Q-Ko-Chan 1: The Earth Invader Girl

by Hajime Ueda

Book Overview

GREETINGS, EARTHLING In the near-future on planet Earth, a world gone mad where never-ending war is a fact of life, Kirio is the coolest kid at school. Up in the sky, a giant robot is fighting a fleet of gunships, but the brilliant and distant Kirio is far from fazed-until the battling 'bot makes an unexpected landing in Kirio's front yard and rings the bell. But the worst threat for Kirio could be what stands on the other side of the door: an alien...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345492080
• ISBN13: 9780345492081
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 7.5"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 and higher

Customer Reviews

Hajime Rocks

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?

Donald Duck This Isn't

"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.