<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Battle Angel Alita is a Japanese manga series written and drawn by Yukito Kishiro (born 1967, Tokyo). Titled GUNNM (“Gun-Mu”) in Japan, it’s set in a cyborg-laden, quasi-post-apocalyptic world that mixes technology and urban poverty in a very cyberpunk manner. The manga was serialized in the magazine Ultra Jump from 1990–1995. Viz Communications published the series in comic and graphic novel form in English starting in 1994.

Title character Alita is diminutive robot who looks like a teenage girl, found broken and battered on a junk heap by cyberneticist Daisuke Ido. Repaired, Alita has no memory of herself or her origins, and embarks on a quest of self-discovery. One thing she soon learns is that she has lethal combat skills, which come in handy when she assists Ido with his other job: bounty hunter in a land of techno-waste called the Scrap Yard. Inhabitants of the Scrap Yard work in factories that supply goods for Tiphares, a floating city where the rich and powerful live. Inhabitants of Tiphares use up the goods and drop their trash back down onto the Scrap Yard, a slum literally built from Tiphares’ garbage. The whole system is designed to support and protect the Tiphareans with no regard for the Yardeans.

Over the course of the story, Alita battles bigger and badder cyborgs, while occasionally unearthing hints about her past. One action-packed series involves her playing Motorball, a gladiatorial death sport on rollerskates. Kishiro also wrote a series of independent stories set in the Motorball circuit called Ashen Victor.

Interestingly, the story has two endings. Author Kishiro felt the original ending was rushed, so he later re-created it in a new volume called Last Order.

The series was adapted into two direct-to-video films in 1993. These were brought to North America by ADV Films as Battle Angel. James Cameron is working on a live-action film of the series, scheduled to be released in summer 2007. He loosely based the short-lived television series Dark Angel on Battle Angel.