Badass Brawling Bloodsuckers: Trigun Author's BBB Is AAA

Follow Dark Horse Comics:

Badass Brawling Bloodsuckers: Trigun Author’s BBB Is AAA

04/30/2012 10:15am

by Breeze Grigas (Guest Fan Post)

Yasuhiro Nightow’s Trigun was one of my first manga, and for five years I followed Dark Horse’s releases of the series. Its crazy, nearly cinematic fight sequences, memorable characters, and energetic style never ceased and kept me coming back every time, and even years after it ended I’m still personally convinced it’s the best action manga published in the US to date.

Trigun ending left a pretty big hole to fill for a long time, but as it turns out Dark Horse managed to pick up Nightow’s new venture: Blood Blockade Battlefront, or B³ for brevity’s sake. Volume 1 was put on bookshelves last September, and when I bought it my hopes were pretty high.

I can tell you I wasn’t let down; I wanted Nightow and I got Nightow. This book was two hundred pages of a kind of cool only that author’s mind could churn out.

What gets you right off the bat is the tone and setting. The author’s offbeat style and penchant for drawing weirdoes, monsters, and the utterly abstract shows here immediately, as opposed to the more “realistic” sci-fi/western setting that Trigun thrived on. B³ leaps straight into the realm of fantasy, where a normal journalist kid named Leo has taken up a life in Jerusalem’s Lot, a.k.a. New York City, after it fell into a parallel dimension full of demons and other horrifying creatures. The story presents this place in a comically normal way, much like one of my favorite recent animated series: Ugly Americans. On many pages you’ll see shots like a monster strolling with its own mouth tentacles in a baby carriage down the sidewalk, or a traffic jam made up of both taxis and horned behemoths.

The action starts when our boy Leo meets up with Libra, a secret organization of “peacekeepers” headed by the burly gentleman vampire Klaus. Other members of Libra include the blood-blade-wielding, cigar-smoking Zap and their irritable werewolf lady friend Chain. This brigade proceeds to partake in cross-city fight scenes, car chases, explosive monster slaying, and all that good stuff while also showing just how likable they are as characters. After drawing around 3,500 pages of Trigun, the author has his style refined perfectly, and a berserk demon cutting a skyscraper in half has never looked better.

If you love Trigun Maximum and Hellsing or abstract stuff like Ugly Americans, or just need some kind of new and original action-comedy fix, Blood Blockade Battlefront Volume 1 should find its way onto your bookshelf. It’s a pretty enjoyable read, and volume 2 hits direct market retailers shelves May 9th.

Dark Horse Comics

Badass Brawling Bloodsuckers: Trigun Author’s BBB Is AAA

Tags

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News

Dark Horse Comics

Badass Brawling Bloodsuckers: Trigun Author’s BBB Is AAA

Tags

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News