MANGA REVIEW: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM (1972-1974, 2006-2008, 2020)

by Kazuo Umezz

English translation by Sheldon Drzka

Adaptation by Molly Tanzer

Lettering by Evan Waldinger

Book Design by Adam Grano

Edited by Joel Enos

English language publication by Viz Media in ten paperback volumes from 2006 to 2008, and republished in three hardback volumes in 2020. 

Original Japanese language serialization in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972 to 1974.

. . .

"I believe the children are our future"

-lyric from "Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston

"Oh, that's right . . . we're in the future, and the earth is a wasteland devoid of food and anything else . . ."

-dialogue from the children's adventure manga The Drifting Classroom

"Is it future or is it past?"

-dialogue from the TV show Twin Peaks

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You could call The Drifting Classroom a manga riff on Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies with a strong Fortean timeslip vibe. It's the kinda story that starts wild and gets wilder, ultimately giving you the feeling that it might go in any and all directions at once.

An entire school full of teachers, support staff, and children grades k thru six vanishes from 1970s Tokyo and reappears in the middle of a forbidding wasteland that stretches endlessly to the horizon in all directions. These vanished people must figure out a way to survive on their own once it becomes clear that no other human beings live in this bizarre new world. Along the way, those that survive uncover the location of the wasteland and how and why it came to be such a devastated place. Drinkable water and edible food must be found and rationed. The adults start cracking up under the psychological trauma of being wrenched out of one's home reality only to be abandoned in a terrifying desolate hellscape. Some of the children break down, too, but they are surprisingly resilient when measured against the adults. Conflicts over authority and management of resources ignite. Factions form. Lines are drawn. And that's when the mutant monsters come calling. Not everyone survives.

I said that The Drifting Classroom feels like it could go in any and all directions, and that's true; but there are also recurrent themes: the socially-even arbitrarily-constructed nature of authority; going hungry and thirsty; creating purpose for oneself when cut off from your usual sources of existential affirmation; children crying; children missing their mothers; learning to improvise and manufacture deadly weapons; determining the conscionable amount of violence to use in order to stop dangerous enemies; the power of belief; how to assess whether a mushroom or plant is safe to eat; ecology as a survival necessity; radical transformation; the confusion of brutality and self-sufficiency; the emotional absence of fathers; the bond between mother and child.

The Drifting Classroom could also be read as a part of the "mysterious disappearance" genre of stories particular to Japanese film, novels, and manga. You could compare it with Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes and The Box Man, which are two novels that narrate how and why middle aged men would wander off the map. From a different angle you have Shohei Imamura's film A Man Vanishes. The Drifting Classroom is mostly about people disappeared against their will, whereas The Woman in the Dunes, The Box Man, and A Man Vanishes are explorations of situations where people seemingly choose to disappear . . . or are they choosing to vanish because they felt they had no other choice? And what the hell kinda choice is that . . .?!

The Drifting Classroom is also a wildass survivalist ride full of action and grotesque atrocities. A yarn, in other words, to be spun just for the fascination of spinning it. Once the kids are left to fend for themselves there's no stopping the narrative momentum as they alternately fight amongst themselves and endeavor to solve the mystery of their appearance in a world of desolation. If you start reading it at a chain bookstore you may as well get comfy because you're going to want to read it to the end. I know I did.

COMICS REVIEW: HEDRA (2020)

 by Jesse Lonergan

Published by Image Comics in 2020.

. . .

"Is it future or is it past?"

-Mike, the one-armed man in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

ICBMs arc across the page, left to right, right to left.

Many mushroom clouds.

A world-Earth?-in ruins. But a farmer scatters seeds. Or is it just the memory of a farmer? 

A government starts again in the ruins-or is it just the memory of a government?

From out of the nuclear arms race emerges a super rocket technology that forms the basis of a new kind of spaceship-or is it the memory of a space program?

Did the nuclear war lead to a Buck Rogers future, or am I getting it all backwards?

Pages are divided up into squares which read like discrete units of perception. When you're in the squares, you're going through it, mired in the hustle of the moment-to-moment. But lean back into the reader's perch and grok the whole page. Comics gives the god's eye view. How nice.

Our protagonist is a space pilot who wins a lottery and gets to take the super rocket to Infinity and further out. She visits planets, slingshotting around sundry gravity wells, physics be damned. New tech. New materials. New physics. New day. Born from the atomic annihilation of the old regimes. Too optimistic? Yeah, probably, but why not fuck with optimism now and again? It's just comics. It won't kill you.

Eventually, our space explorer meets up with a superbeing who can change their size at will. They come across like Legally Distinct Ant-Man/Giant-Man. Heh. Image Comics, indeed!

Human and superhuman end up needing each other. Not all the planets they visit are welcoming to outsiders. 

Space exploration opens the way to new perspectives, new powers, new transformations.

Platonic solids-ideal dream shapes, in a sense-lurk just beyond the threshold of empiricisms. Adventure opens up the dream states. Creation from destruction. 

Purple. Pink. Baby blue. White. Red. Yellow. Black. Gray. Green. 

Only text is a title splash. Pure visuals. Someone could do their very own unauthorized version with reams of captions, dialogue and thought bubbles, sound effects if they really wanted to but I'm sure that's not allowed. 

All in one issue. What more do you need? You reach the end, and you may find yourself turning back to the beginning, just to do it again. I did. 

Hedra's scope is cosmic even as it is also confined to paper and ink. It's neat. 

COMICS REVIEW: KERRY AND THE KNIGHT OF THE FOREST (2020)

 Written/Drawn/Lettered by Andi Watson

Book designed by Patrick Crotty

Published by RH Graphic (Random House) in 2020.

. . .

"A child who eats thornberries and listens to talking snails. It is no surprise that the forest swallowed you whole."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A boy named Kerry is journeying home with medicine to save his mortally ill parents back on the farm. He decides to take a shortcut through a sinister enchanted forest which turns out to not be a shortcut, because the forest is ruled by an evil spirit who takes over the minds of people, animals, and monsters. Fortunately, Kerry meets a talking, floating, one-eyed boulder that offers to lead him through the dark forest. Adventures ensue.

Kerry and the Knight of the Forest is a straight-ahead children's fantasy comic book of some two-hundred fifty pages of scratchy, leafy, woodsily charming art, in which a selfless boy has an extended philosophical/moral dialogue with a cynical cyclops boulder while adventures happen. (Weirdly, it reminded me of Roger Ebert's interpretation of the Michael Mann action thriller Collateral, but without the brutality. Ebert basically describes it as an extended dialogue between a killer and their victim embedded within an action flick.) It is totally unpretentious. There's action, and danger, but no gore, no blood. Small children will like it. Adults will appreciate its willful, well-intentioned, mildly delusional optimism. 

Even though this is by a British creator, and is therefore, presumably, drawing on American and European comics, it actually ends up playing, for me, in the style of an 'uncompressed' manga. It's cinematic. The pacing is superb. I inhaled it in one sitting, and, even though I do not share its cheeriness, I would recommend it on the strength of its craft alone. It works on a similar wavelength as animated films such as Kubo and the Two Strings, Ponyo, and The Black Cauldron-but not as edgy, not as intense. Kerry and the Knight of the Forest is much mellower, much gentler.

Really, I have no criticisms of Kerry and the Knight of the Forest, just a different outlook. This book is exactly what it wants to be, in defiance of the gloom and doom of this world. No one can take that away from it. 

MANGA REVIEW: SAZAN AND COMET GIRL (2020)

 

Story and Art by Yuriko Akase 

Originally published in Japan by LEED Publishing 2015-2018.

English language publication by Seven Seas Entertainment August 2020.

English translation by Adrienne Beck

Adaptation by Ysabet McFarlane

Layout and Lettering by Karis Page and Gwen Silver

. . .

"I know it's a terrible idea, but somehow . . . I just can't hate you guys. I'm hopeless."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Mina, a magical young woman on a flying space bike falls for a boring-but-nice young man, Sazan, who is a construction worker, and together they team-up with space pirates to save the Earth with True Love, the Power of Friendship, etc.

You see, Mina is an extraterrestrial superhero, and she was created long ago to be a living source of power. Mina could go toe-to-toe with the Avengers and the Justice League and she would probably do okay.

Sazan is a standard issue human, but he’s a very nice person. He's sincere. He's honest. Believes in true love. Blandly handsome. 

The space pirates are led by a belligerent pig-man who can alter his size at will. He becomes the frenemy of Sazan and Mina.

There are dangerous swarms of robots. 

There's a villain packing schemes that he's perfectly willing to monologue about. 

Most impressive of all are the whimsical visualizations of a science fantasy future-a watercolor future, no less. Just looking at it gives a lift to my spirits. 

This one has lots of wild action, but no brutality. There are consequences to the mayhem, characters do suffer, but this is not a bloodbath. It's exciting without running on nightmare fuel. 

The story is assembled from an identikit of manga plots and themes and characters and sentiments. If you-like me-are a longtime reader of manga and watcher of anime there’s not a single surprise in the narrative. Sazan and Comet Girl would be an interesting first manga, maybe for a younger reader. If you got a brat, and you're looking to hip them to manga this is a fun, wholesome introduction, I suppose.

What's noteworthy is that Sazan and Comet Girl is five hundred pages of fully watercolored manga-not the usual black and white-and it feels startlingly effortless for all of the detail of its visuals. Of course, it's anything but effortless. Comics is hard work, and I can only stare in admiration at the hundreds of pages that must’ve taken years to draft and craft and color into their final form. Remember, this is the work of a single author, not the Marvel Bullpen. The visual flow is nonstop, even if the story, themes, plot, and characters are kitbashed from earlier works.

Look, I'm too cynical, too old, and far too steeped in more sophisticated works of comics and animation to buy in to this True Love At First Sight In Spaaaaace bullshit. 

But even a heartless cyborg like me got caught up in the fun and elaborate watercolor futurism of the visuals. 

So, I say give it a look.

And keep an eye on the future works of Yuriko Akase. I think she's in the manga game to stay. And with the best yet to come . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: OUTLAND (1981)

 Written and Directed by Peter Hyams

Special Effects John Stears

Special Optical Effects Supervisor Roy Field

Production Designer Philip Harrison

Art Director Malcolm Middleton

Costume Designer John Mollo

Make-Up Peter Robb-King

Director of Photography Stephen Goldblatt

Head of Video Department Richard Hewitt

Editor Suart Baird

Produced by Richard A. Roth

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Leisure Club Music Produced and Composed by Richard Rudolph and Michael Boddicker and performed by Ganymede

Starring 

Sean Connery

Frances Sternhagen

Peter Boyle

James B. Sikking

…

“It figures. It’s all happened too sudden. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don’t care. They just don’t care.”

-Lon Chaney, ex-Wolf Man, former Jr., in High Noon (1952)

“Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”

-Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

The Company is back. Kinda. I’m talking about the Company referred to in the  1979 film Alien, and, well, they’re up to their old tricks of exploiting workers’ desire for wealth and adventure out on the frontiers of space. This time the setting is a harsh, dystopian mining colony on Io, a moon of Jupiter. The colony proper comes across on screen as a  warren of cage-like capsule bedrooms and spartan apartments alleviated by a laser light titty bar, some wall tennis courts, a bleak cafeteria, video golf for the hardcore assholes, and legalized prostitution. 

Workers have been behaving erratically in statistically significant numbers: suicides, assaults, murders, all seemingly coming about due to the extreme psychological stress of working in an ugly, depressing, dehumanizing environment. A guy takes off his spacesuit helmet while on a moon surface worksite. Another guy enters an airlock with no suit, just regular clothes, and a cigarette behind his ear. Guess he was going out for a smoke. Sex workers are reporting injuries due to assaults, rapes, and beatings in higher than normal numbers. The Io colony is not a happy place. 

Head explosions are a thing in this movie. Caused by explosive decompression. Which is not scientifically accurate. I dunno, maybe there’s something weird about the way the pressurized atmospheric environments interact with the monumental gravitational force exerted by Jupiter? Eh? (Shrug) I never been to Jupiter, okay, so I can’t speak about it from direct experience. Of course, the movie follows a theme of ‘people under pressure’ which is to some degree literal, but also metaphorical. So, I don’t know, maybe the various head explosions are meant to be taken, um, not so literally? Look, if you’re a stickler for scientific accuracy, you’re probably gonna laugh at those bits, so that’s not super-terrible. It’s kinda fun in a sicko sort of way.  

On top of everything else at the Io colony-the suicides, the murders, the brutalizations, the sexual violence-on top of all of it . . . there are fucking cops on the moon of Jupiter. That’s right. LIke they needed that as a cherry to lord it over the turd cake. Not just regular cops, either-space marshals. And who is the Number One Space Marshal on Io? Sean Connery, of course. 

But this isn’t 007 Connery. This is Connery when he was in his real prime as an actor. When he was older, and when the roles had nuances worth digging into. A lot of people like to say, “Oh, Connery was the best Bond. He was the best as 007!” And, you know, sure. You can say that. But if you actually look back at those Connery Bonds, I think you’ll see he was at his best during moments of absurdist comedy. The look on his face when a woman tells him her name is Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. It’s the same look he has on his face when he shows up  dressed to the nines at a sleazy casino full of cowboys in leisure suits in Reno in Diamonds Are Forever. Connery mastered deadpan comedy beats as 007. But I don’t think he really came into his own as a dramatic actor until much later in his career. 

In Outland Connery’s marshal character is very much inspired by Gary Cooper’s beleaguered lawman in High Noon, as he realizes that the entire system of the lunar mining colony runs on greed, corruption, and the murder of anybody who fights the extractive-capitalist status quo. Gary Cooper gets deserted by the entire town of Hadleyville. Sean Connery stands alone on the moon of Jupiter. Harsh realm, my dude, harsh realm. 

Like Alien, Outland is a highly inductive piece of film, assembling a wealth of fascinating science fiction world-building details that eventually submit to the grand deduction of the total fuckedness of existence under no limits gangster capitalism. The Company has constructed the perfect system that can function no matter the misery and waste it generates in volumetric quantites. 

But there are moments where the inhuman perfection glitches:

-an assassin using a futuristic infrared scope botches his shot when sweat gets in his eye;

-the greedy corporate supervisor played by Peter Boyle as a version of his maniacal character from Joe-think of him as ‘Joe made good’-playing video golf. Just like a proper all-American oligarchic asshole would;

-Sean Connery and his corrupt subordiante James B. Sikking slamming tennis balls against a slab of what looks like the Berlin Wall to pass the time, and avoid confronting their growing rift directly;

-Connery wields a sawed-off shotgun because buckshot scatters, and that’s safer than a rifled shell which would drill holes through the walls of the pressurized space colony and thus cause everyone’s head to exlode . . . but I think we can all agree: buckshot or shell, let’s not go firing off guns inside space colonies or space ships, okay? Glad we all agree . . .

-the fact that Connery actually engages in some detailed detective work, aided and abetted by Frances Sternhagen’s ornery moon doctor-how much actual sleuthing happened in 1982’s Blade Runner, eh? Yup. Outland, tho’ mostly forgotten by pop culture, is a better police procedural future investigation than the 1982 world-building trendsetter.

Speaking of forgotten movies: my legitimate Warner Brothers DVD copy which I bought for $5+applicable sales tax some, I dunno, ten or eleven years ago? It has the video quality of a bootleg VHS rip. Technically, it’s in letterbox-not the ‘enhanced for widescreen TVs’ lies printed on the insert paper on the inside of the plastic sleeve-which means you can watch it in its proper aspect ratio but it’s smaller on the screen than it should be. This kinda sucks . . . but it is amusing that I can have the thrill of watching what feels like a bootleg VHS-perhaps purchased through a late-1990s Luminous Film Works catalog of gray market reduplications-from a ‘legitimate’ home media release.

It’s the fuckin’ Company, man.

You just can’t win.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #4B: CASTLEVANIA III: DRACULA'S CURSE (1989)

D.I.S.: Dracula Invasion System

Yoke the iconic image of Death-the Grim Reaper-to your unholy desires

This figure is current in the collective imagination of humanity 

Deploy the undead

All the graveyards in the land are full of conscripts-and-saboteurs-to-be

Put ‘em to work: skeletons, zombies, ghosts, monsters manifesting out of some blood-soaked battlefield past, enraged nature spirits taking the form of outsized swamp critters,  

the Dracula Invasion System shows how to employ a rigorous metaphysical logos to call forth beasts of mythos

reshape the land into ruthless gauntlets of traps and strenuous stair-climbs and asshole-clenching leaps-over-deadly-voids

it’s not just about your people in the field

it’s about total dominance of the landscape

which you must make hallucinatory at key moments

suddenly the blighted towns and forests give way to Atlantean ruins

the glories of yore beguile, perhaps things are not so bad, it could even be the Golden Age come again-

-this is the mindfuck you put onto Enemy

with the Dracula Invasion System

as this or that Protagonist Aspirant stumbles dreamily through your custom trip

now sic the fish people and the dragons and loose the flooding waters

break the will-to-resist

with overwhelming illusions

of total battlespace dominance

With

D.I.S.

Dracula Invasion System

-November 2020

MOVIE REVIEW: ALIEN (1979)

 Directed by Ridley Scott

Jones trained by Animals Unlimited

Alien design by H.R. Giger

Alien head effects by Carlo Rambaldi

Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder

Concept Artist Ron Cobb

Production Designer Michael Seymour

Art Directors Les Dilley and Roger Christian

Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

Story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

Director of Photography Derek Vanlint

Edited by Terry Rawlings

Executive Producer Ronald Shusett

Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Starring

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Yaphet Kotto as Parker

Tom Skerritt as Dallas

Ian Holm as Ash

Veronica Cartwright as Lambert

Harry Dean Stanton as Brett

John Hurt as Kane

Bolaji Badejo as the alien

Helen Horton as the voice of Mother

Jones is Jones

...

“Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you’d known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror.”

-Emperor Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe in Flash Gordon (1980)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

In the future, being an intergalactic space traveller is just another shit-ass fuckin’ job. You’re basically an extension of an artificially intelligent space ship-the whole goddamn operation could run without any all-too-human bags of meat, couldn’t it? The only reason why you’re there is politics and economics: labor negotiations to ensure jobs for highly evolved primates inside the hyper-rationalized, mostly autonomous ultra-tech resource extraction industries of whatever distant century within which Alien takes place. 

The space ship is the Nostromo, a vast and ugly, yet star-worthy, mobile ore extractor, refinery, and transport vessel, which visually evokes a dystopian devolution of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. When we first see the Nostromo it’s in visual contrast to a huge, Saturn-like planet with impressive rings of space rocks, and all this measured against the pitiless void of space. We eventually go inside the Nostromo, and it is so dense with Millenium Falcon-esque run-down retro-future details that, if you’re watching this at home-as opposed to a COVID-19 superspreader theater-you’ll want to pause and play back a lot of the scenes after you watch it through once without stopping, just to try to suss out what all the gadgets and junk are supposed to be:

-robot heads that seem to pilot the craft whilst the human crew are locked in cryogenic hypersleep-those fuckin’ robo-heads always creep me out, as they seem to be sending and receiving some kind of machine language, which you know is bad, right? When the machines are talking to each other when no humans are around . . .

-what is that-is that an elephant key chain hanging on someone’s astro-navigation monitor? Is that Dumbo? Someone adding a little kitschy human flair to their work station?

-smooth glide, stalkery camera maneuvers combined with Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score give us the sense that the Nostromo is haunted by some unseen, pervasive evil presence-which would be capitalism, of course-BUT, if you mute the sound and watch it again, it’s almost like a virtual tour of some second hand space craft. Try before you buy.

-and then we get to the hypersleep bed-pods. The lids open. John Hurt slowly sits up, awakening from a no doubt years-long slumber. He’s so pale and withered looking. Yet he has a kind of anguished Zen about him, as though he is resigned to his dehumanizing fate as a disposable cog in the overall corporate machine. A quintessentially John Hurt moment-see also 1984. 

-and soon the rest of the crew is awake, and gathered around the mess table, eating a variety of vaccuum-packed self-heating meals. You’ve got the alert and by-the-book science officer Ian Holm, who’ll surely dole out plenty of technobabble and vital exposition as the movie chugs along. You have chief engineer Yaphet Kotto who brings up the “bonus situation” on behalf of himself and his fellow below-the-line engineer Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt as the laconic hard-on of a captain tells him everybody gets paid what’s in their contract-so, a very reasonable, “Fuck you.”

Warrant Officer Sigourney Weaver and astro-navigator Veronica Cartwright soon realize that their star charts are all wrong for an automated return trip to Earth. Something has diverted their homeward voyage: a signal, of either distress or warning, from an unknown source on an unexplored planet. The laws of space travel require that any capable crew has to assist another vessel in distress, and so the homeward voyage becomes a rescue operation. 

Look, you’ve seen Alien, right? This is one of those movies everybody’s seen. Or it used to be. It still is, right? Is it possible to spoil Alien, in this miserable fucking pandemic year of 2020? 

I’ll err on the side of caution. I’ll try not to totally spoil this one, ‘cause it is one of the best. Not so much in terms of absolute originality of ideas or themes-Alien is highly derivative of earlier sci-fi B-movie thrillers. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon may have lifted a crucially disgusting aspect of the titular alien creature’s life cycle from David Cronenberg’s Shivers, tho’ I don’t know that for sure. I wasn’t there myself, you know. 

What sells Alien is the obsessively wrought production designs of the Nostromo and the structures awaiting the human crew upon the surface of the planet where the mysterious signal originates; the off-the-cuff Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes shot and edited in what William Friedkin would call “induced documentary” style; the nasty twists and turns of plot as the wealth of inductive details give way to terrifying deductions about the horrors that are possible in a universe that is both mind-numbingly vast and utterly indifferent to human moral conceptions-

-okay, okay, I’ll do a major spoiler . . .

. . . WARNING! WARNING!

YOU ARE ENTERING A SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE . . .

. . . the Company sends mostly extraneous humans on their mostly automated ship because machines can’t be infected with parasites. Thinky meat-bags chasing paychecks and financial stability and bonuses and class mobility are the bait, my friend . . .

YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Just one more thing, Human.

There’s a scene that really got to me this last time I watched Alien. 

Okay, the Nostromo is run by an intelligent computer called Mother. Mother-or some sub-system of her-is engaged with an ongoing translation process of the signal from the alien planet. This process is entirely automated. When it’s done, there’ll no doubt be a ping or a beep and an indicator light. But Sigourney Weaver insists on watching the raw feed, the translation-in-process-not because she or anyone else on the crew can do anything to make Mother’s work go faster . . . I guess she just wants to be there as the results come in, even if all she can do is take it in, and see if the new information clarifies the larger situation. 

We are hypnotized by a flow of inductive detail, so compelling, so novel, leaving so many possibilities wide open, until we are crushed by the grand deduction that it all adds up to being cosmically fucked to death by both alien indifference to the value of our lives and human malice towards the same. 

Enemy without. Enemy within. 

Right.