A short one this time as frankly, outside of fighting there isn’t a whole lot going on here.
Remember how Mondo and Tatsuma got gruesomely killed in the last arc? Well we open with them alive and well and wandering through the wilderness once more, as they glimpse a great dragon cleave through the land.
Way, way back, early on we had Violence Jack superimposed with a lion over him, well this dragon is actually the Slum King’s cavalry that is charging across Japan murdering and a pillaging as they go. We see a unit of them terrorise a village, before Jack appears and starts laying waste to them (of course not before the villains have beheaded a few innocent civilians themselves!). Seeing this the leader of the charge decides to break out the heavy weapons and they managed to slow Jack down with a barrage of missile fire before fleeing.
The injured Jack is rescued by Jun Hono, who luckily now has a sidecar attached to her motorcycle that will accomodate a 10 foot tall killing machine!
However they are followed and Jun ends up gunned down, which leads to another strange sequence similiar to the one that Mondo and Tatsuma went through, however here it appears the same powers that were used to make those hoodlums relive the Earthquake, heal Jun and she’s reborn in a peaceful park surrounded by a sheer cliff face.
Having managed to really get on Jack’s bad side, Jack proceeds to kill the remaining members of the cavalry charge. When the full force of the cavalry attacks hits Jack, the art shifts to show a giant Jack fighting a giant dragon. This shift in visuals is something that happens again and again when the series restarts in the 80s, eventually becoming a plot point one of the arcs. But more on that in later posts!
This is an odd ending to the 70s run, especially after an arc that feels more like a finality. It’s more upbeat that Golden City, in that Jun gets to live in some kind of paradise (heaven?) after her death as opposed to the ignoble ends Mondo and Tatsuma met. At the same time there’s still lot of dangling threads.
NEXT: Violence Jack returns in the 1980s. Guest starring Terrence Stamp!