It’s not hard to see that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is going to end horribly for everyone involved. The book opens with pictures of fifteen characters, eight boys and six girls. They are the main characters of the book, the ones who will be piloting the giant robot against whatever threats care to invade Earth. Save for one younger girl, they’re all in the seventh grade.

The cast feels distressingly large. Not helping matters any is the way that the characters fade into a vague blur shortly after they each deliver personal introductions. We know their names, we know their ages, we know their relationship to each other (friends, with a sidebar for family), and that’s it. We’re instantly faced with a cast that means nothing to us.

Generally, large casts can mean a couple of different things. In the case of Lord of the Rings, a large cast is an opportunity for an author to tell several stories at once by splitting the cast into smaller, more manageable pieces. In Uncanny X-Men or Legion of Superheroes, a sprawling cast allows for serial storytelling that has a fresh, but regular, cast. In Bokurano: Ours, the cast is so large because basically all of these children are going to die.

The story should sound familiar to fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Fifteen young kids sign a contract to play a game with a giant robot. They soon find out that the robot is real, the threats are deadly, and the robot is powered by their lives. After the threat is defeated, a person’s life force is sapped and they fall down dead. Later, when another threat appears, another pilot is chosen and the process is repeated.

Bokurano: Ours feels like a counter-shonen comic. A lot of shonen comics, like American adventure comics, revolve around wish fulfillment. The scrawny nerd gets powers, the village idiot finds out that he’s the most important person of all, a fighter becomes the best in the world, and a dumb kid no one likes ends up being the only person who can save the world.

Mecha stories, in particular, have had that leaning since the dawn of mecha fiction, whether it was a kid pushing buttons on a remote control in Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Tetsujin #28/Gigantor or a manly man in a cockpit in Go Nagai’s Mazinger Z. Series like Robotech/Macross and the Gundam franchise, along with dozens of others with names like Super Bestial Machine God Dancougar, push and pull at the limits of the genre, swapping in military fiction, romance, and science fiction for childlike wonder or doofy plots, but the core essentially remains the same: giant robots are awesome and it is awesome to be the guy who is the hero. This parallels the superhero genre, which features works that dabble or indulge in science fiction, pulp, noir, romance, and other themes, but are still undeniably superheroic.

Neon Genesis Evangelion shows what happens when a kid who is genuinely special is given a robot and expected to do his job under very adult stresses. Shinji Ikari, pilot of EVA-01, becomes a misanthrope and collapses under the strain. The show is a maelstrom of hurt feelings, depression, cruelty, great robot fights, absolutely disappointing decisions. It takes the wish fulfillment and spins it on its head, directly contrasting the visceral cool factor of a giant robot fighting a strange monster with the severe emotional trauma that the characters experience.

Bokurano: Ours follows in a similar, but parallel, vein, aggressively setting up typically shonen characters and situations (the hard working older brother caring for his orphaned siblings, the cruel aristocrat, the shy but observant girl, the loudmouth) and blowing the wind out of any attempt at pulling wish fulfillment from the tale.

While Bokurano: Ours is pretty emotionally manipulative at times, I can’t deny that it is also effective at what it does. The personality and home lives of the characters are set up by brief stories before and during the fight begins. Their backgrounds are generally something you’ve seen before, whether it’s the kid who learned the wrong lesson from a display of power or someone who finds meaning in soccer. These shortcuts let Kitoh get to the point quicker, since your memories of shonen stories allows you to fill in the blanks.

The deaths are understated and bloodless. Characters simply collapse. The first is particularly well done, looking like a horrible accident, and the aftermath of it is treated as such. Bokurano: Ours is not exploitative, exactly, but Kitoh is more than willing to stack the deck to make you feel sad.

The art’s good, and Kitoh is particularly skilled at conveying surprise and paying attention to realistic posture. Some of the giant robot fights lean a little too much toward the incomprehensible for me, due in no small part to the cool, but off-kilter, designs of the robots, but it works. My favorite parts by far are the ones that just feature humans, but Kitoh is good at delivering large-scale destruction.

Bokurano: Ours isn’t bad, but it is definitely bleak. Watching as fifteen kids are slowly picked off while saving the world is a depressing prospect, even with the unstated possibility that one of them figures out a trick to not die after their tour of duty. You can read the first volume for free on SIGIKKI.com, plus a couple chapters of the second. Bokurano: Ours, Vol. 1 is pretty cheap on Amazon, just ten bucks, but I’d suggest you try it before you buy it. It feels like an acquired taste, and I don’t think I can put my full support behind it yet.

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Posted in comic books, manga, reviews by david brothers |