^Ripper's Anime Page

So, a funny thing happened on the way to releasing Volume 10...

I decided to randomly email the Kishiros, saying how good a job they were doing on Gunnm, and how I was driven to learn Japanese because of it, sort of standard fan letter stuff.

To my surprise, Tsutomu Kishiro (Yukito's younger brother, who helps out on Gunnm) emailed me back and asked if I'd help out with yukito.com's English-language forum, because he can't speak English at all.

So now I'm a semi-official go-between for Gunnm-related Q&A, I guess. If you have questions, post them up on the yukito.com forums and I'll try to fwd them to Tsutomu when I can.


The first question I forwarded to him was, who was the guy in the original Gunnm series who blew up Yohko's ship and tore Yohko in half in the flashback Alita has after her fight with Nova. His reply:




The mysterious person in question is not Caerula from Last Order. Because the original Battle Angel Alita series ended midway through, the post-Tiphares "space saga" was never able to be written, and so the mysterious person's true identity was never revealed.

This mysterious person's name is Galeed, and he was made with an "Armor Technique" humanoid body, stronger than even Alita's. In the 1998 Playstation 1 game, "Gunnm: Martian Memories" [trans. note: never released in America], Galeed makes his debut. He fights Alita and wins, but shortly thereafter is defeated and vanquished by a four-armed cyborg named Zuou. I do not know whether he will appear in the current serialization of the Last Order series.



So yeah, if you have questions, post them on yukito.com. I'd try to steer away from questions from volume 10/11, as they haven't been released even in Japan (as graphic novels, at least).

And you can find Battle Angel Alita (Gunnm) - Martian Memory here http://www.rippersanime.com/index.php?page=Games

Do you know if Yukito speaks english?

I don't think either of them do. In any event, Tsutomu's the one in charge of PR and the website, it looks like, so inquiries go to him.

Regarding Galeed, I don't think we will see it on GLO, but many of the ideas put on him have been inherited by the LO series:

First, according to the sidenotes on the Martian Memories game, present on the spanish reedition of the original series, Galeed's body is built very similar as sechs Fizziroy body, as in the fact that it is made of a high density fluid (althought sechs body seems to be contained by a pump, and galeed's is formed by means of an electromagnetic field). When you first find galeed in the PSX game, its form is very similar as the "expanded form" of sechs fizziroy body (when i's being fixed by Yani the engineer). Later you find his memory cartridge and galeeds body shrinks and gets its final shape.

Second, Galeed is the Last of a series of soldiers built with the purpose of defending Jeru (Ketheres). These soldiers were called Orders and were eliminated long time ago.

The misterious Zuou is a cyborg with a berserker body (like Alita's), his four arms being purposely designed to defeat Galeed's technique.

As you can see many of the concepts used in Galeed have been already put in the LO series, so I doubt we'll be seeing the Last Order in Last order

They also reused the Galeed name, for Ping's battle avatar.