Manga Review #1: Thunderbolt vol.1

I recently picked up this book from my local bookstore, at this point I had only heard about the Thunderbolt story from this video from Zeta Rise it's story and that is got its own anime series. Before that, I had not heard about it.

Prior to reading the manga, I had only ingested Gundam through its anime and model forms. Though I had heard that the Gundam novels and manga are great, I just never got around to reading any of them.

Yasuo Ohtagaki does both the illustration and he wrote the story for this manga. I loved his illustrations as they evoked nostalgia from the original Gundam series, while also being able to make something new and add to the already expansive Gundam universe.

Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt takes place during the Universal Century, which includes stories like the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Zeta, ZZ, etc. This particular story takes place in the one year war, the same war where a young Amuro Ray first stepped into the cockpit of a Gundam.

Ohtagaki's story shows the classic gundam trope of the horrors of war, and we see the struggles that both the Earth Federation and the Prinicpality of Zeon face during the endless battles. The specific battles that this manga covers are the fights in the Thunderbolt sector of space, where the former colony of Side 4 use to stand. Our main protagonists that we follow are Io Flemming and Daryl Lorenz. Flemming is the jazz loving, hotshot of the Moore Brotherhood (the Moore brotherhood is what the remnants of Side 4 call themselves), while Lorenz is the eagle-eyed sniper of the Principality of Zeon's Living Dead division (a group which mainly consists of amputee soldiers with robotic prosthesis) who loves to listen to the blues.

There are many things that I feel that Ohtagaki succeeds in throughout this nine chapter volume. Firstly lets look at the illustration, I have to say that I love all of the two page spreads in the book, Ohtagaki manages to blow me away with every one. As well,the colour pages included in the book really pop off the page. Another thing I love about this is how Ohtagaki writes the characters and how he sets the scene.Though this is only the first volume, I feel like I can get a grasp of what the characters feel, this is also helped through the expressive faces on the characters. As well one of my most prominent positives about the story is that we do not see one side as a clear good guy or bad guy. In the established Gundam story, Zeon is usually seen as the bad guys. Though in Thunderbolt, both sides are written as human, both are not perfect, both kill and die. These are not the Char Aznables or the Amuro Rays. These are front line grunts, which is something that I really grew to enjoy from reading this manga.

One small criticism that I have about this book is that sometimes some of the background faces are not drawn as 'dramatic' or emotionally. These faces kind of take me out of the story. Though this is just a small pet peeve of mine, it  in no way harshly worsens the experience of reading this book.

My Rating: 8/10