Battle Angel Alita

This sophisticated, complex science fiction tale by master writer and artist Yukito Kishiro is full of action, black humor, and bizarre philosophical, historical, and cultural references. The heroine, Alita, is a powerful cyborg with a soft heart and a mysterious past. Her second lease on life isn't easy: her heart is broken, she gains and loses friends to the cruel world of the Scrapyard far below the Utopian city of Tiphares, and she serves many masters in her quest to protect the innocent and create a new life for herself. A cross between Star Trek and Blade Runner, this series constantly challenges the reader's definition of what it means to be human.

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The people and cyborgs of the Scrapyard live beneath the floating city of Tiphares, whose inhabitants dump their junk in the Scrapyard and rule above its inhabitants. One day Ido, a former Tipharean citizen and doctor specializing in cyborg repairs, finds the intact head of young cyborg-girl in a vast pile of scrap. He takes her in, gives her a body and the name Alita. Alita then discovers long forgotten fighting techniques hidden in her body and decides to become a hunter-warrior; a bounty collector employed by the factories of Tiphares.

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In a post-apocalyptic world, humans, robots and cyborgs live in the Scrapyard - a landscape of twisted, rusted junk made up of the garbage sent from the above city of Zalem. In this place, the inventor Ido finds a partially-destroyed cyborg amidst the rubble, gives her a new body and names her Gally. With no memory of her past and an instinctual ability to use a powerful martial art known as the Panzer Kunst, Gally matures and relearns life's lessons while she travels the broken landscape, struggles to remember who she is and where she came from, and discovers the mysteries of Zalem.