Shigeru Mizuki's "Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths" begins with a gallery of the faces of each of the 30 main characters.
Although none of these portraits could be called realistic, each is idiosyncratic enough to be instantly recognizable and distinct from each of the others. That we can tell one from the other is, perhaps, the point: these young men, Mizuki shows us, were not a nameless and faceless mass marching toward their "noble deaths," but sons and brothers, husbands and lovers, human beings caught up in something beyond their control.
It becomes painfully clear, as we move through the pages of Mizuki's "90 percent fact[ual]" account of a detachment of Japanese soldiers sent, in 1943, to an island in the New Guinean archipelago, that their superiors did not see things that way. For them, the grunts "were not even thought of as human beings."