Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle Volume 1 - (Review)

By: ZelyhonYukito Kishiro started writing Gunnm (later released in the US as Battle Angel Alita, which I'll be using from here on out) back in 1990.  The first series ran for 5 years before he had to end it due to health reasons (I believe.  I can't find the citation on that at the moment).  Five years later, in 2000, once his health improved, Kishiro went back and decided to pick the story back up.  In order to do this, he basically wrote out the last segment of the Battle Angel Alita manga and took it in a different direction.  Battle Angel Alita: Last Order ran from 2000 to 2014 with some hiccups in the middle over publication and what magazine it ran in.  Last Order came to an end in early 2014 on a somewhat ambiguous note.  Later that year, the series continued in Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle.I'd really recommend reading the two prior series if you haven't read them yet.  In order to discuss some aspects of the first volume of Mars Chronicle, I'll need to spoil at least the end of Last Order.  At the end of Last Order, Alita (or the main one we've been following, the one with the brain bio-chip) had accepted a job from the two most powerful supercomputers in the Solar System to work as their agent before departing to parts unknown on the onion frame, leaving behind most of the supporting cast.  We pick up this volume with Alita (or Yoko, as she was still known at the time) and her past.  We start right after the incident we see in Last Order, where Alita was recalling the first time she saw Panzer Kunst.  Yoko and Erica are taken to an orphanage after their rescue, where the local bully of the children starts causing trouble for them.  After a short amount of time there, however, the town the orphanage is in is destroyed by the near perpetual wars on Mars.  All the other adults and children aside from Erica and Yoko are killed in the attack.  They are then picked up by the wandering doctor who treated them when they first arrived in town and taken to try and find safety and family.  On their way out, however, the barrier keeping that segment of Mars' atmosphere in is ruptured, killing many refugees and trapping the three of them in an airless wasteland.  They are then rescued by Mui, one of the faction who is responsible for maintaining the barrier.  Yoko and Erica are almost used to repair the barrier before Mui's higher-up orders the three of them to be released.  Also, pursuing the three are some bounty-hunter types looking to capture at least Yoko, dead or alive.This is both an interesting place to pick up the series and also a terrible place to pick up the series.  We've received some hints over the course of the series regarding Alita/Yoko's training and history on Mars, but everything we've seen has been tied to her Panzer Kunst training.  Everyone she's met has been tied to Panzer Kunst in one way or another.  We know Erica will be tied into Panzer Kunst as well, but this is well before either of them end up at the school.  Alita barely can move her body at the beginning, which is definitely a stark change from how strong her control is in the future.  We've seen a bit of confusion and hesitation from Alita when she switches bodies, but nothing like this where she has no control over herself.  That begs the question to me about whether she was even able to walk before she was put into the cyborg body.  That then also begs the question of who did a full cyborg conversion on a baby, and why.  Most of the others we see are just partially robotic, nothing to the extent of Yoko's body.  I'd be curious to see if these questions are addressed later in the series.I didn't really get that attached to most of the other characters in this volume.  I'm not sure if that's because I expected most of them to be expendable or if it was because they didn't do a whole lot to draw me in.  Because of that, when most of them ended up dead by the end of the volume, it didn't pack the punch it potentially should have.  Most of my curiosity about the series is strongly tied to how it will eventually tie into what we know about Yoko's future and the rest of the series.  Aside from wondering how we get from Point A to Point B, this volume didn't do a whole lot to draw me in.  Most of what we've seen from Erica is the same as the brief glances we've gotten previously.  There isn't yet much of substance to work with, and certainly nothing that doesn't tie directly into the previous events of the story.The art in the series still feels similar to the previous volumes, which I quite enjoy.  It's interesting to see the different styles given to the different groups.  There's a stark difference in the sleek MBV and the more blocky Papagei Corps and the various styles of cyborg bodies we've seen from the Scrapyard, Tipharies, and Ketheries in the past volumes.  It helps to say something about each faction and their values and individual level of sophistication.  Similarly, the series does a great job with the two-page spreads.  All in all, I'm still a big fan of Kishiro's artwork and thought that this volume shows he's still got it.All in all, while it lays some groundwork that can be quite interesting going forward, it's not necessarily the strongest beginning to a series.  I'm definitely curious to see what happens, but almost all of that is from prior investment in the series.  On the other hand, if you've been following Alita for the decades it has been running, you're either in or you're out by this point and a single weak volume or start to a new part of the series isn't going to turn you off.Note - Kodansha provided us with a free digital copy in exchange for our honest review.