ゴルゴ13（１） (ビッグコミックス)

by Takao Saito

英国諜報部は大戦末期に莫大な偽札を隠匿した元ナチの親衛隊長を消すためにゴルゴを雇った。要塞化した城で待っていたものは！？表題作『ビッグ・セイフ作戦』他、3話（『デロスの咆哮』『バラと狼の倒錯』『色あせた紋章』）を収録。

Genres: Manga

303 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 22, 2013

About the author

Takao Saito (斎藤隆夫, さいとう・たかを) is a famous mangaka, creator of Golgo 13.

Reviews

[Nick H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty fun as a late 60’s Japanese approximation of James Bond (though I’m not sure why a supposedly stealthy hired gun would choose to use an M16 as his go-to weapon) but I definitely had trouble reading during this one. Like in Bond novels, each story starts out with a lengthy briefing section, in which the panels are absolutely FILLED with text. I personally don’t think this is a very compelling way to use the comic book format, but on a Japanese learning level, I was gasping for air during these parts. Most of the time I’d only scrape by these pages with only the most limited understanding of the stakes. I had fun though, even if all the stories ended up conforming to a pretty rigid formula.

I will now recount what I understood about the storylines, in case I go back and read this later


========== SPOILERS FOLLOW (maybe) ==========


The first story is called something like “Operation Big Safe,” and it involved our hero pulling a pretty cool OCEAN’S ELEVEN style heist on a private safe in a bad guy’s complex. This one opened with a really baffling scene of Golgo punching out a woman he was in bed with seconds before, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Maybe she was a double agent? Idk, it made a weird first impression. This one was cool, but I found it weird the way he simply executed the guy as he opened the safe- seems like there are a lot of better ways to take him out if that’s what he was going to end up doing. There’s also a nice double cross in there at the end.

The second story is called “Delos [something]” and this involved Golgo infiltrating a high society party. There were a few pretty fun scenes on the dock when Golgo got to talk face to face with the villain. He then gets caught after executing his target at the party (though I didn’t understand why they waited until after to catch him) and he later escapes with a woman in tow, while having something like an hour to live due to being injected with a lethal drug cocktail. Then he wakes up and forces himself on the woman, which was weird, but I guess that one is no different to what Bond would have done. I honestly can’t remember how he counteracts the drug. Maybe the woman knew how to save him?

The third is called something like “[something] of The Girl and the Rose,” where Golgo is charged with finding a rich guy’s daughter, who has been caught up in some kind of pornography ring. Golgo sweet talks his way into another high society party by skeet shooting really well in front of its host, then he sees that they’re screening weird hidden cam pornography to all the guests. He stays behind on the boat where the party took place and weirdly interrupts the host while he’s in bed with his wife to ask about the details. Then Golgo finds the two-way-mirror room where the films are shot, as well as the girl he’s looking for. They get away together, though I can’t remember the details. Maybe he goes in a boat?

The fourth is called “The Bloody Bridge,” which seems to be a similar situation to the Spielberg film BRIDGE OF SPIES. There’s a bridge between two parts of Cold War Europe, and there’s a lot of intrigue about something going down in a day’s time. The Russians have some kind of major interest in the bridge, though I’m not sure exactly what. This story had the most complex dialogue, and I understood shockingly little. Golgo in this one gets embedded deep undercover, and he’s posing as one of the officers in the army meant to hold the bridge. There’s also a guy named ‘Brave Man Riebeck’ who gets namedropped a lot throughout. Riebeck double crosses somebody at the last minute, and they figure out that Golgo was a spy at the last minute too. But then Golgo blows up a guard tower and escapes on a motorcycle, executing his captors on the way across, so everything works out fine I guess.

Overall, this was my most dismal reading performance. The language in this one was just too complex for me. The subtleties whenever they got into the cold war intrigue was way out of my league. It didn’t help that this was 100 pages longer than anything else I’ve read either. But there were still a lot of parts to enjoy. I don’t know that I’d read the next one until I’m a lot more competent though.

[Hachimaru · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this 1st volume the protagonist's character was not established yet, talk too much and sometimes make faces, so I was not interested in it so much more than 20 years ago , but now, read through again, I was. World situation in 1960's is also interesting to me now. It must be very hard to collect materials to draw pictures then without Internet.

「人を殺すときには　つまらんおしゃべりをしているひまに　引き金をひくことだ……」
"You should pull the trigger soon without talking when you kill somebody..."