“Why are you so… angry?!” So every opponent asks of the vengeful Hyaku immediately before their violent dismemberment at her rage-filled hands. Hyaku, it turns out, has a lot to be angry about. Like her namesake Hyakkimaru, protagonist of Osamu Tezuka's classic Dororo, Hyaku's infant body parts were sacrificed and replaced with prosthetics. Raised in the wilderness by a brilliant but reclusive doctor of cybernetics, she lives in a frozen land barely recovered from a recent war between “Hyoos” (humans) and “Kreaches” (artificial creatures). Following the brutal death of her foster father, Hyaku enters the nearby city in search of her stolen body parts.

Whereas Dororo is set during the Sengoku (warring states) period in Japan, and Hyakkimaru's body parts are taken by demonic yokai, Kaneko transposes his version of the story to a far-future land where sentient robots covet the sensations granted by human flesh, grafting organs to their metal frames to satisfy their twisted desires. For reasons revealed only later in the third volume, baby Hyaku's body was divided up like a fleshy birthday cake, the pieces distributed amongst the artificial beings whom she now hunts relentlessly.

Hyaku wraps her replacement metallic body in stinking animal hides, her rudimentary prosthetic limbs doubling as brutal weapons, as a single kohl-rimmed eye stares balefully out from under her asymmetric bangs. She strikes a dangerous, animalistic figure, accentuated by Kaneko's stark, high contrast monochrome art. There are no shades of gray in this world. The skies are black, the ground perpetually coated in freezing white snow, while evil, corruption, and hypocrisy lurk in the inky shadows.

Search and Destroy doesn't look like any other mainstream manga; instead, it evokes the style of the 1980's North American indie comic “black-and-white boom”. Kaneko's art is so sharp it looks like it was drawn with a scalpel – though the introduction claims it to be his first foray into using digital tools, employing an iPad for the drawing process. Kaneko's previous hand-inked works are mostly unavailable in English. Apart from Digital Manga Publishing's aborted 2005 localization of Bambi and her Pink Gun (cancelled after only two of six volumes) and some short stories in multi-author anthologies, Search and Destroy is the first of Kaneko's works to receive a complete English language edition.

Perhaps the link to Tezuka's Dororo (first brought to the US in three volumes in 2008 by Vertical, now available as a single omnibus) is what makes it more marketable in the West? While Search and Destroy began serialization in 2018, Dororo received a highly-regarded anime adaptation from MAPPA in 2019, the popularity of which may have led to the localization of Kaneko's take on the story. This isn't the first time another author's interpretation of a Tezuka manga made it across the Pacific – Naoki Urasawa's Pluto (a detective noir take on Astro Boy) is a famous example that even spawned its own excellent anime.

The original Dororo was cut short by cancellation, so its ending was abrupt and frankly unsatisfying. The 1969 anime adaptation was truncated as a result, and crammed with filler episodes as they ran out of manga chapters. 2004's PS2 hack'n'slash game Blood Will Tell retold Dororo with its own ending, as did the 2019 anime, both with great measures of success. Search and Destroy forges its own identity and plot, while maintaining close thematic resonance with Tezuka's original, right up to and including its conclusion (which is more satisfying than Tezuka's, I'll say it now.)

Kaneko's decision to gender-swap the main protagonist isn't merely done for the sake of it. By making Hyaku a rage-filled woman wronged by men, her story only becomes more potent. Like Hyakkimaru, Hyaku begins her journey overpowered with metal knives in her arms, spring-heeled metal blades instead of legs, robotic eyes with digital zoom, and bionic ears with an audible alarm when in proximity to a robot with a stolen body part. As she wins her organs and limbs back through the viscerally brutal application of swift, ruthless violence, she grows weaker. Her organic eyes, of course, don't feature magnification; her fleshy limbs are weak and can feel pain. Yet we know she's the rightful owner of these things – the robots misuse them in horrible ways. “I belong only to me,” she defiantly cries, echoing the thoughts of every woman ever treated as mere property by men. Yet the recapture of her lost humanity only makes her more vulnerable, prone to injury, and for the first time, subject to fear. Only her overwhelming, righteous rage drives her onwards to reach her goal. Hyaku is wordless, primal feminine rage given form.

Joining her at times on her journey (much to Hyaku's reluctance) is 9-year-old thief Doro, the direct equivalent of Tezuka's Dororo character. Much like the original, Doro is a downtrodden underdog who will do anything to survive, and latches onto Hyakkimaru for companionship and protection. Their fractious relationship is extremely similar to Tezuka's original duo. Doro also harbors secrets about their origin that update Tezuka's ideas on gender and identity in thoroughly modern ways, while also giving them an unsettling sci-fi bent.

Kaneko's future world is a dark, desperate place, filled with hateful people on both sides of the human and Kreach demographic divide. Volume three introduces a terrifying pair of synthetic hunters who relentlessly pursue Doro at the (extremely bloody) expense of multiple women and children. That they appear as a seemingly pleasant old married couple only adds to the sinister disconnect. The story touches on themes of racism, immigration, political corruption, and economic division, making this a story of our time.

Dororo was also a product of its time, which means that Tezuka's cartoonish, slapstick-filled art can sometimes sabotage its more serious storytelling ambitions, and its very episodic structure has fallen out of favor in modern manga. Search and Destroy updates the world and characters, telling a more serialized and satisfying story, while staying true to the aims and concepts of the original. It comes highly recommended to fans of both Tezuka's work and readers looking for something with a little more (lab-grown, artificial) meat to it.