Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt vol. 17

Depending on your point of view, vol. 16 was either a triumphant stomping of the Federation by Darryl Lorenz and his friends in the Nanyang Alliance, or 200+ pages of the antagonists of the series having their way with no consequences whatsoever.  Vol. 17 would seem like a good time to balance the scales, right?  It starts off innocuously enough with the reader getting a look at the Alliance’s training facility inside an abandoned space colony.  There are currently three Psycho Zakus on-site, piloted by one character you may remember, Vivi, and two you almost certainly won’t, Hank and April.  Everything’s going great for them until the scanners pick up a Federation fleet inching closer to the base’s security perimeter.  The hope is that the fleet will just pass the base by, but Vivi and the base’s crew have to be prepared in case they’re discovered.  So they head out to scout the situation…

As for whether or not this is the mirror image of the previous volume’s story, I’ll leave that for you to read for yourself.  I will say that mangaka Yasuo Ohtagaki manages the action and the unspooling of the story quite well in spite of a few issues.  The first being that the new (to me at least) mobile suit we see in this volume is one of the silliest looking yet, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Darryl snorted in laughter if Io shows up to their climactic duel in it.  The other is Io’s new co-pilot, who isn’t Bianca as I initially thought.  She’s there because the mobile suit requires her to be, and because she will help keep the two protagonists on an even skill level.  It’s not that I object to seeing a kid thrust into a wartime situation – this is “Gundam” after all – it’s that it doesn’t feel like she’s being written like the kid that she is.  More like a small adult instead.

I do want to reiterate that the action in here is pretty spot-on and while most of this volume feels like one big fight scene, it helps that it’s a good one.  Ohtagaki also does a good job of making you feel sympathy for the people who are killed in this volume, something that was desperately missing in vol. 16.  So while this volume may exist to balance the scales, it’s also a more balanced effort overall in its tone.  Which is something I’d like to see continued as we go forward from here.