Japanese Cover
A manga adaptation of the video game of the same name, Scumocide sends individuals from his self-named organization to terrorize Metro City and cull lives until there is nothing left there but those strong enough to have use for him while allowing those who have no use to him anymore die. It's up to the Commando Team lead by Captain Commando himself; with his teammates being Ginzu, Mack, and Baby Head; to save the city and by extension the whole world.Suffice to say, the manga got cancelled before a third volume could be released, leaving everything hanging with no proper resolution.
The manga has examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion:
- The manga greatly expands on the game's plot and takes cues from the backstory present in concept art, giving the characters proper backstories and the bad guys a more extended role in the plot. That said, it didn't stick entirely and made a lot of changes to the backstory and characters as well.
- Certain mooks got much more important roles than being simple enemies. Most notably Carol and Brenda became crime bosses in Metro City and Mardia went on to become a member of Yamato's ninja clan, his right-hand woman and lover.
- Ginzu's little sister Akane is mentioned in concept art, but very little is given about her. The manga presents her as a ninja-in-training that's also a childhood friend of Commando, and is looking for Ginzu ever since he left their home in a training journey. She is also shown to be good at fighting and wielding a three-section staff.
- Adaptational Heroism: In the game, Carol and Brenda were mooks through and through. In the manga, they were driven to pull a Heel–Face Turn after Dolg tried to kill them both and later inform Mack about how many lives are at risk of being lost as a result of Scumocide's actions.
- Adapted Out: Almost every boss character appears in the manga, with the exception of Doppel and the Shtrom family. While a reptile monster similar to the Shtrom trio does appear briefly as an enemy and Dr. T.W appears to be creating them, the actual characters are never mentioned at any point.
- Bad Boss: As shown in the manga adaptation, Scumocide only allows people useful enough by his standards to join his organization and will allow any minions who fall beneath his expectations to die at the hands of others such as Carol and Brenda who nearly died at Dolg's hands when their plan to get Captain Commando killed by Ginzu failed.
- Body Backup Drive: The way Dr. Hoover survived after being fatally shot by Dr. T.W, by transplanting his mind into an artificial body created as part of their research, that of a small baby.
- Bodyguard Crush: Mardia is in love with Yamato, and stands always next to him as his second in command. She's the one who stops his duel to the death with Ginzu when it is clear he can't match him in battle.
- Blood Knight:
- Ginzu is all about his training, and his training is all about roaming the lands searching strong enemies to fight with. The only reason he decides to join the team eventually, is because he notices they attract interesting people he'd like to fight.
- Lagmin of the mercenary unit Z is all about fighting and killing, sometimes getting way excited over it and requiring his teammates to bring him down a notch to complete their mission.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: The boss character Monster, here a robot, is controlled via a fighting game pad, with Dr. T.W providing a list of moves and combos while excitedly explaining how he can do cancel and chain combos, and how he included hidden moves as well.
- Continuity Nod: The mooks Skip and Sonie make an uncredited cameo as thugs in a bar fight involving Commando.
- Cut Short: The manga was cancelled in the middle of its third major story arc, leaving its story unresolved and unexplained. The UDON release added a bunch of extra chapters not published originally, so while they completed the origin story of Baby Head and the girl Tina, it still left the manga in a massive Cliffhanger, with Scumocide having trapped the entire city in a dome-shaped energy barrier and Tina being kidnapped by the bad guys and showing signs of some psychic powers that are never explained.
- Deadly Upgrade: Yamato subjected himself to Scumocide's experiments to become stronger and be able to defeat Ginzu, but as his sporadic coughs of blood imply, this came at a prize. Yamato's desperation to get Ginzu to fight (and once defeated, kill) him seems to be because he's not expecting to live for long.
- Declaration of Protection: When they meet again after a long time, Baby Head apologizes to Tina for failing to protect her from Dr. T.W and renews his promise to keep her safe from him and his subordinates. Unfortunately for him, Blood breaks through the door moments after, kicks him into unconsciousness and leaves with Tina. The last we see of Baby Head, he left his bed despite his injuries and is feverishly working on his mecha in order to rescue her.
- Dehumanization: Dr. T.W sees the little girl that him and Hoover created as part of their research as an object, and gets pretty upset in how Hoover treats and talks to her like a person, telling him she's a weapon and has no need to have emotions. Hoover, on his part, is angry at T.W over this as he gives the girl a proper name (she is codenamed T-91, so he calls her Tina) and wishes for her to live a normal life despite her unnatural creation.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Two examples from the manga.
- When Dolg tries to kill Carol, her sister Brenda pleads with him to stop.
- Despite willingness to kill Ginzu's sister Akane, Mardia lets her go upon seeing what a bad shape her master Yamato was in as she runs to his side.
- Expanded Universe: The 2-volume manga gives further background to the Captain Commando characters, such as the backgrounds of the enemies and commandos alike. It also introduces a few characters who never appeared in the game like Sarah Kisaragi. It's canonical status is debatable, however, as the author admitted he was not following entirely what was written for the game, and several plot points are incompatible with what's known of the game's background.
- Expy: Commando has a family butler named Albert that raised him once his parents died in an accident. No points to guess he is a thinly-veiled reference to another well known butler to a vigilante superhero...
- Heel–Face Turn:
- Carol and Brenda return near the end of the manga, no longer working for Scumocide and warning Mack about the upcoming horrors his organization is planning to subject the whole city with.
- A Wooky working for Dr. T.W starts out as the one attempting to recapture Tina, but following a series of defeats and mistreatment by other villains has him decide to assist Sarah and the others, even saying he lamented how sad Tina was back when she was experimented on by T.W. Sadly, the manga's cancellation came before he could do anything to help.
- Hidden Buxom: A handful of outfits Aya Maverick, Captain Commando's assistant when he works as Mars Carlyle, dons make her look flatchested. However, several of the tops she dresses in show she is more stacked than she appeared to be.
- Hired Guns: The mook enemy Z in the game was changed in the manga to be a mercenary unit named "Z", with only one of its members (Lagmin) wielding the long claw weapon the game's enemy uses.
- Implacable Man: Blood in his few appearances near the end of the manga. He first walks into Sarah's apartment (through the wall), beats everyone present and takes Tina with him, with zero effort. He's later seen fighting off an army outside the energy dome Scumocide set up around Metro City, effortlessly destroying tanks with his powers, without showing even a hint of emotion.
- Karma Houdini: Due to the cancellation of the manga, even with the extra chapters, Scumocide and his remaining followers do not receive any punishment unlike the game.
- Let's You and Him Fight: The Basia sisters hire Ginzu to eliminate Captain Commando, at the time a vigilante super-hero ruining her criminal heists. Ginzu accepts and gets into a fight with him, but the moment he realizes he's his childhood friend Mars Carlisle he drops the fight and cancels the contract.
- Made of Iron: Dolg becomes The Juggernaut in this adaptation, scoffing off attacks like nothing (even from Commando, a guy who punched through the side of an helicopter bare-handed!!) and walking through walls as if they weren't there.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Commando's parents died in a laboratory accident when he was still a kid. Years later he came to discover Scumocide was connected to it.
- Mecha-Mooks: The 4th boss in the game, Monster, is a mass-produced robot instead of a human-turned-monster.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: After Carol and Brenda were no longer deemed useful to Scumocide's organization, Dolg tries to kill them for being so weak. After Captain Commando and Ginzu helped the two ladies escape, they pull a Heel–Face Turn and later inform Mack of the schemes Scumocide had in regards to Metro City.
- Mysterious Waif: The little girl Tina in the manga's final arc. She is an Artificial Human created by Dr. Hoover and T.W with some kind of important, possibly pyschic, powers. She escapes Dr. T.W and comes to live with Sarah, but in the end she is recaptured by Blood. Unfortunately, the manga was cancelled before her story was properly finished, so its unlikely we'll ever know why was she so important to the bad guys.
- Named by the Adaptation: The official manga gives the titular captain the civilian name Mars Carlisle and provides Ginzu and his rival Yamato with last names (Takegami and Mikagura, respectively). Baby Head gets the full name "Hoover J. Estefan" written on a monitor screen, and when UDON translated the manga they decided to use "Hoover" as his name, leaving "Baby Head" only as a codename.
- Original Generation: A few characters were original to the manga, most importantly Sarah Kisaragi (a reporter obssessed with Commando's identity), Aya Maverick (Commando's assistant in his role as CEO of Star Electronics) and Tina/T-91 (an Artificial Human created by Hoover and Dr. T.W to be a weapon).
- Out of Focus: Out of the four Commandos, Mack the Knife is the one without much plot relevance, being mostly Commando's hidden bodyguard. According to the author, his story would have been revealed in the cancelled 3rd volume.
- Psychoactive Powers: Captain Commando's Captain Gauntlet prototype works based on his emotional state, the more intense his state of mind is the stronger the gauntlet's discharge of energy becomes. Due to this, he is forbidden to use it more than once a day lest he ends up draining himself of energy. The first time he wields the gauntlet, he uses it twice to defeat Dolg and ends up in the hospital.
- Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Aya has pale skin and long black hair, she not only has a pretty face, she also turns out to be stacked.
- Siblings in Crime: Carol and Brenda are presented as the Basia sisters, working together as the top mafia bosses in Metro City.
- Super Prototype: During most of the manga, Commando uses a prototype one-hand version of his Captain Gauntlet, who has yet to be fully developed. The strain of using it more than once in his first battle leaves Commando hospitalized for 2 weeks.
- The Social Darwinist: Scumocide and all members of his organization believe in this. Dolg, the first proper enemy in the manga, establishes that the weak are only there to be killed and the strong are entitled to do whatever with them. He goes as far as threatening his own mooks because they don't think they can take over the whole city in a single day.
- The Starscream: Dr. T.W works for Scumocide, but harbors his own ambitions of grandeur and is planning stuff behind his back, wishing to surpass even God. Unfortunately, the manga's premature end means we'll never know what he was up to.
- Vigilante Man: The Cap works like one at the beginning of the manga, fighting crime at night as Captain Commando and becoming an urban legend at first.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Similar to the game, Dr. T.W abandons his base and escapes in a motorboat before he can be captured by Commando and Ginzu, leaving them with an army of Monster robots...and a self-destructing lair.
- Walking the Earth: Ginzu left his home and has been going around the world for the last 6 years as part of his training journey, looking for strong opponents to fight.
- Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Humorous example. When Commando and Ginzu find the Wooky assistant of Dr. T.W, Commando starts berating them for answers...until the mask comes off and the Wooky appears to be female. Commando tones it down and asks forgiveness for his rude behavior, but the moment the Wooky clarifies he's a man, Commando's back to threatening him with violence.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: When in the Collapsing Lair of Dr. T.W, Commando is sure they will reach the exit before the place blows up, as it is "the way these things work"...but when faced with a wall of enemies he adds: "that is, of course, unless this is the series finale...?". While it wasn't, the manga didn't last much more chapters before cancellation.
