Dominion Vol. #01

By Greg Hackmann     April 25, 2008
Release Date: December 31, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Shirow Masamune
Translated by:Dana Lewis, Frederick L. Schodt, and Toren Smith (with Duane Johnson)
Adapted by:Dana Lewis, Frederick L. Schodt, and Toren Smith (with Duane Johnson)

What They Say
Welcome to the future, where the norms are vast bio-constructed cities, air toxic enough to force citizens to wear oxygen masks, and crime so severe that the cops drive tanks! When a mysterious winged girl with the power to cleanse the poisoned air is kidnapped by the villainous Buaku, police mini-tank commander Leona Ozaki, her tank Bonaparte, and her lovesick partner Al must confront the arch-criminal and his catgirl molls-the beautiful and deadly Annapuma and Unipuma-before Buaku's master plan kicks into gear. Buaku has more than money on his mind, and the future fate of humanity hangs in the balance!

Produced by international comics superstar Shirow Masamune, creator of Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, Dominion is an ecological-dystopian-police procedural adventure/comedy as only Shirow can create! This new edition is published for the first time in America in right-to-left reading format, as originally published in Japan.


The Review
Shirow's incredibly short attention span keeps Dominion from living up to enough of its potential.

Packaging:
Continuing the release style that Dark Horse has been using for their recent Shirow reissues, Dominion is presented in a larger-than-B6 form factor with the artwork restored to its original right-to-left orientation. The cover artwork makes Dominion's main draw clear from the outset, giving us a full-color portrait of the heroine Leona brandishing a machine gun (and seemingly very happy about this fact) in front of a dilapidated urban landscape being torn through by one of the story's ever-present mini-tanks. (Which, in turn, seems to be piloted by a second Leona. Nobody said these things had to be logical.)

The bright colors of the cover art are nowhere to be found inside, since Dominion is printed strictly in black-and-white. That said, Dark Horse has again used the nice bright paper stock that seems to be a staple of their Shirow re-releases; so the black-and-white artwork does look really sharp, and is generally very easy on the eyes.

Seven "Dominion File" pages are interspersed between Dominion's four chapters, each of which gives a detailed profile of one or more of Dominion's major characters. Shirow's six-page essay "The Mini Tank!" is also included as a sort of afterword, providing the reader with a quick history of the tank's evolution and explaining some of his mechanical design choices.

Artwork:
The highlight of Dominion's art is these mechanical designs, particularly that of the Bonaparte tank. Though Shirow's essay discusses how hard it is to give personality to tanks, Leona's mini-tank does seem to have more than a little bit of expressiveness to it -- imagine the Tachikomas from Shirow's later Ghost in the Shell, minus the AI and with treads in place of legs, and you've got something that's pretty close in spirit to the Bonaparte. As usual, Shirow crams tons of detailing into these designs, though it unfortunately comes at the cost of visual clarity in some of the busier frames.

The character designs, on the other hand, are somewhat unrefined and feel a bit too generic. Too many of the characters seem to rely on only a couple of basic facial expressions, usually just slight variations on bug-eyed gawking. (The most central characters -- namely, Leona, Buaku, Annapuma and Unipuma -- are thankfully exceptions to this problem.) The "bad guys" also have too much of a kitschy 80s fashion influence that makes them look out-of-place and unattractive next to the protagonists, and in general their design really hasn't aged well. I don't want this to sound like an "I like/hate the 80s manga look" complaint, so much as ... well, did Annapuma and Unipuma really need to look like groupies for a bad 80s hair metal band?

Text/SFX:
The dialogue is pretty much B-movie level material, but I can't really take issue with how the translation reads: grammar and spelling are all in line, and none of the script feels awkward or forced. While Shirow's essay is translated in a distinctly different style with much more complicated vocabulary and sentence structures, it also reads well.

Signs, SFX, and Shirow's margin notes are translated between the panels in frustratingly small print. The English script is otherwise consistently legible.

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)

At some unspecified point in the future, civilization has degenerated to the point that people must wear gas masks to survive outside in the toxic environment, and that the police force performs routine patrols in mini-tanks to survive the rampant crime. Leona Ozaki, one of the future's finest, is called into action after the police raid the hideout of master criminal Buaku and discover what first appears to be a life-size doll. On further inspection, this green winged humanoid figure turns out to be Greenpeace Crolis (groan), an organic lifeform capable of converting toxic clouds into oxygen. As Buaku points out, Crolis could be used to develop surgical implants that would allow humans to breathe the toxic atmosphere outside; and being an all-around low-life bad guy, he's opposed to any such move.

He's so opposed, in fact, that he'll stop at nothing to kidnap Crolis back: he storms into police headquarters to grab Crolis, then makes his escape in a gigantic quadruped tank conveniently parked outside of police headquarters. Unfortunately for Buaku, our intrepid heroine Leona fell asleep inside the tank just moments before the caper, giving her a chance to stop the whole plan from the inside. (Or, rather, giving her a chance to haphazardly bust out of the tank and lead Buaku on a wild goose chase up a tower until he accidentally falls and destroys the tank. But hey, whatever works.) This scenario repeats over the first three chapters, with Buaku (and/or his catgirl partners-in-crime, Annapuma and Unipama) constantly trying to steal Crolis, only to end up caught by the police and ultimately escaping under contrived circumstances.

After the ending of the third chapter wraps up the Buaku plot thread, Dominion transitions into a standalone fourth chapter that has basically nothing to do with the previous three chapters' case. Instead, it follows the Tank Police as they try to protect a city commissioner from violent demonstrators. I won't spoil the surprise of what they're protesting over, but believe me when I say the whole thing is really silly and way out-of-character with the rest of the story; anthropomorphic flames and superhero firefighters are only the beginning of the story's goofiness.

Comments
There's a thin line between dumb action manga and outright mindless action manga, and all too often Dominion end up on the wrong side of the line. Shirow's biggest offense is that, in creating an action/comedy hybrid, he's gone about it by mixing the wrong elements from each genre. Essentially, he's taken all the insanity and hyperactivity of a manic comedy series and applied it directly to his sci-fi action sequences, forcing Dominion to hop aimlessly from subplot to subplot without giving any particular one much of a chance to develop. Even the "main" plot thread surrounding the theft of Greenpeace Crolis falls victim to Shirow's lack of focus. At best, her presence is a flimsy excuse for Shirow to add another bit of fanservice while simultaneously beating the reader over the head with simple-minded environment message; at worst, it's just a Macguffin.

What's probably most frustrating about this is that Dominion has many individual elements that could have made it work really well, had there been a coherent plot to hold the whole thing together. Shirow's characteristically detailed mechanical designs are always impressive, and they're a real joy to look at here when placed against some of the expansive wasteland backdrops. We get a taste of the office politics and police camaraderie that Shirow would greatly expand upon in Ghost in the Shell; even as limited as it is in Dominion, it's still a nice touch. Then there's the comedy: it may not all be to my taste, but there's got to be something said for any chase sequence where the villain makes his getaway in a delivery truck full of babies.

If you dive in with appropriately low expectations, there's certainly some fun to be found in Dominion. Sadly, more often than not its entertainment value comes in spite of its storyline rather than because of it.