Urban Dirt - Times Online - WBLG

No more Mr Nes guy

As an incurable fan of manga and a barely grown-up schoolboy at heart, Golgo13 is perhaps my greatest guilty pleasure. I have a large and much-loved collection of his comic-book adventures that stretches back over 20 years and along yards of bookshelf: when each new tome comes out, I knock children out of the way to get to the news-stand.

I say "guilty" because I know that the stories are really very nasty indeed. They appeal to precisely the same part of the brain that causes addiction to Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil and the Bourne Trilogy.

For the newcomers, Golgo13 - the working name of Duke Togo - is a professional assassin par   excellence. In over 400 stories, he has never, ever failed to hit his mark. He has travelled from the seething jungles of South America to crumbling African dictatorships to thriving Iraqi biological warfare factories (I did mention this was fictional, didn't I...) and killed someone at every stop. Usually with a head-shot. Men or women. Black or white. Young or old. Married or Single. Rich or Poor. It doesn't matter: if he takes the contract, he makes the kill.

Along the way, however, he does get into a few scrapes. Scrapes which inevitably end in tears, violent sex, plumes of blood or all three. Something, one might say, of an anti-hero, Golgo merrily rapes, stabs, batters, shoots, and slices his way through the twilight world of espionage and organised crime, inflicting his amoral code on more or less everyone he meets. (On the right is a charming frame of him punching a woman in the face).

Religious and political leaders of all creeds, culture and race are depicted as villains or buffoons. He has been both victim and inflicter of torture and a voracious user of hookers. Everyone around him screws, swears and subverts. Oh, and he's a heavy smoker, the swine.

Odd, therefore, that Golgo13, should have been selected as the new "face" of Nescafe in Japan.

A fistful of Wobarrdy-Prikkdy...

"Wobarrdy-Prikkdy"...

A lesser baronet from a Jeeves and Wooster episode? A small duchy in southern Belgium that has violently declared independence? The sort of complaint that would prompt a doctor to lower his half-moon spectacles and yell "nurse, the screens!"?

Well, perhaps not. But it is, I confidently predict, a mouthful for which we will all soon be forced to slacken our jaws and perfect our pronunciation. To some, it will be a potential panacea for a world on the brink of food-price cataclysm and inflationary madness. For others, a neologism of peace and stability for our strange and troubled political times. 

For yet others it will be a bold slogan of change - the rallying-call for a new Asian Century that owes nothing to the pinstriped pig-doggery and safari-suited colonial presumption of the West.