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.