[POWER-UP PERK] Gundam: MS GENERATION (Patreon)

Okay, this one took a bit longer to wrap up than I wanted to, but it'll be one of two extra releases this month as a bonus! Working on just my laptop while out of town has me a bit more constrained with what I can get through quickly (aside from my novel translating). Anywho, I hope folks enjoy another one of the random Gundam manga that've long gone untranslated!

ABOUT THIS TITLE

MS Generation ran as a serial from 1989 to 1990 in Bandai's hobby publication MJ (Making Journal).

Told through the lens of newspaper cameraman Thomas P. Ims, the work weaves together two threads: the shifting battlefields of the One Year War, and the Federation's G-4 Project, specifically, the development of its centerpiece, the Gundam GT-Four. The cameraman premise and the GT-Four narrative never quite mesh, leaving the story feeling somewhat caught between two purposes; in an ironic twist, the self-contained episodes that have nothing to do with the GT-Four tend to be the ones readers remember most fondly.

The Gundam GT-Four at the heart of the story is a transformable mobile suit whose design resembles a Gundam with a Core Booster grafted onto its back. The notion that a TMS could have existed during the One Year War has always been a difficult pill for some fans to swallow, and the debate continues to this day. Even so, there is a genuine satisfaction in watching the GT-Four progress from an unfinished prototype to a completed machine over the course of the narrative. The final chapter introduces a Zeon-side transformable mobile suit, the Zaku Speed, but the nagging sense of anachronism is hard to dispel. Had the entire story been set in the post-Zeta era, it might well have earned a place among the more celebrated sidestories.

The series that preceded MS Generation in the pages of Making Journal was Double Fake, which still clings to a measure of official standing; its mobile suits, for instance, continue to appear in the MS Encyclopedia. MS Generation has not fared as well as time marches on, and has, for all practical purposes, been consigned to the status of an unofficial work. This is notable given that Sunrise was directly involved in the planning and original concept, and that at the time of its debut, the series was presented and promoted with full official backing.

Because the story diverges so sharply from the established history of the One Year War, whether it deserves to be treated as official has become an ongoing point of contention within the fan community. Mobile suit design sheets were drawn up during the original run, but their conspicuous absence from the MS Encyclopedia lends weight to the idea that the work has quietly been stripped of its official credentials.

No compilation version appeared for some time after the serialization concluded in 1990; it would take three years, until 1993, before one was finally published. The initial Bandai release came in two volumes, each bundled with Gundam parody strips originally printed in SD Club, the first volume featured SD Gundam: The Curious Momotaro, Parts 1 & 2, while the second carried SD Gundam: The Great Iron Man Race!!, SD Gundam: Jiangshi, and SD Gundam: Heart-Pounding Transfer Student. When MediaWorks later reissued the series as a single volume, these SD Gundam parodies were omitted entirely. The Bandai editions also included GT-FOUR design reference materials in their back pages.

Over the course of its serialization, the title appeared in various forms, MS (Mobile Suit) Generation, Sidestory of Gundam: MS Generation, and others, but strictly speaking, the words "Mobile Suit Gundam" never featured in any of them. The first collected edition carried the same title, with only the colophon bearing the fuller notation Mobile Suit Gundam: MS Generation. It was only with the MediaWorks reissue that this became the work's formal title.

During serialization and in the Bandai collected editions, Tetsuya Asagiri received an explicit credit for composition assistance, a credit that was quietly removed from the MediaWorks edition. Asagiri had previously been credited for script assistance on Double Fake as well.