Patlabor, Mobile Police

Publisher
Viz
Country of origin
Japan
Year
1998

Mobile Police Patlabor: Volume 1

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
7th Apr 05

Mobile Police Patlabor was the creation of a five person team known as “Headgear”, featuring some soon to be well known names like Mamoru Oshi.

Set towards (what was then the future) the end of the 20th century, where the polar ice caps had begun to melt at an incredible rate and Tokyo was at the waters mercy. The “Babylon Project”, an idea of lifting Tokyo above the rising water line (and creating more real estate at the same time), which was highly acclaimed to be a great “idea” just wasn’t possible with the current technology, until the invention of the Labor mobile suit. This suddenly made not only the Babylon Project possible for Tokyo but would help in general construction and maintenance the world round. Shortly after the introduction of the Labor, problems arose; some Labors would go haywire or be sabotaged and Labors were being used more and more for criminal activates. So much so that the police commissioned a division that would combat Labor crime with Labors. The police were given Labors by some of the big companies and called the Patrol Labors or Patlabors for short.

Our story starts as Tokyo Police’s Special Vehicles Division is expanding and looking for new Pilots and staff. The SV would be split in half to form the SV1 and SV2 and both would contain to sections. SV2’s two sections, Section One containing half of the original SV division’s crew, and Section Two being made up of totally new personnel, and it’s these new recruits that the story shall follow.

This volume shows us how Section Two, or at least the majority of it, is formed. We are introduced to a couple of main characters in the first half (the manga is spilt into two halves, “Prologue” and “The Right Staff”). Noa Izumi is a young female candidate, who has a bit of a Labor fetish, we see be “scouted” as it were by the leader of section two Captain Goto. We’re also introduced to Asuma Shinohara, trigger happy Isao Ota and Chief Engineer Seitaro Sakaki amongst others. Patlabor is very much Police Academy meets giant robots (although much better than most, if not all, of the Police Academy films). The majority of pages are played for laughs rather than drama and the volume is also full of hardcore mecha-on-mecha action (does that sound weird?).

The artwork is clean and crisp with very little distraction from what’s happening, the action sections are carried of extremely well. Other than Noa very few other characters get a lot of development, but this is very early on in the series, and Noa is pretty much the “main character” (the series doesn’t become much more of an mixed bag until later, but Noa does take the majority of the focus for Patlabor).

The only problem with the series is its publisher VIZ, having first released the manga a few years ago VIZ pulled it after two volumes due to lack of sales. They’ve recently re-issued it, however they may now re-release Patlabor in a new format (most likely left-to-right as they did with the Evangelion manga) meaning some people may end up with different sizes and shapes in their collection, something that does tend to bug people.

The large format manga also includes some mechanical files on the various Labors featured, a timeline of the Patlabor anime, notes on Patlabor’s geography and a short biography of the manga’s writer (and former member of Headgear) Masami Yuki..

The Patlabor manga is a great read, now is someone would just release the OVAs/TV series and the third movie on region two DVD.

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 7th Apr 05