Wilderness volume covers and summaries
Character Guide
Compared to Geobreeders, Wilderness is much more straight forward. Three separate individuals get brought together in a small outpost in Mexico, and are forced to work together to survive the assaults by the U.S. DEA, the L.A. gangs, dirty L.A. cops, and just random chaos. It's non-stop action right in the vein of John Woo and Robert Rodriguez. Akihiro Itoh has said that he's a fan of gun action flicks, and here's his homage to them.
Vol. 1
Takashi Seruma is a computer science major in the University of Minnesota, enlisted to break the security on a bank vault for a robbery masterminded by L.A. gang boss Broughton Senior. One of the members of the group betrays them and only Seruma survives the resulting helicopter crash, with all of the money. One of the robbery's leaders had an MO disk that Broughton wants back, and he's convinced that Seruma has it, so he tasks his son, Donald, to recover the disk at all costs. Donald then sends out a pair of assassins, codenamed Heckel and Jeckel, to the Mexican hotel Seruma is hiding in to make the hit.
Meanwhile, dirty L.A. cop Leonard Rosenman is chasing after a Japanese runaway girl because she caught him on her video recorder making a hit. Washed up Japanese private detective Toshio Horita is hired to bring the girl, Ena Tairagi, back home. Rosenman stumbled across Ena in a small cafe, and finds himself forced to shoot his own partner while trying to kill her in the back alley. Ena escapes, puts a bullet in Rosenman's leg, and then runs to Mexico. Seruma, Ena and Horita all converge on the same hotel, closely followed by Heckel and Jeckel, and a couple of Mexican cops accompanied by Rosenman. There's a shoot-out, eliminating the Mexican cops, and when the dust settles, our three heroes are stuck in Horita's beat-up pick-up truck, racing further into Mexico.
Finally, DEA agent Enora Copeland had been one of the hostages caught in the bank robbery, and had actually talked to Seruma before trying to kill him during a shoot-out shortly after. She's a friend of Horita's, and he tries contacting her for information on Ena when the hotel shoot-out starts. Failing this, she tracks down a member of Broughton's gang that she mistakenly thinks is Seruma's long-time girlfriend. The girl fabricates a story that makes Seruma look like a hardened criminal, cementing Enora's resolve to bring him to justice. However, Broughton decides to eliminate the girl, and Enora gets into a shootout in Stillwater, Minn., to save her.
Vol. 2
Rosenman is brought in to work with the DEA in tracking down Ena, and by extension Horita and Seruma, but all he can contribute is an ongoing request for his own pair of DEA shades. Goldsmith also wants the MO disk that Seruma is belived to have, so he hires a local Mexican family to put the hit on Seruma in competition with Heckel and Jeckel. Meanwhile, our heroes retreat to a mansion that Ena had worked at as a technician, run by porno film producer Harold Foltemeyer, where they regroup, take stock of the situation, and load up on ammo. Horita ends up telling his backstory, where he killed his private detective agency partner 5 years earlier, and was told by Joel Goldsmith to never return to the U.S. (The partner had sold out to Goldsmith, and Horita killed him in revenge.)
The volume ends with the 4 Mexican killers and Heckel and Jeckel, all converging on the mansion at the same time, destroying any Mexican cops they happen across in their path.
Vol. 3
The 4 Mexicans used to live in the mansion back when it was used for selling drugs, and they take a secret passage into the storage room, which is now filled with crates of sexual aids. They're closely followed by Heckel and Jeckel, who've summed a couple carloads of men in black to back them up. Foltemeyer keeps trying to get footage of Ena naked, and failing. But, he keeps filming some other scenes for one of his movies with a few of the other girls. Eventually, the girls in the editing room see some of the intruders on the cameras set up all over the grounds, and when one of the brothers gets the drop on Seruma, Horita and a bevey of women with prop rifles interfere. This is when Broughton's crew crash the gates and everyone shoots at each other. Finally, Ena grabs the pickup and races out with Seruma and Horita, leaving Heckel, two of the Alvarez Brothers and all the backup dead. Horita and Jeckel are wounded, and Jeckel hobbles out on her own. All of the film crew come out unharmed.
Enora makes her way to Mexico as well, where she gets busted. Alan, her partner that had been with her in Stillwater, had gotten winged in the shoulder, and returned to the DEA offices. The second one, Jim, drives with Rosenman to the jail to get her set freee. The three of them go to her contact in Mexico, Alfonso Alvarez, to ask him for a local guide. He reluctantly supplies "D", a young kid who's even more deadly than the four brothers hired by Goldsmith, combined. They pick him up at the gun shop in town, where his mother tells him to not shoot other Mexicans, or any of their neighbors. Meanwhile, back at the DEA HQ, Graham is getting chewed out by his superior, who wants to know where Graham's minion, Enora has run off to. Graham is to turn her over the second she calls back. Graham leaves the office, and the superior places a call to Rosenman's hotel and leaves a message to call him back. Jim returns to the hotel, where the clerk gives him the message to hand to Rosenman. Rosenman is currently at a bar trying to figure out how to get himself out of this mess. He can't let Enora talk to Ena, and he needs to eliminate Jim before he can erase Enora and Ena. He decides to use the same tactic he had with his last partner and heads to a gun shop to get a better pistol.
Our three heroes arrive in the same town and split up. Enora sees Seruma and tags after him. Horita and Ena go to the gun shop to get ammo, and Rosenman follows Ena back out the door. At the same time, the two remaining killer Brothers go to a bar, kill half the guys there, and offer the other half a suitcase full of drugs if they join them for a gun fight against the DEA. The first one caught is Rosenman, who's pulled into an alley by several of the thugs. D runs up to Enora, telling her that he's learned the three suspects are in this town. She pulls her gun out and prepares to fight. But, some of the other punks see her and try to ask D what's going on. Jim finds Rosenman, who yells out that the DEA agent they want is over there and the shooting starts. Enora sees Horita and tries to get past one punk, who makes the mistake of swearing at her and taking the Lord's name in vain. D goes ballistic and pumps the punk full of lead. The boy tells Enora to chase after the pickup truck as it roars away, and he'll stay behind to clean up. Jim rescues Rosenman and gives him a backup piece. Rosenman answers that he'd always hated the DEA agent then shoots Jim in the head. The volume ends with Enora running through the alleys, thinking about the "old Horita" from 5 years ago.
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