Hello. Did you miss me?

Despite their apparent deaths years back, Mondo and Tatsuma from Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko are back as the lead characters again.

Also showing up – that blonde haired girl from Harenchi Gakuen. The girl who isn’t secretly a ninja. You know, the one who is the template for characters like Gamia Q from Mazinger amongst many, many other Nagai heroines with the same haircut. For the life of me I can’t find any reference to her in English so I’m stumped on her name. More on Harenchi Gakuen later when we get to the arc that deals with the main characters from that strip.

And apparently there’s some Mao Dante stuff in here too, though I’ll be damned if I can find it!

Once again, as seems to be the way with Mondo & Tatsuma, this story takes all sorts of twists and turns, and could do with translating. Particularly as this is the first arc where the lady Violence Jack plays a significant part in the action. So take all this with a pinch of salt.

Mondo & Tatsuma find themselves once more caught between various factions. This time it’s a corrupt police force who are in league with a biker gang and the armies of the Slum King. They are arrested and taken to where the police enjoy torturing folks. Here they meet a dude with a scar on his face, who may be the chief in Mao Dante at a stretch, but I’m not sure. Oh and the girl from Harenchi Gakuen, who the scar faced guy is interrogating. The guys beat up their captors, steal the weapons and free the girl, with the pair taking their time to dress up as cops on the way.

Elsewhere we see Lady Violence Jack swing into town and get into a brawl at the local saloon. And the aforementioned biker gang is engaging the army of the Slum King. The gang are led by this big dude.

Learning that he’s now fighting on two fronts – Slum King on one side, Lady Violence Jack, Mondo & Tatsuma on the other, he returns to town and faces off with the femme-Jack. His gang persue her, only to run into Violence Jack himself!

In the meantime though, our heroes have got caught again, and so are tied up naked and whipped. Bondage is still equal opportunity in Go Nagai’s world! Eventually the Slum King’s army attacks the town and Mondo & Tatsuma convince the corrupt cops to let them out so they can help fight the army.

In the middle of the war, Jack and the biker gang leader face off in a fight that takes on a mystical element the pair becoming giants that fill the sky in a cosmic battle. All very Jim Starlin.

Needless to say, I have no idea what’s going on here. Then a berserk Jack attacks Mondo once again, this time just knocking him out.

This may be the first of the seinen era arcs that feels like the 70s material. This is mainly down to the shock material being kept to a minimum. It’s closer to the late 70s material though, while there’s some fantastic cosmic scenes like the one above, it doesn’t approach the pure cartooning energy of prime Nagai. In terms of understanding the overall series, this is one that could really use translating over the two gorey arcs we’ve had scanlated and the more recent strips.

NEXT! Iron Muscle! And the end of that Susano-OH storyline from the Dragon Fort chapter!

Well by the looks of things, Shin Mazinger’s Tsubasa Nishikori did have a pre-Violence Jack appearance. And the looks of things being this post.

She appeared in Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko (Guerilla High) alongside her co-stars in her Violence Jack arc. Obviously had I been able read Japanese I wouldn’t have missed it as they have the same name, but relying of visuals it’s hard to spot them as the same character. Because this version was a bikini clad, gun toting leader of a gang of mod motorcycling girls.

Apparently she also shows up up Susano-OH too, but I can’t find that appearance in what I’ve got of that series.

Oh boy.

This and the following arc, Golden City, are frankly far more complicated than my lack of Japanese language skills allow me to fully comprehend. However, I’m not even sure being able to read the language would fully explain some of what goes on here. Particularly as Go Nagai himself seems to pretend some of what happens in these arcs didn’t actually happen.

The guest stars here are the two leads from Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko aka “The Most Boring Guy In School” aka “Guerilla High“. It ran in 1970 and picks up some themes from Harenchi Gakuen (“Shameless School”), but places more focus on the violence and is both a satire on student uprisings and on Nagai’s own experience with the PTA protests at Shameless School (though that book itself does that far better).

The first volume plays out like a western, the remaining like a horror film. The “hero”, Mondo feels like a prototype Akira Fudo or Violence Jack, and visually Nagai draws on that particularly in the next arc. He also resembles the character Ryoma from Getter Robo, which is unlikely to be a coincidence as Ken Ishikawa was reportedly heavily involved with Gakuen Taikutsu Otoko too.

The other character pulled from that series is a character called Tatsuma. Arguably this could be seen as a precursor to Ryo in Devilman, being the androgynous male sidekick/rival of the hero. However Tatsuma takes his androgyny a few steps further, being introduced as a girl and basically being a Nagai heroine’s head on a male body.

In Violence Jack they are similarly a couple of would be revolutionaries who pre-Earthquake appear to be planning some sort of armed uprising. During the Earthquake they had somehow been arrested and locked up in prison (this is the first time we see that there is some sort of organised civilisation still in Japan beyond the Slum King’s domain).

They escape, have a tussle with some gangsters who they dispatch despite being handcuffed, then run into Violence Jack who frees them from their cuffs. AND IT’S RIGHT ABOUT HERE I START GETTING LOST.

They get into an argument, Jack beats them up, ties them up (here’s your bondage for this chapter folks) and drags them through the wasteland. They wake up in what appears to be pre-Earthquake Japan, then things start going all Golden Age Spectre on them as they are forced to relive the Earthquake over and over again, until finally…

Those are just three pages out of an amazing sequence where they appear to be confronted by the souls of those whose deaths they’d been indirectly responsible during their revolutionary days. It’s fantastic stuff.

Taught their lesson (or are they?), they find themselves back in the real world and wander off into the sunset. Cut to what is the start of the most puzzling aspect of Violence Jack for me:

Yes, THREE Violence Jacks. The one we all know and love. A Lady Violence Jack and a Kid Violence Jack. WHAT IS GOING ON?!? Seriously, if anyone can explain the deal with the other Jacks I’d love to know. I can follow all the stuff with Ryo, Maki, Slum King and so forth and how that ties to Devilman, but this bewilders and befuddles me.

Up until now, Jack has been kind of a giant tough guy, here though he clearly has supernatural powers and that’s an important shift in the story. Occasionally we will see him portrayed more like a mortal, but there’s a lot of future stories where he is portrayed with this power.

Actually in retrospect, outside of the argument Mondo and Tatsuma have with Jack and the dialogue between the Jacks on the last few pages that wasn’t too confusing. Let’s see what Golden City holds though…