By Ethan Gurr
edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai
Hey reader, I know it's been a while and honestly, a lot of that's on me. I would try and come up with a convincing
reason why but “I felt a bit burnt out and wanted some time away from this” is just pretty
much it but i'm back reignited to write things for you. Other than this, the big thing I'm working
on right now is a review of the Kamen Rider Zero-One comic as a whole now that it's all out.
But today, I’d like to come at you with something a little more personal. Kamen Rider, for those
that don't know, is a Japanese superhero franchise consisting of TV shows and films but
spins off into manga and anime as well (originally created by manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori).
Kamen Rider media generally features a motorcycle-riding superhero with an insect motif who
fights supervillains. Though each series radically reinvents itself, only connecting in the form
of keeping core iconography intact season to season. Especially after the revival in the 2000s,
now it’s unsurprising for the series to jump between telling the tale of a fruit-themed samurai battling
invaders from another world before becoming God to the taleof an unmotivated cop solving weird
cases involving a race of shapeshifting artificials with the power of cars to what if we made
Detroit: Become Human but good?, and the most recent series Ancient Rome's sassiest
joins the time traveling hunger games to find his mum.
I originally found Kamen Rider in 2018 through clips of the past year’s rider, Kamen Rider Ex-Aid appearing on
my instagram feed. My curiosity piqued seeing these bright colourful heroes, I eventually found a way to watch
the then most recent season, Kamen Rider Build, and loved it. I loved it so much that one of my strongest
memories coming out of the theatre from seeing Avengers: Infinity War with my little brother was me realising
I was more excited for the upcoming debut of a character's power up form than I was for Endgame.
There are many reasons why Kamen Rider really clicked for me when it did - the designs, the ability for the
franchise to reinvent itself each year, the fact that Kamen Rider Build was just really good, the theme of “power
itself does not define us regardless of where it’s from, it's what we do with it that’s important” subtly or overtly
expressed in every season by the main characters getting power to transform from/using the same powers
as the villains. But on reflection, I think a large reason why Kamen Rider clicked for me as hard as it did,
when it did, was the fact that a few months prior. I had stopped reading Marvel and DC comics.
If i'm being honest, the reasons why I stopped reading western cape comics could easily be an article
on their own. The short story was, I had realised that none of it matters, that it was a toothless medium,
that for all their talk of the importance of continuity, the “YOU NEED TO BY THIS YEAR’S HUGE EARTH-
SHATTERING EVENT THAT WILL BE CROSSING OVER INTO ALL OF YOUR BOOKS”
marking guff, they would and will happily regress, undo, retcon and reboot characters out of any meaningful
character development so that they can remain in the same status quo from the 70s.
Trapped in an eternal middle, we would only ever see origins for more and more characters. Sure,
they would kill them off every now and then for a sales bump but everyone knows in superhero
comic books, death is less meaningless. Realising all of this, that I would never get the true closure
and satisfaction that a good ending can provide, I stopped reading comics.
As I mentioned before, every season of Kamen Rider reinvents itself. Each one brings an end to the battles
and the years-long main story of its hero while leaving the door open for them to crossover
and team up with the following series.This provides the closure western comics refuse
to while also ensuring it never gets stale and boring.
Another reason why I love Kamen Rider is that it never gets boring watching them jump kick nazis so
hard they explode,
And while I know I didn’t have quite the emotional heartstring-puller as the personal story from my
Why I love Ultraman article, I hope my comic book medium hot takes can more than make up for that.
