Reviews by Ivan the Terrible

Pik Lando (no, not Lando Calrissian) is a smuggler whose ship, The Tinker's Damn, looks ratty and neglected but is actually in excellent shape. Lando is a master of deception and good at the smuggling business, but he has an honest side to him too.

Lando is hired to help a pacifist doctor named Wendy Wendeen, whose community The Chosen are at war with powerful corporation Mega-Metals for control of the planet Angel (which has a "halo" -- check the cover art). The Chosen want only a place to live, farm and raise their families, while Mega-Metals wants to mine the planet for metals. Lando isn't too keen on going against Mega-Metals until a brutal event makes it a personal thing for him.

Lando and Wendy develop a physical relationship, but their differing personalities make a lasting relationship impossible, something that hurts Lando more than he ever expected it to. However, he sticks to his guns and adheres to the agreement made, even though he is risking his life unnecessarily in doing so.

Deitz has a decent writing style, though a bit inconsistent, which can be distracting at times. He also jumps relentlessly from one character's mind to another within the same chapter, which works for character development but works against storytelling. Also, the final few chapters of the book are more like a mini-story that feel like a set-up for a sequel (and it has two sequels) and make a somewhat clumsy if action-packed ending for the book.

So, it's okay. Not great, but okay.

I liked Drifter enough to pick up this sequel and give it a read. This book remembers the continuity established by its predecessor, but it doesn't pick up immediately where it left off. Instead, we join Pik Lando sometime later, when he's on the run and down on his luck. Even his beautiful new ship is gone.

Dietz's writing style doesn't change much, remaining at times satisfying and at times distracting. He does well in describing his characters, but very few of them really have very much development. Luckily, the ones who are developed to any great extent are the most important ones in the story.

The way this book is written makes each chapter feel like a new episode of an ongoing TV series. It seems as though Dietz couldn't think of any other way to flesh this book's story out, so he threw in a bunch of hardly consequential sub-plots that usually end the chapter after they begin. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't exactly an award-winning idea, either.

The plot, such as it is, involves Lando joining the tiny crew of a tug ship called, appropriately, the Junk. The Captain spends most of his time inebriated, the engineer, Cy, is a floating cyborg orb (see the cover) and most of the business stuff is taken care of by the Captain's young daughter Melissa, who hires Lando. Lando proves to be a more effective father figure than Melissa's own father, and this is one of the really good points of the book. The relationship they build is a solid one, and it's hard to not feel sympathy for Melissa.

The book also has a few more humorous moments in it than the previous one, especially with Cy and various other machines. Cy, in fact, is good mainly for getting himself into trouble, though he manages to redeem himself in a big way later on.

This book ranks about equal with the first one. I may check out the third one at some point.

Drifter's War, the final book in the trilogy of smuggler Pik Lando, is the best book of the three, and a satisfying conclusion to an average-to-slightly-above-average sci-fi series. The title is apt, as Lando is indeed caught up in a pretty big war, and a rather grim-looking one at that.

This time, a race called the Il-Ronnians wants the entity known as "God" on a planet populated by light and heavy constructs. It takes quite a bit of deduction to come to the realization of who God actually is, and I won't spoil it by revealing it here.

Lando is still part of Captain Sorenson's crew (the crew he joined in the previous book), and unlike Drifter's Run, Drifter's War reads less like a series of related episodes and more like a true single story. It kind of takes a while for the real meat of the plot to show up to the table, but the appetizers are satisfying enough.

Of course, Cap and Cy being the troublemakers they are, things are not easy for our heroes, and the crap really hits the fan early on in the story. Lando and Melissa (Cap's daughter), close companions by now, work well together and manage a pretty daring escape, while Lando's lover Della does her best to keep the pathetic Cap alive. Cy, as always, gets himself up to his non-existent ears in gambling debts.

Every member of the crew has a chance to shine in this book, and it's rather fun to see how each one deals with being in the hot seat. Perhaps the most moving sequence, however, is when Cap finally makes a decision to act, and his heroic effort has enormous impact. I wasn't expecting him to do what he did (and again, I won't reveal what it is) and was a little surprised at how much I cared. The old fool grew on me, I guess.

Overall, while still not really a great book, Drifter's War is a definite improvement over its predecessors, and a decent read for any lover of science-fiction.

Not much story here, but any fan of Lightning Warrior Raidy isn't going to go into a manga such as this expecting a detailed story. A fun adaptation of the game series, with a lot of very interesting art from multiple contributors. Fans of the games will like this.

This manga adaptation is very different from the anime; in this version, Yohko has no parents and receives her devil hunting powers and yoma ring from a goat spirit instead of her grandmother. As it isn't available in English, I can't describe the story too accurately, but I can say that it involves an evil spirit with the ability to transcend time. The art is wonderful and a great deal of fun to look at. I wish this had been given a translation, but I suppose there simply wasn't a big enough international audience. Pity.

The third Legends book is a fun one, with Street Fighter III cast member Ibuki taking the spotlight this time around. Joined by fellow SF3 fighters Elena, Mokato and Oro (along with a familiar figure from the original Street Fighter game), Ibuki runs herself ragged in her double life as a ninja and a high school student.

It's a familiar sort of story and offers no surprises, but that's not really the point here. We're mainly reading about a rather fun and popular character from Capcom's cash cow franchise and learning a bit more about her. It certainly doesn't hurt that, like all of Udon's Street Fighter graphic novels, this one is very well-drawn and features a lead character who is quite easy on the eyes.

While better than and not as goofy as the Sakura installment of the Legends series, Ibuki's volume doesn't quite reach Chun Li's level and in places feels a little rushed. The story also feels a tad disorganized, with some things being revealed either too early or too late and thus feeling either overlooked or just thrown in. This doesn't harm the overall story too much, but it makes it less effective than Chun Li's nicely-told story. It also doesn't feature the explosive sort of climax that Chun Li's story did, either, and thus we go from one anti-climactic battle right into another. One would expect a bit more real fighting and struggling. This is, after all, Street Fighter.

Still Ibuki's story is a fun read and any fan of the character should have a good time with it. Hopefully Cammy is the next in line for a Legends entry; hers is long overdue, if you ask me.

This is the predecessor in the Legends series to the superior Chun Li volume (which was technically volume 2). Unlike Chun Li's well-crafted story, Sakura's volume is a sit-com with some fighting thrown in, and some fun cameos from a few notable Rival Schools characters (since, after all, Sakura crossed over into the original Rival Schools game). This volume is pure fan service, but of the far goofier variety. There are moments that are genuinely funny, but for the most part, it doesn't really reel you in the way Chun Li's story does since so much of it is so ridiculous. The art and effects are really good, though, and the supplemental materials at the end are fascinating for fans and practitioners of the craft of drawing at all levels. Worth the price of admission if you're a Street Fighter fan (or just a fan of Sakura or even Udon), but for those who want some real storytelling to go with their art, Chun Li's book is the must-have.

Nicely-told story of what eventually led up to Chun Li's losses and reasons to enter the Street Fighter tournament. None of the familiar SF characters that appear appear needlessly; they all have a role to play. The action is good and the art is a real treat for the eyes. Recommended for SF fans, especially Chun Li fans.

The second Junk Force novel brings us back into the world of post-apocalyptic Earth, where water is the most precious thing one can possess. Liza, Wooty, Louis, Mill and Mamet continue their trek to find the ZPT across six loosely-connected stories.

This novel suffers from the same problems as its predecessor: sloppy writing and editing. It's clear author Hideki Kakinuma is more comfortable as a scriptwriter for anime and manga than he is as a literary writer. He seldom goes into great detail on anything other than technology and has a narrative style that is rather unsophisticated and under-developed. It doesn't help that the editing team at Dr. Master Publications didn't seem very interested in much other than the task of translating the text; scattered punctuation errors and sentences that begin without capital letters are distracting at best, made all the worse by formatting problems and no effort in the English-language sentence structure. Instead of taking the time to make the stories easier to read so they might flow more smoothly, the editors left them as is, creating the wrong sort of challenge for the reader. Lack of attention creates moments of unintended hilarity, such as this gem:

"Owww! I think I threw out my back!" Louis writhed on the floor looking very much like he had thrown out his back.

It's a shame more care wasn't put into this book, as the stories it tells are a lot of fun, and the illustrations accompanying them are high-quality and fun to look at. The strength of the stories themselves (particularly "The Old Castle" and "The Lakeside Town") and the illustrations are what earn this book three out of five stars. If the text quality and narrative structure were on par with those things, this book would be a perfect five. The casual reader isn't really going to be drawn into this book, but Junk Force fans will at least appreciate the illustrations and the scant fan service they offer if nothing else.

It makes me wish I could re-edit and re-release these novels; with the right care, they would be worth reading by anyone looking for a good story.

Before he gave the world The Dirty Pair, sci-fi author Haruka Takachiho created a space opera series focusing on a team of galactic mercenaries called Crusher Joe. Crushers, the mercenaries in question, would do anything for a client if the price was right. And the titular Joe and his team would frequently find that the jobs they were hired for were much larger than they first appeared.

While the series mostly appeared in literary form as The Dirty Pair would later, a series of manga stories was produced as well. These stories were not constructed with deep plots; they usually allowed the action and the characters to carry most of the weight. The charm of Crusher Joe comes mainly from the comical antics of Joe and his teammates (the fawning Alfin, motormouthed Ricky, the cyborg Talos and the robot Dongo), whether aboard their ship, the Minerva, or anywhere else they happened to be. It also presented a number of well-drawn action scenes that artist Fujihiko Hosono made seem effortless. There was just the right amount of attention to detail without the panels ever becoming too busy or cluttered.

Crusher Joe eventually went on to spawn an animated feature film before falling into the shadow of its more successful successor, but that fortunately did not stop it from finding an American audience as well. While Animeigo handled the movie, the now long-defunct Studio Ironcat brought over the manga in a single-volume paperback (ISBN 1-929090-02-1; $15.95).

Joe and his team take on seemingly simple missions that prove full of surprises, though aside from a nicely-handled flashback in the first of the book's three stories, the characters are never examined too closely. We're left to learn all we can about them through their words and actions; very little else about them is ever revealed. We're engaged by them mostly through how they treat and react to one another and their surroundings, while the stories' villains are given little more than stock personalities and motives. However, this isn't meant to be a groundbreaking series. It's meant to be a series of fun romps through space, and it is.

Though out of print for some time, the Crusher Joe manga can still be found through online retailers such as Amazon, and fans of Takachiho or the Dirty Pair would find it worth their while to snag a copy. Aside from a few very minor spelling flubs, Studio Ironcat did its job well and gave us a nice, easy-to-read translation. There really isn't a whole lot of substance here, but there is plenty of adventure and fun. And sometimes that's all we really need.