Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 8: Operation Odessa

The (admittedly incredibly good) flashback arc has concluded, and now we return to the White Base - first as they come into port at Belfast, before moving to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean as part of the final push to drive Zeon forces from Earth, with Operation Odessa.

As with the earlier volumes, Yasuhiko's art is incredibly good, and while he's still working from Yoshiyuki Tomino's original framework, with the TV series, he builds on it in ways which do in incredible job of expanding of some of the characters. In particular, M'quve gets some considerable character growth. Miharu also gets some additional screen time, as opposed to basically being a one-episode wonder in the show.

However, after Miharu's arc, the focus of this volume is particularly on action, and the action sequences here are played out brilliantly. We have a tense cat-and-mouse duel in Gibraltar leading up to the fourth battle between Char and Amuro - along with the various parts of Operation Odessa. Yasuhiko does an excellent job basically doing a montage in sequential art. Where the original series budgetary limitations restrained the scope of this larger war, Yasuhiko is able to use the implied gaps in time between panels to let our mind fill in the pieces.

Unfortunately, with the conclusion of combat on Earth, and the next volume likely taking us back to space, this does mean that we won't get my favorite episode of Mobile Suit Gundam - the episode where a Zeon Patrol blunders across The White Base, in the forests of Northern Europe, and hopes that the Feddies will be just as caught off guard as they are, and they attempt a sneak attack. The plan doesn't work - but in the episode the Zeon troops survive, and no one on White Base is killed, so the incident serves as a nice psychological rest break, focusing on the idea that sometimes in war, a lot hinges on luck, not everything goes according to plan, and occasionally you legitimately get moments where you can end up saying “Someday, when all this is over, we'll look back on this moment and laugh.”