Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt volume 1 - Yasuo Ohtagaki

 Finally I began the manga of perhaps one of the grittiest instalments of the Gundam franchise: Thunderbolt.

Taking place in the debris field known as the Thunderbolt section during the One Year War, the series centers around Zeon sniper Daryl Lorenz, and Federation ace Io Fleming.

Now, the thing is, while the whole series has a strong jazz supported soundtrack which also comes through in the manga, the Zeon force is actually a veteran group full of people with war disabilites and prosthetics, but as Zeon forces are so thinly stretched they remain on the field of battle.

Oppossing them are Earth Federation forces that keep throwing in masses of young, unexperienced pilots, suffering as such heavy casualties.  Io's GM is shot down, but he escapes and manages to take over one of the Zeon mobile suits, sending out a message to Daryl that he will find him and take him down.  In order to to make him a martyr, he receives an actual Gundam to help reclaim the Thunderbolt sector.

Piloting the Full Armour Gundam, Io quickly takes out three of the snipers from the Living Dead Division, who themselves are experimenting with a neural interface system to connect with their prostethics and gain better control of their mobile suits that way.  But the first duel sees Daryl taking him on in nothing but an old Zaku I, barely ending in a stalemate...

So, that's the first volume of the series, and in the typical black and white of manga comes across even grittier then the anime.  I`m looking forward to the next instalments!