Asuna Elmarit, the heroine of Ecole du Ciel.
Asuna Elmarit, the heroine of Ecole du Ciel.
I love Gundam and I love Macross. However, I am particular about the Gundam and the Macross I like. For example, I hated Macross 7 and I thought that the concept of flying Valkyries by guitar strings was so pathetically hilarious that I couldn't stand to watch the show at all. (When I first saw Macross 7, my friends and I were at a fansub viewing party in the mid-90s for an anime BBS called the Anime Archive. I was literally Rolling On the Floor Laughing when I saw this.) And when it comes to Gundam, I only like the UC Gundam timeline: Gundam, The 08th MS Team, 0080, 0083, Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, Char's Counterattack, Gundam F91, Victory Gundam, and now the new Gundam Unicorn (which I have not yet seen). None of that Gundam Seed or Wing nonsense, and G Gundam was puke-inducingly stupid. No, only the UC Gundam universe interests me, although I am wanting to give Gundam X a try. Haruhiko Mikimoto, the artist behind Macross, was responsible for the character designs to 0080, a sorrowful and dramatic tale of a young boy caught up in the war. Mikimoto's involvement with the Gundam universe returned when he created the manga Ecole Du Ciel.
Ecole Du Ciel is the name of a mobile suit school designed to train children to become MS pilots. The manga starts out in the year 0085 and bridges the gap between Operation Stardust in 0083 and the beginning of Zeta Gundam, the events of which begin in 0087. Asuna Elmarit is an awkward, insecure daydreamer who could care less about being a pilot. Coming from a Zeon colony, she is ostracized and ridiculed by the other students. The story starts out with a small scope and just focuses on Asuna's efforts at the school, her friends, and the boy she has a crush on. Then by volume 2, the students are brought into space for training. Once those naughty crappy smelly Titans are introduced into the story, the plot becomes far more complex. It is revealed that something sinister is afoot at the school, and that the students are being manipulated by the Titans. Asuna's concepts of family, friends, and allegiences are completely turned upside down. Not only is this a coming-of-age story in which an irresponsible young girl develops into a mature young woman who has to decide which side she is on in an escalation to war, but the manga also shows some incredible action sequences. Sometimes in manga such as this, the pacing and action are not quite well portrayed and the action can become confusing. This is not so with Ecole du Ciel.
Being a girl, Asuna is unique for a Gundam protagonist. Not including Emma Sheen piloting the Gundam Mk.II in Zeta, Mikimoto is responsible for the only other female Gundam pilot, Christina MacKenzie, the test pilot for the RX-78NT-1 in 0080: War in the Pocket. Emma and Christina were not the main characters however, making Asuna the first female Gundam pilot protagonist. She's a day dreamer and has no real interest in mobile suits at all. In fact, she's not a very good pilot at all. She doesn't really prove herself to be a useful pilot until later in the series. So, she doesn't just hop into a Gundam and start kicking butt all the sudden. At the same time, she fits the profile for a stereotypical Gundam protagonist, in that she reluctantly accepts the role. Like Kamille, she is coerced by the Titans into fighting, and she sees how evil they are. But unlike Amuro or Kamille, she had been trained since a little girl to be a mobile suit pilot. That's something that I found peculiar about the first Gundam series. In the Gundam novels by Yoshiyuki Tomino, Amuro is already a soldier in the Federation army from the beginning. In the TV show/movie, Amuro just hops into the Gundam with no real training at all, which shows just how well-made the Gundam RX-78 is and how it's made to just basically pilot itself. But, I digress. As with other Newtypes, Asuna's true Newtype abilities arise in the middle of conflict, a battle manufactured by the Titans to scare the children into action in order to identify Newtypes.
The cool thing about this manga is that it doesn't really revolve around a Gundam unit at all. For most of the story, you don't even see any Gundams until the Mk II makes a cameo appearance later on in the series. Although The focus of the story is on Asuna, where it should be. So often it's become a cliche that you cannot have a story in the UC Gundam timeline without it revolving around some Gundam prototype. Why not just have the protagonist pilot a GM, Nemo, or Rick Dias? I suppose it's because apparently it wouldn't be a true "Gundam" story, hence the name. Unfortunately, the notion that you can't have a Gundam story without a Gundam seems to be the case most of the time. However, Ecole du Ciel goes beyond that. Eventually, Asuna does get her own Gundam-type mecha, but again the focus of the story is on her. Perhaps this is what would prevent this manga from being turned into an anime series, especially since the OVA market is not what it used to be and a TV anime series would practically dictate that a Gundam unit must be involved from the beginning. (The episode order of Victory Gundam was screwed up in order to leap ahead to show the V Gundam for the first episode, which wasn't supposed to appear until several episodes into the series, resulting in a bit of storytelling whiplash.) Star Trek: Voyager proved that you can have a Star Trek show that doesn't revolve around a Starship Enterprise (although the show sucked), and there was also Deep Space Nine (which also sucked, IMHO as a Babylon 5 fan, although I hear the latter episodes were great). So why should Gundam shows and manga always need to revolve around some Gundam prototype robot?
Ecole du Ciel shows the earlier years of the rise of the Anti Earth Unification Group (A.E.U.G.). The UC Gundam universe is so broad that so many stories can be told, stories of conflicts ocurring at the same time as the shows such as Z Gundam or the original 0079 Gundam series. Asuna's story is told without her even crossing paths with Kamille (at least so far), and it's really cool. Many side story manga and video games have been created to expand the UC Gundam timeline, and I hope to see more of these manga translated for English audiences. Like Z Gundam, Ecole du Ciel also shows the Titans' use of manufactured Newtypes and how it really wrecks their psychology and turns them into emotional basketcase killing machines. But I wonder, why is that? I'm not sure if this is ever properly explained.
The first 9 volumes of this incredible manga series was published domestically by Tokyopop. Tokyopop is certainly one of the most prolific publishers of English-language manga, with many solid titles. I have quite a lot of Tokyopop manga I've collected faithfully: Ai Yori Aoshi, DearS, Fate/Stay Night, Grenadier, GTO, Sakura Taisen, and Sgt Frog. Ecole Du Ciel, despite being a fantastic addition to the UC Gundam timeline, seems to have had a difficult time getting a complete publication in the USA. Volume 9 was originally announced to be released in October of 2008, but it didn't get released until April of 2010. This doesn't look good for those of us who want to complete this series. Two years was a long time to wait between the releases of volumes 8 (released in April 2008) and 9.
The anime and manga explosion of popularity from the late '90s/early '00s has certainly waned, and between the decrease in interest in the subject matter (for various reasons)and the overall economic downturn since the late 2000's, this has taken a toll on the industry. AD Vision is gone (no tears of mine shed over that one), as well as Geneon and US Manga Corps/Central Park Media (R.I.P.). Several lesser manga publishers have disappeared, most notably Broccoli Books (that makes me a sad panda). Tokyopop has had to drop a significant amount of titles from their rosters, while holding onto the true sellers. I am afraid that Ecole du Ciel is one of these casualties.
I have decided to not wait any more for Tokyopop to release volume 10. I have bought volumes 10 and 11, and I plan to read these in Japanese. With my trusty DS, I hope to be able to translate much of the text on my own and it will be a good learning experience. As of this writing, volume 12 has yet to be released. I look forward to reading more of this series.
If Tokyopop does not continue the series, I'll be sad. I really like them as a publisher, and although they are hit or miss with how much they tamper with the manga, I think they do a good job overall. By tamper I mean messing with the written language and artwork. They don't reverse the images to read from left to right anymore like they did at first. Normally they leave the Japanese onomatopoeia intact, but for instance if there's a scene where the characters are standing in front of a store or a train station, sometimes they will erase the Japanese language name of the place and draw the place's name in English, depending on the title and who is working on the localization. I hate that. Broccoli Books seemed to be the best about leaving the manga's purity intact, leaving the art completely unaltered (save for the speech bubbles, of course) and providing plenty of footnotes to explain issues with vocabulary or cultural aspects. Their work on Galaxy Angel and Disgaea manga was exceptional, I think. Alas, they are no more, and I'll likely just buy volume 3 of the Disgaea 2 manga because that is extremely hard to find since it was released right before the company died.
UPDATE April 2011:
This month, Tokyopop has announced that they are quitting the publishing business for North America. The founder of Tokyopop issued a statement that totally skirted the issue of why they're calling it quits, and yet claims that the "manga revolution" has been won. To an extent he's right, since Tokyopop has paved the way for other publishers. Plus, they were the first publisher to make the decision to publish all of their manga without reversing the images. For that I am grateful, since seeing so many left-handed Japanese people and cars driving on the right side of the streets was so weird. What is strange is that Tokyopop is maintaining their publishing in Germany. So, I have no idea if this will pose a barrier to any other publishers picking up series where Tokyopop left off. You can read the details at icv2 for more information on Tokyopop giving up. Basically, it says that since Kodansha has decided to cut their ties with Tokyopop and release their titles through Del Rey Manga (and now directly under the Kodansha name itself, such as the popular Suzumiya Haruhi series), along with the bankruptcy of their largest retailer in the US, Borders (I'm sad that most of them have closed down), Tokyopop wouldn't go on further. I don't understand why Borders has failed while Barnes & Noble makes you pay for their discount program while Borders gave it away for free, but there are still plenty of B&N stores everywhere. So we've seen the demise of ADV Manga and CPM manga because their respective companies are gone, and other great manga publishers like Comics One, CMX, and Broccoli Books are gone too. Viz is still going, as well as Kodansha, Go! Comi, DrMaster", Vertical, and maybe a few others out there.
Anyway, it looks like I won't be seeing Tokyopop finish the Fate/Stay Night manga either. Nuts.
Read about my trip to the Phoenix Comicon and my growing up as a nerd in my next essay.
Go back to the "Greg's Life" Table of Contents
"I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away." ---Jack Handey
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net