Crying Freeman | KYOTO VIDEO

I actually have a connection to this one. I did the subtitle script for the ADV re-release (which involved reading photocopied hand-written Kanji transcripts for some of the episodes). I had read the first 4 or 5 chapters of the manga back in the day, but dropped off as it got ever more fantastic.. Getting Dump Matsumoto to actually voice a character who looks based on her is more than Megazone 23 part did (there is a similar character in the "heroic" bike gang. As to the various chapters/arcs, they are VERY plot-dense (you might say characteristic of Koike). It is clear that he thought about them a lot, but I wouldn't put them in the same world as "realistic". The original manga duplicated an old Golgo 13 plot (one Koike worked up?) about arming a secret army with a cache of long-lost type 100 sub machine guns (which is kinda cool, and deeply stupid in a world where AKs can be had for the cost of a cheeseburger. The anime omitted that detail, but does have the mercenary commander referring to his troops as "Rambos" (here literally "violent ones"), since "ranbo" is the Japanese word for violence (and the Japanese title of the Original "First Blood". Koike and Ikegami had one more notable (manga only) collaboration. The political thriller "Sanctuary", which had a solid fandom in the last days of the first wave of Manga Anime in the US (I think ADV may have picked up the OVAs to sell to the readers who were buying "Sanctuary" Collections. I would put this series, and Golgo 13 as well, into the "salaryman escapism" genre. More even than the Bond books Golgo 13 grew out of (when the Bond manga license got pulled), these are lurid (and VERY Sex-soaked) tales to entertain men who put in long hours in generally drab anonymity. The original Bond Novels targeted a similar audience, but the Japanese descendants seem to cater to a slightly different power fantasy (as, interestingly, do the more recent and younger-targeted isekai stories vary from their Western Equivalents).

Andrew Dederer