released 17 feb 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Comic writer Adam Warren's major claim to fame is his Americanization of the Japanese DIRTY PAIR sci-fi anime action / comedy / adventure series, but he also did one installment of BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, another anime series of the same era.
The BUBBLEGUM CRISIS scenario involves a near-future "MegaTokyo", risen from the ashes of another "great Kanto earthquake" in 2025, with the city dominated by the Genom Corporation and its product, the sentient / partly sentient androids known as "Boomers". Genom is run by folks who are up to no good, and they are opposed by four girls -- Sylia, Linna, Priss, & Nene -- who dress up in fashion-color / high-heeled combat armor as the "Knight Sabres" to take on the Boomers, trying to help out the occasionally ineffective MegaTokyo AD Police.
In Warren's BUBBLEGUM CRISIS effort, titled GRAND MAL, MegaTokyo gets a visitor, an American soldier of fortune named Peter Vashnevskaya, the "White Knight". He is on one final mission, a continuation of an earlier job involving an unusual robot known as the "Skorpion" that went wrong, leaving Vashnevskaya with a murderous form of epilepsy. His mission takes him into the path of the Knight Sabres, with explosive results.
I had seen a bit of BUBBLEGUM CRISIS and its companion series AD POLICE and couldn't say I was too much impressed, the whole thing striking me as fairly stupid and often sleazy, probably not too far off the median level of anime quality for its time but definitely below standard these days. However, as with the DIRTY PAIR, Warren takes the BUBBLEGUM CRISIS scenario and makes it his own.
Unlike Warren's DIRTY PAIR stories, GRAND MAL takes itself more or less seriously, and actually generates a good deal of drama and tension. It doesn't take itself too seriously, though, enhancing the story with its own intelligent self-awareness of the silly aspects of the BUBBLEGUM CRISIS scenario. Vashnevskaya, for example, savagely mocks the Knight Sabres for their "goofy crusade", telling Sylia: "I'm sure that the very thought of a couple of cute girls prancing around in high-heeled armor is gonna put the fear of God into the most powerful commercial entity in human history!"
GRAND MAL also showcases Warren's manga-styled artwork to good advantage, not only highlighting his fascination with hardware but his sophisticated "production" style, weaving together multiple elements such as TV commercials and op-ed pieces in the early part of the story to set things up. (A shrewd reader will figure out eventually that this "multimedia" approach is actually from the point of view of one of the "characters".) As always, he is clever; his Skorpion is an original device, an extension of the concept of a virus to a mobile electromechanical system.
GRAND MAL is a taut, smart, well-put-together piece of work, and it's a bit of a pity that Warren never came back to BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, at least as far as I know; eh, maybe it didn't sell. I thought GRAND MAL shined much more than the fun but smartass DIRTY PAIR stories and it would have been nice to do more of BUBBLEGUM CRISIS -- but Warren's in the driver's seat and he calls the shots.
