Customer Reviews

Q-Ko-Chan 1: The Earth Invader Girl

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"Q-ko-chan" is another example of how different manga is from American cartooning. It's about a girl robot, who - for reasons unknown - comes to Earth, together with an astonishingly vivid, if oddball, collection of other aliens. If you try to read it for the plot - like reading a Donald Duck comic - you'll be horribly disappointed and annoyed. "Q-ko-chan" does have a narrative structure, but it comes and goes and is not at the forefront of the story.

Instead, the characters are at the center - Q-ko-chan herself, minus memories, and feeling lost; Kirio, a boy who lets her live in his closet and with whom Q-ko-chan falls in love; Kirio's sister Furiko - they quite heartily dislike each other; a crew of space octopi who are a cross between truant officers and flying tanks, but who look like neither; the military, hell-bent on whatever the military does (which is mostly destroy things); and assorted friends, rivals, enemies, and others. The story is told primarily from Kirio's point of view, and the distinctly non-linear plotline, plus the drawings - sometimes incomplete, sometimes confusing, sometimes surreal - are the disconnected images of a child who cannot yet make sense of what he sees, hears, or feels. The setting - war and destruction - further complicates the narrative: if war barely makes sense to grown-ups, it certainly makes no sense to Kirio.

An example: in one episode in Volume 2, homes have been bombed. It doesn't matter how or by whom -- it's all wreckage. Kirio sees a little girl sitting in the debris and asks her what she's doing. She says "This... is my home" and then asks if her mother is there. Kirio pulls some wreckage out of the way; maybe we see a body, maybe not. "Naw," he says, "Nobody's here. Let's get out of here." "I'll stay," she says. There's no more to the scene.

For an adult, poignant; for Kirio, it's comprehensible only at the same level as the little girl: this happened. Nothing more than that.

The result is that Q-ko-chan is *evocative* rather than narrative: it stirs up memories, disjointed and incomplete; it shifts focus from one partial understanding to another; resolution eludes us. If you want the certainty of a Donald Duck cartoon, then by all means read Donald Duck. If you want academic analyses of children's thought processes under stress, try a textbook on child psychology. But if you want a sometimes quite uncanny visceral revisioning of childhood amidst chaos and war, read "Q-ko-chan." Highly recommended.

Ueda Hajime was the artist behind the FLCL manga. That alone is enough to make me forgive many faults. Q-ko-chan is similar in a lot of ways to FLCL: mysterious girl from space, anti-social girl with glasses. But Kirio is no Naota, and Q-ko is definitely not another Haruko. Kiro's mom seems intriguing, and I'm looking forward to finding out more about her, the situation in general, and what Q-ko-cahn really came to Earth for...

The art is an acquired taste, but it really suits the fast pace of the story. When the author did the FLCL manga, there were a number of added moments that didn't show up in the anime--little character moments that showed extra backstory. For example, Naota's grandfather's backstory was really fleshed out, and the relationship between Haruko and Mamimi got extra attention. The author continues this in Q-ko-chan with little moments that show another side to the characters, bite sized glimpses that leave you ready for more explanation in the following volumes. If you like the FLCL manga, check out this one.

Ueda Hajime's Q.ko Chan is an odd science fiction story set in an apparently not too distant earth future. While the details are never fully spelled out, the setting is post-apocalyptic, somehow both post and pre global war, and filled with alien interventions of peculiar kinds (teen-ish girl mechs on the one hand and squidlike alien vessels on the other).

Ueda Hajime's work is always an artistic treat. He is known for works such as the manga version of Fooly Cooly (FLCL), whose world bears a striking resemblance to Q.ko Chan's chaotic setting, and a number of anime OPs and EDs (including, of note, the ending for a few Bakemonogatari episodes). His style is rather unique and somehow couples a sharp exactness with a loose, carefree feel that almost seems childish (until you look close and see how perfect the lines and shading actually are).

As for story and plot, it is really hard to figure out what the heck is going on. The story comes across as a teen angst scifi romp, but folds in plenty of moe (the girls, when not in mech mode, are cute as can be), a bit of school life, sibling rivalry, family quarrels, plenty of mech battles, and even more plot confusion. This first volume mainly introduces the mech girls (Q.ko being the main) and the students who pilot them (with Kirio being the primary male lead). And with a main male student piloting a female mech, from Q.ko's early, desperate plea that Kirio "board her now!", the sexual innuendo is also rife. However, it seems that the major plot movements (if they are to come) are left for the second volume.

So far, it feels like a lesser version of FLCL.

All the fun of FLCL but with a totally different attitude. You have an arrogant and oblivious main character that you just love to hate, and a robot who's just a little girl. Isn't highschool fun?

Q-Ko-Chan is set in a world that is never quite revealed. Apparently the people in Japan have been thrown out in a "Great Diaspora" and people from other countries have come and taken it over. It seems as though there has also been some sort of nuclear conflict and nations are still very distrustful of each other so that violence still breaks out. Behind the scenes there is some sort of secret government plan called a "Noah's Ark thing" that hints at leaving the Earth behind and starting afresh. Into this vague mess comes a young girl named Q-Ko, who is actually not human and can transform into a giant robot. She asks a kid named Kirio to be her pilot, and he doesn't have much choice as some space aliens begin showing up at his house, apparently attracted by Q-Ko.

Q-Ko-Chan is a mishmash of different manga cliches in story and a hodgepodge of bad art in action. The art is the first big negative I got from this book. It is sketchlike and at times seems like it is coming from the pencils of a junior high level artist. It's almost like Hajime said "How bad can I make it look?" or "How fast can I draw it?". The result is that a lot of panels, especially action sequences, are incomprehensible. The characters also suffer from this artstyle. I had to literally flip back to the beginning of the book where it introduced the chracters to tell who they were as I was reading. The sad thing is that sometimes, even looking at the name of the character along with their picture, I still could not distinguish them in some panels! In terms of story, Q-Ko-Chan works on vague premises without giving enough information to let you understand the setting of the manga. What little is given consists of soundbites taken so out of context that you can't make much sense of the situation. And, actually, Hajime makes me not care if I ever understand. This book just has nothing going for it. Bad writing. Bad art. Overdone concept. I will probably read the second and last volume of this stinker, but please, save your money, and skip this purchase.