Houjin Exaxxion
Cannon God Exaxxion

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There are two really good ways to describe this manga. One is who it's by and the genre it's tackling: It's a super-robot manga by Kenichi Sonoda, legendary girls-with-guns mangaka, the guy behind Gunsmith Cats and Riding Bean. Maybe that means something to you - myself, I know Sonoda mostly through his seminal character work for Bubblegum Crisis 2032. I stopped reading Gunsmith Cats right around when the lesbian brainwashing rapist became a major character. I wish I was making that up.

Anyway, the other way to describe Cannon God Exaxxion is that it is the anti-Evangelion. It's like this:

Teenage protagonist? Beats other kids up at ... school for harshing his granddad's name, and Gets In The Robot without much hesitation or feeling emotionally traumatized - there's an alien invasion to fight, after all!

Mad Scientist Parental Figure? He's wacky as hell, all spikey hair and hot-blooded determination to smash them goddamn space-monkeys back to whence they came, even fewer questions asked than his descendent!

Mom? Still around, and can turn her hair into a nanotech hardsuit! Love interest? Mentally stable and the outcome there is never in doubt! The mech? It's not a metaphor for returning into the womb, instead it has a giant antimatter-powered cannon that extends out from its torso! Some might even say, with a name like Exaxxion, that it's kind of phallic! The aliens? They look like humans and they're mostly pretty evil! Exaxxion is good, clean, wholesome fun.

Except, well, y'know, there are some complexities. Some reasonable hard-ish technobabble, nanotech and antimatter and antigravity, is in play, but what's really interesting is the PR war between human resistance and alien occupier, as the latter attempts to convince humanity that no they *aren't* going to commit omnicide and that the guys with the giant robot are the *real* baddies. Not a whole lot is done with this plot line, especially since the manga kind of wraps things up in what feels like the equivalent of a season and a half of anime instead of a full two - like Sonoda either lost interest in the series or Kodansha made him taper it off and go back to GSC, I dunno. But it's there, and gives texture to the story in a way that most other manga don't try to do.

The other trouble is that Dark Horse published most of this back in the early aughties - five out of seven volumes - but now has no plans to finish, since that was largely a Studio Proteus / Toren Smith translation as surely as Gunsmith Cats was. Your best bet is to find a scanlation site and read it there - admittedly, in the later half, the quality of said scanlation starts to drop and then craters pretty badly, almost like English wasn't their first language, but just getting *an* ending is better than no ending.

It's a pity, because this is hands-down one of my favorite manga considering how effortlessly it taps into my fanboy Id, how easily it makes me squeal and snigger with glee. This is a manga that deserves your time, your attention, and deserves better overall.

Ultimately, I would say that this was a plot focused manga with a simple but solid plot. It was an interesting plot line in terms of action and suspense, though it didn't really have much depth to it beyond some superficial elements. Character relationships were pretty weak overall, and there were some issues with consistency, such as it felt like it never properly decided what role they wanted "grandpa" to play, but overall the plot and characters were simple enough that it was a pretty enjoyable plot to read through, even if it never really got you invested in anything. It brought up a lot of points, such as heroes during war, racism, propaganda, ... the fault of government or civilians, etc. but didn't really properly say anything about them. Rather, it seemed more occupied with simply showing a story about fighting back against an alien invasion, and to that end while it was pretty simply, I thought it was a pretty decent story. The action, though also lacking the depth you would expect from mech action, was pretty solid, and the comedy was decent enough as well when it showed up at strange points. The art was pretty good too.

tl;dr: A story that occasionally tries to seem like its more than that, but is really just a simple but solid story about a guy fighting a war against aliens.