Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin vols. 5 & 6

After the current arc reached a climax with the fighting in Jaburo, mangaka Yoshikazu Yasuhiko takes a break to flash back and give us the backstory of the conflict between the Federation and Zeon, along with some of the key players on the latter side.  This actually turns out to be a smart move as the additional information goes a long way towards fleshing out characters who had presence and style, but with their actual development left to the fact that the series seemed to assume you’ve already seen that stuff in the anime.  For someone like me who still hasn’t seen the original “Mobile Suit Gundam”  (I know, I know.  One day, eventually…) finding out the stories behind the Principality of Zeon’s namesake, the behind-the-scenes power struggle of Houses Zabi and Ral, and Casval — the fierce young boy who would grow up to be Char Aznable — makes for engrossing reading and further solidifies this series as an excellent space opera.  There is some over-the-top melodrama, usually involving Casval and his sister Artesia’s mother, and the means by which the young man actually “becomes” Char is an incredibly obvious storytelling trope that Yasuhiko should be ashamed of trotting out here.  Even so, if you’ve accepted the issues and excesses of the previous volumes, then you won’t have too much of a problem dealing with the ones here.

That’s vol. 5, and vol. 6 continues on in much the same way, only a little less gracefully.  Much of the volume’s focus is on Char, now ensconced at the Zeon Academy and matching wits with its supposed brightest star Garma Zabi.  There’s a little… Okay, there’s A LOT of homerotic subtext to just about every interaction they have, which will no doubt appease a lot of fangirls.  I found it to be more hilarious than anything else since it’s really hard to tell how much of it is actually intentional on Yasuhiko’s part.  We also get a lot of “Building the Legend of Char Aznable” here.  Though things like seeing him set up Garma as the ostensible leader of the Academy’s attack on Federation forces works to that end, other bits like the rest of the class cowing an instructor into picking up Char’s glasses just feel like the measure is being forced.  Still, it’s not all about the Red Comet, as we get an involving parallel subplot about the Federation’s race to develop their own mobile suit and the role of Amuro’s father in that.  While some flashback arcs can sap a series of its momentum, I can at least say that that’s not one of the issues with these two volumes.