Just about everybody knows Yasuhiro Nightow’s Trigun. If you’ve ever been to a comics or anime show, you can barely go five minutes without running into a Vash the Stampede or tripping over a Wolfwood cross-gun. The Trigun manga crushed the charts, the anime owned Adult Swim. Trigun is the genre mashup to end all genre mashups, a science-fiction/western/drama/comedy that seems to be pouring off a forty-foot-high screen instead of a five-by-seven-inch page. But, as great as Trigun is, it’s old Nightow news.
In recent years, Nightow-sensei has been crafting his dream project, Kekkai Sensen, or Blood Blockade Battlefront as the master titles his English-language edition. In many ways, the two series couldn't be more different. Instead of featuring the most dangerous man in the galaxy, hunted by every maniacal brigand wanting a piece of a sixty billion double-dollar bounty, B3 stars Leonard Watch, an everyman among everymen. The setting is not a far-flung world, but New York City (although NYC is almost another planet). But that’s where the normalcy ends.
This New York has undergone a serious makeover. A dimensional rift opened over the Big Apple, creating a gateway to the Beyond. In one terrible night, the city was destroyed and rebuilt, trapping New Yorkers and extradimensional creatures alike in an impenetrable bubble. But life goes on in the rechristened New Jerusalem, a paranormal melting pot where madness dwells alongside the mundane, where every form of vermin gathers to exploit otherworldly assets for earthly profit. If the bubble is ever breached, the horrors from Beyond will flood the world—and there are those who intend to do just that.
Which is where the agents of Libra come in, a mysterious group of powerful operatives pledged to make sure that whatever happens in New Jerusalem stays in New Jerusalem. And, as it so happens, little Leo is not as humdrum as he appears—or he even thinks—possessing “the eyes of the gods,” making him a valuable (and somewhat less than eager) recruit into Libra’s ranks. Leo is running with the big dogs now, and he soon learns that the crazy world in which he lives is far more insane that he ever imagined.
And for readers, one helluvalot more fun! Blood Blockade Battlefront Volume 5 drops February 12...and explodes on impact!
—Chris Warner
Senior Editor