Jan 4, 2008

New Manga (to the US): A. I. Revolution

This manga came out in Japan 13 years ago, so you will have to forgive the clothing and the absence of the Internet ;p. Despite the age, this simply is not a very good manga. Basically it's a bunch of loosely tied stories about a teenage girl, Sui, and the two robots her father created for her. One robot she names "Vermilion" is a mother robot put into the body of a handsome male y that looks like her father's dead friend. The other is a very beautiful male robot with a gay narcissist personality. The stories are pretty shallow, mainly involving Sui and her friends getting into a dire situation and Vermilion coming to their rescue. I found it rather bizarre that the robots have female personalities paired with a male body. I'm not sure what the point is with this. Perhaps it would have been interesting to experiment with a Mom-robot in a female body.

There's better robot/A.I. shoujo manga out there -- "Chobits" (for the 18+ crowd), "Zettai Kareshi" ("Absolute Boyfriend") (for the 16+ crowd), and "Planet Ladder" come to mind as manga I enjoyed. Ken Akamatsu's "A.I. Love You" didn't appeal to me, but many readers enjoy this manga too.

Anyhow, I will not be buying volume 2 of this series because I found the first volume too benign to be interesting.