Lawman "Hard Action and Comedy....!?", by Akihiro Itoh Copyrights and disclaimers are all the same as ever. Copyright Jan. 1996. While I was wandering around in Manga no Mori (Manga Forest) in Tokyo, looking for the latest copies of Geobreeders and Belle Starr, I discovered LAWMAN. Of course, I bought it right away. Lawman is a typical Akihiro manga -- strong action, good artwork, fun characters, some sex, and just enough talking to set up the next action scene. For these reasons, I highly recommend Lawman to all western fans. Lawman first appeared in Young Animal magazine, between 1993 and 1995. Moon on Ice appeared in Comic Dragon in 1993. (ISBN number: ISBN4-592-13410-9 C9979 P800E) The main character is a young man named Shouzou Irie. He is one of the most powerful representatives of the Japanese Ministry of Finance (ie -- the Treasury Department.) He has carte blanche to take whatever actions are necessary to complete any given assignment, access to a variety of high-tech guns, and the skills to use those guns when the next shoot-out starts. He wears wire-rim glasses, has short black hair and an innocent-looking face, and always wears a dark suit and tie. Irie also has no compunction against killing innocent victims if an assignment requires it, although he'd rather protect innocent people if possible. A few other characters do show up throughout the book, but they never reappear later on. The only exception is a nameless black army sargeant who is a helicopter pilot. The chapters are: Lawman Lawmans Lawman Goes to North Lawman and the Thief Moon On Ice In "Lawman", Irie is introduced as a very nasty man that uses his gun on suspects that don't like to talk. Later, he is very casual and easy-going, to the dismay of an Army base camp commander and the black helicopter pilot. (The pilot's helicopter runs out of fuel while Irie screws around on the landing pad, and the pilot is put in the brink for destroying the chopper.) Irie is in the camp to investigate rumors of weapons smuggling. Turns out the camp commander's assistant is building up a weapons cache to support his own private army. Irie gets the pilot to help out during the ensuing fire fight, and the second chopper gets destroyed. Irie had planted bombs all around the camp, and when he gets cornered, he starts blowing up the weapons caches. Eventually, Irie wins. His pistol with the laser sight is used to guide a rocket at the jeep that the villian tried to escape in (the villian dies.) And, the base commander takes his daughter back to Montana where he retires. "Lawmans" is a slightly different story. When a bank robbery goes wrong and the robbers hide out in an old theater, Irie appears on the scene, enters the theater, and starts shooting. This enrages the chief cop in charge of the case, and only amuses the cop's female sidekick. When one of the suspects is later caught and arrested (Irie shoots up a transformer box on a telephone pole, and the box drops onto the suspect), the suspect identifies Irie as one of the other gang members. Because the cop and the sidekick can't dig up ANY information on Irie via the police computers, Irie finds himself in jail. He bides his time in the cell, listening in on the cop's conversations via wireless transmitters. The robbers have sophisticated weapons, and they use them on the cop's car -- demolishing it. The cop is forced to enlist Irie's help. Irie discovers that the robbers are getting their weapons from the female sidekick, and he sets up a trap in a parking lot that the robbers will use as a rendevous point for the next purchase of weapons from the woman. The cop and Irie bust up the weapons buy -- one villian gets shot in the legs, and the other two escape in their van. Irie places a belt on the woman and throws her outside of the parking lot (where she dangles from a rope, screaming.) Irie triggers all of the bombs that he'd placed under various cars in the lot -- the cars fly outside and land in a big pile. Irie rappels down the outside of the lot until he reaches the floor where the van is. He shoots the van, and it rushes out of control out of the lot, and onto the big pile of cars. The suspects are all arrested. The cop and the sidekick (who is handcuffed and sitting in a squad car) actually love each other, and the cop tries to tell her so in front of a bunch of his men. He is interrupted to be told that Irie had gotten into a taxi and disappeared. "Lawman Goes to North" comes next. Irie finds himself stranded in a small town during a snow storm. Turns out that the girl running the udon shop he is eating at hates both the mafia and treasury agents (including Irie.) Seems that the local mafia has been controlling this town, and the girl's older brother was killed when trying to confront the mob boss. The boss relies heavily on a female assassin, who likes fighting people with a sword, and then pulling her gun on them and shooting them down at point-blank range. Irie can't leave while the airport is snowed in, so he chases off the mob by himself. Eventually, Irie, and the girl's older hired cook, confront the villians, using Irie's bulletproof vest as protection. Irie also manages to enlist the aid of the black chopper pilot to have his briefcases airlifted in at the last moment. The assassin kills her boss, and tries to go for Irie, using the girl as a shield. The cook uses a sword to impale the assassin to the wall long enough to get Irie's grenade launcher and blow a big hole in the wall where the assassin had been. At the end, the cook goes into an ambulance to have his ribs looked at, and the girl happily asks Irie to come back anytime. "Lawman and the Thief" is an earlier story that was reshuffled in the order that it appears in the volume. This is the last story for the series, and is very different from the others. Irie has been sent out along with two cops (one looking a little like Carl Malden, and the other very definitely looking like Dirty Harry). They are out driving at night to locate the hideout of some bank robbers. To avoid detection, Dirty Harry is driving with the headlights turned off, and he crashes the car into a tree nearby the hideout. Meanwhile, two of the robbers, a white guy and a dark-skinned girl are having sex. They stop when the TV news broadcast announces that they are suspects in the latest robbery. In the shower, the daughter of the one of the most powerful men in Japan is washing off. She apparently was an innocent kidnap victim, but is in fact a member of the gang. The two cops shoot their way into the house, killing the guy and the black girl. Dirty Harry goes to fix the car. The other cop tries to comfort the surviving girl, and she kills him with a concealed assault pistol. Irie and the girl have a stand-off, and the girl thinks that her opponent has to bring her in alive. Irie corrects her, and she asks how he'll explain things to the other cop outside. Irie tells her to not worry about that -- her father had given him orders to "take care of everything". Irie kills the girl, then goes outside. Dirty Harry says that he's just finished repairing the car, and that Irie should go back and get the other two. Irie uses a remote control to trigger a bomb that blows up the car and kills Harry. Irie's parting words are, "no thanks, I'll walk." The final story is "Moon on Ice". It was added to the book to bring up the page count. Basically, two soldiers are running from something, and they escape into an abandoned house to hide. They find an injured girl there, and try to stick together until morning. One soldier panics and runs, and gets killed. The girl turns out to be a were-wolf. And, were-wolves only become a problem during a full moon. The remaining soldier tries kill the girl, but she turns back into a wolf, and is joined by others of her kind. The soldier just keeps repeating that this is not the work for the army (that is, he is completely out of his league.) The end of the story is left unfinished. Either the wolves leave because they really aren't interested in fighting humans, or they attack and kill the soldier.