6/20/00 update: No, no updates to this page, but I now have a general-information Trigun webpage up. It's called Make a Little Light Bulb in Your Soul.
sumire-ya presents
The
Hastily Assembled
Nicholas
D. Wolfwood Shrine
Meet Nicholas D. Wolfwood.
He's a gun-toting, Kansai-dialect-speaking clergyman in TRIGUN, Yasuhiro Nightow's "Deep Space Planet Future Gun Action" manga and anime.
Wolfwood is a breed apart from your usual
anime bishounen--for one thing, he's a biseinen,
if anything (somebody once defined biseinen as "a bishounen
that needs to shave," which strikes me as apt a description
for Wolfwood as I've ever heard). He has a decidedly masculine
look, in a slightly sleazy way. He's got an Adam's apple and a
relatively convex nose, and those hairs sprouting from his chin
make his sideburns seem more like sideburns and less like
eartails.
You've got to be cool to pull off wearing a black suit every day in the desert, although Wolf gets a bit of ventilation since his shirt seems to be missing a few buttons. He accessorizes with silver cross cufflinks and, more importantly, a five-foot cross wrapped in canvas and straps that's actually one of several varieties of concealed weapon.
The Blues Brothers shades, the vintage motorcycle ("Angelina 2"), the endless series of crumpled cigarettes, all shout kakko ii!, but actually, Wolf has a soft spot for children and uses the money he earns to help support the church orphanage where he grew up. He becomes a good friend of Vash & co. despite some shady motives...
Anime episodes
in which Wolfwood appears:
Episode 9: Murder Machine
Episode 10: Quick Draw
Episode 11: Escape From Pain
Episode 16: Fifth Moon
From episode 18 on, he becomes a regular character.
Wolfwood's
real-life origins:
The
"Nicholas D." is said to come from Nicholas D.
"Nic" Knowland, a British cinematographer who worked on
The Phantom Menace, among other things, but Wolf
bears a suspicious resemblance to Tortoise Matsumoto
(shown at left), vocalist of the Osaka-based rock group Ulfuls,
which also happens to share the first three syllables of its name
with "Wolfwood" (pronounced "urufu-uddo" in
Japanese).
A note on
religion:
Wolfwood's title of bokushi would imply that he's of the
Protestant denomination. (Catholic priests are called shinpu
in Japanese.) But that may not mean anything in the crazy
mixed-up world of Trigun.
What would any anime character shrine be without the obligatory image gallery?
For more Trigun information, Make a Little Light Bulb in Your Soul.
TRIGUN is copyright Yasuhiro Nightow, Shounen Gahousha, Tokuma Shoten, and Nippon Victor. And even if Wolfwood wasn't in it, it would still be a damned good anime. Check it out.
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Comments, criticism, love letters? E-mail me at sumirechan@yahoo.com
This page was created on June 2, 1999.