Dirty Pair: Biohazards


By Toren Smith & Adam Warren (Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 1-56060-008-X (softcover), 1-56060-007-1 (hb), 1-900097-04-4 (UK edition)

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a genuine international collaboration that merged the best of Japanese and American sensibilities to create something genuinely appealing and tremendously fun.

In a fast and furious future of 2141AD, intergalactic proliferation of human civilisation has led to a monumental bureaucracy, greater corruption and more deadly criminals preying upon the citizens of the United Galactica.

Thus the constant need for extra-special Trouble Consultants: pan-planetary private paramilitary police employed by the 3WA (or Worlds Welfare Work Association) to maintain order in hotspots across the sort-of civilised universe…

Kei and Yuri are team #234, officially designated “The Lovely Angels” after their sleek and efficient starship. They are lethal, capable and infallible. Whenever they are deployed, they strike fast and hard and never fail…

…Although the collateral damage they propagate is completely unimaginable and usually causes client worlds to regret ever asking for their aid in the first place….

Much to the crisis agents’ disgust and chagrin, the universe knows them best as The Dirty Pair and planetary authorities have to be in the most appalling straits to let them help…

The concept was conceived for light novels by Japanese author Haruka Takachiho (Crusher Joe) in 1985 and quickly made the jump to TV, movie and OVA anime, but there was no comics/manga iteration (until over a decade later), inspiring Adam Warren and Toren Smith of Manga translation company Studio Proteus to approach independent publisher Eclipse Comics with an idea for a comicbook miniseries…

The result was Biohazards; 4 issues (December 1988 to April 1989)of licensed light-hearted, manic murder and monstrous mayhem which was then swiftly collected in a brash and breezy graphic album. The many reprintings from the franchise’s successors Dark Horse in the USA and Manga Books in the UK heralded a blistering run of wry and raucous adventures that still read as well today as they did when the Japanese comics experience was seen as a rare, quaint and exotic oddity…

In ‘Biohazard’ the deadly babes are going about their lawful but excessively violent business – subsequently and of course unintentionally devastating a colossal space station and killing fifty civilians – when a call comes from Alex Goldin, Security Director of corporate paradise Pacifica.

He has a thorny problem to manage: a brutally efficient theft of personality-preserving bio-construct Brainchips and tissues samples, plus the loss of a full-grown clone, is only the latest skirmish between rival bioengineering industrialists Kelvin O’Donnell and Abraham Streib.

The escalating battle between magnates too powerful to censure compels the obsequious and duplicitous Goldin to tread softly. Both men are massive wealth-creators: master-makers of bio-weapons, body augmentations and innovative medicines, but he still doesn’t want anything incurable or unkillable loose on his streets if their economic struggle continues.

The organo-industrialists are both experts in skirting what rules and regulations exist and officially test their wares on their private manufacturing moons but you never know…

The situation is particularly tenuous at present because O’Donnell, thanks to the unfortunate lab accident, is a space-chipmunk.

…Or rather the brainchip encoding his personality currently resides in a Whelan’s Pseudo-Fuzzy in the possession by Streib. When cyborg chief enforcer M97 destroyed O’Donnell’s almost matured Adonis-like new body in the raid, the triumphant genegineer couldn’t resist an opportunity to gloat. After all, with no spare chips, no proper body to put them in and O’Donnell on a leash, surely Streib has finally won…

Triumphant Streib is actually no better off. After similar bioagent “misfortunes” over the years of their rivalry, his organic head is now stuck on a robot body whilst his organics are so messed up he can’t be cloned or brainchipped.

Tracking O’Donnell’s chip to Streib’s private estate, Goldin has called on 3WA and is now stuck with Kei and Yuri. In the final assessment he needs someone from outside the system to rescue O’Donnell’s brainchip and genetic material from Streib without starting a horrific WMD war that will end life on Pacifica…

What could possibly go wrong?

With their enigmatic, electronics-warping alien super-cat Mughi the girls easily infiltrate the vast compound just in time to find Streib employing horrific techno-organic warbeasts to hunt O’Donnell.

Employing the catastrophic violence they are renowned for, the Dirty Pair easily lay waste to the human soldiers and rapacious mechanoids, but rather than turn the little Fuzzy over to Goldin they are cajoled and are convinced by the little cutie to take him to his own lab where he has himself transferred into one of his own trademarked warbeasts.

And up until then the case had been practically catastrophe-free…

‘Complications’ occur when Kei sees the body O’Donnell will eventually return to and gets all girly-fluttery and romantically entangled; allowing herself to be convinced that they should take Streib down for good.

It’s not hard to get Yuri to agree and soon Lovely Angels and wrathful warbeast are breaking into Streib’s main lab citadel.

As the girls convincingly crush all resistance O’Donnell discovers a deliciously illegal bioagent weapon which will prove his rival’s downfall – even in Pacifica’s courts – and asks Yuri to hold onto it as they escape, but in the resultant firefight the canister is breached and she is doused in something very nasty…

Luckily, rather than a disease or toxin it’s “only” a chemical to enhance aggression and violence and ‘Outbreak’ finds Yuri descending into a berserker mode even more dangerous than her regular state; ruthlessly efficient and wildly careless of consequences. Manically outfighting the army and air force despatched to stop them, she and the astounded Kei and O’Donnell soon completely destroy a major population centre before escaping M97 and his fanatically pursuing cohorts…

With Yuri fully recovered from the combat craziness, the Angels decide to take the battle to the arrogantly gloating and seemingly unimpeachable Streib, infiltrating his industrial moon Telek and ultimately reducing it to slag and space dust and free-floating bio-bombs in their own inimitable style.

However there are two more surprises in store: a rather predictable last stab from the stylishly indefatigable M97 and a more personal heartbreak bombshell for Kei once Goldin gets his hands on O’Donnell…

Both incredibly information-dense and astonishingly action-packed, this cool, light-hearted cyber-punk space opera romp is a solidly satisfying slice of Sci Fi magic that will delight all fans of tech-heavy blockbusters, and the book comes with an afterword by co-author Toren Smith – heavily illustrated with Adam Warren sketches – detailing the love of hard science and social extrapolation which flavoured and textured the creators’ trans-Pacific interpretation of Haruka Takachiho’s concept.

The digest-sized (210 x 150mm) UK edition has the tag line “in the tradition of Red Dwarf” and that assessment is not a million miles from the truth, as long as you factor in sexy death-dealing ingénues, wry socio-political commentary, very skimpy costumes and oodles of cartoon carnage.

Fun and frolics future-style: you know you want it…

The Dirty Pair © 1989, 1994 Haruka Takachiho. English language version © 1989, 1994 Adam Warren and Studio Proteus. All rights reserved.