In a World… where a massive land reclamation project in Tokyo Bay has necessitated the creation of Humongous Mecha called "Labors" to aid the heavier construction work, Noa Izumi, a young officer with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, begins training for an experimental Labor police program to counter crimes involving the vehicles after recently graduating from a local police academy.
The manga ran in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from 23 March 1988 to 11 May 1994 with republished works done in Aizo/Wide/Bunkoban versions. It received a partial English localization by Viz Media, but this was cancelled after only two volumes. The French version has been localized with 18 out of 22 volumes done before this was cut short.
The manga is an Alternate Continuity to both the Mobile Police Patlabor: The Early Days OVA (which it began in parallel with) and subsequent films and the TV series, including Patlabor: The TV Series.
This manga provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptation Personality Change: Shinobu is far more expressive in the manga adaptation, as opposed to the anime where she's a Deadpan Snarker instead.
- Adaptational Late Appearance: Kanuka Clancy joins the cast much later than in the OVA/film and anime continuities: she shows up after Takeo Kumagami, who replaced her as Ohta's backup in the anime series and never appeared in the OVA at all.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Near the end of the manga storyline, masked and armed men backed by Richard Wong raid the SV 2 compound and seize it, taking some of the officers there as hostages.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall:
- One of the earliest examples occurs in the first chapter. Noa complains she can't keep track of all the geographical data, so Asuma tells her he'll explain two pages later. And he does - complete with a map and pointer!
- Noa breaks the 4th wall, herself, by turning her back to the reader while taking her physical exam so we can't see her topless. While in another scene, she notes that the manga's becoming more like a cartoon.
- Depending on the Artist: While not too jarring in the long run, the Patlabors' designs differ between each incarnation as a result of them being produced by different studios. This version uses the original Headgear design, which depicts them with a pair of cooling fans at the bottom, positioned in such a way as to invoke the iconic Mobile Suit Gundam's jump thrusters, whereas most other versions replace them with a set of modest vent slits.
- Divergent Character Evolution: In every iteration of the franchise, all three Ingram units in SV2 initially look identical, but Ota's Unit 2 eventually gets a different head in every continuity and slightly different shoulder armor. This is justified in the manga as part of a cancelled prototype donated to the police by Shinohara Heavy Industries after the Special Vehicles Unit ran out of spare heads due to Ota's insanely aggressive fighting style.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: In the first manga volume, Noa gets her first awesome moment when she rips a leg off a four-legged labor, then beats the labor into submission with it. (This particular application of the trope shows up from time to time throughout Patlabor).
- Kaiju: One story involves an airline crash that accidentally releases a genetic experiment that rapidly grows into an amphibious monster that Division 2 (among others) get called out to deal with. WXIII: Patlabor The Movie 3 was loosely based on this story.
- Shown Their Work: The manga version used an actual map of the city of Tokyo for geographical accuracy.
- Super Prototype: The Type Zero from Patlabor: The Movie shows up near the end of the manga, piloted by Noa. It actually does quite well, until the bad guys deactivate the computers that did the calculations for the Type Zero: since it was a prototype, it relied on an outside unit rather than having all the hardware inside the chassis.
- Welcome Episode: The manga's first chapter starts with Noa still in training before getting any sort of Labor instruction. When she was introduced, she's involved in part-time gigs as a security guard in a graveyard shift. This was prior to her graduation from the local police academy.
