In the shadow of the mainstream North American manga industry, there are a handful of indies who are keeping manga weird. They’re publishing the kind of offbeat stories that you won’t read in Shonen Jump or stream on Crunchyroll, stories that are elliptical, profound, strange, funny, or unsettling in ways that My Hero Academia or Blue Lock aren’t.
On a recent visit to Star Fruit Books, for example, I discovered Okaya Izumi’s Drunks, a pair of stories that put a novel spin on the meet-cute. In the first, a shy salary man staggers home from a night of drinking only to fall prey to a chatty vampire who casually asks, “Do you have blackout drapes at your house?” You can guess where this is going, but the light tone and odd notes of humor push “Drunks” in an unexpected direction as these two wildly different people find solace in each other’s company. The second story—“Tick Tock”—also crosses genre boundaries, using elements of science fiction to set the plot in motion. Tomoko, the heroine, spends a century in a cryogenic chamber before a young man accidentally frees her. Though the pair stumble into a physical relationship quickly, Okaya focuses as much on Tomoko’s complex reaction to rejoining the world as on her sexual reawakening, helping us understand why Tomoko is secretly relieved to discover that the future is not much different than the past.
Art-wise, Okaya’s style recalls Nishi Keiko (Love Story) and Yamada Murasaki (Talk to My Back, Second Hand Love), as Izumi’s characters are rendered in thin, almost scribbly, lines that make them look a little fragile. In her stories’ most emotionally charged scenes, there is almost no background detail; the reader’s eye is drawn to the characters’ faces and body language, allowing us to more fully appreciate their sense of joy, astonishment, and confusion over finding companionship in unexpected places. The quiet authenticity of these moments help both stories transcend their cliché elements to make a deeper point about the characters’ need for connection. Recommended.
DRUNKS • BY OKAYA IZUMI • TRANSLATED BY DAN LUFFEY • LETTERING/RETOUCHING BY KELLY NGO • STAR FRUIT BOOKS • 60 pp.