Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle

Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle, known in Japan as Gunnm: Mars Chronicle, is the third manga series in Yukito Kishiro's long-running cyberpunk saga. Picking up where Battle Angel Alita: Last Order left off, this installment splits its narrative between two timelines. In ES 594, an adult Alita returns to Mars for the first time in centuries, only to find a world still scarred by conflict. The other timeline jumps back to ES 373, when Alita was still the young cyborg girl Yoko, scraping by on a war-torn Martian landscape. These dual threads weave together to explore her origins and the brutal events that shaped her, while also setting up the events of the follow-up series, Gunnm: Panzer Kunst Chronicle.

Kishiro, who both writes and illustrates the series, delivers his signature blend of intricate mechanical design and philosophical introspection. The manga, serialized in Kodansha's Evening magazine before moving to Comic Days, has been collected into multiple tankōbon volumes, with each volume running around 200 pages. As a sequel to Last Order, it continues the franchise's tradition of dense, kinetic storytelling, but it also stands as a more personal story, digging into Alita's past and the scars of her childhood. For readers who have followed her journey from the scrap heap of Zalem to the farthest reaches of space, Mars Chronicle offers both a homecoming and a reckoning.

The series began serialization in 2014 and went on a 10-month hiatus before returning with a new chapter on the Comic Days app. The English translation is published by Kodansha USA, with at least 11 volumes released in English. The series concluded, with a new series slated for 2025, making Mars Chronicle the penultimate chapter in the saga. [edit]