You will remember to call them "Lovely Angels", won't you?
It's not our fault!
Humanity has abandoned Earth and spread across the galaxy, but that doesn't mean there aren't any problems any more. In fact, there are quite a lot of them, and some of them are worse than people could have dreamed of before going into space. An agency of the galactic government called the Worlds Welfare Work Association ("3WA") has its own special way of dealing with these problems — it dispatches teams of highly-trained, well-equipped troubleshooters, called "Trouble Consultants", to find the trouble and, well, shoot it.
One of the most successful teams of Trouble Consultants is the "
Lovely Angels", two teenaged girls who have a near-perfect success record. However, they also have a reputation of blowing up everything they touch (which isn't fair — only about a third of their missions end with something being destroyed, and it's
never their fault), which has led to their unofficial and hated nickname of the "Dirty Pair". On the other side of matters, the things they have accidentally blown up have on occasion been
inhabited planets, so it's not as if their reputations are undeserved.
Haruka Takachiho created the Pair in a set of stories published as
Light Novels (which continue to be published), set in the same continuity as his other series
Crusher Joe (which debuted 2 years earlier). The production studio
Sunrise adapted the stories into a successful action/comedy TV series in 1985, which continued into a movie, an
OVA series, and two feature-length
OVAs. In 1994, the franchise was rebooted as
Dirty Pair Flash. Meanwhile, Adam Warren (future author of
Empowered) and
Toren Smith (of translation house Studio Proteus, who left after the first three miniseries) obtained the rights to create an English-original
manga-styled Dirty Pair comic miniseries for
Dark Horse Comics, technically based on the original novels instead of the anime.
The
Dirty Pair anime was originally translated in the US by
Streamline Pictures in
the 90s, with the release of the movie and feature-length
OVAs. Later,
ADV Films released
Flash, the
OVA series, the feature-length
OVAs, and the movie. They had plans to release the original TV series, which fell through due to poor sales. However, the TV series was finally
licensed
and released by
Nozomi Entertainment. Nozomi has now announced plans to re-release the movies, the original
OVAs, and
Flash in 2012.
Dark Horse Comics is currently publishing translations of the first two light novels. They also published the comics by Adam Warren (after the original publisher Eclipse Comics went out of business), but those are out of print now.
Also, starting in March 2010, the
seinen manga magazine Monthly Comic Ryu started publishing an adaptation of the first light novel, "
The Great Adventures of the Dirty Pair". The artist for this version is Hisao Tamaki, who is most famous for the manga adaptation of
Star Wars: A New Hope.
More information about the Dirty Pair, in all of their incarnations, is available at the website
Tea Time in Elenore City.(Original entry text written by Rob Kelk for
The Anime Primer, and used with permission of the author.)
The various incarnations of Dirty Pair contain examples of:
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