MANGA REVIEW: SHUNA'S JOURNEY (1983, 2022)

Written/Drawn/Colored by Hayao Miyazaki

English language translation by Alex Dudok de Wit

Edited by Mark Siegel and Kara Valdez

Cover designed by Kirk Benshoff

Interior design by Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, and Angela Boyle

American edition published in 2022 by First Second

Original Japanese language publication in 1983 by Tokuma Shoten

. . .

“Spotting the slave traders’ vehicle, Shuna got in front of it and unleashed a burst of fire at point-blank range. The attack caught them completely off guard. Shuna kept firing with wicked composure, as he would when hunting snow leopards. By the time he had run a ring around the vehicle, he had shot them all down.”

-text from page 62 of Shuna’s Journey

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Shuna’s Journey is a manga-adjacent work from the master animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose most recent feature length film is The Boy and the Heron, and whose other works include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I refer to Shuna’s Journey as manga-adjacent because even though it will most likely be shelved in the manga section at the bookstore it apparently is considered an emonogatari-an “illustrated story”-as per translator Alex Dudok de Wit’s afterward. Indeed, Shuna’s Journey is much more “compressed” in its storytelling than other manga works which often allow the action scenes to play out cinematically-almost moment to moment-across many pages and panels. Shuna’s Journey evokes the widescreen majesty of John Ford and Sergio Leone, as opposed to the hyperkinetic action of contemporary shonen sagas such as One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Kaiju No. 8. Having said all this, I still personally found Shuna’s Journey to be very manga-like: it’s fast-paced, full of beautifully detailed environments, and inhabited by incisively stylized humans coexisting with fearsome, outsized monsters and bygone ruins of forgotten empires.

A boy named Shuna leaves his fading village to seek power and adventure in a vast, harsh world full of magic and cruelty. Shuna wanders the ruins of dead empires, battles slave traders, and comes face-to-face with bizarre powers which humankind can never hope to tame. Shuna’s main quest is for some magic seeds-a fairy tale element-but he is forced to do battle with the evil forces of the world using a variety of guerilla warfare tactics. All this is rendered in evocative watercolor art in a sort of storybook style which lends a peculiar grace to this hard-boiled fantasy adventure. Long time Miyazaki fans will perhaps see in Shuna’s Journey a kind of roadmap for many of the themes, character designs, production designs, conflicts, and strange creatures that would go on to achieve global pop culture iconography status. Shuna’s Journey is so dense with the primal material of Miyazaki’s subsequent work that it almost seems like the artist conjured a prophecy of his future glory via the power of a maniacal work ethic. 

Shuna’s Journey also works as a story all unto itself. It is not merely of interest to Miyazaki obsessives and collectors. If you have never even heard of Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli Shuna’s Journey offers an experience complete unto itself. The main ideas here have to do with survival and power. Shuna leaves his fading agrarian village to seek a better life for himself. Shuna is also tantalized by the prospect of finding the source of magic seeds which promise a future of abundance beyond subsistence farming, beyond hunting and gathering. To this end, Shuna manufactures his own bullets to feed the rifle handed down from the previous generation. Shuna’s a very model of rugged self-sufficiency, and yet he seeks ever more power. This restless seeking comes at a terrible price. Shuna’s adventures are grand: he kills slave traders with the bullets he himself crafted; he liberates slaves; he stands his ground against ghoulish night raiders; and, much like the player characters of The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, he’s persistent and intuitive enough to see the way forward through bizarre, formidably occulted terrain. The cost is that Shuna suffers trauma from violent battle, sleepless exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and deprivation of nutrition. Shuna’s capable, yet also mortal. 

Late in the narrative, there’s a change in perspective which suggests Shuna’s single minded pursuit of the magic seeds must be tempered by ethical connection to other people. His personality and agency are evacuated by his experience of a terrible otherworldly power which requires him to enter another’s care. This level of hardship and the complexity it entails brings a sense of gravity into the fantasy. Unlike with Marvel Cinematic Universe products-where endlessly malleable computerized action figures get iterated across endless potential product outputs- in Shuna’s Journey great power comes with both great responsibility and consequences. The power Shuna attains might be wielded responsibly, but it will always do some violence to its wielder. Shuna’s hope lies in his allying himself with the oppressed who endure injustice while also fighting to expand their domain of autonomy.

Shuna’s Journey is an engaging fantasy about power, self-reliance, and finding a place in the world against oppressive regimes of both nature and humankind. Its seemingly happy ending is shadowed by a certainty of future conflicts against the powers of the world. One is left with the sense that Shuna and his allies will endure no matter the hardships.

MANGA REVIEW: ROBO SAPIENS: TALES OF TOMORROW (2018, 2019, 2021)

 

by Toranosuke Shimada

English translation by Adrienne Beck

Lyric translation by Jelly Cat

Lettering and cover design by Nicky Lim

Interior layouts by Sandy Grayson

Logo designed by George Panella

Proofreading by Dawn Davis

Edited by Alexis Roberts

Original Japanese language serialization by Kodansha  in Morning Monthly Two July 2018-June 2019.

English language publication by Seven Seas Entertainment in November 2021.

. . .

"If I wander about the shore this morning

It will bring me back to good ol' times"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Humanity constructs intelligent machines as servants, but these robots end up-somewhat accidentally-carrying the spark of our consciousness into the far future. Humanity fell in love with technology even as it fell out of love with the biological world. We built the robots to serve our whims, to create answers to our desires, to serve our truest faith-our desire for immortality-and ended up shaping a product beyond all the cynical/cyclical schemes usually dictated by ideologies of planned obsolescence. The robots of the manga future history Robo Sapiens are built to last for tens of thousands of years. This defeat of product life cycles might be the most fanciful idea expressed by this manga. 

The future depicted is vast and tragic, but the tragic elements-global wars, nuclear meltdowns, environmental degradation-are viewed at a remove. The wondrous robots who embody superhuman fantasies are foregrounded, human frailty rests in the middle ground, and human cruelty looms in the background. Robo Sapiens could be described as dystopian, at least in part. I think it's more that dystopia is a thread in the tapestry, if you will. You strip that out and you can still make some sense of the work, but something is clearly missing. The same could be said for the idea of utopia-it's not the whole picture, but you can't just rip that out, either. 

Robo Sapiens is episodic. Each chapter seems like a stand alone story or observational vignette. Then characters from earlier chapters return, change, and secrets from the past unfold line by line, memory by memory. We meet a super robot who exists as a friend to all in need-think of a shiny chrome version of Christopher Reeves's Superman-who answers all the prayers and wishes that no deity or devil or genie in a bottle ever could. There's a dutiful caretaker of a massive subterranean nuclear waste storage facility. Early on, we meet one of the last hard-boiled detectives, complete with an old school ass-kicking certain set of skills, even though much of the rest of the narrative consists of interlocking mysteries across numbingly huge expanses of time that defy the efforts of any solitary protagonist to solve.

Much of the narrative, ultimately, is driven by a brilliant but disillusioned roboticist who creates a number of the robot characters in the story. This roboticist has become disenchanted with her fellow humans who fill the world with war and waste, but much of her contempt is expressed obliquely. During a TED Talk style presentation, we see the cruelly caricatured human audience-distracted by screens, badly dressed, ill-mannered, entitled-from her perspective. Interestingly, the robots never seem to absorb this contempt. Maybe it's an Asimov thing: robot minds are programmed to show humans the utmost benevolence. It could be that the disillusioned roboticist has taken a cue from Asimov's Laws of Robotics to prevent her contempt from being replicated inside these newly created minds. Robo Sapiens cleverly chooses to respect the privacy of one of its central figures-this bitter roboticist-and therefore preserves a sense of mystery. 

However, the robots are established as having capacious minds capable of downloading vast amounts of human history in an instant, and engaging with that infodump via fully immersive internal simulations. One of the robots is able to walk through a vast swath of human evolutionary history from cave people to present. This historically enriched robot doesn't seem to view humanity in a bad light. Ultra fast robo-brains capable of sophisticated multivariable analysis of vast amounts of historical/evolutionary/psychological/economic/sociological data results, intriguingly, in empathy and tolerance. (Compare and contrast with the sadistic supercomputer conjured up in the Harlan Ellison short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" who uses its vast intelligence and stores of data to inflict eternal punishment upon the last remnants of the human race.)

Robots are also constructed to be romantic mates for humans. This is, if you're wondering, handled in an extremely elliptical fashion. There's no explicit human-on-robot action, but the power dynamics are disturbing. For much of the timeline, robots are totally subject to human power. Even though they show intelligence and individuality, the living machines-designed in the image of humans-have no rights to disobey or resist their human masters. If a human tells a robot to do something-anything-it must comply. If a human desires a gendered robot, then the robot assumes whatever gender expression serves the human's wishes. 

As for specific sex acts, Robo Sapiens is, as I said, elliptical. Presumably, anything goes. Later in the narrative, humans seem to grant robots full civil rights including autonomy of thought and action. Later still, humans and robots have separated from each other, with the human population on the decline. Wars are alluded to, and it's possible the humans were defeated by the robots in some global conflagration. The robots don't seem bitter or hostile towards humans, even though the final remnants of homo sapiens do seem to be fearful of the robots. Overall, robo sapiens as a species don't seem to hold on to grudges or vendettas despite their long history of subjugation by humans. It's never completely clear if this easy going attitude on the part of robotkind is a moral stance of not antagonizing a non-threatening group of beings, or if this confidence came about after thoroughly defeating their former masters. Robo Sapiens contains no explicit depictions of warfare, so you kinda have to decide for yourself. It's eerie. It's ambiguous.

The art is curved, rounded, and non-threatening for the most part. There's a strong influence from Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka. Late in the timeline robots choose more imaginative forms, and are no longer bound to resemble their human creators. Writer/artist Toranosuke Shimada's robots evoke a formidable benevolence, as if the gods humanity prayed to for deliverance for countless generations could only be realized by futuristic comic book science. 

Robo Sapiens left me with the sense that humanity's yearning for immortality could ironically outlive the species by finding expression in robotic, artificially intelligent beings.

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.

MANGA REVIEW: BLACK BLIZZARD (1956, 2010)

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi 

English translation by Akemi Wegmuller

Edits/Design/Lettering by Adrian Tomine

Title logo designed by Tim Hensley

Published by Drawn and Quarterly in March 2010.

Original Japanese language publication by Hinomaru Bunko in 1956. 

. . .

"If you ask me, the only way we're getting apart is if one of us loses his hand."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Black Blizzard is a film noir on paper. Full stop. It's not an homage. It's not a pastiche. It's not neo-noir. It is full noir. It was created in 1956. It has the melodrama, the psychodrama, the romanticism, the haunted pasts, the moral gray areas, and the (except for the opening pages) black and white visual scheme. Get Seijun Suzuki on the horn and have him shoot it in Nikkatsu Scope. It's ready to go. 

Black Blizzard is, actually, a manga. A comic book. 128 pages all from the mind and hands and sweat of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who would go on to have a long and influential career in Japanese comics. But in 1956 he was in his twenties, just in the first act of his career. All by himself he crafted a feature length crime thriller worthy of anything produced by Nikkatsu or by the various Hollywood studios that fits between two covers. That's the power of a manga writer/artist firing on all cylinders. Writer, director, actors, crew all in one furiously scribbling man. How about that? It's kinda neat.

Much like the genre crime films of yore, Black Blizzard uses crime and criminality most interestingly as a way of exploring moral confusion within people through various melodramatic situations. This isn't about strict realism so much as a hard-boiled sort of romanticism. Doom can be averted only by proving oneself before the eyes of fate. To this end, we have two men-one a young musician recently convicted of murder, the other a middle aged career crook facing a life sentence-handcuffed to each other as they are transported by train to prison. An avalanche derails the train, and our handcuffed pair escape the wreckage to go on the lam. The musician is trying to hold on to his old identity as a respectable young man with a future. The career crook is on a defiant death trip, seeking nothing more than to evade the law for as long as possible, perhaps visit his daughter one last time, and then die in a shootout with the cops. It occurs to the career crook that one of them will probably have to cut off the other guy's hand if they are both truly going to be free. The musician is appalled by this idea, and keeps fighting for a way to break the chain without either of them losing a hand. 

The conflict resolves itself in an unexpected manner which some may find a bit over the top, especially for those who are more familiar with Tatsumi's later, more sophisticated character studies like The Push Man or Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Black Blizzard has two protagonists who seem to represent different aspects of one person, whereas later Tatsumi works would follow singular characters roiling with inner strife and loneliness. Tatsumi started here under the heavy influence of the melodramatic variety of film noir and would later be writing stories comparable to Taxi Driver-but this is a very crude comparison. Tatsumi has his own voice to be sure. Also, I think Black Blizzard stands on its own as a legitimate expression of genre crime fiction. It's fun and stylish in the way those old timey black and white crime flicks could be, even if the ride is more fun than the eventual destination. The plot is a framework for the tormented characters to struggle with existential dilemmas and the burdens of the past. 

Tatsumi's art is stripped down, propulsive, with lots of slashing lines. When we dive into bitter memories from the past those are just as sharp; no dreaminess to these flashbacks, no easy escape. There's even a jolting nightmare sequence evoking the fatalism of noir crime fiction. 

Black Blizzard could, if followed exactly, be a ready to go blueprint for a new cult classic film noir. It also stands on its own as a comic book. 

MANGA REVIEW: CHAINSAW MAN CHAPTERS 1-97 (2020-2022)

by Tatsuki Fujimoto

English Translation by Amanda Haley

Touch-up art/Lettering by Sabrina Heep and James Gaubatz

Design by Julian JR Robinson

Edited by Alexis Kirsch

Published in 11 paperback volumes October 2020-June 2022 by Viz Media.

Also available digitally.

Original Japanese language serialization began in 2018. 

. . .

"Wouldn't you like to have a prairie dog living in the middle of your chest, sharing your blood supply?"

-American philosopher George Carlin from his book Brain Droppings (1997)

"That . . . was a family slap, okay?"

-dialogue from the manga Chainsaw Man

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You follow the news, and things seem to only get worse. 

People are working longer and harder than ever for wages that only know how to stagnate even as the cost of living increases. 

Anthropogenic climate change creates drought, famine, plague, water wars, permanently displaced people, and extreme weather disasters, the harsh aftermaths of which seem to offer a preview of the posthuman Earth. 

Democracy seems to be on life support all over the planet, as dictators rise to power.

Random acts of terrorism and violence are perpetrated by extremists as they enact lethal persecution fantasias to assert their identities. 

Politicians serve the interests of capital.

Capital serves itself. 

Strange devils appear to slaughter humans to consume their blood. 

Only the work grind offers any kind of hope in a world that has no place for intimacy or kindness; or failing that, a distraction from troubling feelings of despair or discontent. 

Some, in the depths of their powerlessness, make deals with the blood drinking devils for fantastic combat capabilities in order to survive this brutal reality.

Chainsaw Man follows the bloody misadventures of a Japanese teenager named Denji who strikes a deal with a cute devil named Pochita in order to level up his grind so that he can pay off a crushing debt inherited from his dead father. Pochita is a 'Chainsaw Devil,' which means that he is both an adorable Pokemon-esque quadruped and a chainsaw. He's got handles on his butt and his head, the blade protrudes from his face, and you pull on his tail to spark the engine. Pochita is either a horrific abomination or the coolest pet of all times depending on how you reckon such things. Pochita seems friendly, though, and not especially aggressive all on his own. In fact, Pochita seems to want nothing more than to be of service to a kind master. 

You see, Denji has already sold off parts of his body to service his debt. But the people he's indebted to are scummy gangsters-yakuza-who just keep inventing bullshit reasons for Denji to pay them more and more money. Denji, who is naive in these matters, decides to take up devil hunting as a job to make an honest living so he can pay off his debt. Denji's an illiterate high school dropout, so devil hunting-an extremely dirty and dangerous job-is about the only gig he can score that pays above minimum wage. Denji uses Pochita as a living chainsaw to slice grotesque devils for cash. The kid is trying, he really is; and all the while he dreams of having enough money to ask a girl out on a date. Sixteen year old Denji's highest aspiration, in fact, is to touch female human breasts. 

But this is truly a tale of woe, as Denji is murdered by the same gangsters who were ripping him off, but, in a twist, our hero returns from the dead after Pochita sacrifices his own adorable life to combine his Chainsaw Devil heart with Denji's human heart thus giving birth to the titular Chainsaw Man . . . which should really be Chainsaw Teen, but it's fine. Boys become soldiers that die in wars in order to become men, right? Ah, hell, let's give it to the kid. He's been through it. Denji dies, and we'll go ahead and call that a growth experience since he did indeed come back from the land of the dead. Most teens would just eat all of your food, play video games while farting up your couch, and stay dead. Denji's earned it. 

Now, as Chainsaw Man, Denji's dressed in a nice shirt and a necktie-like he's a server at a nice sitdown restaurant or he's an office temp or something-but with the pull-cord tail of Pochita sticking out of his chest. That's right: when Denji's ready for action he yanks himself just so . . . and chainsaw blades pop out of his arms and head. He also sports a gaping mouth full of wicked fangs. Chainsaw Man's fuel is not gasoline, but blood. The longer Chainsaw Man goes, the more blood he uses. It's like Ultraman's color timer or the limited battery life of an EVA Unit, except Chainsaw Man can refuel by consuming blood. Chainsaw Man's main gig is killing devils whose blood also happens to be quite drinkable due to Denji being merged with a devil-sweet Pochita-which makes our boy a half-devil. I think that's how it works. So, as long as Chainsaw Man stays bloodthirsty and eats as he kills there's no limit to what this kid can achieve!

Denji eventually gets conscripted into a government-funded devil killing organization who exploit his half-devil status to deny him human rights and force him to work for food and shelter. Denji's been so down that he can't see a way out of this unfair deal even as he instinctually resents it. The head of this organization is a woman named Makima, who brazenly manipulates Denji with sexual titilation. At first, we are seemingly in the tropey realm of action manga pandering to the power fantasies of teenage boys. It's common for the adolescent heterosexual male protagonists of these comics to magically become the center of the universe, to fight all the battles, and to miraculously be irresistable to attractive, older women. Often these stories are balanced with farcical humor in which the hero guy's Big Dick Energy is undercut by various humiliating episodes-usually in a high school setting-which bring him back down to Earth. The recently reprinted Spriggan offers some amusing examples of this, in which a teen super-agent gets his ass kicked by unimpressed female classmates between bouts of world-saving combat with cyborgs and ancient aliens. One of the more extreme examples occurs in Eden: It's An Endless World in which the teenage hero survives various brutal battles involving cyborg militias and bloodthirsty gangsters only to become an undercover cop while romancing a cynical sex worker-scenes of puerile humor play counterpoint to vistas of slaughter in jaw-dropping fashion-

At first, Chainsaw Man seems to be falling into line with this brand of power fantasy, but the devil's in the details. Remember, Denji's an illiterate high school dropout who has suffered one devastation after another: death of his father; homelessness; economic exploitation by the yakuza; violent death-he's lucky to be alive. When a government agency offers to take care of him, it's the first time he has a chance at having a place to sleep, good food, a sense of belonging, and a purpose to his existence beyond survival. Yes, Denji's being manipulated and exploited yet again . . . but it is also, sadly, brutally, an improved form of bondage. Later on, one of Denji's devil killing colleagues-a teenage girl-speaks bluntly about how she would've taken up sex work if not for the government gig. Chainsaw Man's action power fantasy characters pay a steep price for the glory of killing devils.

But this makes it sound totally depressing. Which it really isn't. Chainsaw Man is quite hilarious and exciting. People make deals with devils for various superpowers which allow devil killers to unleash heavy destruction upon their enemies. The various monstrous creatures assume forms that are both terrifying and amusing, leaving one with the distinct impression that devils embody our tackiness as well as our evil. Combat rages across countless pages in the wild, unconstrained style of action manga. Comic interludes involve the government devil killers getting blackout drunk and engaging in all kinds of regret-inducing behaviors. 

But the fun and excitement are counterbalanced by paranoia and sudden death. Terrorists also cut deals with devils to commit mass slaughter. Assassins target the government agents. Epic battles level entire city blocks and massacre scores of civilians. One gruesome image involves what might be an entire telephone book's worth of names of people killed during an especially appalling event. Chainsaw Man offers both naked power and chilling consequences in equal measure.

I was absorbed by the thousand or so pages I read of Chainsaw Man. I liked the fantastic displays of devil-enhanced powers. I was intrigued by the themes of exploitation and power that complicated the 'super-team' action sequences. I was kept on edge by the sudden death which could seemingly befall any character. There's even a bizarre and fascinating element to do with historical amnesia which provocatively suggests why so many action manga have highly abstracted settings divorced from real world concerns. Chainsaw Man is an ongoing serial, so it could still let me down. But so far so good.

Y'know, for all the trouble and pain it would cause me . . . I think I wouldn't mind having a super-kawaii Chainsaw Devil inside my chest, too! It would hurt, sure. But I could also really fuck shit up. Sometimes the pain is worth it.

MANGA REVIEW: BOMBA! (2022)

 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. 

MANGA REVIEW: MW (2007)

 

by Osamu Tezuka

English Translation by Camellia Nieh

Book Design by Chip Kidd

Production by Hiroko Mizuno, Mami Yamada, Ayako Fukumitsu, Shinobu Sato, and Akane Ishida

Original Japanese Language Publication in Big Comic (Biggu Komikku) 1976 to 1978. 

English Language Publication by Vertical, Inc. in 2007. 

. . .

"You and I are bound by fate. When you fall, I'm prepared to fall with you." 

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Once upon a time in Japan-

At the end of the 1970s-

Widespread disillusionment with the self-immolating excesses of radical left-wing violence . . . The Red Army factions spent more time "purifying" their own ranks into oblivion than they did smashing capitalism. Left wing thought is now mostly entombed within academia and pretentious theoretical texts of surpassing tedium and opacity. 

Widespread cynicism with the entrenched right-wing conservatism of the Japanese government . . . It's a man's world of rigid gender roles and consolidated political blocs. It's all about who you know and who you blow. Having a dumptruck of cash money also helps. 

Normalized denialism of the atrocities committed by Japan against China and Korea during World War II . . . Hey, lotta war criminals in the executive suites, doncha know!

And now Japan has to live with the fresh stigma of being perceived as a forward operating base for America in its protracted war of folly against Vietnam.

And what of the scores of civilians annihilated by conventional firebombing campaigns during World War II conducted by the U.S.? All this followed by Occupation, censorship of thought and culture, and infuriating land reforms. There are those who resent the heavy hand of Uncle Sam. 

What of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-the Bomb is Everywhere, now! The USA and the USSR could spark off any day and lay waste to the entire human population of Planet Earth! Why bother with questions of right and wrong when it could all become twisted and fused rubble in a flash crimson instant?

And do people still think on the six million systematically murdered by the Nazi death machine of the Holocaust? Germany and Japan had been allies in World War II. How do you come to terms with that?

People forget. Willfully and/or accidentally.

Because the economy is hotting up, and the past is pointless. 

But, into this world of amoral greed and dominance a monster of revelation is born to remind people of what has been buried-

MW gives us a doomed pair-a Catholic priest and a terrorist serial killer-who find themselves drawn to the fires of hell in late 1970s Japan. These fires manifest in different forms for each one. The priest has convinced himself of the literal hellfire of spooky religious damnation. The terrorist's body and mind burns during intense episodes of agony due to his exposure to a chemical warfare substance as a child. Priest and terrorist are also drawn to the flame of a forbidden love for each other-well, it's supposed to be forbidden on the part of the priest, who presumably has sworn off carnal desire. The terrorist is way less uptight. For what it's worth, the priest beats himself up on a spiritual level for his desires. The good father doesn't resist his desires, of course, which should come as no surprise for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the mechanics of performative public piety, institutional/political homophobia, religious hypocrisy, etc. These two are bound to each other as they pursue a mission of cruel vengeance against the government of Japan. 

Our terrorist is named Michio Yuki, a handsome banker who looks like a manga riff on Clark Kent. Yuki comes from a respectable family. His older brother is a kabuki theater actor specializing in female roles. Fifteen years ago, he was on a coastal vacation when he's assaulted by a gang of scruffy hippies. One of these teenage hooligans is named Iwao Garai. Garai holds Yuki prisoner inside a cave where they spend the night. In the morning, the entire population of the coastal town has been killed due to exposure to a chemical warfare agent. Yuki is also exposed. Garai is spared. MW's plot is driven by the mystery of the chemwar substance: who made it? Why? How did it get loose during a time of peace?

Yuki's neurological damage deprives him of a conscience, but his intelligence and determination are unaffected. He studies his older brother's female impersonation techniques and uses an alternate identity as a woman to contrive various blackmail scenarios to work his way up through the hierarchies of Japan's male-dominated business and political elites. Yuki's seeking the truth behind the mysterious presence of deadly chemical weapons being housed on Japanese soil. Yuki's lack of conscience and unconstrained rage allows him to engage in all manner of atrocities-torture, rape, murder, bombings, blackmail, stolen identities-to get what he wants. And what Yuki wants, ultimately, goes beyond the simple truth or even bloody vengeance.

Garai grows up to become a Catholic priest. He tries his best to deny his hooligan past as a drugged-out hippie. Garai also attempts to suppress his homosexuality, but he cannot deny the spark between himself and Yuki. This leads to comical displays of bogus sexual conservatism, but as Yuki's rage spirals out of control, Father Garai tries to prevent violence. But the Good Father just can't bring himself to expose Yuki to the police. Part of it is his fatalistic love, but, in a telling sequence, it is also due to the moral confusions of the mid-century: Garai listens to the fears of his flock, who are riled up by a media story of an unknown madman injecting poisons into chocolate candies. This leads him to ask God why He allows mass slaughter by chemical warfare and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Powerful states and obscure individuals both seem to indulge the desire for indiscriminate massacre. Anybody paying attention upstairs? 

Yuki looks at this moral confusion more decisively: I'm free to do as I please and unleash my inner beast! Truly, Yuki reveals himself to be a monster shaped by both unjust external factors as well as his own rage and sadism. Yuki wants to know the secret behind the chemwar substance so he can use it for himself. Yuki desires the power of mass slaughter just as nation states covet the Bomb. Why should scummy politicians and their bloated government systems have all the fun, eh?

MW gets super-dark, no question. These weighty moral dilemmas-and amoral dilemmas-get a deft and pacy treatment from God of Manga Osamu Tezuka, who shapes it all into a grandiose superthriller that evokes Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, Hiroshi Matsuno's The Living Skeleton, Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge, and the perverse cruelties of Italian giallo cinema. We see it mostly from Yuki and Garai's perspectives. Together, they are,perhaps, one of the most dysfunctional couples in all fiction. Edward Albee was writing light chamber comedy by comparison. 

Tezuka's cinematic visuals evoke the hard-boiled black and white of film noir and Akira Kurosawa's dynamic riffs on noir: Yojimbo, High and Low, The Bad Sleep Well. Tezuka also uses the deft fluidity of comics to weave in visual metaphors of mythic allusions-to evoke the hermetic tragedy of romance gone toxic-and metamorphic monstosity-to evoke the veneer of human civility ruptured by the loosing of inner cruelty. MW is an effective mixture of realism and expressionistic hyperbole. 

MW gives us a cynical view of late 1970s Japan wherein everyone is acting as some sort of stage character due to the rigid norms of masculinity and femininity; of class position and family name; of church and state. Politicians serve money. The media is widely perceived as just another weapon in a national game of conformity control. This rigidity allows a bright, ruthless operator like Yuki to prevail. The more conflicted Garai ends up a well-meaning fool, both lost in aggrandizing self-flagellation fantasias and in deep denial about his sexuality. In the bleak reality of MW only a psychopathic terrorist can be truly free of all the interlocking layers of bullshit.