Jabberwocky 1914, vol. 4

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Jabberwocky 1914, vol. 4, Masato Hisa. Grade: A-
Sometimes it's hard to keep track of when certain manga that I like are about to come out. Often, it's a matter of my remembering the title and wondering, "isn't it about time for the next book to hit the shelves?" Then I go to Amazon.co.jp, or to the info kiosk in a bookstore, and check for release dates. That's what happened with Jabberwocky 1914. Turned out that volume 4 came out in November, and I'd never seen it on the store "new releases" shelves (that happens with titles that someone decides might be a bit "too adult" for the general public to know about). Junkudo was sold out, but the neighboring Maruzen store still had one copy left.

J1914 was a sequel to Hisa's original Jabberwocky series, in which dinosaurs had never died out. Instead, they hid in the shadows, and attempted to manipulate humans into killing each other off. J1914 picks up with Lily Apricot, a mercenary dinosaur hunter, and her adopted son (the dinosaur teenager, Samoed) and daughter (Shelty) in the middle of the battlefields of Europe trying to prevent the dinosaurs from wiping out humans in WW I. Lily is kind of an alcoholic who loves fire bombs; Samoed is a master gunfighter, and Shelty is an off-the-wall (literally) driver. In volume three, the group followed the orders of British intelligence mastermind Bruceloyd to face off against the killer dinosaur, Jango. Jango escaped, but the rest of the crew he was with were defeated.

Volume 4 starts out with a guy with a heavily scarred face, Eight, being airdropped onto a zeppelin to assassinate the top 10 dinosaur generals. However, Jango was also in the airship, and he waits until the generals issue the orders to trick America into entering the War before killing them so that the orders can't be cancelled. When Eight gets into the dining room with all the corpses, he decides to fight Jango just for the challenge of it. Turns out that Jango can use the newly-discovered Schrodinger "infinite probabilities" principle to see what all the possible outcomes of a battle are, and then collapse the unwanted ones to tell him what action to take to get the result he wants. In effect, he's able to control the future on a small, limited scale. He defeats Eight and escapes. Eight meets up with Bruceloyd, and the two of them track down Lily to set up a mission to kill Jango.

The problem is that Lily hates Eight, and he is Shelty's true father. Worse, Samoed also demonstrated the Schrodinger talent in volume 3, and Bruceloyd wants to use the boy in the upcoming fight. And, if the boy's skill looks to be a threat to humans, Eight is to kill him as well. Jango is currently hiding in the dinosaur egg nursery in Antarctica (which is where Lily and her dinosaur lover, Sabata, stole Samoed's egg from 17 years earlier. Jango killed Sabata during the egg heist.) So, that's where everyone goes. Ultimately, we learn that Jango's plan is to jack into Samoed's power (which ends up looking like a really creepy sex scene) to travel backward through all of the past collapsed infinite world probability fields to the one moment millions of years ago when one of the dinosaur ancestors failed to kill a newly-evolved mammal destined to be a direct ancestor of the hated humans. If Jango can use Samoed to kill that beast, humans will never have existed. As part of that plan, Jango captures Samoed and forces the boy into a mindless Schrodinger state that panics Bruceloyd into ordering Eight into killing Shelty as a way of sending the boy over the edge and render him useless to Jango. Eight shoots, there's blood everywhere, and Shelty collapses. Samoed is indeed pushed over the edge at the loss of his sister - "there's no more futures with her in them" - and Jango uses this state to reach back through probabilities to that wretched little mammal.

--- Spoilers ---

Lily's lover, Sabata, also had the Schrodinger talent, and when he was distracting Jango from Lily during the egg heist, he had foreseen what was going to be happening 17 years later. Sabata reached/reaches through the time channel and blocked/blocks Jango from getting Samoed to pull the figurative trigger on the mammal. In fact, this delay allows enough time to go by to allow Bruceloyd to fall over dead. Actually, Eight had shot his boss while throwing Shelty to the ground. A beaker Bruceloyd had in his jacket shatters, pouring a fast acting ice melting chemical onto the floor, directly above Sabata's frozen corpse about a foot or two down (Bruceloyd had used this chemical to get into the egg chamber where Jango was waiting for them). Samoed uses Schrodinger to pick a recent past decision point to shoot himself in the stomach, closing off the present reality where he is chained up, and his bonds disappear. Before Jango can react, Lily throws Sabata's gun into the air, and Eight throws Samoed and Shelty up to intercept it. The story ends with Shelty and Samoed, human and dinosaur, sister and brother, about to kill Jango and enter a future where the two species can coexist. (Note that as a bit of foreshadowing, Eight had been in the background of one scene a couple volumes back where a bunch of soldiers had vowed to protect the two kids, and he tells the dying Bruceloyd that he'd always intended to keep that promise.)

Summary: Well, that was fun and altogether too short. I still haven't been able to track down copies of the original series, but I want to now more than before. In the afterward, Masato writes that the final scene had been in his head when Jabberwocky ended, and now the future he'd wanted for the two species can come to pass. The action sequences are fast-paced, and there are a lot of tricky twists and turns this time that don't become obvious until the very last page. The character designs may be a bit too stylistic, but I do like them, more-or-less. The scene with Jango and Samoed made me uncomfortable, but otherwise I liked all four books. Recommended if you like shooting and driving action, along with a bit of alter-universe science.

Next up, book one of Hisa's newest title, Kamuya-Ride.