The Fall & Rise of Comic V3: Part 1 of 3

For nearly as long as the Kamen Riders have been on TV, they have been in comics as well. Ishinomori's original series and BLACK manga are both well-known and worth checking out, and Kamen Rider Spirits is pretty much required reading if you ask me. Beyond that, things get a little tricky. The truth is, for all the many Kamen Rider comics over the years, from the monthly serializations of Kamen Rider V3 or Kamen Rider X up to the one-shot/two-shot comics for say, Kamen Rider Ryuki: 13 Riders or Kamen Rider THE FIRST... the number of ones that have actually been any good are few and far between.

Don't get me wrong, there are some other good ones. They're just swamped by many, many more that aren't quite so hot. To get into exactly why they flop is something you have to do on a case-by-case basis. For example, some earlier comics have decent artwork but an utterly incoherent story with much OCCness (Out-Of-Characterness) and some of the new ones do a decent job with the story, but have some cringe-inducing artwork. A couple fall into both categories, or simply have something fundamentally wrong to begin with that undermines the entire comic, no matter how good it may be otherwise. Like, for example, the one where the Riders go into SPAAAAAACE!, which is sadly not half as cool as it sounds and will be elaborated upon some day.

But getting back to the troubles of OCCness for a second. I generally really dislike it when characters act so out-of-character that they no longer are believable as the character they're supposed to be, unless there is a reason. This is true of anything, pretty much: If Hongô suddenly has a drinking problem, you better have a damn good reason to back it up, because the Hongô I know never had any such thing (he does, however, have a problem of having too many old friends who are high-profile scientists that Shocker tends to exploit.)

Now, some would say you can defend OOCness to an extent, because as a fan fic writer or whatever, you're simply putting out your interpretation of the character. So "Your" Hongô isn't Toei's Hongô. As a writer myself, who strives to stay as true to the source material as I can (which is no easy task), I'd argue against that logic, but either way, we're still talking about fan fiction here, not something you're going to be putting out for money or anything.

So what happens when someone does just that: an officially-sanctioned comic that also has such horrible OOCness that you'd think they never watched the actual show? That brings us to Sugaya Mitsuru's "New" Kamen Rider manga. It was recently put out in two jumbo-sized collected volumes, both of which I picked up, Because, as bad as it gets, it is still amusing.

Despite what you may think (and despite what I sorta wish) it has nothing to do with Skyrider. Rather, this is one of the many Rider manga spin-offs that came about when Ishinomori became too busy with the shows themselves to handle doing regular, serialized comic versions as well. He passed the torch over to several other writers, the most prominant of which being Sugaya here. The contents of the book are essentially covering the whole second half of Kamen Rider (Ambassador Hell, Gelshocker, etc.) and the beginning of Kamen Rider V3. Many, many story liberties are taken, and the character designs are on the whole closer to Ishinomori's own comic versions than anything on the show.

Speaking of which, I should point out that Ishinomori's comic deviates from the show in all sorts of ways itself, and Sugaya's comics are basically following in "that" version of the story. To be fair, Ishinomori developed his adaptation after the show had begun, but staying closer to, essentually, "how he would have done it if he had the $$$". So I can't really fault him for writing the characters differently, and by extension, Sugaya writing them so wackily. But at the same time, as some one nearly raised on the original TV Riders, there are certain aspects to the comic versions that just don't seem right, as I'l elaborate later.

Now, as for Sugaya, I have the complete Kamen Rider X manga by him, and prior to getting this I had read a great deal about him in the guide books. So I can say that, with all honesty, he is a pretty normal guy. He just happens to have a very strong tolerance for ultra violence and extreme amounts of gore, something that one can find by the proverbial bucketful in his comics.
Now, Kamen Rider is as far from the most peaceful, non-violent franchise as you can get, but on the whole, stuff like this doesn't usually happen every episode, if at all:

(For the record, that dude is getting impaled on the cross at the top of a church.)

Yeah. And that's pretty tame, considering most Rider Punches and Rider Kicks involving at least one flying eyeball. Ishinomori & Muraeda (Spirits) both knew/know how to put in plenty of blood, decapitations, dismemberment, etc. But Sugaya easily outdoes them both, and pushes it to an almost tiresome extreme. Must every eye be gouged out, every spleen ruptured, every deciding final blow accompanied by an explosion of blood so great that it makes anything in Kamen Rider Amazon look like a paper cut?

Now, it must be understood that this kind of violence happens and nobody really bats an eye. Hongô is not exactly like his TV show counterpart (especially not when he rips off his shirt while yelling at Kazami, to show his scar-covered cyborg body... huh?) but he's not some bloodthirtsy nutcase either. He just happens to do this when killing Kaijin. Like you would.

Similarly, the bodies pile up thanks to the bad guys' actions, and not a single cybernetic surgery scene goes by without some nasty red stuff splashing about. I think, it never quite gets as bad in this volume as the X-Rider manga, where Apollo Geist kills half of Tokyo just to get X-Rider to come out and fight him (although he probably would have done that on TV if they had the time and budget), but still, it gets pretty nasty.

But that's not really why I'm bringing this up. For as wacky as the "New" Kamen Rider comic is, it's a little scene involving our favorite green & red & silver & white Rider, V3, that is the very definition of out-of-character.

Stay Tuned!