This past week I finished reading Tezuka Osamu’s Dororo. I’ve read a few of Tezuka’s other works, including Apollo’s Song, Black Jack, and Ode to Kirihito, but I haven’t written about any of them partly because I can’t shake the feeling of audacity in passing judgment on someone of his stature (it’s for similar reasons I haven’t written about, say, Shakespeare). I’ll just shake off that feeling for now, though, and share my impressions of this one.
Tadano Nobuaki’s 7 Billion Needles starts off right, with an extremely introverted girl walking by the sea and noticing what at first looks like a shooting star, but which then turns towards her and incinerates her.
Awesome.
She gets better, though, and also gets drafted into helping to hunt down an extraterrestrial menace which threatens all life on Earth.
Clearly, Tadano’s story, based on Hal Clement’s Needle, jumps right into the action. For good reason, too - the whole series is only four relatively short volumes, and Tadano keeps up a brisk pace throughout. On one hand, this means that there’s never a dull moment, no need to pad out the story to make it longer, nor any sense of rushing to finish too quickly. On the downside, there’s not a lot of depth here, and a couple fairly major changes in characters’ personalities come too abruptly (for those who’ve read it already, I’m thinking especially of the change in the relationship between Horizon and Maelstrom). Overall, though, the comic is as close to a perfect length for this story as one can reasonably expect.