I am taking a bit of a detour today. Among my reading goals for 2025, I had planned to try to read all the volumes of Vagabond (by Takehiko Inoue). Instead, I got distracted and did a full reread of Trigun by Yasuhiro Nightow instead. Trigun was one of the pivotal science fiction stories of my childhood, greatly shaping my taste and love of sci-fi, and Dark Horse has been releasing giant high-definition deluxe versions of the 16-volume run that I couldn’t resist.
For those unfamiliar, Trigun is a Japanese space western manga (with two different anime adaptations) about a gunslinger and a priest who team up to stop a mass murderer. While avoiding as many spoilers as possible, humanity has spread to the stars on many generation ship fleets searching for new places to cultivate. An emergency causes one of these fleets to crash land on a desert planet, scattering spare technology and weaponry across the arid and desolate planet. These people must find a way to survive in an utterly inhospitable world. Thrust into this frontier wasteland are our two main characters. Vash, a gunslinging pacifist who heralds unending destruction in his wake, and Wolfwood, a murderous and opportunistic priest who decides to follow him along. Together, they uncover a conspiracy to eradicate human life from the planet and must rush to stop it.
As a child, I was obsessed with Trigun’s plot. It has numerous twists that I have attempted to avoid discussing, and they blew my mind when I was a teenager. I remember thinking that it was one of the greatest stories I had ever read, and that feeling had persisted until I did my reread this year. On revisit, I found the plot of Trigun surprisingly underwhelming. The narrative is split into essentially two core sections: the intro, which is an anthology of Western short stories where Vash comes to a new struggling town and uses his pacifism to solve a complex situation. Often, these shorts have fun morals or takeaways that inject hope and optimism into a setting that is steeped in misery. Then we have the core conflict, which begins when Vash and Wolfwood discover the plot to end the world. Once the heroes make the discovery, the narrative is essentially placed on a rail track where the duo fight increasingly strong underlings in a mostly straight path to the final conflict. The story has a lot of fun with many classic tropes from both westerns and manga, but it is surprisingly straightforward if you discount the twists (which I already knew on reread).
The story feels like it is missing a middle to a degree. Yasuhiro Nightow clearly knew how he wanted his story to start and end, but decided to take the shortest path between the two in a way that gives the feeling that you are reading an epic with the middle cut out. While I found myself mildly underwhelmed by my memories of the plot, my experience with the atmosphere and themes of the series was one of pure awe.
Trigun, thanks to Yasuhiro Nightow’s brilliant art, has one of the most palpable senses of place in any story I have ever read. This is an artist who understands how heat feels, how sand moves in the wind, and how the sun plays tricks on the eye in the shimmering desert. Every single panel in Trigun exudes the sense that this is a hostile world that is actively trying to kill the space refugees. It does not want them there, and it is going to use the insidious patience of Mother Nature to get rid of all of them eventually.
Yasuhiro Nightow has an incredible ability to use character design and concept to tell the story. Many of Vash and Wolfwood’s looks are iconic for how cool they are, but they also speak volumes about the narrative and do just as much heavy lifting as the dialogue. I would argue that you could probably read Trigun without any text and still get a very clear sense of the characters and their entire conflict just through the clothing composition alone. There are so many big page spreads in the series that just delighted me. I sat, soaking in the art, in awe over and over again as I made my reread through the volumes.
The entire time I was stepping back from the plot, I was sprinting toward its themes. While the story might be simple, the greater context and its exploration are anything but. This is a powerful tale that examines humanity’s role in the greater universe and asks a lot of very important questions about our cosmic obligations. It is a story that pulls up the foundations of our assumptions and looks at everything we take for granted and asks us to walk through life with a much greater sense of awareness. It pits hyper-individualism against a galactic pan-species sense of community and deals with a sense of scale that is baffling to me. And throughout all of this, it continues to drop elite fit after elite fit.
There is a lot more to dissect with Trigun that I am completely unqualified to talk about. I would love someone better versed in the storied histories of Westerns to tell me their thoughts on how it engages with the media type. I am not the right man to do it. But what I can say is this: twenty years ago, Trigun had a profound effect on shaping my taste in media and fiction that stuck with me forever. Rereading it as an adult all these years later, I am struck again by how it still has a myriad of new things to show me, and it continues to hold a very special place in my heart. I highly recommend you check it out if given the chance.
