Orion
© Dark Horse

Mania Grade: B+
Art Rating: A
Packaging Rating: A-
Text/Translatin Rating: A
Age Rating: 13 & Up
Released By: Dark Horse
MSRP: 17.95
Pages: 280
ISBN: 978-1-59307-695-5
Size: A5
Orientation: Right to Left
Series:

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Orion Vol.#01

I'm having a hard time deciding whether I like Orion in spite of its absurdity or because of it.

Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Shirow Masamune
Translated by:Frederick Schodt / Toren Smith / Duane Johnson
Adapted by:

What They Say
In the mighty Yamata Empire, magic and technology are one and the same. Now, the Empire is preparing its ultimate feat of psycho-science: the destruction of all the negative karma in the galaxy! But will this mystical purification be the salvation of humanity - or the trigger of its ultimate destruction? Only one being can save the Empire from its folly: Susano, the God of Destruction. Wild, arrogant, and homicidal, Susano has come to teach the world the true nature of power!

The Review
Shirow Masamune, creator of Appleseed, Dominion, Intron Depot, and Ghost in the Shell, has earned a huge worldwide following with his unique, eclectic, and visually stunning blend of science-fiction and fantasy. Orion is Shirow at his wildest, and is now for the first time in America published in right-to-left reading format, as originally published in Japan. Plus a variety of great bonus features: art gallery, Orion glossary, and notes on the text composed by Shirow himself!

The Review

Packaging:

Readers who have seen any of Dark Horse's other Shirow reissues should know what to expect by now: a larger form factor than a standard mass market paperback, an eye-pleasing bright white paper stock, and mountains of small print.  In grand Shirow tradition, we also get cover artwork that focuses on a major female character -- in this case, the heroine-turned-villain Seska -- placed front-in-center of Orion's urban setting.  Unfortunately, the brightly colored cover artwork is the only bit of color in the entire volume: the contents are printed strictly in black-in-white, albeit with sharp lines and good contrast.

Dark Horse includes two related, and very significant, extra appendices: a dictionary of Orion terminology, and extensive author notes.  Without these extras, it would be basically impossible to make any sense of what's going on in the story.  (Not that it makes a whole lot more sense with them; but with enough mental contortions, they're at least enough to give a vague idea of what Shirow's trying to say.)

Artwork:

Shirow's artistic focus in Orion is turned away from his usual futuristic machinery and much more towards the magic end of things.  The sci-fi elements mostly consist of atmospheric touches like cityscapes and the occasional warship, with the foreground being dominated by highly detailed gods, monsters, spells, and explosions.  It's a slightly different approach than some of Shirow's earlier works, but it's no less attractive; the evolution of the eight-headed dragon spell throughout the course of Orion is really something to behold.  The artwork is strictly black-and-white here, but the shading and detailing are so well-done that I don't miss the color too much.

Shirow's character designs are appealing, if sometimes outlandish in reaction shots, and consistently stay on-model.  The female character designs are a bit generic -- I sometimes think the man only has three or four basic female designs, and he just switches up their hair lengths and skin tones to make new characters -- but otherwise it's hard to fault Orion's art.

Text/SFX:

I didn't find any spelling or grammatical errors in the English script.  As far as how smoothly it reads ... well, the dialog is mostly a scrambled mess of pseudoscientific terms, but every indication is that Shirow's the one at fault here.

As with Dark Horse's other Shirow reissues, the SFX translations are printed alongside the original Japanese lettering or in the margins using a frustratingly tiny font.  Fortunately, for the most part the rest of the text is perfectly legible.

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

For a manga that's earned a reputation for being notoriously convoluted, Orion starts off innocently enough: while casually knocking back a few drinks at the local pub, priestess Seska of the Fuze clan finds herself surrounded by agents of the Yamata Empire and placed under arrest.  Amidst a few cursory explanations of her clan's "psychoscience" powers (which involve -- I'm not making this up -- manipulating the basic yangeron and yingeron particles at a quantum level using so-called dharmaquations) Seska high-tails her way back to the temple before the Yamata Empire soldiers can capture her.  Once there, she finds Master Fuzen tinkering with a dharmaquation containing the Yamata Empire's state secrets, which he quickly hides on Seska's person before the Empire's imperial forces can raid the Fuze temple.  The Yamata Empire's skilled Dr. Hebime eventually breaks through the seal on the temple door and starts a psychoscience showdown with Master Fuzen.

In the midst of this fighting, Seska stumbles into a dharma circle, causing a reaction that summons the god of darkness Susano ... and marking the point where the story's clarity goes completely to hell.

When Susano finds out that mortals have been screwing around with powerful dharma seals in violation of celestial law, he decides to dish out some self-described divine retribution on everyone in sight.  By the time his wrath finally dies down, he's stolen the dharmaquation off of Seska's body and ejected her onto a remote beach.  Through a bunch of complicated maneuverings that I'm not going to even attempt to distill down in this review, Seska winds up with enhanced psychic powers and joins the side of the Yamata Empire, hoping to gather deity-level powers and impress her would-be boyfriend in the process.  This fits perfectly into the Yamata Empire's ultimate plan of summoning a nine-headed dragon to consume all of the negative karma in the world, a move which Susano fears would tear the entire world apart.  (Yeah.)  After Seska kicks off the process of summoning the dragon, she and Susano spend the rest of the manga engaged in city- and planet-scale battles of magical powers with plenty of Shirow's infamous jargon mixed into the proceedings.

Comments:

Orion is a title so filled with contradictions that I almost feel odd having to give it a discrete letter grade.  In terms of basic plot and characterization, Orion is among Shirow's more straightforward titles: you've got your good-intentioned but misguided leading lady, your bog-standard evil doctor figure, a couple of warriors making up the good guys' side (one of whom just so happens to be an ultra-powerful deity), and of course lots of broad comedy and things going "boom" when these characters clash.  The political machinations and complex mechanical designs that Shirow's later works are so famous for are virtually absent here, or at least significantly toned down.

In their place, Shirow backs the plot with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that mixes quantum mechanics, Buddhist philosophy, Cthulu mythos, Chinese folklore, and probably a dozen other influences.  The backdrop that Shirow sets up here is simultaneously the best thing Orion has going for it and one of its greatest sins: in spite of how poor a job Shirow does communicating to the reader what the heck's going, trying to wrap your head around exactly how the world of Orion works can be an interesting game in and of itself.  Normally, I'd write off Shirow's brand of New Age pseudoscience as pointless gibberish; but the extensive author's notes and glossary paint a picture of an intricate mathematical and philosophical system rather than something that he's just making up on the spot.  Even with these notes, the universe of Orion is still pretty scattershot, and it's significantly hobbled by Shirow's inability to explain what's going on in any meaningful way. (By his own admission, it's not even a mixture that's supposed to mean anything: though he's worked out a whole scientific system from applying quantum mechanical equations to Buddhist teachings, it's only for stylistic reasons and not because he thinks it actually makes for a usable belief system.)  Still, it's enough to give the impression that -- with the right combination of sleep deprivation, nit-picking, and mind-altering substances -- you could probably put your brain in a state where all these pieces could fit together into a schizophrenic but self-consistent universe.  And from what I can make out of it, it's one hell of an interesting universe at that.

On the other hand, if you're not in the mood to understand Shirow's machinations and just feel like mentally deleting all the jargon, you're basically left with a decent but unremarkable action manga.  There's a ton of eye-candy spread throughout the storyline, ranging from futuristic urban landscapes to massively complex spells, and the action is more or less unrelenting once battle between Susano and Seska really kicks into gear.  Unfortunately, the story basically turns into a gigantic blank if you take away the convoluted scaffolding: major story events like Susano splitting in half make almost no sense if you just read around the gibberish.  Worse, the story will sometimes stop cold for an explanation of how quantum spin affects this-or-that spell, which builds into a major distraction if you aren't all that interested in the details. Set in a more conventional universe and told by another author, Orion's otherwise straightforward good vs. evil plot could have unfolded in a fraction of the time that Shirow takes, and with a whole lot less confusion.

Whether or not you're going to enjoy Orion basically boils down to how much fun the idea of unraveling Shirow's rants sounds like.  This sort of thing is right up my alley (to a point, anyway), and so I ended up really liking most of the experience.  Still, Shirow's almost impenetrable writing style started to wear down my patience near the end, and I think that readers with less interest in his shenanigans probably aren't going to get much out of Orion.