Trigun Volume 7

Still staggering his way through Trigun’s dangerous Old West, it’s now got the point where merely Vash’s fleeting presence is enough to level an entire town. Unable to hide and haunted by his insane brother Knvies and the ever weird Gung-Ho Guns, he is chased through petrified cities by giant sand worms and has to fend off a series of bizarre and vicious attacks aimed as much at his dear friends as himself.

At the behest of Knives, the mission handed to the Gung-Ho Guns isn’t simply assassination – they have been told to torture Vash, to test, twist and break his pacifism and love in life. They attack and murder his friends because to protect them he will have to kill himself, to save them he will have to abandon them. Vash intends to stop Knives, but without a killing intention, what can he do? When you’re dealing with a man so in contempt of “love & peace”, how do you stop him without dropping to his sadistic level – Vash’s innocent and pacifist naivety is both his greatest strength and only weakness. He is admirable for strictly sticking to his good morals, but ultimately he is helpless to stop the slaughter of his friends and loved ones.

One of the best points of Trigun is its use of colourful action and humour. Nothing is normal, and here Vash again faces off against a mass of frankly odd adversaries; a bunch of hulking post-apocalyptic cyborgs, a supernatural puppet master and a teeming legion of mammoth sand worms – it all makes for an exhilarating and exciting experience, addled with just enough sarcastic humour and dim-witted interactions with the likes of Wolfwood to be funny without dropping the now consistent serious tone.

And serious it is – characters (though none major) are regularly being killed off in unromanticised, unfair but touching circumstances. And it’s all for Vash.

In Summary

Trigun #7 is the beginning of the end for Vash’s journey as his search for Knives intensifies and he finds himself running through an ever growing desert of human corpses. Between a trio of colourful demons and a tragic sacrifice, the only way Vash can put a stop to such misery is by facing his arch enemy – but to win is to kill, so whether or not the peace loving Vash has what it takes to save mankind (and kill his brother) remains to be seen.