Rina (リナ Rina, alternatively romanized as Lina), codenamed F-502, is a character that appears in the 1968 "Immigration" arc of the Cyborg 009 manga. She comes from the year 2222, and travels back to the '60s in hopes of preventing the nuclear war from happening.
Appearance[]
Rina has long blonde hair, and wears a short fur-trimmed dress and boots. She is at first depicted with a spotted headband, although Ishinomori remains inconsistent with this detail, with it being forgotten in portions of the story before returning as a solid black band. Her forelocks gradually evolve to be drawn longer over the course of the arc, and the style of her fringe is also altered through the story.
At one point, Rina is depicted with the black sparkly "mysterious girl"-type eyes when confessing that she is from the future, however all her other panel appearances depict her eyes in the standard female character style.
While most people that came from her time period were affected by the war and have prostheses (equated to highly advanced cybernetics), Rina got off relatively easy, only having a scar from a bite wound on her foot.
Personality[]
As first seen, Rina is strictly determined to protect her older brother and to retrieve his arm. She is intimidating enough to be equated to a "beautiful demon" of legends, and goes as far as to threaten 007 and 006 with a ray gun for the arm back. However, she is easily disturbed by the sight of slimy creatures, such as 007's octopus form. This is partly due to the fact that in her time, various people have become grotesquely mutated along with other life forms.
She is distraught and helpless at her brother being disintegrated, and considers herself to be just as hideous as others affected by the nuclear war of WWIII, even if the deformity with her foot was minor in comparison.
Ultimately, Rina is sidelined for the rest of the story, playing a passive role in accepting to be traded back to her commander and the other Future People, in exchange for the hostage 009, 006, and 007.
History[]
Notes[]
- In the original printing of the manga, the panel where Rina reveals her foot had her drawn with six toes, as she was displaying her mutation from the result of the nuclear war. Ishinomori redrew the panel and revised the text about Rina's backstory, to remove the passages about humans becoming deformed from nuclear fallout. Instead, any lost limbs were stated to be the results of mutated animals and plants attacking them. The time of WWIII was also altered from 1983 to a vague "19xx" through reprints, as the 1980s would no longer be considered futuristic.
- As shown in Ishinomori's book Introduction to Manga, as well as a reprint of the same image in Cyborg 009 a la Cult, aspects of Rina's character design appear to have been sourced from a rejected draft for 003.
- Around the time of Rina's appearance in the 009 series, her design and name were re-used in the Ishinomori series Blue Zone, as one of the protagonists, Rina Hirokoji. Her boyfriend Jun (himself sourced from Ishinomori's "Jun" character) also bears some similarity to the Commander that appeared in the Immigration arc. However, the Blue Zone Rina would eventually have her design evolve to resemble 003 by the end of the series, while oddly, the Cyborg 009 Rina would resemble the initial Blue Zone design by the end of the "Immigration" arc (minus the black sparkly eyes).
- Ishinomori's general "Rina" character from that series and this arc would eventually be re-purposed for Eva Maria Pallares in the Cyborg 009 vs. Devilman OVA series.
- The spelling of her name is up for some debate, due to the R/L ambiguity in Japanese. While English fan and official translations (such as with her counterpart in the 2001 anime) have used Lina or Lena, the Italian edition of the manga by JPOP went with the Rina spelling when they translated the Immigration arc, likely due to Rina being more commonly used in manga as an English notation for the katakana (as there is no "Lina" name in the Japanese language; only foreign women would have "Lina") and her Blue Zone counterpart. This is complicated some by the 009 Rina's ethnicity being ambiguous, though her Blue Zone counterpart is Japanese.