Hand it to the editors at Viz Signature when it came to premiering the first of its collections of Takao Saito's long-running super-hitman series, Golgo 13: they've definitely got their eyes on the times. First book of this 13-volume series of "Golgo 13's Greatest Hits" finds our master marksman-for-hire in 1997 taking on Iraqi boogeyman Saddam Hussein and his Supergun, an irrefutable weapon of mass destruction set to fire a rocket filled with deadly virus onto Washington D.C. Yup, right here in the pages of Golgo 13 is incontrovertible proof that the Iraqis were developing WMDs. I'd make a joke that this was probably the document our current president read to justify our going to war, but I'm fairly certain the guy would've been stymied by the reading back-to-front thing.
Golgo 13 is a lonnnnng-running adult manga action series centered around Duke Togo, an impeccable marksman who has a knack for showing up at various hotspots in modern history – unchanged despite the passage of decades. In Volume One of Viz's new reprint series, our taciturn mercenary appears in Iraq in the mid-nineties, but, in a second story set in 1979, he's also established as a hitman with a major rep. Volume Two's two episodes are set in Tianamen Square, 1989, and Tijuana back in '74. Through all four adventures, our protagonist has the same long sideburns and thick black hair: obviously, the man's found a look he intends to keep. Per the "dossier" included at the end of each volume, our hero's recorded exploits as an assassin began in 1968, but like any good comic hero away from Gasoline Alley, Golgo 13 doesn't age.
What he does do is shoot, screw (he has, his dossier helpfully tells us, "an amazing penis") and mainly keep his thoughts to himself: the kind of hard-boiled character who's defined as much by what he doesn't show us than what he does. In "Supergun," Duke Togo doesn't even make an appearance 'til the 40th page – and then it's only in a short snippet showing him crossing the Iraqi border. In another story, we never even see the gunman, though his presence is felt by all the other characters. As a story center, Golgo 13 brings to mind Jules Feiffer's memorable description of Will Eisner's Spirit as a "masked Mary Worth," coming in at the last to neatly tie things up.
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