by Osamu Tezuka
English translation by Polly Barton
Edited by Daniel Joseph
Proofread by Micah Q. Allen
Production by Risa Cho, Shirley Fang, and Evan Hayden
Published by Kodansha USA.
Original Japanese language publication in 1970 as a serial in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine.
. . .
"Oh, shit, there's a horse in the hospital!"
-Dr. Octagon, "General Hospital," from the good doctor's album Dr. Octagonecologyst (1996).
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP-
Tetsu is a boy who is terrified by the sound of approaching horse hooves.This boy is horrifically bullied by one of his school teachers, a macho authoritarian asshole. He's also mistreated by his mother, who seems to resent his very existence. His father is a doormat, and offers no protection to his son. The boy's only solace is his hopeless crush on a kindly and beautiful female teacher. All the while, there is the sound of a horse approaching, which seems to be an omen of doom for Tetsu. As it happens, it's not just Tetsu's doom.
BOMBA! is, to be cute about it, Equus as written by Harlan Ellison, a saga of an adolescent male whose burgeoning sense of sexuality crashes into a hostile, traumatized/traumatizing world in which people haunted by the legacies of World War II-empire, sexually enslaved comfort women, Imperial Japan's atrocities against Asia, firebombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, defeat, occupation, reconstruction, politically convenient historical amnesia-inflict neuroses and psychoses upon the postwar generation. These historical traumas constitute a curse which manifests as a spectral horse that both oppresses and liberates Tetsu. Tetsu fears the horse as a bringer of death . . . and then Tetsu revels in the horse as a bringer of retribution against his enemies when he realizes he can summon the beast to serve his desires.
BOMBA! offers atmospheric black and white art that stalks back and forth across the past and the present. We begin in an eerily desolate train station, where the CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP sounds find and afflict young Tetsu, and then, through his point of view, we start to unpack the impossible burdens of World War II that have fallen upon his shoulders. Tetsu's mother-as awful as she is-has powerful reasons for resenting her offspring. Tetsu's father-a veteran of World War II-comes to embody the disillusionment of many men who fought for a government that tossed them into an infernal meat grinder of death, atrocity, defeat, and profound shame.
BOMBA! comes down to Tetsu's choice: can he let go of his vindictiveness, or does he pursue his vision of unlimited conquest with the aid of the spectral doomsday horse? Will Tetsu become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, or can he forge a path of his own? BOMBA! dramatizes the plight of a generation of young people caught between a devastating past of total war and an uncertain future that might well be more of the same.
