World Comic Book Review

26th March 2024

Super Ready Battle Armour #1-4 (Review)

Super Ready Battle Armour #1-4
Team SRBA, 2016
Writer: Bradley Adan

New South Wales is very far from Japan. But Australian creators Bradley Adan and Michael Milhan have immersed themselves in the type of manga genre called akuma shonen, and delivered a story which is clearly a cousin to a title such as “Tokyo Ghoul“.

The protagonist, a young man with the unlikely and off-putting name “Infector”, has the power to see the extent of life and death in a living creature, represented as an battery symbol floating adjacent to the creature’s head. “I can see how much time some of us have left,” Infector notes in an inner monologue, “… and how lucky some of us really are.”

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In the market for a giant weaponised robot? It pays to buy Japanese.

North Dakota in the United States has legislation which specifically allows flying drones used for policing to be equipped with Tasers, pepper spray and rubber bullets. This is not new thinking. Comic books both in the US and Japan have long considered militarised robots, although ordinarily on a gargantuan scale for visual effect. (For the purposes of this discussion, we exclude “mecha” and other forms of exoskeletons, like “Iron Man”, “Gundam”, and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”).

In US comic books, most robots tend to be opponents to altruistic superheroes. Here is the schematic for a Sentinel, a mutant hunting robot most often seen in Marvel Comic’s “Uncanny X-men” titles:

sentinel drone

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