Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Horror/Supernatural

King of Eden, Vol. 1

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Is it too soon to enjoy a pandemic-themed manga? That question was foremost in my mind as I read King of Eden, a new thriller that pits a group of globe-trotting scientists against an assortment of terrorist organizations that have weaponized a lethal virus. I’m happy to report that King of Eden didn’t remind me of the COVID crisis, but it did something arguably worse: it bored me.

The dullness of the story is all the more surprising for a series written by Takashi Nagasaki, Naoki Urasawa’s collaborator on such entertaining pot-boilers as Monster, Master Keaton, and 20th Century Boys. All of Nagasaki’s worst tendencies are on display in King of Eden: there are pointless flashbacks to the main characters’ childhoods, solemn monologues about the Old Testament, long-winded conversations about global terrorism, and an interminable lecture on the ancient Scythians that name-checks Herodotus because… why not? Though the first volume introduces a dizzying number of characters, Nagasaki barely fleshes them out. Even leads Rua Itsuki and Teze Yoo feel more like skill sets than actual people, as evidenced by an on-the-nose exchange in which a bureaucrat recites Dr. Itsuki’s resume—she has degrees from universities in Korea, Germany, and Israel—and reminds her that she “hold[s] a black belt in Tae Kwon Do” and is “proficient in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga” as if she didn’t know these things about herself.

None of this would matter, of course, if King of Eden were entertaining, but Nagasaki is so intent on world-building that he overwhelms the reader with information, all delivered in such earnest, exhaustive detail it saps the narrative momentum. Itsuki and Yoo cross paths with MI-6 agents, WHO officials, IRA terrorists, crazy archaeologists, Interpol officers, and zombies—ZOMBIES, for Pete’s sake!—yet none of these encounters are memorable. Had Nagasaki placed more trust in artist SangCheol Lee (a.k.a. Ignito), King of Eden might have been a brisker, more imaginative entry in the zombie canon.

The first chapter offers a tantalizing glimpse of that potential partnership. Gone are the long-winded speeches; instead, Lee drops the reader into the action alongside two police officers who stumble across a baffling, gruesome scene. After the officers arrest a potential suspect, Lee skillfully cross-cuts between two spaces at the local precinct—an interrogation room and the morgue—allowing us to glimpse what’s unfolding in each room, and to feel the policemen’s growing unease. Lee’s crack pacing keeps the reader invested in the characters’ fate, building to a satisfying reveal of the carnage’s true source: a hideous, lantern-jawed creature that’s part werewolf, part zombie.

Alas, that cinematic flair disappears as soon as the characters begin talking; the next two chapters consist of information dumps punctuated by the occasional fist fight or car chase. By the time Nagasaki and Lee introduce a vampire arms dealer near the end of volume one, it barely registers as a major development. And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with King of Eden: the story is so overstuffed with characters and events that I couldn’t muster the energy for another 15 or 100 chapters of talking heads explaining zombie behavior or Scythian culture just to figure out who this vampire is, and why he matters.

Yen Press provided a review copy of volume one.

KING OF EDEN, VOL. 1 • STORY BY TAKASHI NAGASAKI • ART BY IGNITO • TRANSLATED BY CALEB COOK • LETTERING BY ABIGAIL BLACKMAN • RATED OLDER TEEN (16+) • 384 pp.

Chainsaw Man

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There comes a moment in every manga reader’s journey when they’re no longer dazzled by the sheer variety of genres, styles, or outrageous storylines that an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump or Big Comic Spirits offers—the moment when a manga about killer goldfish or a warrior with lethal nose hair sounds more exhausting than awesome. I reached that milestone around the time I read The Qwaser of Stigmata, a manga so lewdly preposterous I felt uncomfortable even summarizing the plot in my review. So when I heard about Chainsaw Man, a series whose premise is pretty much summed up in the title, I was pretty sure I wasn’t interested in reading it. Then I saw this image:

My first thought was whoa. And then: cool. And so began my Chainsaw Man read-a-thon, an attempt to understand the appeal of this blood-and-testosterone-soaked battle manga.

The character atop the shark is Denji, who begins the story as an ordinary young man struggling to pay off his father’s gambling debts. His only friend is the sweet-faced Pochita, a dog demon with a chainsaw blade where his snout should be. After local mobsters brutally attack Denji, Pochita transfers his demonic powers to Denji, thus enabling Denji to transform from scrawny teen to chainsaw-wielding menace with the pull of a cord. His remarkable abilities attract the interest of Makima, a professional Devil Hunter who recognizes Denji’s potential value as a weapon. Through a mixture of flirtation, cajoling, and threats, Makima recruits Denji for the Public Safety Council, dispatching him to kill monsters.

Going into Chainsaw Man, I was fully prepared for carnage and mayhem and three-eyed sharks. What I didn’t expect were moments of genuine pathos. The interactions between Denji and Pochita, however, are sniffle-inducing, underscoring the poignancy of Pochita’s decision to sacrifice himself for Denji. Later chapters set up an interesting parallel between Denji’s relationship with Pochita and his relationship with Makima, who refers to him as her “dog.” When Denji chafes against the conditions Makima has imposed on their partnership, it spurs a moment of self-reflection about his own treatment of Pochita, making him realize just how much he took Pochita’s companionship for granted.

Of course, no one is reading Chainsaw Man for these kind of emotional beats; they’re hoping for outrageous displays of gore and violence, and on that front, Tatsuki Fujimoto does his utmost to push the boundaries of good taste. Every time Denji reverts to his demonic form, chainsaw blades burst through his chest and head with great clouds of arterial spray, a preview of the even bloodier manner in which he kills his enemies. Though some of the demons are uninspired—how’s a giant bat grab you?—Fujimoto’s most memorable creations are clearly designed to elicit an appreciative “ewww”; the first monster Denji kills, for example, is an enormous tomato devil who looks like something that’s been moldering in the crisper drawer for weeks.

Between the action scenes, Fujimoto peppers the script with crude jokes to remind us that Denji is a teenage boy whose primary motivation for fighting demons is to impress Makima and earn enough money to eat junk food. In that respect, Denji is a more honest shonen hero than the typical Jump lead; he thinks and acts like a real teenage boy, right down to his self-absorption and total objectification of women. (There’s even a chapter called “A Way to Touch Some Boobs.” Yes, really.) I can’t say I ever warmed to Denji as a lead character, but I finished my read-a-thon with a grudging respect for Fujimoto’s excessive, ridiculous creation, which entertained and repelled me in equal measure. Your mileage will vary.

Chapters 1-53 of Chainsaw Man are available at the VIZ website. 

CHAINSAW MAN • STORY AND ART BY TATSUKI FUJIMOTO • VIZ MEDIA

 

The Drifting Classroom Signature Edition, Vol. 1

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In a 2009 interview with Tokyo Scum Brigade, Kazuo Umezu acknowledged that his debt to Osamu Tezuka went beyond storyboarding and character designs. Tezuka “didn’t pull any punches for children or dumb down his works,” Umezu explained. “He dealt with complicated themes and let the readers work it out on their own.” The 1972 classic The Drifting Classroom reveals just how profoundly Umezu absorbed this lesson. Though it ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday, a magazine aimed at grade schoolers, Umezu’s work was bleak, subversive, and weirdly thrilling, depicting a nightmarish world where kids resorted to violence and deception to survive.

The Drifting Classroom begins with a freak accident in which a rift in the space-time continuum sends the Yamato Elementary School and its occupants into the distant future. Initially, the students and teachers believe that they are the sole survivors of a devastating nuclear attack, and the area immediately surrounding the school supports their hypothesis: it’s a barren wasteland with no water, plants, or signs of human habitation save a pile or two or non-degradable trash. As the school’s occupants realize the severity of the crisis, panic sets in. Teachers and students engage in a brutal competition for dwindling supplies while attempting to solve the mystery of what happened to them. And when I say “brutal,” I mean it: the body count in volume one is astonishing, with murders, mass suicides, fist fights, knife fights, and rampaging monsters culling the herd at a breathtaking rate.

It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves against their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to the present. Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups, a point underscored by one student’s observation that adults “depend on logic and reason to deal with things.” He continues:

When something happens and they can’t use reason or logic to explain it, they can’t handle it. I don’t think they were able to accept that we’ve traveled to the future. You know how adults are always saying that kids are making things up? It’s because they only know things to be one way. Kids can imagine all kinds of possibilities. That’s why we’ve managed to survive here.

That speech is delivered by The Drifting Classroom‘s plucky protagonist Sho, a sixth grader who becomes the children’s de facto leader. When we first meet Sho, he’s behaving petulantly, pouting over his mother’s decision to throw away his marbles. The intensity of his anger is drawn in broad strokes, but it firmly establishes him as an honest-to-goodness ten year old, caught between his desire to play and his parents’ desire to mold him into a responsible teenager. Once transported to the future, Sho’s strategies for scavenging supplies or subduing a rampaging teacher are astute but not adult; there are flourishes of imagination and kid logic guiding his actions that remind us just how young and vulnerable he is. As a result, Sho’s pain at being separated from his parents, and of losing his comrades, is genuinely agonizing.

Umezu’s artwork further emphasizes the precarity of Sho’s situation. Sho and his classmates have doll-like faces and awkwardly proportioned bodies that harken back to Umezu’s work for shojo magazines such as Sho-Comi and Shoujo Friend, yet their somewhat unnatural appearance serves a vital dramatic function, underscoring how small they are when contrasted with their adult guardians. The adults, on the other hand, initially appear normal, but descend into monstrous or feckless caricatures as their plight becomes more desperate. Only Sho’s mother—who is stuck in the present day—escapes such unflattering treatment, a testament to her devotion, courage, and imagination; while her husband and friends have accepted the official story about the school’s fate, Sho’s mother is open to the possibility that Sho may be reaching across time to communicate with her.

Like his character designs, Umezu’s landscapes are willfully ugly, evoking feelings of disgust, fear, and anxiety that are almost palpable, whether he’s drawing an abandoned building or a garden filled with grotesquely misshapen plants. The area just outside the school gates, for example, resembles the slopes of an active volcano, with sulfurous clouds wafting over a rocky expanse that seems both frozen and molten—an apt metaphor the characters’ state of mind as they first glimpse their new surroundings:

Though The Drifting Classroom‘s imagery still resonates in 2019, its gender politics do not, as an egregious subplot involving a sadistic girl gang demonstrates. When the gang attempts to seize control of the school, a classmate urges Sho to oppose them on the grounds that girls are fundamentally unsuited for leadership roles. (“Women are made to give birth and rear children so they can’t think long term,” Gamo helpfully opines.) Umezu’s goal here, I think, is to suggest that girls are as capable of violence and cruelty as boys, but the dialogue suggests the gang’s behavior is a symptom of innate irrationality instead of a genuine and logical response to a desperate situation. Making matters worse is that the few sympathetic female characters are consigned to stereotypically feminine roles that give them little to do besides scream, run, and comfort the younger children; even Sakiko, the smartest girl in the class, never gets a chance to solve a problem or offer a useful opinion.

Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, The Drifting Classroom is a thoughtful meditation on adult hypocrisy, exposing all the ways that adults manipulate and terrorize children for their own convenience. “Adults are humans, children are animals,” a cafeteria worker tells Sho and his friends. “That’s why adults have the power of life and death over kids.” That Sho and his followers cling to their humanity despite the adults’ selfish behavior reminds us that children are innocent but not naive; Sho and his friends are clear-eyed about their teachers’ failings, yet choose to persevere. Recommended.

This is a greatly expanded–and reconsidered–review of The Drifting Classroom that appeared at PopCultureShock in 2006. VIZ Media provided a review copy. Read a free preview here.

THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY KAZUO UMEZZ • TRANSLATED BY SHELDON DRZKA • ADAPTED BY MOLLY TANZER • RATED T+, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, HORROR, GORE) • 744 pp.

Short Takes: Museum and Phantom Tales of the Night

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I have a confession: I am a complete chicken when it comes to horror movies. I watched Alien through my fingers and made it to the end of Fright Night by staring at the ingredient list on a candy wrapper; even the hot vampires of The Lost Boys weren’t soulful or shirtless enough to fully hold my gaze. But horror manga is another story, as I count Mermaid Saga, Gyo, Tomie, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and PTSD Radio among my favorites series. I can’t explain why horror manga doesn’t affect me the same way that movies do–no soundtrack, perhaps?–but I’m glad that I’ve found the intestinal fortitude to read Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezu’s work. Alas, I had less patience with the two most recent horror series I read: Museum, a digital-only offering from Kodansha, and Phantom Tales of the Night, a cautionary tale about a mysterious innkeeper.

Museum, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Ryosuke Tomoe
Kodansha Comics
Rated M, for Mature (graphic violence)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a mask-wearing vigilante kidnaps and tortures his victims in grotesque fashion–feeding them to dogs, severing their ears, tying them to toilets–then leaves cryptic notes that characterize each act as a “punishment,” daring the authorities to catch him. The mystery of who the vigilante is and what motivates him is the main driving force behind Museum, but you might not want to soldier through the carnage for answers to those questions since Ryosuke Tomoe can’t decide if his vigilante is a hero or a monster. Tomoe depicts the violence with such fetishistic detail that the reader is invited to admire the killer’s technique rather than meditate on the true horror of what the character has done. The ugly, utilitarian artwork and  relentlessly dour tone are the nails in the proverbial coffin, underscoring just how unpleasantly banal Museum really is. Not recommended.

Phantom Tales of the Night, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Matsuri
Yen Press
Rated OT, for Older Teens (violence and sexual themes)

Phantom Tales of the Night is the kind of bad manga that’s difficult to review: it isn’t offensive or ineptly drawn, but it’s a chore to read thanks to its poor plotting, muddled characterizations, and maddeningly opaque dialogue. Ostensibly, the series focuses on the Murakamo Inn, where the demonic host cajoles his guests into revealing their secrets. The rules governing how the Murakamo Inn operates, however, are in a constant state of flux, making it hard to pin down what, exactly, Phantom Tales is about. In some chapters, characters share their secrets with the inn’s owner in exchange for having a wish fulfilled, while in others, characters learn a terrible secret about themselves. The later chapters hint at a potentially longer, more complex arc that will play out over several volumes, but the set-up is so abrupt and confusing that it robs the final pages of their full impact–a pity, since Matsuri has a flair for drawing genuinely creepy monsters. Perhaps the most damning thing about Phantom Tales of the Night is that the characters talk incessantly about “secrets” but lack a basic understanding of what a secret really is or why it holds such power—a key failing in a series that is predicated on the idea that secrets are a kind of supernatural currency. Not recommended.

Versailles of the Dead, Vol. 1

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Kumiko Suekane’s Versailles of the Dead feels like a kissing cousin of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. It’s a clever and handsomely drawn manga that also inserts zombies into a well-known story for shock value: who knew the real cause of the French Revolution was an outbreak of “resurrection illness”? The net result, however, is so intentionally kitschy that it sometimes holds the reader at arm’s length, inviting us to appreciate the imagination and research that went into creating Versailles of the Dead without fully drawing us into the story.

You might reasonably think that the zombies were Versailles of the Dead’s most gonzo element, but you’d be wrong: it’s actually Suekane’s decision to invent a sibling for Marie Antoinette. This sibling — a twin brother named Albert — is Marie’s doppelgänger, a handsome lad with the same high cheekbones and pert nose as his infamous sister. En route to Marie’s nuptials, their carriage is ambushed by zombies, forcing Albert to impersonate his sister after she meets a gruesome end. Albert’s identity is quickly discovered by a handful of courtiers, all of whom are invested enough in preserving the status quo at Versailles that they conspire to look the other way, even when rumors surface that Albert beheaded his own sister.

Watching Albert step into the role of Dauphine is fun; he embraces the opportunity to manipulate courtiers through gossip and flirtation, exploiting rivalries within the court to his own advantage. The supernatural interludes, by contrast, sometimes feel like an afterthought, rather than a vital part of the story. Though the zombies are handled in a straightforward fashion, Suekane relies too much on flash-booms, jump cuts, and smudgy silhouettes to imply that certain members of the French court are possessed. Suggestion is an important tool for generating suspense, of course, but here it feels like a half-baked effort at world-building — what if there were demons in eighteenth century France, too? Not everything needs to be explained in a baldly literal fashion, of course, but the demonic angle feels like one accessory too many on a busy outfit.

If the supernatural intrigue is more afterthought than essential element, the artwork is sumptuous, capturing the opulence of Versailles without overwhelming the reader. Suekane’s secret? Lavishing attention on character designs rather than material objects, allowing the intricacy of the hairstyles, gowns, and frock coats to be the focal point of most panels. That approach gives her breathing room to draw the kind of subtle but important details that help establish the characters’ true natures. Albert, for example, never fully disappears into his sister’s clothes and wigs; the twinkle in his eye and the boldness of his carriage are conspicuous signs of his male upbringing, even though he looks ravishing as a woman. Other characters’ personalities are just as thoughtfully embodied through costume and movement. Madame du Barry, the Dauphine’s great rival, makes a dramatic display of her décolletage, framing her chest in a wreath of feathers that accentuate du Barry’s mature womanhood — a not-so-subtle attempt to assert her power and experience over a teenage interloper.

It’s this level of thoughtfulness that helped me soldier through the more clumsy parts of the story, where characters solemnly explain why Albert’s marriage must go forward for “the good of our two countries,” and Madame du Barry thinks in complete Wikipedia paragraphs. (Her internal monologues are surprisingly dull for such a canny strategist.) I’m not sure that all of the plot lines will eventually converge in a satisfying way — there’s a lot of supernatural silliness — but I find Albert a compelling character, a skilled political operator who revels in his ability to sow discord. Count me in for volume two.

VERSAILLES OF THE DEAD, VOL. 1 • STORY & ART BY KUMIKO SUEKANE • TRANSLATION BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • SEVEN SEAS • RATED TEEN (PARTIAL NUDITY, MILD GORE, VIOLENCE)  172 pp.

Short Takes: Black Torch and Demon Slayer

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It’s been a while since I added a new Shonen Jump title to my pull list. Don’t get me wrong: I love One-Punch Man and The Promised Neverland, but I find that many shonen titles overstay their welcome (usually around the fourth or fifth tournament arc). Still, it’s hard to resist the allure of a great shonen series, especially if it has snazzy art and a great hook, so I decided to check out two recent debuts: Black Torch and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaba, both of which draw inspiration from Japanese folklore.

Black Torch, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Tsuyoshi Takaki
VIZ Media, 200 pp.
Rated Teen+, for older teens (violence)

Black Torch suffers from an unusual problem: it has a terrific introductory chapter with emotionally resonant scenes, followed by two chapters that seem stale in comparison.

The opening pages introduce us to Jiro Azuma, a sensitive young man who has an unusual talent: he can hear animals’ thoughts. At the urging of his childhood dog, Jiro uses his gift to help animals in need, whether it’s a crow hassled by people or a kitten trapped in a tree. A chance encounter with a wounded mononoke, however, turns his life upside down, pitting him against his grandfather, a ninja with serious monster-hunting skillz. Alas, the revelation that gramps belonged to the Oniwabanshu, a top-secret government agency that kills demons, pushes the story in a more obvious, less interesting direction. These scenes hit all-too-familiar beats as the bureau’s mission and personnel are fleshed out, one antagonistic exchange at a time. Only the fight sequences provide relief from these info-dump conversations; they’re briskly choreographed affairs, notable both for their inventive use of perspective and sparing use of screen tone, speed lines, and sound effects. The same crisp, minimalist approach informs the character designs, giving Black Torch a distinctive look that’s not fully matched by its Tokyo Ghoul-by-way-of-Bleach plotting. Your mileage may vary.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Koyoharu Gotouge
VIZ Media, 192 pp.
Rated Teen, for readers 13 and up (fantasy violence)

Demon Slayer‘s plot is set in motion by a tragedy: the hero returns home from an errand only to discover that a demon slaughtered his family. One sibling clings to life but shows signs of becoming a demon herself, putting Tanjiro in a terrible bind: should he kill her now, or risk being killed in a week, a month or a year when her transformation is complete? Though the series’ dark tone feels au courant, in keeping with Jump Plus titles like Fire Punch, Koyoharu Gotouge’s line work and character designs are pleasingly retro, the kind of art you might have found in a Reagan-era issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. Gotouge’s bodies and heads are sometimes a little awkwardly drawn, and his demons too obviously fashioned from screen tone, but the artwork’s lack of polish makes Tanjiro seem more vulnerable when confronting monsters that are bigger, meaner, and more cunning than he is. I’m not sure that Demon Slayer is headed anywhere new, but Tanjiro is the kind of hero I’d like to see more often: a frightened but determined character who seems like a real person confronting the impossible, rather than a resolutely optimistic kid whose pluck carries the day. Recommended.

Shibuya Goldfish, Vol. 1

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Shibuya Goldfish falls somewhere along the horror continuum between Sharknado 3 and Jaws: it’s too competently executed to be a guilty pleasure but too predictable to be genuinely scary. Though the premise has serious camp potential, author Hiroumi Aoi settles for a pedestrian approach to the material, trapping his cast in a high-rise shopping center where death lurks around every corner. There are a few glimmers of imagination here and there, but the overall result lacks the visceral punch, humor, or sheer imagination of other entries in the Killer Fish genre.

The story begins in media res, with a shot of Hachiko — Shibuya’s most famous statue — stained in blood. We then cut to an image of a panting, wild-eyed teen staring incredulously at a monstrous goldfish feasting on a pedestrian in the middle of a busy street. “That day was the first time I ever saw someone die,” Hajime solemnly informs us, before a flashback reveals what led up to this gruesome scene.

I won’t lie: those opening pages are a tantalizing hook for a horror buff. Though Aoi doesn’t reveal where the goldfish came from, he sells the Fish-Gone-Wild concept by emphasizing the predators’ size, numbers, and blank-eyed stares, making us appreciate the sheer incongruity of Volkswagen-sized fish swarming through an urban landscape. The goldfish’s penchant for uttering intelligible phrases — “I’m home, mom,” one burbles — adds another layer of mystery to their existence: are they truly sentient or are they merely ghosts, back to haunt the owners that flushed them down the toilet?

Where Shibuya Goldfish falls short is the human dimension. Hajime is the only character who’s properly fleshed out, an earnest, slightly awkward high school student whose dreams of becoming a filmmaker are dashed by the catastrophe. The other characters are more placeholders than people, dropped into the story to generate conflict or provide useful information about goldfish behavior before dying. In recognition of their liminal status, Aoi only bestows names on a small fraction of the cast, one of whom — the beautiful, bitchy Chitose Fukakusa — is such a vile male fantasy that the introduction of two more competent, sincere female characters in chapters two and three barely erase the memory of Fukakusa’s manipulative behavior and panty flashes.

The other fundamental issue with Shibuya Goldfish is the artwork, which juxtaposes photo-realistic backgrounds and fish with generic character designs. The tension between these two modes of representation ends up robbing volume one’s creepiest scenes of their dramatic impact, as the full horror of what happens to several characters is muted by Aoi’s blandly rendered faces and bodies; the grotesque bodily deformations that make Junji Ito, Hideshi Hino, and Kanako Inuki’s work so arresting barely elicit a “yuck!” in Aoi’s hands. It’s a pity these moments don’t land with more oomph because Shibuya Goldfish flirts with an interesting idea: the notion that a pet as small, helpless, and disposable as a goldfish might be the downfall of humanity, punishing us for our reckless treatment of other living things. Perhaps Aoi will delve into the monsters’ origins in future volumes, but the so-so execution of these foundational chapters didn’t reel me in. Your mileage will vary.

SHIBUYA GOLDFISH, VOL. 1 • BY HIROUMI AOI • TRANSLATED BY KO RANSOM • YEN PRESS • 242 pp. • RATED OT (OLDER TEEN) FOR LANGUAGE, NUDITY, AND VIOLENCE

The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read

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In the early 1950s, horror comics were big business. Out of the eighty million floppies sold each month, nearly one in three featured a vampire, a zombie, a cannibal, a werewolf, a parasitic alien, or a vengeful spirit. The comics were as sensational as their titles and were popular with kids—that is, until the Comics Code Authority effectively banned them in 1954 with its prohibition against “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations.”

The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read focuses on horror’s brief renaissance in the 1950s. The first third of the book provides a historical overview of the genre, tracing horror comics’ roots back to the popular crime serials of the 1940s. The rest of the book explores the numerous subgenres and tropes found in series such as Tales from the Crypt, Tomb of Terror, The Thing, and Dark Mysteries. Each chapter is organized around a theme—vampirism, werewolves, zombies—and copiously illustrated with full-color reproductions of covers as well as complete stories ranging in length from one to twelve pages. Rounding out the volume is a 25-minute DVD containing “Confidential File,” a 1955 television documentary meant to show the harmful effects of comics on children.

Author Jim Trombetta is an excellent curator, selecting some of the era’s most memorable stories for inclusion in the book, from “Foul Play” (1953), a short piece in which a baseball team punishes its uppity pitcher, to “Some Die Twice” (1954), a longer story about a modern-day slave trader who falls prey to a tribe of cannibals. Through short but trenchant analyses of each story, Trombetta makes a persuasive case that horror comics gave readers a way to thumb their noses at polite society. Authors challenged the social emphasis on conformity, normalcy, and knowing one’s place by depicting all sorts of taboo behavior, from garden-variety criminal acts (e.g., extortion, robbery) to necrophilia. The stories were lurid, exciting, and decidedly un-PC, often reinforcing racist and sexist stereotypes, even as they lashed out at traditional authority figures.

Trombetta’s writing is lively and full of interesting observations, especially in his efforts to show the connection between America’s emerging military might and civilian reservations about the Korean War. His chapters on brainwashing and zombies, in particular, reveal the extent to which the plight of American POWs captured the popular imagination. Stories like “The Brain-Bats of Venus” (1952), for example, depicted pilots falling victim to a race of mind-controlling aliens—a thinly veiled allegory for the kind of reprogramming that Chinese captors allegedly conducted on American prisoners. Likewise, Trombetta’s chapter on vampirism does an excellent job of examining the way in which latent fears of miscegenation were embodied in the vampire’s unique mode of reproducing: swapping blood with the victim.

The only drawback to Trombetta’s approach is that his interpretations aren’t always as explicit or convincing as they could be. By lumping vampirism and cannibalism under the common heading of “The Hunger,” for example, Trombetta misses an opportunity to explore the very different ways in which these two categories reflected American anxieties about racial integration. His critique of horror comics’ not-so-latent sexism, too, would have benefited from more historical context, given the large numbers of women displaced from wartime jobs.

On the whole, however, The Horror! The Horror! is a beautifully designed, carefully researched book that chronicles one of the most important, vital genres in American comics while capturing its pulpy spirit.

This review originally appeared at The Graphic Novel Reporter on November 1, 2010.

Happiness, Vols. 4-7

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This review contains a few spoilers for later volumes of Happiness, and discusses one character’s efforts to cope with PTSD after a violent attack. Proceed with caution. 

The first three volumes of Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness explore familiar terrain, using vampirism as a metaphor for the ravages of puberty, that moment when hormonal urges overwhelm the rational mind and the body morphs into its adult form. And while these early volumes contained some well-rehearsed scenes of bullying and bloodlust, Oshimi’s artwork — at once raw and refined, primitive and expressionist — made these moments feel strange, fresh, and specific to his story. One could feel fourteen-year-old Makoto Okazaki’s palpable anguish over being trapped in a body and a life he could no longer control, and wondered how he might escape his fate.

Volume four was a turning point in the series, culminating in a scene of frenzied violence in which a major character was killed, another forced into hiding, and a third — Gosho — badly wounded. The violence was grotesque in the Romantic sense of the word, a scene so horrific that it filled with reader with a strong sense of revulsion and pity. But a curious thing happened in the next installment: in the aftermath of this bloody cataclysm, Happiness became Gosho’s story. A time jump advanced the plot ten years into the future, showing us Gosho’s efforts to rebuild her life, one temp job at a time.

Though Gosho seems outwardly calm and self-possessed, her carefully constructed facade is shattered in volume six by a sensational newspaper headline: “Vampire Boy: Where Is He Now?” Oshimi captures Gosho’s experience of being triggered in all its nauseous horror; we can see a painful memory well up in Gosho, causing her to double over and fall to her knees as if she were trying to purge her body of all the fear and shame she’d experienced on that fateful night ten years ago. What makes this moment even more powerful is the skill with which Oshimi captures Gosho’s mounting terror through a series of closeups — first her face, then her eye, then the article itself, as her gaze darts across the page, lingering on a striking image or a suggestive snippet of text.

For all the emotional intensity of this moment, however, volume six is largely uneventful, focusing primarily on the tenative relationship between Gosho and Sudo, her co-worker. Much of their courtship unfolds in brief, wordless scenes depicting everyday activities: eating out, walking home from the train station, buying groceries. The normalcy of these vignettes suggests that Gosho has recovered from her anxiety attack — that is, until Gosho glimpses a boy who might be a vampire:

What makes this image so potent is its ambiguity: is it a figment of Gosho’s imagination, a flashback, or an actual vampire? We’re left feeling as unsettled as Gosho, and wonder what this bloody omen might mean.

That brings me to the hardest part of my review.

Despite the consummate skill and sensitivity with which volumes five and six explore Gosho’s psychic wounds, volume seven may be my last, primarily because I’m dismayed by Oshimi’s decision to further brutalize Gosho. In volume five, Gosho nearly died at the hands of a knife-wielding psychopath, an event that left her with an angry scar on her neck. The terror she felt, and the violence of the scene, seemed necessary at that juncture in the story, revealing the extent to which Gosho’s naivete, determination, and caring could be ruthlessly exploited by someone older and more experienced.

In volume seven, however, Gosho is captured by a cult leader who tortures her, mutilating her body and smearing it with her own menstrual blood. The violence in this scene is fundamentally sexual and, frankly, disgusting. One might argue that Oshimi is deliberately provoking the reader, making us complicit in Gosho’s exploitation, but nothing in Oshimi’s other work — Drifting Net Cafe, The Flowers of Evil — suggests that level of critical engagement with tropes. Instead, it feels as if Oshimi is using this violence as a shortcut, a way of revealing the cult leader’s depravity while providing Sudo motivation to seek revenge on behalf of his girlfriend. The scene also undermines Gosho’s agency — she broke into the cult’s compound looking for Okazaki — and dehumanizes her, reducing her womanhood to breasts and blood rather than her courage, intelligence, and determination to save a friend she hasn’t seen in a decade.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading and watching scenes like these, whether they serve a legitimate dramatic purpose or not. Oshimi’s undeniable artistry makes quitting Happiness an even more difficult decision for me, as I found his artwork and storytelling in the first six volumes compelling. (Hell, I’m quoted in the promotional literature for Happiness.) I don’t have the stomach for another scene of Gosho’s degradation, however, so I don’t think I’ll be reading volume eight.

HAPPINESS, VOLS. 3-7 • BY SHUZO OSHIMI • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, PARTIAL NUDITY, SEXUALITY)

A First Look at Starving Anonymous

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Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird horror manga. Medical drama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of, say, Deathtopia, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.”

That’s not a bad description of Starving Anonymous; if you can imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to read Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe’s latest effort. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Kuraishi and Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s more a placeholder than a character, a collection of reaction shots in search of a personality. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff, so I’ll be passing on this one.

Starving Anonymous, Chapter 1
Story by Yuu Kuraishi, Art by Kazu Inabe, Original Concept by Kengo Mizutani
Kodansha Comics
Rating: OT (Older teen)

Yokai Rental Shop, Vol. 1

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Yokai Rental Shop is a classic example of Monkey Paw Theater, in which a foolish person comes into possession of a magical object, uses said object to grant an ill-advised wish, then pays a terrible price for his rash decision. Author Shin Mashiba puts a Japanese spin on W.W. Jacob’s famous story, substituting a nekomata and an okuri-inu for a cursed paw, but otherwise conforms the tenets of the genre. The clientele of Pet Shop Crow seek quick or unwise solutions to everyday problems: one mourns the untimely demise of her favorite idol, another dreads his daily encounter with bullies, and a third worries that her younger sister is trying to steal her boyfriend. To help each client “solve” her problem, shop owner Karasu rents them an exotic pet with special abilities. That pet comes with specific instructions — defy them and the deal goes sideways, resulting in bodily harm or emotional trauma.

I liked this story better when it was called Pet Shop of Horrors.

Part of the problem is that Karasu’s clientele is an unsympathetic lot, especially when contrasted with the characters in “The Monkey’s Paw” or Pet Shop of Horrors. The bullying victim, for example, is so enraptured by his yokai companion’s powers that he explicitly ignores Karasu’s instructions, fantasizing about how he will utilize his new-found strength. Within two pages, however, he realizes the folly of his arrogance, as the okuri-inu metamorphoses into a canid Godzilla with a taste for human flesh. Only a quick intervention from Karasu prevents the chapter from devolving into a gruesome spectacle, though you may wish that Karasu had adopted a more laissez-faire attitude towards his foolish client.

The other major issue plaguing Yokai Rental Shop is that Mashiba doesn’t stick with the monster-of-the-week formula for long. A subplot involving Karasu and his half-brother Hiiragi, a fussy civil servant, takes a detour into InuYasha territory when Karasu makes an important discovery about their father. Mashiba tries milking the brothers’ temperamental differences for laughs, but the jokes don’t land with much force; if you’ve seen one episode of The Odd Couple or read a chapter of xxxHolic, you’ve seen this dynamic executed with more gusto and imagination, two qualities that Yokai Rental Shop sorely lacks.

Neither of these deficiencies would be so glaring if the artwork was less perfunctory, but Mashiba’s serviceable character designs and settings do little to imbue the story with its own identity. The shop’s clientele, in particular, are blandly interchangeable; they look like they belong in a government-issue manga about tax returns or recycling, lacking the kind of individuality that might highlight the poignancy of their dilemmas or underscore just how determined they are to get what they want. Even the “turn” in each story — in which the yokai reveal their true natures — is executed in get-the-job-done manner, relying too much on dialogue, smudgy screentone, and slashing lines to suggest what’s happening.

By skimping on these moments, Mashiba misses a crucial opportunity to make the reader feel pity, revulsion, satisfaction, or fear at the outcome of each story; the strongest reaction that any of these scenarios elicits is a shrug of the shoulders. The reader is left wondering why the author even bothered with the horror angle when her true objective seems to be writing a dramedy about a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of brothers—albeit eccentric ones.

YOKAI RENTAL SHOP, VOL. 1 • BY SHIN MASHIBA • TRANSLATED BY AMANDA HALEY, ADAPTED BY JULIA KINSMAN • SEVEN SEAS ENTERTAINMENT • RATED TEEN

Until Your Bones Rot, Vol. 1

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When Lois Duncan passed away in 2016, fans and critics alike fondly remembered her as the author of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the first great psychological thriller for teens. Duncan’s story took a tried-and-true plot and retooled it for younger readers, focusing on a quartet of teens who commit and conceal a crime, only to be stalked by an anonymous avenger. While the plot was pure potboiler, Duncan’s characterizations were remarkably realistic, convincingly depicting the confusion, uncertainty, and rashness of the teenage mind under extreme duress.

Until Your Bones Rot explores similar terrain as I Know What You Did Last Summer. Bones’ teen protagonists — Shintaro, Akira, Haruko, Ryu, and Tsubaki — are bound by a gruesome crime they committed when they were eleven years old. Artist Yae Utsumi doesn’t immediately reveal what, exactly, they did, though he plants tantalizing clues throughout volume one: a fleeting glimpse of a nighttime ritual, a nightmarish vision of a bloodied face. The plot is set in motion by an anonymous phone call threatening to expose the group unless they meet the caller’s demands. Though the five initially work together to protect their secret, fault lines soon develop within the group, particularly between Akira — the group’s alpha male — and Shintaro, the odd man out.

Utsumi handles the set-up with finesse, but his tone is less assured. Some passages feel like they’ve been ripped from Love Hina, with bikini-clad girls fawning over the nebbishy Shintaro; other passages read more like MPD Psycho, with characters doing disgusting things to dead bodies; and still other passages play out like a Very Special Episode of The OC in which one character silently copes with an abusive boyfriend. None of these scenes feel like they belong to the same story; about the only common thread that binds them is Utsumi’s fanservice, which gratuitously eroticizes a scene of sexual assault.

It’s a pity that the first volume is so uneven, as Utsumi makes a game attempt to create believable characters. Tsubaki and Shintaro, in particular, behave like real teenagers whose emotional and sexual attraction to one another is so overwhelming that they don’t know how to have a normal conversation or behave like friends; their one-on-one interactions suggest that both were deeply scarred by their participation in the murder, but lack the words — or the maturity — to say how it effected them, instead turning to each other for physical comfort. That’s a level of psychological nuance that Lois Duncan herself might have appreciated, even if Utsumi takes a few narrative shortcuts to establish the dynamic between Tsubaki and Shintaro.

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Until Your Bones Rot so frustrating: Utsumi clearly understands the teenage mind, but can’t decide if he’s writing a finely observed psychological thriller or a junior-league Saw. The push-pull of these two different storytelling modes robs the most gory scenes of their horror and the most dramatic scenes of their poignancy, yielding a muddled stew of blood, boobs, and tears. Someone should make him read I Know What You Did Last Summer for a few pointers on how to walk the line between Grand Guignol and Afterschool Special more convincingly.

UNTIL YOUR BONES ROT, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY YAE UTSUMI • TRANSLATION BY URSULA KU • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED 16+ (SEX, PARTIAL NUDITY, GRAPHIC VIOLENCE)

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories

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If you admire the fecundity of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination but not the turgidity of his prose, you might find Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptations of The Hound and Other Stories an agreeable alternative to the originals. Tanabe sticks close to the source material while pruning away the florid language characteristic of Lovecraft’s writing, offering more polished — and, frankly, unnerving — versions of three early works: “The Temple,” first published in 1925, “The Hound,” from 1922, and “The Nameless City,” from 1921.

Tanabe is no stranger to literary adaptations; he’s also tackled works by Maxim Gorky (“Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”), Franz Kafka (“A Hunger Artist”), and folklorist Lafcadio Hearn (“The Story of O-Tei”). Lovecraft’s writing, however, occupies a unique place in Tanabe’s oeuvre, as he’s published adaptations of other Lovecraft stories — “The Color Out of Space” (1927) and “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935)” — and expanded Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness” into an ongoing, multi-volume series. Reflecting on his fascination with Lovecraft, Tanabe reverentially describes him as a “priest of his own Mythos,” capable of summoning “unknowable darkness” on the page. “By illustrating his stories,” Tanabe declares, “I intend to become an apostle of the gods he made” (172).

And while Tanabe’s sentiments are a little purple, his affinities with Lovecraft are evident in his artful translation of words into images. Consider “The Temple,” a tense drama set aboard a German U-boat in the waning days of World War II. While Lovecraft’s narrator baldly ascribes the crew’s irrational behavior to “peasant ignorance” and “soft, womanish” dispositions, Tanabe focuses instead on the extraordinary claustrophobia of their environment, cramming every panel with ducts, pipes, valves, levers, and gauges; the walls of the ship seem to press in on the characters as their disabled submarine plunges to its doom. That sense of entombment is heightened by Tanabe’s stark use of tone in the story’s final act, when the light emanating from the ship barely pierces the jet-black depths of the ocean. A fleeting glimpse of a dolphin — normally a symbol of innocent playfulness — becomes a sinister omen when lit from below, its smiling visage transformed into a sneer.

Tanabe also demonstrates a flair for drawing lost cities, evoking the grandeur and mystery of ancient civilizations through sheer scale: his temples and monuments are so large that they spill off the page, while their interiors are cramped and dark, more cave than castle. In “The Nameless City,” for example, we follow the narrator through a labyrinth of dark tunnels, his torch briefly illuminating objects and surfaces that hint at the true nature of the city’s inhabitants. These panels culminate in an extraordinary two-page spread revealing a Romanesque fresco that, on closer inspection, is populated not with demons, angels, and men, but reptilian monsters arranged in concentric circles around a Christ-like figure.

The revelation of who lived there — and how they treated their human subjects — provides a moment of thematic continuity with the other two stories in the anthology. As writer Robert M. Price explains in his forward to The New Lovecraft Circle, Lovecraft’s heroes seek forbidden knowledge, “gradual[ly] piecing together… clues whose eventual destination one does not know.” Price elaborates:

The knowledge, once gained, is too great for the mind of man. It is Promethean, Faustian knowledge. Knowledge that destroys in the moment of enlightenment, a Gnosis of damnation, not of salvation. One would never have contracted with Mephistopheles to gain it. One rather wishes it were not too late to forget it. (xviii–xix)

At the same time, however, the narrator’s terrible discovery exemplifies another important strand in Lovecraft’s writing: a sense of cosmic indifferentism, the idea that the universe is, in Lovecraft’s words, “only a furtive arrangement of elementary particles” that “presage of transition to chaos.” As Lovecraft observed,

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. (Riemer)

Viewed in this light, the rendering of the fresco seems less like a simple artistic choice by Tanabe than an expression of Lovecraft’s own cosmic indifferentism. By parodying the Christian iconography enshrined on Medieval cathedral walls, ceilings, and portals, Tanabe points both the futility of belief — it didn’t save the monsters, after all — and the inevitability that mankind will repeat the cycle of birth, life, and death that the monstrous fresco depicts.

And if all of this sounds like the ruminations of a freshman philosophy major, fear not; The Hound and Other Stories can still be enjoyed on its own merits. All three stories are well paced and vividly rendered, each embodying the Romantic definition of the sublime — “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror”— while offering the kind of satisfying twists that pulp fiction readers craved in the 1920s. And for those more invested in the Lovecraft mythos, The Hound provides an opportunity to revisit these stories afresh, seeing them through the eyes of an artist who has dedicated his career to finding the poetry, the mystery, and the weirdness in Lovecraft’s words. Recommended. 

References

Price, Robert M. “Introduction.” The New Lovecraft Circle. Del Rey, 2004, xiii-xxvi.

Riemer, Andrew. “A Nihilist’s Hope Against Hope.” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 2003, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/27/1056683892274.html. Accessed on 11 Oct. 2017.

Tanabe, Gou. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories. Translated by Zack Davisson, Dark Horse, 2017.

Elegant Yokai Apartment Life, Vol. 1

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Elegant Yokai Apartment Life suffers from multiple personality disorder, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next without comfortably settling into one storytelling mode long enough for the reader to decide if it’s a sitcom, a soap opera, or a horror show.

In fairness to creators Hinowa Kouzuki and Waka Miyama, few stories purely embody a single genre; the labels that the publishing and entertainment industries have coined — rom-com, dramedy — give ample proof that hybridization is a common strategy for enlivening familar plots. For such hybrid forms to work, however, the tonal shifts must be intrinsic to the story, arising naturally from the interactions between the characters and their environment. Elegant Yokai‘s narrative swerves, however, feel more like a desperate attempt to appeal to as many different constituencies as possible: there’s fanservice for guys (a female ghost who wears only panties and a well-placed towel) and girls (a hot onmyoji with a ponytail and a silver fox with an eye patch), yokai drawn from folklore and urban myth, a potential love interest for the hero, a raft of comic-relief characters who get brief turns in the spotlight, a subplot borrowed from a 1983 Afterschool Special, and tragic backstories for several characters just in case the idea of a “ghostly boarding house” doesn’t tickle your funny bone.

The most frustrating part of this narrative abundance is that so much of it feels… extra. Any one of these elements could be excised from the story without fundamentally changing the premise, making room for more character development. That point is crucial: Elegant Yokai‘s lead is less a person than a reader surrogate, walking from one situation to another in a state of mild befuddlement about his supernatural neighbors. Author Hinowa Kouzuki has saddled Inaba with motivations that explain how he ended up rooming with yokai, but hasn’t actually given him any discernible personality traits. Kouzuki and Miyama’s few attempts to flesh out Inaba’s character are clumsy and, frankly, illogical: what well-adjusted person marks his middle school graduation by fighting his BFF in an abandoned lot because he’s “always wanted to do that”? (Shouldn’t Inaba quote one of the rules of Fight Club or something?)

The artwork suffers from a similarly overdetermined quality. The human characters are less drawn than assembled from bits and pieces of other artists’ work — a dash of CLAMP here, a bit of Yuu Watase there — while the yokai have been shamelessly copied from Rumiko Takahashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. Making deliberate allusions to other artists’ work is, of course, a time-honored tradition, but here, these nods feel less like tribute and more like theft; readers tempted to compare Miyama’s art with Miyazaki’s are bound to find hers a poor substitute.

It’s only in the final chapter of volume one that we get a glimpse of what Elegant Yokai might have been. The story trains the spotlight on Inaba’s fellow apartment dwellers Kuga and Shiro, a boy and his dog who were murdered by Kuga’s mother. Once a month, Kuga’s mother — also a ghost — shows up at the apartment building to reclaim her son. Over time, however, her human form has deteriorated and memories have faded, reducing her to a pitiful demonic state, more scribble monster than angry wraith. The frankness with which Kouzuki and Miyama depict her crime prevents these scenes from descending into bathos; these moments are the only ones that elicit an authentic emotional response from the reader, not least because Kuga and Shiro’s predicament has a demonstrable effect on the other characters. Too bad the rest of volume one is such a frantic, disjointed mess.

ELEGANT YOKAI APARTMENT LIFE, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HINOWA KOUZUKI, ART BY WAKA MIYAMA • TRANSLATED BY ADAM HIRSCH • 206 pp. • RATED T (13+)

Melody of Iron

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Osamu Teuka hit rock bottom in 1973. Mushi Production, the animation studio he’d launched to great fanfare in 1961, had just declared bankruptcy. Although Tezuka had parted ways with Mushi in 1968, he was still linked to his old company in the public imagination — Mushi was, after all, the studio that had introduced Tetsuwan Atom to television viewers around the globe, and made Kimba the White Lion a household figure in Japan. Tezuka also faced a creative crisis: his work was out of step with emerging trends in what he called “young adult manga,” a point he plaintively addressed in the afterword to the 1974 short story collection Melody of Iron:

The media was whispering that I’d hit my wall… With a broken heart, but also rebellious determination, I blindly tackled magazine jobs …These are examples of my Young Adult Manga write during times when I was mentally hungry. There were many more. Ranging from pieces that were too dark and hopeless, to really harsh pieces that, in today’s day and age, would immediately receive protest from all sorts of organizations. All of my pieces then had really emotionless themes and I don’t remember enjoying writing most of them.

Manga publishers agreed with Tezuka’s glum self-assessment. In 1973, Weekly Shonen Champion offered Tezuka an opportunity to write a limited five-week series with the implicit assumption that Tezuka was publishing his final work. That series turned out to be the opening salvo in a new stage of Tezuka’s career, however, as Black Jack became one of Tezuka’s best-known, best-loved titles, a mixture of bold, expressive cartooning, crazy plot lines, and gut-punch endings all held together by one of the most memorable characters Tezuka ever created.

Not all of Tezuka’s work from the 1970s walks this melodramatic tightrope as effectively as Black Jack, a point underscored by Melody of Iron. The title story, for example, is a three-act mish-mash of gangster movie cliches and seventies pseudo-science. In the first act, a young man runs afoul of the mafia, ratting out one their assassins in court; as punishment, the Albanis cut off his arms and leave him to die. In the second act, Dan holes up in a mad scientist’s laboratory where he learns to use a set of psychokinetic prosthetic arms. And in the final act, Dan’s ability to harness PK proves a mixed blessing when the arms exact revenge against the Albanis… without him.

The finale exemplifies what’s good and bad about Tezuka’s crank-it-to-eleven approach. On the one hand, Tezuka has the cartooning chops to make the arms look sufficiently animated, a necessary condition for selling us on his Stephen King-meets-Mario Puzo concept. On the other hand, Tezuka’s own distinctive style works against the potential horror of the killer limbs; the arms aren’t menacing enough to be a convincing embodiment of Dan’s fierce anger, looking more like the Tin Man’s costume than instruments of death. The arms’ efficacy is further neutered by the staging of their grand murder spree, a string of over-the-top deaths that re-enact Dan’s initial humiliation in the most baldly literal fashion: look, Ma, no arms!

The story also stumbles in its efforts to depict American racial dynamics. Shortly after Dan’s bloody encounter with the Albani’s goons, for example, a mob of African American teenagers harasses Dan, pelting him with stones and mocking him for his missing arms. The way these characters are rendered — with thick lips and maliciously gleeful expressions — creates a profoundly uncomfortable moment for the modern Western reader, resurrecting the visual iconography of minstrel shows to dehumanize these unnamed teens. Dan is rescued by Birdie, a black Vietnam vet who counsels Dan to abandon his murderous plans. Birdie looks more recognizably human than the rock-throwing teens, but he’s more a construct than a character, a noble voice of reason whose primary purpose is to advance the plot by introducing Dan to the mad Dr. Macintosh.

The third strike against “Melody” — and, by extension, the entire anthology — is that the edgier content feels like a self-conscious effort to dress up the material in adult themes, rather than a vehicle for exploring the darker corners of the human psyche. This problem is most pronounced in “Revolution,” a short story about Yasue, a housewife who wakes up from a coma convinced that she’s a young radical named Minako Hotta. In an effort to prove to her husband that she is, in fact, Minako, Yasue describes Minako’s sexual encounters with a wounded revolutionary, explaining how Minako’s tender ministrations brought him back from death’s door. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with Yasue’s husband — he’s disgusted by Yasue’s “memory” — but his boorish, violent behavior in previous scenes makes it hard for the reader to sympathize with his predicament. Worse still, Minako’s sacrifices are presented as a sign of her dedication to the cause, a notion so risible it seems more like a lame joke from Woody Allen’s Bananas than a credible character motivation.

As with Tezuka’s other work from the period, the principal characters in Melody of Iron are generically attractive types whose personalities emerge primarily through what they say, while the supporting cast members are vividly drawn caricatures whose personalities are established through how they look. Such visual shortcuts are a standard manga technique, of course, but in Tezuka’s hands these aesthetic decisions are effective since they’re rendered with flair and specificity; you know exactly what kind of person Dr. Macintosh is from the shape of his nose, the tousle of his hair, and the hunch of his shoulders. Tezuka also scatters a few Easter eggs through the collection, including a sequence modeled on The Godfather‘s iconic wedding scene, and a panel depicting Broadway’s signature jumble of lights and signs; look closely and you’ll see the names of several Tezuka titles gracing the marquees.

For all the flashes of imagination in Melody of Iron, however, Tezuka was onto something when he characterized his “young adult” stories as “less approachable” than his other work from the early 1970s. Even the most over-the-top scenes feel a little labored and dour, lacking the visual exuberance or emotional oomph that makes “Dingoes” and “Teratoid Cystoma” such memorable entries in the Black Jack canon. Readers looking for an introduction to Tezuka’s late work may find Melody of Iron a good point of entry, but anyone with dog-eared copies of Black Jack or Ode to Kirihito may be underwhelmed by this more workmanlike collection.

THE MELODY OF IRON • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • TRANSLATED BY ADAM SECORD • DIGITAL MANGA, INC. • RATED YOUNG ADULT (16+) FOR VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL CONTENT • 214 pp.