The Fall 2019 Manga Guide

No Guns Life

What's It About? 

After the war, Juzo came back home to become a “resolver,” a sort of detective/enforcer hybrid helping to resolve the problems of other people like himself. And what that is is an “extended,” a person who has been augmented to have an extended lifetime and physical capabilities. In Juzo's case, that means that he was modified during the war, so he now has a gun for a head and another embedded in his hand. He can only use the hand gun, however, as he required someone else to pull the trigger for his head. He's still looking for a partner to do that, and in the meantime he's busy prowling the hard streets helping others, which gets him involved in a case about missing kids, illegal modification experiments, and a whole lot of trouble…

No Guns Life is written and illustrated by Tasuku Karasuma. It was released by Viz in September and is available in hard copy ($12.99) or digitally ($8.99).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I can't decide if No Guns Life is a straight-up science fiction reworking of the hard boiled genre or if it's a parody thereof. There's certainly enough evidence for both: protagonist Juzo is a hard-bitten, tough-talking ex-soldier who came back from the war without a clear idea of what life held for him, so he turned to investigation and protection to keep himself in cigarettes. (Or “cigarets,” if I'm being period-accurate. Yes, I have problems, why do you ask?) That's pretty standard for your average Sam Spade knockoff; where things get weird is that in the war Juzo fought, he and other soldiers underwent body modifications to make them more useful fighters – and in Juzo's case, his head is now a pistol.

So I guess I'm leaning towards parody?

The gun head aside, No Guns Life really does run like a classic hard-boiled detective novel, although I suppose he's more Continental Op than Sam Spade. Juzo has no problem putting his old war skills to work for the downtrodden (for a price, of course), and once he takes a job, he sees it through, come hell or high water. In this volume, that case is a missing kid, who turns out to be a runaway kid, who may actually be a kidnapped kid, things we discover in such a way as to actually make the whole convoluted thing make sense. It's all wrapped up in the company that pioneered the technique of creating the Extended, and they've definitely run off the rails since the war ended. Although it isn't said, there's a sense that the lack of military oversight allowed them to let their greed take over, and now they're a full-on evil corporation. Juzo may not like kids, but he has a job to do, and I suspect that a piece of him wants to help the boy who initially hired him to see himself as a person, not a tool like Juzo spent years being told he was. Underneath all of the crazy science, there's an almost Gangsta.-like story here, with the same sort of humanity buried under tough talk and running gags about where Juzo's eyes are.

There's also one very specific joke that Tasuku Karasuma allows us to see but never spells out, which I very much appreciate. Juzo's job is as a “resolver,” but his head is a “revolver,” which maybe isn't the cleverest gag, but it's sort of a fun play on words, and the fact that it's never explicitly stated in the volume is a great example of everyone's least favorite writing advice, show don't tell. That's actually something Karasuma generally is good at; the text and image work together nicely, rarely (if ever) overstating something that we can either see or read. Add in the translation that allows for the hard-boiled parallels to shine through, and this is a well put together book – not one of my favorites, because the child torture is a bit much for me, but definitely far more entertaining than I was expecting it to be.

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Faye Hopper

Rating:

No Guns Life is stupid. Really, really stupid. Parts of it play like legitimate parody, like our hard-boiled, gun-for-a-head private dick (or fixer, or whatever Noir trope he's supposed to embody) ‘Juzo the Resolver’ solemnly affirming that he ‘only lets close friends touch his trigger’, or him tearing apart the entire cyberpunk Hellscape in order to find his favorite brand of cigarette (which, it's worth noting, he doesn't smoke because they help him ‘sustain his physical function’, no; he only does it cuz he likes the taste, like a true blue bad-ass). But make no mistake, this is as authentic a cyberpunk neo-noir as they come. It's got the full monty: Vague anti-capitalist and anti-state sentiments without the specificity needed to make those undercurrents actually resonant, a world ravaged by war where body augmentations have disseminated to every street corner and slum, and a tough, chain-smoking vet with a heart of gold underneath the bluster and cold steel and—oh my god I can't take any of this seriously HIS CRANIUM IS HOUSED INSIDE A REVOLVER HOW DID THIS—

…Anywhoo. The surprising thing about No Guns Life given its patent its absurdity is how forgettable and tepid its basic story is. So, get this: The government has been kidnapping and experimenting on children. Crazy, right? But, and this is the especially wild part, one of the children has escaped! And the only person who can help him elude the G-men (or the hitwoman dressed up as a nun who takes off her religious garb to reveal Quiet from MGSV's outfit, yes I insist this is all far less interesting than it seems) and use his ridiculously powerful weapons-tech for good is our bullet-headed main man Juzo! Radical, huh?! Yeah…the main problem with No Guns Life is that it doesn't lean hard enough into what makes it unique and potentially fun (i.e., sheer freakin' ridiculousness), and instead emphasizes the exact same boilerplate cyberpunk plotline that has relegated a genre with a lot of radical ideas and historical import to niche near-irrelevancy. It doesn't help that the art is a little messy and the paneling difficult to follow. This is the kind of thing that could be saved by lavish aesthetic quality, and instead the art is like the story: Some silliness, some invention, but nowhere near enough. No Guns Life is a chimera of things I like (the humanism and style of Blade Runner, the bizarre cyber-modified killing machines of Battle Angel Alita) that I found equal parts baffling and bland. I laughed my butt off at the first few pages and their self-serious stupidity, but after that, it's Johnny Mnemonic if Keanu had a gunpowder-based noggin. Which…ok yeah, sounds amazing in description, but in execution? Sadly, it's anything but.