Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga Dororo gets a sci-fi reimagining in Atsushi Kaneko’sSearch and Destroy. This take is set in a dystopian future where mercenary robots known as “creatures” serve the human elite and victimize the city’s scrabbling, desperate masses. The violent death of one of these creatures connects an orphaned thief named Doro with a mysterious girl in a stinking animal hide that conceals deadly cybernetic implants. Who is this mysterious girl? How is she killing, one by one, the city’s most twisted and powerful creatures?
Dororo is held in high esteem as an all-time classic in Tezuka’s library of work. One of his darker projects, it is a seminal piece of historical fantasy. With the Feudal Japan setting being one of its defining features, you’d imagine that it’d be challenging to move the story into a different era. Nevertheless, Kaneko transfers Dororo very smoothly into a futuristic sci-fi setting and creates a very memorable sci-fi manga in its own right.
In a similar vein to Naoki Uraswa’s reimaging of Astro Boy in his acclaimed manga Pluto, Kaneko goes in a much grittier direction that fully embraces a cyberpunk aesthetic. This is a dark and dirty world which evokes elements from classics like Bladerunner and Ghost in The Shell. The new female interpretation of Hyakkimaru as a stone-faced cyborg killing machine is a perfect fit for these elements. The fact she has no limbs particularly lends itself to the sci-fi genre with Hyaku making full and deadly use of cybernetic prosthesis as she ruthlessly pursues gangster robots.
The pairing of Hyaku and the young thief Doro is obviously a driving force of the story and does a great job of capturing the spirit of the original Dororo. But this is not a simple change in location and period. The sci-fi setting gives Kaneko free reign to explore themes such as class divide and fascism. Despite being an adaptation of an established classic, you can very much hear Kaneko’s voice coming through the pages and it is clear this is a personal piece to him. With much of manga aimed towards escapism from the outside world, it’s fascinating to see a manga creator channelling his real-world frustrations into his work.
The art goes a long way in building the dark and grimy tone Kaneko is seeking to establish. The backgrounds are largely dirty and sleazy with little attempt to make the characters easy on the eyes. Doro is one of the few characters who you could still imagine as a Tezuka character – being more cartoony and light-hearted than her co-cast. But the rest fall into a more noirish vibe that has no aspirations of being cute. The cyborgs and crime bosses are particularly terrifying (and hideous in some cases), but non as much as Hyaku. The sequence where she battles other cyborgs and wild animals are some of the most intense pages you’ll see in any manga this year. Kaneko has a great sense of pacing and how to layout scenes which really shines through in this opening volume.
This is a terrific reimagining of a classic manga and one of the best manga releases in general this year. An easy recommendation to both Tezuka fans and those who appreciate top notch sci-fi manga.
Search and Destroy Vol. 1 is out now from Fantagraphics (9781683969327, p/b, £13.99)
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