“On the Fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Five Bronze Saints!”
Long ago, the ancient Greek goddess Athena, had an army of warriors known as Saints. They were young boys who trained to control their Cosmo, a power within, that allowed them to perform supernatural feats. Thousands of years later, Athena has been reborn, and a new group of knights are training to earn cloths, or armor, and gain the honor to be one of her saints. Seiya is one of these saints, who has one the Pegasus cloth and returns to Japan to compete for the prestigious gold cloth of Sagittarius. But to win it, he must defeat the other returning bronze saints. Shun, Shiryu, Hyoga and Ikki start out as rivals and enemies, but they soon become friends, and Athena’s staunchest protectors.
Saint Seiya is an old passion from my first getting into manga and anime in the eighties. There were no translations of either at the time, so when Viz announced the release of it in English, I had to have it! I just had know what was going on in these stories! Saint Seiya is a basic shonen fighting manga, with our 5 protagonists getting ridiculously strong with each story arc. They are only bronze knights, the lowest of Athena’s saints, but by the end of the first arc, Seiya is already handling gold cloths, that only the most powerful of saints can handle. But I love mythology and the constellations, and this manga has plenty of both, as all the enemies are from Greek mythology, gods who are reborn just like Athena.
There’s only one thing I don’t like about this title, and half isn’t the title’s fault, is Saori, the reincarnation of Athena. She’s supposed to be a powerful goddess, but she’s always getting herself kidnapped, or arrows stuck in her chest, so that the bronze saints have to get their butts kicked, and faces dragged through stone to save her. It gets tedious after a while. And then, for some mystifying reason, Viz changed Saori’s name to Sienna, but no one elses’. Why? What was the point of doing that? Dumb.
Anyway, Saint Seiya is a great action manga. So many other mangaka that are big today credit it as an influence on them. Study your manga history properly and pick up this title! There are only 4 volumes left until the end…
“Four Friends in Winter
Three Sibling Cards
Two Girls named Nana
And a One Piece for the Pirate King.“
One Comment
Absolutely agree, of all of the shonen fighting manga and shows, Saint Seiya is one of the few that I give high marks, at least for the first arc. Unfortunately, it suffered from the same problem that just about all shonen shows have, they have to keep finding bigger and more powerful opponents and eventually it just gets silly. Also, because they had to keep finding new enemies, they kept introducing new pantheons, all with their own armored knights, and that was even more silly.
Ultimately, as much as I love the show and the manga, Saint Seiya is a great example of why these shows need to END!