Area 88 #1 - Video Review by ComicBook.beer

Welcome back to ComicBook.Beer, trying something a little different today and taking a look at Area 88, published by Eclipse and Viz Comics in 1987. This is an Americanized version of the 1979 manga from, and I'm gonna butcher this name, so hang in there, Kaoru Shintani. That's the best I can do. I can barely speak English.

But I know what I like, and what I like is classic manga and airplanes, and I was browsing through a comic book sale the other day, and this jumped off the shelf at me. Because it just reminded me of Robotech, and I love Robotech, and I was like, ooh, that looks fun. So I bought a whole bunch of them, read the first issue, loved it, and now I wish I'd bought the rest of them, but you know, one step at a time. Taking a look at the first issue here, which is, I think, a lot of fun.

This reminds me a lot of the Ace Combat series as we're following a mercenary named Shin Kazama who gets money for every kill that he makes and he had to buy his plane and there's some backstory on that. And obviously a lot of technical detail about the airplanes which, you know, back in the day, back in middle school, I just loved airplanes and just liked military jets and would just obsess over all the details and who doesn't love this kind of artwork It's just really remarkable.

This is a super quick read, you'll blow through this in a couple minutes, but it's a lot of fun to go back and admire the details and the storyboarding and the obsessive detail, just the attention to detail that Kaoru Shintani put into every panel.

And we get to learn a little bit about the cutthroat nature of being a mercenary. The base commander is assigning him this mission where he's... He doesn't feel like his plane is up for it, so he declines, and then he's penalized 5000 dollars and sits it out. But knowing all too well the enemy is going to attack, and he gets more money for moving targets in the air, so he goes back up anyway on defense, and there's all kinds of explosions. It's a lot of fun, I'm intrigued. I'm in for issue two, which thankfully I have. I think I bought like the first 12, so we'll get a bunch of them here on ComicBook.Beer. Although I filmed this in the morning, so it's more like the ComicBook.Coffee. version of this show. Less screaming. More airplanes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.