Following Edgerunners fan-favorite Rebecca and her brother Pilar, the story takes place before they’ve fallen in with Maine’s crew. At this point, they’re a pair of nobodies, as Pilar would say. Rebecca is happy to continue living in obscurity, but her big bro can’t help jumping at the opportunity to make it big by tracking down an Arasaka Corp asset: a nameless man whose memory and life experiences have been deleted and overwritten countless times. After Rebecca gets her hands on this outwardly polite target whose wiring is so scrambled that he doesn’t know his own identity, she and her brother get sucked into a spiraling mess that showcases just how inexperienced they are.
If there’s a clear target demographic for this story, it’s probably Edgerunner fans whose favorite character was Rebecca, an agent of chaos with an unexpected soft side. Here, she hasn’t fully become the seasoned operator we meet later, but still demonstrates why she’s so popular through a compelling combination of do-gooderism and trigger-happy outbursts. The manga’s very first scene shows the aftermath of a splatterfest where Rebecca dismantled a group of gangsters who were harassing a waitress. Despite all the decapitations, these bloody displays carry an irreverent tone, especially because the comic’s body count comes surprisingly close to the show’s in much less time. The frantic pace is fun at first, but eventually proves a bit too much; there’s not really a deliberate march towards bad times, as much as the characters starting out in hot water that keeps heating up.
Thankfully, there are some elements to latch onto, mostly related to Rebecca’s backstory. Tying in with the broader series’ tragic tone, it turns out she used to have dreams that didn’t involve shotgun shells before this city, or more specifically her dad, dragged her down to their level. As for her older brother, Pilar, he gains more depth than the background appearance he had in the show; this isn’t exactly a high bar, but he makes for a solid co-star here. He has nightmares about his old man’s disappointment, pushing him (and his sister) further and further into a Blood Simple-style botched job that keeps them on the run. Asano’s art and paneling are up for this breakneck pace, illustrating punchy violence where cybernetically enhanced bodies are reduced to circuitry and meat chunks. In contrast to the jagged bursts of violence are rounded character designs that seamlessly make the jump from color to black and white. If nothing else, Night City and its inhabitants definitely look the part.
Even with these similarities, though, this manga is missing something crucial: It lacks the brutal twists found in David Martinez’s doomed journey. This first volume doesn’t resolve enough to get to that point, ending on a cliffhanger before anything is meaningfully resolved. More fundamentally, as a prequel to a prequel, there isn’t much room to surprise us. In the anime, David’s allies would get flatlined at a moment’s notice, whereas here, we know our central pair will survive, undercutting any real tension. As for the main original character introduced, the unnamed Arasaka asset, it’s difficult to become invested in his story because he comes across more like a MacGuffin than a person.
It goes without saying that Night City is a place where dreams (and a lot of people) go to die, but even judged against these cynical standards, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Madness feels too predetermined. While the anime got the most out of this doomed inevitability, so far, this manga hasn’t been able to repeat that trick.
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