Noch bevor die »Annex 01« den Mars erreicht, erliegen die ersten Crewmitglieder den brutalen Attacken der Terraformer. Nur mit Mühe können sie notlanden, doch ihre Gegner lassen sie nicht verschnaufen. Um die schwachen Mitglieder zu schützen, ist es nun an der Zeit, dass die Offiziere ihre volle Stärke zeigen. Wird ihre Kraft ausreichen, sodass sie ihre Mission erfüllen können …?
A new mission to Mars, Annex 1, is under way. Their mission: crucial research into the A.E. Virus currently plaguing mankind. The mutant Terraformars, giant humanoid cockroaches, may hold the key to a cure. Unfortunately for the crew of the Annex 1, the Terraformars have somehow gotten on board the ship and have only one goal—total extermination! Led by Akari Hizamaru, the crew will need to rely on their superhuman powers to survive…if those powers don’t kill them first!
** MINOR SPOILER ALERT ** Well well... what a surprise on the plane. How could the Terra Formars slip inside?? It was so creepy. When I tried to steady my weak heart (LOL!), now I have to race again the story. Unfortunately, this inhuman cockroach are trying to destroy their medicine supply. As you know, they need it for transform since many of them doesn't have from genetic. So, the cockroach figure it out after 20 years? *groans*
Now all the crew Annex I need to survive and split into six emergency plane and land on Mars. The worst case is they will meet Terra Formars and need to be ready. There is no happy and sad. Only surviving when the cockroach evolve into something surprising than ever. I don't want to believe it! But I suspect some shit will happen asap. This volume focused on Akari & Michelle's plane. I wonder with the others.
As people all over the world marveled at Perseverance having not just landed on Mars but managed to contact Earth and provide crystal clear footage from the Red planet, I hunched over my laptop as I am wont to do, thinking to myself, "But what about the Roaches? And the pyramids? Was it all a lie?! A LIE?!"
Okay, so maybe not but thoughts of giant humanoid roaches did cross my mind. I apologize to no-one!!
Anyway, volume 3 is probably the best one thus far, which is to say, it provides topnotch action and gore in spades, the pace being so frantic that one hardly has time to truly assess what is happening. Once one does stop and think, it tends to fall apart. And unfortunately, given the language barrier- Terraformars does not condescend in providing pesky furigana to its readers, no matter how hermetic the language gets, and in this case it reaches levels of spastic scholarship, you better know your way around entomology and pseudo-biology- I cannot quite be lulled into the lunacy as the target audience.
It picks up just where the second volume ended: the Terraformars have invaded the ship before it even reached Mars and set to destroy the drug that allows the crew to activate their bug abilities. Shokichi has really grown up since he realizes right away that something is up, the Terraformars are targeting the drug deliberately. They must be obeying orders. Akari also comes to this conclusion right away which means that the cast, as a whole, got an IQ boost since the first volume.
With that said, a lot of the character still insist on gaping and standing stock still upon being confronted with Terraformars. I suppose it is panic and to be fair, once they try to escape they usually get minced.
I remember these events from the anime, it got so butchered by censorship that it was borderline unwatchable. I had to stop watching until a non-pixelized version surfaced because it was literally impossible to follow otherwise. This is a franchise that simply cannot be censored without becoming entirely worthless as it's precisely the impressively well drawn violence that keeps readers coming back to it. Get rid of that and you do not have Terraformars as much as a blurry mess. And several people had to draw and animate all that only to be completely obscured. It strikes me as highly unfair to those involved.
And granted, making a claim for artistic integrity in a manga such as this can be a bit pompous but be it as it may, plenty of work went into crafting the artwork, in making it flow alongside the narrative proper.
Shokichi tries to go back to Earth, taking the Terraformars on board as samples which strikes me as a great idea. But ground control will have none of that and at this point, it would not surprise me if ground control turned out to be Roaches in human suits. Turns out they need more samples and never mind that they have precious little of the drug that is their own chance of holding their own in a planet infested with monsters, just fight-o, y'all.
So Shokichi splits everyone into six groups, each one helmeted by an Officer, and these sub-units each board an emergency vehicle, taking off in different directions so as to avoid being all targeted by the Terraformars that have now covered most of the ship's outside. The plan is to reconvene on the ship that should still be viable after crash landing, take it back (how, though?) and capture some living Terraformars while they are it.
What could possibly go wrong? But worry not, we are told that a rescue ship is on its way and will arrive in 40 days. I honestly do not even see the point. By the time the rescue ship gets there, they will all be dead except maybe Shokichi who is plot shielded (thus far, that is). I guess the rescuers can still recover some Terraformars but odds are, they will also all be slaughtered.
Meanwhile, Hiruma's brother- you know, the other survivor from the Bugs 2 mission, twenty years prior- is still having a cryptic conversation with the professor. He speaks in Exposition and is the character whose lines I cannot, for the life of me, follow. He goes on about changes in the Bugs surgery, it can now use rarer insects and even other animals, about how Michelle and Akari are special because they descend from people who already had the surgery (Michelle's father was the captain of the Bugs 2 mission; as for Akari, we do not know and oddly enough he does not seem much interested. He is 20 years old so he must have been born shortly before or after the mission), rambles about politics and goes on into truly absurd levels of detail regarding Terraformar biology. We get pearls like [免疫寛容臓] which gets a ruby reading as 'Mosaic Organ'. To be fair, stringing kanji together like this is actually pretty common in scientific discussions. But it feels extremely ham fisted in this context. I do not think this manga really needs such language. It strikes me as an attempt to sound 'sciency' and serious. At the same time, Hiruma Jr. provides commentary that becomes ironic once the action flips back to Mars.
The problem is, as usual, this is so on the nose. Hiruma's remarks are immediately juxtaposed, panel by panel, it's as if the narrative fears readers' minds will wander off unless they have everything to make contrast parallels right before their eyes. In a way, this does give it a sense of immediacy but it is done over and over again. After a while, it becomes a bit tiresome.
Speaking of repetition:
But the real heroes are Michelle and Akari. I love Michelle and she is on fire in this one. We finally find out about her insect abilities and she tears into the Roaches like there's no tomorrow. She remains, as of this volume, the only woman who can really put up a fight. Akari is better suited at actually capturing the critters alive, though, as Michelle herself admits.
But the manga really has a thing for getting bogged down in insect trivia. This time it's not even just the narrator telling us about the bugs, now, we get to see and hear about the first entomologists- who get named, the poor dears- who found this rare ant. Did we need to know this? Probably not. Did we need to read part of their actual thesis about this ant's particular ability? No. I think these two experts have passed but they really should get to see what Terraformars did with their work.
If made up scientific terms is already a bit of an overreach, bringing a thesis into battle manga is just plain weird.
So is a long quotation from a history book about the versality and omnipresence of the net since prehistory. We are given this information just as a Terraformar struggles to escape from this special net that they made just for the propose of capturing them. It looks a bit silly in combination with an actual quotation. It is more stuff that it is not really needed.
I suspect these bits of information are there to pace the action some, otherwise the breakneck speed threatened to overwhelm the storytelling. The anime had a narrator deliver these lines in a truly solemn manner that absolutely cracked me up and I just hear his voice resounding in my mind, telling me all about the technical term about this particular ant or how nets were played such a role in the Neolithic period.
I have other problems: This volume picks up a terrible routine from the first one, namely, telling us about each female character's bra size. Each character has a brief presentation of sorts and along with eye color, birthday, favorite food and the like, we get the girls' bra size. And then, it decides to add a dash of homophobia as we learn that Shokichi is single and afraid that at the ripe age of 42 only other men will be interested in him. It is so gratuitous. There was no need for this. I already expect a lot of manga to simply blanket out queerness altogether and just erase it but going out of this way like this to jab at gay people, is just entirely uncalled for.
The plot thickens!! The power scale has increased and the fights are ramped up and still awesome. The artwork is still great and I’m excited to see what new things will be introduced in the next volume. I don’t think I’ll write many more reviews for this series as I see that it isn’t trying to be serious or be taken seriously. It’s a dumb action story about fighting with interesting plot progression that doesn’t make sense in the real world but does it have to? I think this series does what it and I want it too, so 5 stars. By no means a masterpiece but fun in its own right.
So the most powerful fighters and thereby officers are from Japan, Germany, China, USA, Russia and the Roma Federation... wow, not even France or South Korea, Britain or Israel? Also to be honest I only started this because I wanted to know what "Roma Federation" means here, and apparently "Roma" here stands for "Rome." Too bad.
And I am glad that I did not read any further: You see, their plan in case of roach emergency is to go into the 6 shuttles, fly in 6 directions and then try to recapture the ship... considered that 6 roaches somehow got into the ship before landing this means that they had been underestimated despite the "adaptations" they showed 20 years ago already, so they jump from the frying pan into the fire since they have no idea as to what will come. And here they straight up call it moss what covers the ground... if this is somehow a translation issue that they called it moss in volume 1 and algae (respectively dark algae like moss) in volume 2 and now moss again, this is the weirdest translation issue I have ever seen. And here we know why that one roach got the corpse of the woman with silkworm in her in volume 1, to have silk to make nets, that are apparently strong enough to catch the shuttle here, except how would it have known that she had that DNA (and why did she have that to begin with?) and that you could make nets with it? They don't produce that and the only plants on mars are moss. In fact: What are they eating anyhow? Moss? So the "Russian" team lands at the pyramids, apparently planned that, one of them gets killed and instead of killing the roach outright or get to a better defensible location since they are on enemy territory and don't know the numbers, they instead try to capture the roach that just killed one of them and so get another one captured. And the 1st Japanese-American team also try to catch the roach that hang on to their superfast shuttle instead of trying to kill it, thereby wasting time and resources on something that clearly should not be a priority right now, especially considered that according to volume 1 the roaches lay eggs so they should not have to worry about getting living samples. Apparently the roaches seen on earth in this volume were clones and in Germany they developed and produced nets to capture them... however apparently no one thought of developing poisons or weapons to beat the roaches or immobilize them.... or notice that their biology makes no sense in light of evolution. And now the roaches cannot only use the human weapons (which also don't look futuristic), but they can copy their bug-powers, somehow (plus the "human" roach of volume 1 is back) and the officers have even more powers (some special mosaic operation, I guess from a wider range of animals) and to explain all this we get some garbage about a roaches' organ for selective immune tolerance being used. Also, apparently Sheila was the ideal image of a woman for Marcos? Why? Because she did not run away when he and Alex suggested she was fair game and to be fucked when they first met? Later tried to save them from a gang just for the two to mess it up and her later crying in front of them and so making them "better?" And her death would not only have been avoidable if these morons (writer and characters) would get their priorities right here, but her death made Marcos go berserk and proof he can fight... wow, a woman dying to give plot to the men, never seen that before here. And apparently the writers think we are idiots as we get another explanation for the "operation"... as if we could forget it from one page to the next. And if these weren't everything, now we get told that Davis and Akari inherited their powers, she from the leader of Bugs02. Ignoring how that would not make sense in terms of inheritance, but she is 24, the Bugs02 was on Mars 20 years ago, why did he have the time and chance to sire her? And based on these pictures the roaches do not have skin but armor... that looks exactly like skin, including being bendable... you know it is really odd as to what laws of physics and biology the manga choses to follow and which not. And btw. the third group also prefers to catch roaches now instead of killing as many as possible until they regain the hold on the ship. Does anyone here (characters and writers) have the right priorities? Or are they incapable of having a plot any other way? Three thinks: 1) I have no desire to read any further. The roaches are probably genetically engineered and the writer thinks he hid it well. Or he is so dumb he thinks this is evolution. In fact I think this is very uncreative. 2) How come stuff like the Pokémon Jynx and the Phantom Menace are considered racist by so many but not this here? 3) Why on earth do the character profiles of the women all name their bra size????
J'ai beau m'accrocher c'est vraiment mauvais. Il est impossible de s'attacher au moindre personnage. Y a rien qui marche. Jusqu'aux uniformes qui sont ratés. D'où un manteau moule les seins sérieux ? Nuuuuul.
Some interesting concepts but is it racist (from some of the comments in Goodreads)? It could very well be or...not. The art and writing is visually well done and extremely fast paced. But 20+ volumes to go....
La nave cae...toca huir, peo huir con cuidado, ya que Marte esta lleno de bichos, pero ...si, hay pelea, mucho gore, puyitas aca y alla, pero nada mas, le falto algo del punch de los umeros pasados.
The crew is split up as they evacuate the main ship. More casualties to get samples. I don't like mindless villains but there are some hints of an intelligence in charge.
Un troisième tome vraiment surprenant, qui nous explique l'opération qu'ont subies les membres de la mission ANEX et en quoi elle est différente de celle des précédents groupes envoyés sur Mars. Les combats sont très bien faits, les dessins et le découpage réussis, et on s'attache aux personnages dont la situation semble très risquée face aux Terraformars.