I almost didn't write this review (and no comments from the gallery about that being a good thing ...). Two-thirds of the way through Bubblegum Crisis 2040 I thought, this isn't mythic. It's just people fighting mutating robots and an evil uber-corporation, again and again and like many other anime plots. But then ...

It seems the robots, or "boomers," had been created using the living matrix of a human mind, and that a sort of "super-boomer," one of the first created, can release the boomers from their present forms, and can herself evolve at a superhuman rate.

Suddenly it's not just a story of robot revolt, of the slaves going mad, but of robotic evolution, and postulating boomers as--perhaps--the next step in evolution.

This theme, of humankind evolving through technology rather than natural means, is indeed part of the new mythology, for it is a story of becoming, of how we got/will get somewhere. Prometheus brought us fire; Adam and Eve ate the fruit; and perhaps we will give birth to the next era through our technological feats. Granted, this is a story of what will be, rather than what was, but myths can be of future and not past, as witness all the predictions of the end of the world. And, indeed, perhaps an evolutionary step like the one posited in Bubblegum Crisis 2040 will be the end of our world.

But it will definitely also be a beginning.