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.
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