior to this sequence, Alita has been suborned by another Tipharean with an odd name, Mr. Bigott, who maintains a com-link with her and sends her on missions. Alita accepts this in part because Bigott promises to help her find Nova. But the young cyborg doesn’t take orders well, so Bigott uses his advanced technology to create two duplicates of the heroine. Both knock-offs are destroyed, one by Alita and the other by one of her allies. Alita ceases to obey Bigott—though she does keep contact with a “good Tipharean” named Lou—but then gets captured in Part 50 by Nova.

Nova plays mind-games with the cyborg’s programming, so that she dreams of meeting and contending against her dead Motorball opponent, Jashugan. Presumably Alita’s own mind conjures her idea of Jashugan, for the dream-warrior speaks in very Nietzschean terms:

The purpose of battle is to attain the greatest heights within your own limits.

When Alita fights her way back to reality, she confronts Nova again. He reveals to her a great secret about the aristocratic Tiphareans: that while Alita may have a human brain in a cyborg body, all denizens of the sky-city are human beings with bio-chips in place of their organic brains. 

When Bigott learns this truth, he goes mad and destroys himself. After fighting off Nova’s henchmen, Alita chops off the mad scientist’s head, and goes on to other adventures. These include defeating Den of Barjack when he tries to shoot Tiphares out of the sky, and contending with another of Nova’s creations, Eela, an immortal female who worships “the pleasures of the flesh” and compares human ideals to “the mold that grows on cheese.” But the mythopoeic discourse doesn’t really get going until the heroine’s nemesis comes back from apparent death. Tipharean technology allows Nova to resurrect himself, and he again traps Alita in another cyber-dreamscape.

However, this time Nova himself takes part in the psychodrama, and it’s possible to see his buried humanity surfacing even within his schemes to break Alita’s will. His scenario rewrites Alita’s history in the Scrapyard, so that this time both Nova and Ido unearth Alita’s broken cyber-body from the junkheap. Both of them become quasi-paternal figures to the young android, and there are moments suggesting that Nova himself has been seduced away from Promethean mad science to the ordinary pleasures of life.

During this period, Alita also learns her original nature. In her first existence, she was Yoko, a rather callous soldier from Mars, one of the many planets in the solar system colonized by Earthpeople. Mars and the other planets made war upon Earth over control of resources. The war brought about the division between the aerial station Tiphares and the ruined planet below, as well as apparently cutting off Earth from the other planets in the system. This time, when Alita awakes from the engineered dream, she does so with knowledge of the evil in her own nature.

This time, her awakening takes place on Tiphares, for the city’s officials have allowed Nova to return. Having already killed Nova once, Alita foregoes revenge to learn more about Tiphares. She soon learns that the bio-chipped residents of the city share none of her desire for self-knowledge. When a group of citizens learn that they literally have no brains, one of them cries, “We don’t want out brains! Give us our future!” Later, Alita, accompanied by Nova and Lou, finds the same insanity in the master computer governing the city: Melchizedek, who has the name of a Biblical patriarch and the appearance of a gentle old lady. (The computer, incidentally, provides the only strong maternal image in the overall narrative.) But upon being challenged, Melchizedek goes into meltdown, threatening to bring about a catastrophe that will destroy the city and a good portion of Earth-life.

Alita, who for the entire narrative has been by turns a seeking innocent and a pissed-off warrior-woman, can only save the world she knows by an act of sacrifice. Given a vital serum by Nova—who in his perversity instantly regrets having done anything to benefit humanity—Alita transforms herself into a rapidly expanding cybernetic conduit that not only overrides the computer’s program but also forges a link between Tiphares and the earth below. In a coda that takes place many years later, Alita’s boyfriend Figure patiently waits for her return—and strangely enough, it’s Alita’s “bad father” Nova, gone utterly mad now, who shows the youth a way to resurrect the world’s cyborg-savior.

Artist Kishiro may or may not have known a lot about the Hebrew system of Kabbalah, but one certainly can’t tell from the sparse teferences in ALITA. In addition to Tiphares, he only references one other sephiroth, “Ketheres,” and though Melchizedek does have a Kabbalistic connotation, it also has a lot of other Jewish and Christian meanings as well. Since the name here is applied to a computer ruling a city with overly tight apron strings, Melchizedek probably signifies little more than “a tyrannical god (or goddess) lording it over humankind.” In contrast to this negative image of feminine nature, Alita becomes an “angelic” mediator between Heaven and Earth, though her only message is not one of peace or forgiveness, but of potential. For, echoing the sentiments of Jashugan in her own way, Alita states her ideal:

If there is anything I desire for this world—it’s for everyone to fly with their own wings.

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 3

After formulating my distinctions of the longest structural forms in Part 1-- the compact novel and the episodic novel-- I should point out that a partial reading may be deceptive.

Last year, partly in response to the release of the film ALITA BATTLE ANGEL, I read some of the chapters of the manga. I rated IRON MAIDEN as possessed enough concrescence to qualify as a mythcomic, which is naturally predicated on recognizing it as a "long arc," but the following long arc, KILLING ANGEL, did not qualify for the same status.

To date, I still have not re-read all of ALITA, but it occurs to me that when I do, the entire series might qualify as an "episodic novel," and thus as a mythcomic in itself. If I made that judgment, then the fact that KILLING ANGEL lacked a certain level of concrescence would not affect my judgment of the whole series, any more than a mythically-weak chapter of (say) MOBY DICK would affect my judgment of the whole book.

In some cases, if a given work or series of works has been left incomplete, it's hard not to make a partial reading. I stated in Part 1 that I could have considered the eleven issues of Jack Kirby's NEW GODS series to be an episodic novel, even if the author had not been able to craft an ending for the series many years later. The ending that Kirby used in HUNGER DOGS was probably very different from anything he might have written had he concluded the series in 1971. Yet I would say that the mythic discourse of those eleven issues was strong enough to view them as a technically incomplete but symbolically complete novel.

Similarly, Steve Gerber's VOID INDIGO only enjoyed one large-sized graphic novel and two issues of a regular-sized comic book, before hostile fan-reaction to the series encouraged publisher Marvel Comics to shut down the series. Possibly I might not have liked whatever ending Gerber might have designed for the series, but I felt that the early part of his discourse was strong enough that I deemed VOID also to be akin (to borrow Aristotle's metaphor) to the acorn that, under the right circumstances, has the power to give rise to an oak.

It's hard to state with precision exactly when the discourse is strong enough to subsume any weak elements. The Don McGregor long arc "Panther's Rage" in BLACK PANTHER #6-17 is one in which I did not find a strong enough discourse overall, though I critiqued two of the McGregor stories, "The God Killer" and "Thorns in the Flesh, Thorns in the Mind" as possessing the same strong mythicity as an isolated short story, even though they're part of a larger arc. On a side note, I would probably rate the entire "Panther's Rage" highly concrescent in terms of the dramatic potentiality, since I'm of the opinion that interpersonal dynamics were the main focus of McGregor and his collaborative artists.

NEAR MYTHS: KILLING ANGEL (BATTLE ANGEL ALITA, 1990?)

While the previous arc in this series, IRON MAIDEN, sustained enough of a symbolic discourse to qualify as a mythcomic, KILLING ANGEL feels more like the author marking time to create suspense for the heroine's inevitable ascension to the sky-city Tiphares.

KILLING ANGEL picks up with Alita, bereaved after her loss of her soulmate, losing herself in the Scrapyard arena-game "motorball," a sort of ultraviolent roller-derby for cyborgs like Alita. This arc abounds with many examples of cyborgs using motorized kung-fu on each other, all given a heroic significance akin to current Japan's popularized conception of the samurai ethic.

During this arc, Alita makes her first substantive contact with her forgotten past, which I'll record here for possible future reflection. In the midst of a climactic battle, Alita goes into a visionary state, wherein she hears words of a man who is apparently a former mentor:

When in our mechanical forms, we regain the unified senses of our erdlieb, our earthly bodies... witness! The cosmos, the very universe, resides within you, giving form to the ars magna, the Great Art!

Though I haven't reread the ALITA series in some twenty years, I'll wager the author built on this trope in later arcs. Time will tell.

MYTHCOMICS: BATTLE ANGEL ALITA/IRON MAIDEN (1990?)

Like many adventure-oriented manga, BATTLE ANGEL ALITA is composed largely of “long arcs.”

The first long arc sketches out a futuristic Earth that provides the obverse to Russ Manning’s beneficent “cloud in the sky” civilization, as seen in the MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER story “Cloud Cloddie Go Home.” Yukito Kishiro’s world is dominated by an aerial city named Tiphares (named for the central sephiroth of the Kaballah’s “Tree of Life”), a city linked to the Earth’s surface by a long shaft and assorted cables. Yet for the first two arcs the reader does not see how life is lived by the citizens of the clouds. Rather, Kishiro focuses on the lives of the ground-bound humans whose domain, “the Scrapyard,” coalesces around the aerial shaft. The reader’s first image of this environment is that of a mammoth junkyard, reinforcing the idea that the people, too, are castoffs from legitimate society. Earthbound commerce centers around Tiphares as well. The only businesses Kishiro shows are METROPOLIS-style factories, whose main function is to process food and other commodities and send the goods up to the sky-city via the central shaft. The inhabitants of the Scrapyard, however, live a hand-to-mouth existence, and many of their bodies have become modified through grafting or through the addition of cyborg parts—which seems to debase rather than enhance most of them.

I’ll pass quickly over the set-up established in the first arc. A technician named Ido happens to be rooted around in a junkyard for spare parts when he finds an intact cyborg-head from three hundred years previous. He joins the head to a new body and gives her a new name, Alita, but the diminutive cyborg has no memory of her old life. She does cherish her new “papa,” though, and because Ido does a side-busniess as a “hunter-warrior”—hunting fugitives on the outs with the authorities-- Alita begins imitating Ido’s bounty-hunting profession. But the robotic body Ido’s given her possesses phenomenal powers that even Ido barely understands—and this is where the first arc ends.

Since Alita is functionally “born adolescent,” IRON MAIDEN commences with her first love, as well as giving her a reason to be at odds with the dominion of Tiphares. While fighting with some cyber-enhanced bounties, Alita gets kayoed, and wakes up to see a teenaged boy, one Hugo, looking at her. Alita and Hugo become friends, and he, unlike Alita, feels a great passion to transcend his earthbound status by emigrating, legally or illegally, to the sky-city. 

At this time Alita has next to no interest in Tiphares, but she falls in love with Hugo right away, and is not a little jealous of Hugo’s passion for the city. Later Kishiro reveals that the dream isn’t original with Hugo, for Hugo’s older brother cherished the same impossible dream. However, Tiphares takes extreme measures to dissuade immigration. Possibly thanks the betrayal of his wife, the brother of Hugo is slain by a cyborg hunter-warrior. Thus Hugo’s passion for Tiphares is entangled with filial affection and survivor-guilt.

Hugo’s far from a starry-eyed innocent, though. Alita is aghast when she learns that his side-business is stealing spinal columns from corpses to sell on the black market. Vector, Hugo’s black-market contact, has promised to smuggle Hugo into the sky-city if the boy can amass a huge number of credits. Alita eventually starts helping Hugo gather credits, hoping to go along with him. The cyborg-girl does not know that Hugo sometimes breaks the law in his dream-quest, attacking cyborg-citizens to remove their spines. (Because the victims are cyborgs, this attack doesn’t kill them, though Hugo’s buddy Vector is not nearly as scrupulous about not killing.) Soon Hugo is a wanted man for his crimes, and one of Alita’s many enemies manipulates things so that Alita may have to bring Hugo to justice. Alita tries to help Hugo escape to Tiphaes, but before they can do anything, another hunter-warrior—indeed, the same one who slew Hugo’s brother—deals Hugo a fatal wound. Alita arrives in time to destroy the hunter, and then is able to save Hugo only by taking his head—in the same way Ido salvaged her head—to Ido’s laboratory, where the good doctor attaches it to another robot body.

At this point Ido drops a bombshell on the young couple. Ido himself is an exile from Tiphares, and he knows that they’ll never allow the entry of people from the Scrapyard. Hugo is more than a little disturbed to learn that he’s lost his humanity in pursuit of a chimera, and when he and Alita confront Vector, they learn that the only way he ever sends “people” to Tiphares is as preserved body-parts. The two cyborgs wreck Vector’s office but spare his life, for Alita has more pressing concerns.  Hugo, almost mad from his sufferings, scales one of the cables anchoring the city to the earth. Alita almost manages to talk Hugo down, to convince him that the dream of their future together is better than the dream of Tiphares. Tragic fate intervenes, and Alita loses her first love. Over time, though, she will inherit Hugo’s mission: that of penetrating the mysteries of the city in the sky.