Whenever I catch myself reminiscing about how good Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was, I’m usually resigned to doing one of three things: rewatching the anime, replaying the game (the anime even helped restore the game’s damaged reputation after its botched launch), or vicariously catching a vibe by flipping through the pages of No\Name, creator Rafał Jaki’s unrelated Manga Plus Creators series. Thankfully, I can now add a fourth thing to that rotation as I await the Netflix anime’s second season, whenever it’s ready: reading Dark Horse’s prequel manga, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Madness.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Madness, written by CD Projekt Red’s Bartosz Sztybor and illustrated by Asano (Studio Trigger’s BNA: Brand New Animal), does what most prequels are wont to do: expand on fan-favorite characters before we meet them in the original story. Madness chooses to wind back the clock before we meet David Martinez and focus its story on Edgerunners‘ resident gremlin, Rebecca, and her brother, Pilar.
So, what were they up to before David walked into the picture? They were bums sleeping sideways in the driver’s and back passenger seats of their car. The sting of their baller-on-a-budget reality hits a smidge harder when the manga reveals that their daddy was a Night City legend and that they’ve yet to have anything to show for it, with the easy layup of being nepo babies. As if pulled in by the allure of Night City’s ever-present dark side, the pair finally get a fire lit under their asses and jump-start their dreams of hitting it big as edgerunners.
What follows is a misadventure on par with Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as the pair gallivant from one botched job to the next, pissing off every grunt and mid-level gonk in Night City, and hoodwinking their way to legend status by turning their comedy of errors into a mad adventure that begs to be taken seriously.
Keeping it a buck, I was a bit trepidatious before starting Madness. Mostly, I was fretting that it would be a threadbare trip down memory lane (the way most prequels are), offering me nothing more than the kind of “assembling the outfit” referential fare I’ve seen a dozen times in works like Solo: A Star Wars Story. But Madness‘ first volume surprised me. It basically reads like a DLC expansion of the anime, telling its own little pocket story that blossoms so well, I’m sitting on my hands for its second volume. Of course, as far as member berries go, the manga is teeming with them, but never in a way that feels like it’s insulting my intelligence or pandering to me as a fan of its predecessor without having anything worthwhile to show for itself. If anything, the manga’s reference fodder is big, and it translates Cyberpunk‘s story into manga with an innocuous, neat touch.
For starters, the manga neatly adapts the game’s NPC-scanning feature, where players can read tight, funny flavor text blurbs on characters they’ve either just flatlined or are planning on zeroing. While the game incorporates this as a button you can tap to get a quick scan of someone, the manga takes advantage of its medium by printing character bios for folks Pilar and Becca likely won’t see again on a profile page at the end of each chapter. Likewise, the end of the volume goes the extra mile by showcasing all the locales Pilar and Becca traverse on a giant map just in case readers want to boot up 2077 again and check them out for themselves. And as a fan of Cyberpunk‘s uniquely brisk text-message-esque patois, it’s nice having 2077‘s slang rattling around in my head again.
Tangentially, Asano’s artwork is candy for the eyes. Not only is Asano’s paneling stylish, dynamic, and legible when the action calls for it, it’s also hilariously slapstick, selling the gore of bodies exploding into mist and things not going boom like a Looney Tunes cartoon. But as its own standalone manga, the thing that sold me the most on Madness is how it adds yet another cool wrinkle to the seemingly endless pool of stories that can still be told in Night City—a world I honestly thought had been wrung dry after Phantom Liberty.
That wrinkle comes in the form of the third member of Pilar and Becca’s crew, a guy whose history of swapping personalities via neural chips has left him fractured. One moment, he’s either a really goofy dude or John Wick in his flow state. He’s basically got Roger’s whole deal in American Dad, except he has no recollection of his other personas—a Ricky Spanish, if you will. His whole amnesia deal only makes matters worse because his deep ties to Night City’s high rollers make him a person of interest to rival gangs who want him dead and edgerunners in need of some eddies.
Suffice to say, I would die for him. He’s not just a fun vehicle for Madness‘ story; he’s one of the most intriguing shower thought-esque cyberpunk scenarios I’ve read in a minute. I was caught by surprise by the initial selling point of reading a manga with more. Becca was quickly supplanted by my desire to see the trio become fast friends, sharing one brain cell through Looney Tunes‑like gag manga antics and grindhouse shootouts alike.
While I went into reading Madness expecting a nostalgic shot of 2023’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards Anime of the Year winner, its first volume left me with high hopes for how both the second season of Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077‘s aptly titled (and very much in development) sequel, Cyberpunk 2, will carry the baton. If either project is half as fascinating (and fun) as Madness has been in its first volume, we’re in for a nova ride.
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