Reading time 4 minutes
Whenever I catch myself reminiscing about how good Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was, I’m usually resigned to doing one of three things: rewatching the anime, replaying the game (the anime even helped restore the game’s damaged reputation after its botched launch), or vicariously catching a vibe by flipping through the pages of No\Name, creator Rafał Jaki’s unrelated Manga Plus Creators series. Thankfully, I can now add a fourth thing to that rotation as I await the Netflix anime’s second season, whenever it’s ready: reading Dark Horse’s prequel manga, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Madness.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Madness, written by CD Projekt Red’s Bartosz Sztybor and illustrated by Asano (Studio Trigger’s BNA: Brand New Animal), does what most prequels are wont to do: expand on fan-favorite characters before we meet them in the original story. Madness chooses to wind back the clock before we meet David Martinez and focus its story on Edgerunners‘ resident gremlin, Rebecca, and her brother, Pilar.
So, what were they up to before David walked into the picture? They were bums sleeping sideways in the driver’s and back passenger seats of their car. The sting of their baller-on-a-budget reality hits a smidge harder when the manga reveals that their daddy was a Night City legend and that they’ve yet to have anything to show for it, with the easy layup of being nepo babies. As if pulled in by the allure of Night City’s ever-present dark side, the pair finally get a fire lit under their asses and jump-start their dreams of hitting it big as edgerunners.
