Category Archives: Roundtables

Love and Rockets: The Love Bunglers

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[This article contains spoilers throughout]

 

The ending to “The Love Bunglers” is but one ending among many in Jaime Hernandez’s Locas saga; all of them pretending to a certainty derived from an earlier age of innocence.

It is 1988 and Hernandez is writing and drawing the second part of “The Valley of the Polar Bears”. Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry’s band. Maggie has found new happiness in the arms of Ray Dominguez. They walk arm in arm into a happy future. The words of an imperfect prophet suggest that she could be coming to “the end of her whirlpool”.

She isn’t.

A few hundred pages on and it is 1996; the faithful reader now faced with the closing pages of “Bob Richardson”. Maggie and Hopey suddenly meeting for the first time in “years” at the back of a police car after a series of setbacks; finally together again as they once were 50 issues prior. The perfect ending.

Each of these moments as final as a relationship, wedding, or birth in our own lives; everything apt to be corroded by time.

These periodic assertions of finality are recapitulated in “The Love Bunglers”. Here old past times are recreated…

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[1985 —> 2011]

…and ancient paths retread.

 

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[1985 —> 2011]

The pair of lovers (Maggie & Ray) stuttering, burning brightly, fizzling out, and then rekindled over the course of a few chapters and over 20 years of comics. If likened to a piece of music then a kind of ritornello with elaborations bordered by tuttis where the orchestra plays as one.

This symmetry is reflected in the construction of Jaime’s story and the positioning of “death” in between the story of the two lovers. The first is a kind of foreboding where Maggie’s brother, Calvin, traumatized by abuse, and with a mind to save his sister, beats his tormentor to a pulp. That figure is later seen tortured by obsessive ruminations over the validity of his actions; these thoughts now carried to their natural conclusion of eternal vigilance over his sister. He is a ghost walking the streets, lost in shadow but ever ready to reiterate the past and its tragedies. A personification of his sister’s own state of mind.

In the latter half of “The Love Bunglers”, Letty, Maggie’s childhood friend, becomes an unwitting sacrifice to that tragedy — first pushed into the background by Maggie’s despair at her father’s unfaithfulness and then slowly rebuilding an old bond with her friend. There is space enough to wonder why she has been thus displaced, whether this can be put down to Maggie’s new found wariness or simply her mother’s shame at the preceding events; now spreading like a disease through her family, all of whom are kept close to the nest in light of the recent affliction that has unfolded.

Both of these episodes present themselves as answers to Maggie’s insecurities, always alluded to at various points in Hernandez’s long running series but now brought to the fore. As Ray Dominguez lies bleeding on the ground towards the close of the story, his skull crushed by a brick wielded by Maggie’s deranged brother, Hernandez offers his readers an encapsulation of this pattern of self-flagellation. Ray’s vegetative thoughts of Maggie seguing into Maggie’s own recollections; a gentle push into reconstruction and reminiscence on the part of the author.

Panel 1. It is 1997 and Hernandez will soon be embarking on his much lauded homage to Charles Schulz in “Home School” — clean, elegant lines, wiry hair, and brick walls.

In “6 Degrees of Ray D. Ation”, Ray meets the young Maggie for the first time. There is a hammer hanging over Ray’s head held by a young Maggie, just as so many years later her brother will hold a brick over Ray. He is a willing victim, a deer caught in the headlights. She, his unwitting “scourge”.

Panel 2. Maggie moves back to Hoppers after her parents separate. A friendship is rekindled and Maggie emerges from her shell.

Panel 3. A pose which mirrors that at the end of “The Death of Speedy”.

The school year is coming to a close and Ray has managed to get an art scholarship and will be leaving town. Soon Letty will be dead, a crutch taken from Maggie.

Panel 4. “The Return of Ray D.” (1986). A moment between panels and between pages. Maggie has just been kicked out of her friend Danita’s house and has been wandering the cold streets at night. “Three-thirty in the morning an’ my bed is fifteen miles away…” Ray has been away for 3 years and they meet unexpectedly at a doughnut shop. He only recognizes her after the fact. Maggie remembers that she once started a rumor that they went out “cause I liked him. Like I liked Race…and Speedy…”

 

Panel 5. “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (1987). Ray has just seen his friend, Litos, shot in the face, and he is sitting together with Maggie in a hospital. “Why are you the only sane person here?” she asks. A moment of quiet as Maggie rests on his blood stained shirt, and then she leaves him to meet Speedy who will be dead within moments.

 

 

Panel 6. A Mess of Skin (1987). Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry. Left to her own devices back in Hoppers, Maggie accidentally jumps into a car thinking it is driven by Doyle and sees that it is being driven by Ray. They hook up to Daffy’s consternation. All this before that joyful and ephemeral conclusion mentioned above.

 

Panel 7. Maggie is posing for Ray but she’s stiff and lifeless, finally delegating her duties to Danita who soon shacks up with Ray. It is the beginning of the end for the couple, all this belied by a strained smile, happily ignored by readers of the time hoping for a reunion with Hopey.

Panel 8. “Ninety-Three Millions Miles from the Sun”. The end of the affair. Maggie says a final goodbye to Ray before Hopey puts her through another trauma and she disappears for the duration of “Wigwam Bam”.

 

This before that other blissful and temporary end which closed the magazine sized issues of Love and Rockets. The end of an era. The magazine’s circulation dropping from its heydays, partly due to the Hernandez Brothers fascination with convoluted narratives, dead ends, and indefinite resolutions.

Panel 9. “Life Through Whispers”. Doyle meets Maggie for the first time in years, and he’s worried that she’s seen him with his new squeeze. We never see her expression until this moment. Her visage is a mask of stern resignation, so far from the girl that grew up in Hoppers, the demons still clinging to her soul. The memories of happier times now tainted by experience.The one time mechanical “prodigy” now doing maintenance in an apartment block.

Ray’s expression is filled with an unaccountable sadness, staring and not daring to speak. The heady days of youth now extinct, the colorful costumes of the past long forgotten, life settling into a predictable landscape of drab buildings, anonymous clubs and darkened streets. When Jaime demonstrates his love for the feminine form in one of Ray’s life drawing classes earlier in the story, the entire process is viewed with a sense of bemused distraction by Ray. It seems almost like a casting away of “youthful” ways, a disdainful glance at a game from another age. This is a bleak middle-aged, lower middle-class existence conveyed not by picturesque chaos but by Jaime’s increasingly somber environments and restrained linework. Nowhere is this spartan existence more visible than in “The Love Bunglers”, the artist’s expressive line held in check like the lowering of a narrator’s voice.

In the fourth to final page of “The Love Bunglers”, Maggie looks into the mirror having found out that Ray has been in a near vegetative state for almost 2 years —  a direct reference to the two pages of retrospection that have preceded it. What happens in the moment between those two panels is, of course, a mystery.

Perhaps a moment of resolution; perhaps the desire to remember clearly everything that has gone on before. A clean slate from which to draw the best of memories and less of the pain. If Maggie’s problems can be placed down to her memories, then it might be said that Ray finally gets his girl because he has forgotten so much.

In the end, the attacker (that personification of psychological damage) is somehow forgotten. The author reasserting the points of connection between Maggie and Ray, tearing them down and then rebuilding them. Ray’s mind in a constant state of questioning, his memories containing real and feigned histories.

His lover’s face is placid, understanding, and yet indecipherable — the cartoonist inviting his readers to recall the couple’s years of bitter struggle, before accepting the lies of a pleasant but capricious present reality.

 
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This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Classroom Minus Children

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Seeing as how there’s absolutely no way I can top the  other fine and informative posts submitted this week in terms of information, humor, passion or — let’s face it —  logical sentence construction, I will instead embrace the transformative aspect of the Halloween season to address a mutated form of the series under examination. An abridged form – a hacked-up form, an act of horror movie violence as brutal as the alterations I’m currently making to my Sexy Comics Academic costume for the weekend.

In short, I’d like to talk about The Drifting Classroom, sans kids.

That right – I’m just going to delete all that crazy survival horror stuff with those screaming children in the howling future hellscape. Who needs it? Not me. Not while I’ve got the most wonderful character in the entire series slotted into her proper role as full-fledged protagonist.

It must be said up front that in some ways Emiko Takamatsu (i.e. “Sho’s Mom”) is typical of artist Kazuo Umezu’s depictions of mature women: “pretty on the outside, but ferocious within,” as Jason Thompson put it earlier in this series. Certainly I’m loath to forget such fine specimens of devouring womanhood as the murderous substitute mother of Umezu’s Insects, the best of his shojo horror works available in English (as Scary Book vol. 2, published by Dark Horse) – that’s the one with the little girl who’s afraid of butterflies, eventually becoming plagued with Lepidopteran precognitions when disaster is about to strike, such as an earthquake rattling her classroom and most of her schoolmates subsequently being run over by a truck. As you might expect, all of this dates back to her mother’s murder at the hands of a romantic rival — the very woman now intruding upon Dad’s personal space — whose nourishing characteristics are marred by a giveaway disfigurement.

What’s important then to realize about Mrs. Takamatsu, heroine of our mental edit, is that she’s both the adult and the child. She’s the wall of fury and the helpless pup, seized by irrational forebodings due to an intense personal trauma: the death of her child.

Yes, the first thing that becomes clear when you drift the classroom out of Umezu’s series is that Sho really did die; the school exploded, hundreds of children perished, and poor Emiko is robbed of even the catharsis of anyone finding so much as a human cinder. In a different series — say, something eleven books long — this might be evidence of the kids being whisked away to a hazardous land of crawly things, but for our purposes it’s a manifestation of her inability to put her terse final interactions with her son in the past. The toy “future car” of chapter one thus carries additional ironic weight, as Sho isn’t blasted to a very non-aerodynamic future; his future is instead blasted to bits, and Emiko is left holding all that wasted potential.

And so, as with the little girl in Insects, Sho’s Mom begins to receive messages from the future, but not in the form of butterflies – instead, her status as Sho’s Mom is reinforced by sounds of her boy calling for help, a condition suspiciously brought on after having unspecified Medicine poured down her throat by her well-meaning but largely useless husband. She starts screaming into the telephone when neighbors call, because she can’t hear them – it’s only her son. She picks up a fellow traveler, a boy sidekick of sorts, in the form of Shinichi: a classmate of Sho’s who didn’t arrive at school in time and could have saved his life. Only he can fathom the strange compulsions driving her to invade a hapless foreign couple’s hotel room and eventually plant a knife in the wall for use by her child in god knows how many years.

Gradually, the antics become satirical. Frantic to find the cure to a future plague, Emiko and Shinichi invade a baseball game on the theory that a uniquely-scarred star player will inevitably become a mummy, and thereby a helpful means of transporting necessary drugs. One might also say the shonen manga formula of today is mummified into obligatory burps of friendship, perseverance and victory, traits borrowed (as some say) from the great sports manga of boys’ comics with intent to deliver refined hits of sleek entertainment.

The Drifting Classroom was serialized in wilder days, in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972 to 1974, at the same time hit baseball series by the likes of Shinji Mizushima ran in rival magazines. Umezu’s vision of baseball departs – it is sheer barbarism, with fans leaping onto the field screaming for Emiko’s head as she interrupts the game. It all but goes without saying the great player is a bit of a fraud, seeking to injure himself out of the contest for fear of disappointing his many child fans. Yet Umezu is writing a comic for boys, and just as perhaps his entirely hypothetical children zapped away to the future might embrace sacred shonen values out of sheer desire to survive, so will the baseball player truly serve a young child by dying to save him from kidnapping.

Something else was happening too. Even as work continued on Umezu’s series, the landscape of his former specialization in shojo manga began to change. The Year 24 Group began shifting the focus of girls’ comics into something driven by inspired female artists, as opposed to the men who drew the shojo manga of Umezu’s earlier years. Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas began around the time The Drifting Classroom started wrapping up, and its evocation of affectionate lads couldn’t seem further from the invariably KYAAAing kids of Umezu’s earlier horrors.

But the beauty of excerpting a work like this is that we can draw out potentials often left hidden by the bustle of a busier plot. If Emiko believes she can sense the future like the little girl in Insects, it’s not because of a secret, personal calamity, but an inexplicable disaster that has taken away her child. It’s a wide-ranging thing, evidenced by the mourning crowds of mothers she denounces as quitters, and especially her doppelgänger, the mother of wee three-year old Yuichi, with whom Sho played on the night before that fateful event. If anything, Yuichi’s mom is even worse off that Emiko, in that she doesn’t even get the satisfaction of having her too-young-for-school child recognized as anything other than commonly missing.

Yet this will bring an odd sort of hope. I don’t want to do anything extravagant here, like credit Umezu with the accidental creation of josei horror, but there’s something in the way of real forward momentum to this characteristically high-volume confrontation between mourning women. Time is passing them by. The site of the exploded building is transformed into a garbage dump. Emiko prophesies a desert in place of the already lifeless concrete of the city. Finally, she invades a television variety show with a message for all of Japan: to wish as hard as she has, to will the children back to life, to believe once again in kids’ comics mechanics.

For our purposes, it cannot happen.

But something else can.

First comes Yuichi’s tricycle, and then the boy himself. Heaven only knows where he’s been, or how he got a copy of Sho’s journal, or what the hell is going on with that guy in the hospital with parts of his body missing. In the interests of salvaging my hypothetical, I’ll sheepishly note that the missing body parts aren’t revealed until we switch away from the household television’s point of view, and nobody other than Emiko ever actually reads the journal. Maybe little Yuichi was inspired to run off by the disaster; certainly Emiko’s husband has demonstrated a capacity to support her mania with love.

Regardless, what it all represents is hope – one mother is getting her child back, for real. And for Emiko, it sparks a realization that all her visions of the future cannot make her reactionary – she has to think bigger, better. It’s a sentimental ending of sorts, but as Mizuho Hirayama observed in his essay on the collision of comedy and horror in Umezu’s work (in the back of Viz’s edition of Cat Eyed Boy vol. 2), the glee with which repulsion turns to delight evidences a zest for childlike naivete on the artist’s part. Perhaps this vivid burlesque of a mother’s grieving which I have drilled out today is still childlike, still shonen or whatever you want to call it, in proffering a final, quiet epiphany that children have to live in the future, and we have to leave a future there to imagine.

We don’t see her face in the end, though, and we withdraw as if through a keyhole, as if peeping, as if some things are too complex for a child’s comic to show.

Splashy: Drifting Roundtable

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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I haven’t read enough of Drifting Classroom to write my Grand Unifying Theory of Kazuo Umezu. But what I’ve read I’ve liked, especially the art. Panels that are detailed but not cluttered, expressive characters, a layout that guides the narrative — it’s the type of solid, mainstream craftsmanship that’s all too rare on this side of the Pacific. The most memorable feature of Drifting Classroom‘s art (in the first volume at least) is the frequent use of splash pages.

Splash images (whether taking up one or two pages) can serve many purposes. Using a splash as the first page of a comic is a common way to start things off with a bang (and a large image leaves plenty of empty space to squeeze in narration, credits, publishing information, and other corporate boilerplate).

Jim Aparo – Brave and the Bold #129

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Jim Lee – Justice League #1 (2011)

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Ending a comic (or a chapter in a larger comic) with a splash is like teaser trailer – the big, flashy image leaves the reader wanting more.

Kazuo Umezu – Drifting Classroom

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As for aesthetics, I far prefer Umezu to Jim Lee, but the above two images are similar in function. Full page splashes capture the readers’ attention and highlight an event that readers will presumably find interesting/exciting (an attack out of nowhere, or the first appearance of post-reboot Superman). And both images leave the readers in suspense, offering a payoff only if they buy the next installment. Who is crushing the girl’s hand and why?! Don’t you want to see Superman and Batman fight … AGAIN?! Of course, the notable difference is that the suspense in Drifting Classroom arises purely out of the narrative, while Justice League relies on the devotion of superhero fandom.

A splash image in the middle of a comic tends to arrest the narrative, panel to panel progression is put on hold so that the reader can appreciate the big picture (often both literally and metaphorically). There are several examples of this type of splash in Drifting Classroom.

 

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David Mazzucchelli – Asterios Polyp

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Who doesn’t like craters? These two images illustrate a point that might seem counterintuitive. In most comics, splash pages are “panoramic” images that fully capture some major object or event. But the above image by Umezu is close to the action, so close in fact that the reader can only see a portion of the hole left by the missing school. The enormity is implicit, and the the reader creates a massive crater in their mind using Umezu’s visual cues, such as the little boy (who provides a useful scale for size), the jagged edges, and the contrast between the black pit and the very white surface.

In Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli does something similar by cutting off the crater on the right, suggesting (or at least trying to suggest) that it goes on beyond the edge of the page. And he includes tiny people in the foreground to establish the sheer size of the crater. Yet, while Mazzucchelli is an undeniable talent, his crater seems less impressive that Umezo’s. This is because he’s unwilling to leave too much to the reader’s imagination. While part of the image is cut off, Mazzucchelli still draws nearly 75% of the crater. He wants to show AND imply the enormity, but cutting off the far right portion of the crater doesn’t imply much of anything. Rather it seems like Mazzucchelli just ran out of space when drawing his big hole.

Splash pages are also useful for establishing a place, not just in terms of scale or spatial relationships, but in mood.

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I particularly like the above splash by Umezo. The devastation beyond the school looks like an endless sea about to engulf and drown the tiny children. But the school itself is a bleak haven, the only distinguishing feature of the architecture is its complete lack of any distinguishing features. It seems like the children have only the options of sterile orderliness or complete annihilation.

Splash pages can also stop a narrative at a pivotal moment by encouraging readers to “soak in” a larger image rather than breeze through smaller panels. And the very size of the splash can signify importance.

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Prior to this scene, the story had not been violent, but then a teacher stabs a helpless child to scare the other children into behaving. It’s a shocking moment because the violence is so sudden, bloody, and arbitrary. The splash magnifies the emotional impact, and by freezing the plot in that moment, it forces the reader to consider the logic behind the teacher’s action. The school is order and safety, but that depends on a particular relationship between teachers and students. The school functions only when students respect authority, and that authority is based on brute force. On the other hand, the teachers are actually as clueless and desperate as the kids, so I’m curious to see where Umezo goes with this.

On a concluding note, comparing Umezo to American artists leaves me curious as to what artists like Aparo might have done had they worked on longer books. In an American comic (the old-fashioned “floppy”), more than one or two splash pages per issue is excessive, as the progression of the plot slows to a crawl. One advantage of the manga periodical format is the larger number of pages per volume allows for greater use of splashes without disrupting the overall pacing (in Drifting Classroom only a minority of the pages are splashes, but there are still close to a dozen in the first volume). And the same thing could be said of graphic novels in general. But given the current state of mainstream comics, a higher page count might simply mean more splashes of malapportioned Supermen glowering at the reader.

Adrift/ Cut the Cord

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Adrift/ Cut the Cord

 

Hunger. Butchery. Transformation. An impossible situation.

A world without sense, without purpose or direction. Children adrift with no home, separated permanently from that bit of comfort and warmth that protects, that shields from the unknown. Slaughter, thirst, dirt and maggots and refuse and decay and no order, not at all.

The Drifting Classroom was originally serialized from 1972 through 1974 in the pages of Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine. Ostensibly aimed at an audience the same age as the story’s chief protagonists, the Drifting Classroom finds an entire elementary school mysteriously transported to a horrific landscape of death and waste where they must try their best to survive. The few adults that have been transported are, at best, helplessly arrogant and stupid, unprepared for the unrestrained, unordered world to which they have all been delivered; at their worst, the adults are crazed thieves and murderers who must be dispatched to prevent even more carnage.

The most resourceful of these children is Sho, a sixth grader of extraordinary leadership who struggles to create a small bit of social order in the complete disorder in which the children find themselves. Initially these are very small victories—coordinating the children to fend off an attacker, or equitably distributing a small amount of food. But even as the obstacles mount, Drifting Classroom begins to suggest that more may be possible with Sho, that there may be some reason for these refugees to hope for some resolution, for some bit of survival.

 

Bath Time/Lots of Fun/Helpless

Having all been children once, you would think that no adult needs the reminder—but to be a child is to be completely helpless in the face of a casually cruel world. A parent’s primary responsibility is to protect, and his second, to nurture—to help her child take those first tentative steps towards navigating the world. The first social structures that most children encounter in their lives are the ones created by their parents—their one-on-one relationship with their parent, the close circle of the immediate family. And a child can grow more confident and skilled in this limited environment, assuming a certain amount of stability and safety.

But for most children the world of the family is not the whole world forever, and the child will eventually encounter social situations and structures that are new to him, that may seem completely bizarre and arbitrary. At the age of two I was baby-sat daily by a woman down the street who had a large family. It seemed like a very natural thing for me to be taken into this family every afternoon, like some extended version of my own with different faces and different voices and different toys. But soon after my fourth birthday I began attending a Methodist daycare full-time while both my parents were at work, dozens of children and staff in an old, poorly-lit building in an unfamiliar part of the city. The adults were strange and distant and unknowable, the other children too numerous to be distinguishable from each other. I ate lunch by myself, sat in the corner during play times, was terrified of getting something wrong and of the inevitable retribution. One lunch time I bent a spoon until it broke, and, terrified of discovery, hid it beneath my chair before dumping my tray into the dish washing receptacle. Another lunch time I felt nauseated, and tried to get out of my assigned task of passing out napkins to the whole group. I was told to do my part, and so I continued, until I vomited on the napkins and myself, at which point I was taken to a nurse and sat in a corner alone with a glass of water and a fresh paper towel. All this anxiety, it seems, was justified. My parents told me years later that they had given me a bath one night only to find that I was trying to hide my back, which was covered with long bloody scratches, the apparently accidental work of one of the day care teachers, who had instructed me not to tell my parents about the mishap.

I don’t think that any of these events are unique. Their ubiquity is the point—that, to a child, the world is a confusing, dangerous, and at first, unknowable place, and that an adult is a capricious monster capable of any manner of harmful, arbitrary action.

 

No Francis Bacon/Vegetarian

The imagery of Drifting Classroom is itself so primal, and the staging so visceral, that it is often in conflict in a very real way with the very controlled, assistant-heavy surface sheen. Although the textures of Sho’s world are admirably dirty and gritty, all textures that would be put to similar effect by Junko Ito decades later, the surface is so consistent, the characters so on model in all their doe-eyed splendor, that the violence sometimes becomes distanced and almost comical. The effect is similar to that of photographs of dolls torturing each other, or documentation of a war between porcelain figurines. How would the same story read with a surface style as visceral and loaded as the imagery?

I tell myself it would be better, more attuned to the emotional content, the terror of the events. And then I think more about the later turns of the plot, and look again at one of the hundreds (thousands?) of almost identical drawings of Sho in profile, looking on in horror as another grotesque assaults his friends and his world, and I know that this duplication is part of the effect, that pressed between the pages these doll-like bodies will rip and tear and destroy each other for eternity.

 

The Process-oriented Apocalypse

The later stages of Drifting Classroom present a process-oriented apocalypse in which no problem is too horrific or complex to overcome, even if the solution happens to involve psychic time travel, the unbreakable power of mother/son love, or remotely-controlled severed limbs and partial faces that hide out in the backpacks of toddlers. Putting aside the wildly-inventive details to these problems, the solutions, and the need for solutions and explanation in the first place, keeps the Drifting Classroom from ever truly lifting off into the unknown, for better or for worse. Once the proceedings become so focused on process the series becomes almost procedural, not unlike the console adventure role playing games that would infect the youth of Japan a little more than a decade later. Sho leads his party of adventurers through the hostile land, gathering experience points and new skills and objects and information about their world that furthers their chances of surviving each new conflict. Along the way members of their party are picked off by foes they encounter, alternately sentient and environmental.

Although the early portions of Drifting Classroom are truly adrift, the later portions seem to very specifically reflect a worldview of purpose and direction and structure. God, or parent, may be absent from their lives, but He has not forsaken these children—he has gifted them with the intelligence and training to be able to collectively decode the clues around them. Many of them will die, and yes, they have been placed in a truly hellish place, a world devoid of life and growth and promise. But not devoid of hope. The confident, assured, and ultimately perfect Sho shepherds his flock of students through the dangers, knowing that although many of them will pass, their class, their tribe, will live on. Sho is the intermediary between the absent and the present, the bridge between the missing world of comfort and the current world of absence and abscess.

It is not insignificant that he does this while being the protagonist of the story. Although he may represent one Jesus Christ in relation to the children in his charge, he doesn’t resemble him in his role to the text- Jesus, despite being the central character of the gospels, is hardly our viewpoint character. Because we’re intended to identify with Sho, and because he happens to be the target age of the initial publication of the manga, it’s easy to read into Sho a kind of purpose to this entire enterprise that, on its surface, seems like so much mayhem and carnage. Through the blood and the murder and what on the surface seems like a hot, horrible bloody world of randomness, the students, and the readers, are slowly being encouraged to step into that truly adult space of individual agency, of realizing that they alone are responsible for their survival, but that survival is possible, and is in fact within their grasp, guaranteed by the inevitability of invention. There are problems, the Drifting Classroom insists, and where there are problems there must be solutions.

It’s a surprisingly conventional message for a narrative with so many unconventional details, and such uncommon violence.

Katherine Wirick on Soap Operas, Violence, and Quentin Tarantino

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We’ve been having a ridiculously extended discussion about soap operas, Quentin Tarantino, violence and other subjects at this thread. I really enjoyed this comment by Katherine Wirick, so thought I would give it it’s own post.

I grew up watching ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL with my mother. Three hours a day, five days a week, every week.

So I speak from experience when I say that TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.

In RESERVOIR DOGS, a man is shot in the gut and spends most of the next ninety minutes writhing and screaming in pain. I am a pacifist, and I have been a victim of violence, and I find the extended agony of Mr. Orange more palatable and more morally acceptable than any of the multiple rapes and countless murders I saw in a decade of soap opera viewership. If violence is going to be entertainment, as it presently is in both male- and female-coded genres, I’d rather have the act and its consequences onscreen in all their ugliness than have them sanitized for “general audiences.” (In a different genre but along the same lines, I was far more offended by the clean, kid-friendly warfare in PRINCE CASPIAN than I was by anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) In real life there is no editor to cut mercifully away from the extremity of your pain.

Soap operas, it’s also worth remembering, have a history of turning rapists into romantic heroes. (Two examples come immediately to mind: Luke on GH and on OLTL. There may be more.) These shows do not stand firmly on the moral, humanistic, life-affirming side of any binary question about violence.

Part of the reason I’m posting here is that I wanted to be a female voice in Tarantino’s defense, since, as far as I can tell, there haven’t yet been any. I’ve always been drawn to genres that commonly employ graphic violence (cop shows, war movies, adventure stories and so on). These genres are culturally coded male, and they are privileged over genres that are coded female, but their appeal is certainly not exclusively male; I don’t think it’s even *primarily* male.

The talk about Tarantino as an exponent of some fraudulent “realism” is a bit baffling to me; in my perception, each successive film since RESERVOIR DOGS has been *less* realistic, more mannered, more self-conscious, more stylized. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS never once allowed me to forget that what I was watching was a construct. I have mixed feelings about that. The fundamental draw of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me–the draw his films have lost since PULP FICTION (although I haven’t seen JACKIE BROWN or DEATH PROOF)–was an *emotional* realism. That movie is a love story. I engaged with it on that level, and it rewarded me.

And what the hey; I’ll reprint this comment from Katherine too, in conversation with Caroline Small.

Caro: “And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one.”

Well, for my part, I’ve lost sight of what you mean, specifically, when you say “realism,” or argue against it. (See above re: my attention span.) For me, when realism is as mannered as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or KILL BILL it entirely ceases to be realism. I’d describe Tarantino’s recent work as, well, cinematic mannerism, as distant from my perception of “the real” as the Madonna with the Long Neck.

Caro: “I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not.”

I apologize for misconstruing your argument. But–as I perceive it, and my perception may be incorrect–you’ve been taking a moral stand against the representation of violence as entertainment (your distinction about *graphic* violence was lost on me until your most recent comment), identifying it as a feature of male-coded genres, and praising female-coded genres such as soaps in the same thread. Therefore, I made the assumption that you would argue that female-gendered genres do not rely on violence to provide entertainment.

Caro: “The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s.”

Todd raped Marty on OLTL in the early ’90s, and was redeemed later in the decade. I wasn’t around for Luke and Laura, but I was around for Todd. To be fair, there was controversy–the actor who played Todd actually quit in protest–but, still, the fact that they did it at all…

They had their pleasures, but I don’t really miss those shows. Neither does my mother, who cut down on her soap-watching after she started working part-time, and finally dropped AMC about five years ago. Our TV-mediated mother-daughter bonding experiences are focused on PROJECT RUNWAY and SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE now. Looking back, I’m grateful that she’s a feminist, and could provide a feminist critique of what we were watching when it was needed (which it frequently was).

Caro: “It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense.”

Oh, my. How much fanfiction have you read? I’ve seen violence (more graphic and much more sexualized than Tarantino’s, and portrayed in greater detail) used as entertainment in fanfiction over and over and *over.* It’s one of the most common tropes. Yes, most of the time there’s some kind of narrative purpose for the violence–it’s usually a device to break down one character so that another can rebuild him–but the violence quite often happens onscreen, and quite often happens in graphic, sensuous, loving detail. When the brakes come off, as they do on the internet, there’s an awful lot of blood and torture in my gender’s collective imagination.

Caro: “they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.”

This *is* mostly true of soaps, but, like I said, one of the things fanfiction does, regularly, is present violence directly through graphic representation.

Back to soaps: is the portrayal of a rape or a murder on a soap entertainment, in a “voyeuristic or indulgent sense”? You’re right that, because soaps don’t present graphic violence (for whatever reason), their approach to violence is more about “motivations and structures,” more about the telling and retelling of an event. And yet: that event is still present. It’s there. Its specter looms over the narrative; the specter of a corpse, the specter of an abused body. And those specters provide a frisson for the audience. Violent plotlines on soaps–especially the frequent serial-killer stories–were heavily advertised, which leads me to suspect that they were a reliable ratings boost. I don’t really find that any more acceptable, despite the lack of onscreen blood, than the directly presented violence that drives the plot of RESERVOIR DOGS. Of course, I respect that your response is different.

For contrast: the last Cronenberg I saw was VIDEODROME (I had to watch it for a class; I wasn’t previously familiar with Cronenberg’s work), and I had a very difficult time with the early scene where the woman is tortured–so much so that, later in the film, I found myself thinking, “Yeah, people who would watch *that* for pleasure do kind of deserve to die,” and then being a little shocked that I’d had that thought. As always, the answers to all these questions are powerfully subjective.

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Update: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

They Die Falling Forward

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Every one of his characters goes full throttle at everything. The pursuer and the pursued, the frightened weakling, the ominously disfigured freak, the snake woman, the crimson spider, all the characters in Iara… Even in death, they die falling forward.


Seimu Yoshizaki
Kingyo Used Books, Vol. 3, “Umezu Salon”

 

Kazuo Umezu may be the strangest cartoonist in Japan, and that’s saying a lot. With his wild shock of frizzy hair and wardrobe of outsized children’s clothing (always including a shirt of red and white stripes, the pattern he painted his house), “Kazz” is instantly recognizable on the streets and subways of Tokyo. Now 75 years old, he has a bouncy demeanor and a mad, relentless grin, giving the impression of an elderly child. He’s best known for horror manga, but is almost as famous as the creator of the children’s comedy series Makoto-chan. Think of the EC horror artists who created MAD. (Umezu’s own description of the difference between the genres: “If you’re doing the chasing, it’s comedy. If you’re being chased, it’s horror.”)

There are cultures where artists are expected to be quirky, but modern Japan is not among them, and the cheerfully nonconformist, happily gruesome Umezu has always seemed adrift from humanity, an astronaut from an alternate reality with its own idiosyncratic laws. And yet his comics bleed out of universal human fears and desires; their logic is the logic of the id.

That’s clear enough in Drifting Classroom, arguably Umezu’s masterpiece (although if I know Jason Thompson, he may make a spirited case for recent works like the probably-unpublishable-in-English Fourteen). Nothing that happens in this manga makes sense. Adults go murderously insane at the first sign of trouble. Children are more reasonable but sometimes do bizarre, suicidal things, like when the younger students suddenly decide to jump off the school building en masse. Monsters come out of children’s minds, and you can hide by covering your eyes. Young hero Sho has a telepathic link to his mother that extends through time and space. Survival depends not just on the familiar tactics of desert-island stories—collecting water, growing food, developing a rudimentary government and fighting to keep it together—but weird rituals, psychic transmissions, and trusting in strange stories told by frightened children.

It doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes id-sense. It’s a child’s logic. When you’re a child, adults are impossible to understand. Other children aren’t much better. Fantasies have power. (In her writing lessons, Lynda Barry advises adults to watch children playing “pretend.” They don’t smile.) And the link to Mother is the realest thing in life. Umezu’s manga often play on primal childhood fears, but in his hands they’re not childish; they’re old. Among his early stories is one with the most fundamentally frightening title in horror fiction: Mama ga Kowai, “Scared of Mama.”

If the reality of Drifting Classroom is a child’s reality, that makes the premise even more deeply horrifying. The children are thrust into the future, the adulthood they will inhabit, to find only a ruined, hopeless wasteland. There’s nothing to be done about it, either; their only hope is to get back to their childhoods, to the time when they were, if not loved, at least fed and sheltered and protected. Nothing waits for them in the future but death.

Yet they keep going. Umezu’s protagonists are constantly overcome with shock, terror, and horror, but never with despair. Characters who give into hopelessness tend to die quickly. (There’s the id-logic again; if you give up, you might as well drop dead.) Sho is constantly running, shouting, ordering and begging everyone around him to press on. That’s the one chance Umezu offers: the chance to keep running.

Umezu’s stiff, old-fashioned, almost childlike art increases the sense of urgency and desperation. Hewn from the page in thick, crude lines, the characters seem to be clawing their way into existence, bent on telling their story even as it dooms them. They hardly seem to have come from a human hand at all.

The theme of soldiering on in the face of existential despair is not uncommon in manga, to the point that it’s become something of a cliché cop-out in some recent trying-too-hard-to-be-deep series. But it’s a theme that’s deeply moving—and deeply disturbing—when done well. The climax of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga (not the anime, which ends at an earlier and more optimistic point in the narrative), in which the heroine courageously seals the doom of the human race, is a classic example. So is the entirety of Drifting Classroom, although, as with all of Umezu’s work, it’s pointless to say if it’s “done well” or “done poorly.” It’s done. As done as anything has ever been done. Full throttle.

The Playland of Carnivores

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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“Mine is a world without logic. Adults bring scientific rationality with them. I don’t have room for that.”
—Kazuo Umezu

The strongest theme in the creations of Kazuo Umezu (1936-), by which I include his public image and performance art as well as his manga, is the fascination with and glorification of childhood. Umezu has cultivated an image as an eternal man-child, as a man who made his name drawing children’s and horror manga and still acts like a mischiveous child himself. “I’m writing about myself in a way. I don’t want to be an adult and ‘grow up,'” he said in an interview with Tokyo Scum Brigade. He’s also said that he eats as little as possible because reducing your food intake is the only scientifically proven way to extend your life. Perhaps it worked, since even into his forties and fifties he had a nebulously youthful appearance, helped along by his Harpo Marx mophead of jet-black hair and his childlike wardrobe, such as his characteristic red-and-white striped shirt. Today, although age has taken its toll, he still lives in Pee-Wee Herman-like splendor, and after the end of his manga career in 1995 (due to tendonitis) he has returned to his early alternate dream of being a talent/celebrity, like in the 1970s when, fresh off the success of his gag manga Makoto-chan, he created and sang in the “Makoto-chan Band.” In the sixteen years since his retirement from manga, he has sung Paul Anka’s “You are My Destiny” in English on Japanese TV, worn a boa and a flower in his hair at a dinner celebrating his 55th anniversary as a manga artist, and even painted his house in red and white stripes, leading to a failed legal challenge by his neighbors. In Japanese interviews, he has claimed he’s a virgin; others have suggested that the glam-loving, apparently celibate mangaka is a “confirmed bachelor” in the old sense. Like Michael Jackson, or Dave Sim, he is an artist whose personal eccentricities inspire as much commentary as the work itself; in Umezu’s case, he apparently loves the spotlight, and it is hard not to want to study Umezu’s manga and Umezu in the same eyeful.

The Drifting Classroom (1972-1974) is his favorite of his own works, along with My Name is Shingo (1982-1986) and Fourteen (1990-1995), which unlike Drifting Classroom were published in a magazine for adults. Drifting Classroom, from the premise, is a pure children’s adventure fantasy: an elementary school is suddenly transported into a future postapocalyptic wasteland, and after all the adult authority figures quickly die off, the students must struggle to survive on their own. It’s a wonderful “put yourself in their place” scenario, a survival horror story filled with the kind of details that would make Shonen Sunday readers look through their classrooms and imagine what objects they could use to survive Umezu’s apocalypse: the students must find food and water, form a rudimentary government, deal with internal and external crises, and finally, try to find a way to go back home.

In short, the children must grow up and become responsible…they must become adults, something Umezu makes explicit in a subplot where the sixth graders volunteer to become surrogate parents for the homesick 1st graders to keep them from completely falling apart. Kazuo Umezu remembers that when you’re a kid, a year’s age difference is massive, and it’s the 6th graders (the kids closest to the target audience of Shonen Sunday magazine) who are most humanized in Drifting Classroom; there’s only a handful of named 5th graders, and the 1st through 4th graders are mostly a hapless mass of “little kids.” Sho, the 6th grade main character, starts the manga as sort of a brat, waking up late and yelling at his mother before leaving the house in a huff. Over the course of the manga, which is told mostly from Sho’s perspective as a letter written to his mother, he has endless opportunity to wish he had behaved better. One way in which Drifting Classroom is a very classic children’s story is that it’s full of moral examples, presenting many scenes in which the heroic, idealistic Sho (whom Ng Suat Tong rightly described as a “saint” in his article on Drifting Classroom in The Comics Journal #233) chooses the right path in some moral crisis, as opposed to the other students, particularly Otomo, his rival, whose instincts are more harsh and pragmatic (“We have to figure out how to survive on anything, whether it’s polluted water, poisonous food, or human flesh!”) In keeping with the common Japanese (and human) idealization of the warmth and home and motherhood, Sho and the students sustain themselves by thinking of their homes and mothers (“They must have been thinking of our homes so far away, so long ago…Oh mother! I wished I could have run up to you and thrown myself into your arms!”). But in the end of the manga, instead of returning to their homes in the past, Sho and the survivors resign themselves to the thought that they will never see their parents again, and try to find a sustainable way to live: like the pilgrims on Mars in Ray Bradbury’s “The Million Year Picnic,” they accept that this alien world is their new home.

But despite the characters’ transformation from prank-playing kids to future leaders, farmers and (it’s implied in one mild romantic scene in the last chapter) husbands and wives, Umezu’s manga still enforces a clear separation between children and adults. The story does not take place over a long enough time period to show the children literally grow through adolescence, something that would seem to be outside of Umezu’s artistic abilities anyway. Whereas mainstream shojo and shonen manga from the ’80s onward have increasingly tended towards gender-blur and ageplay (something which had developed earlier in Osamu Tezuka’s proto-lolicon, cartoony-sexy character designs, as seen in characters like Kinoko in Black Jack), so that the typical shonen manga hero nowadays is an androgynous-looking 14-year-old, Umezu’s work is from a different, older tradition, where the lines between Man and Woman, Adult and Child are rock-hard. And the depiction of adults is not kind. Most of the adults transported to the future world immediately go mad or kill themselves, their rigid adult minds unable to take the impossibility of their situation. Wakahara-sensei, the kindest and most competent of the teachers, essentially takes the place of Sho’s father, who is a mere cipher. He tells his class they must see him as a parent (“Until the day we go back home, I’ll be your big brother…no, your father!”), but scarcely a hundred pages later he too goes mad and becomes a terrifying ogre, killing his offspring. The only adult who survives past the first two volumes is Sekiya, the lunch delivery man, 38 years old (just two years older than Umezu was when he started Drifting Classroom). Sekiya seemingly survives by denial, since he obstinately refuses to believe that they have teleported into the future (“Grow up! There’s no other world besides this one, you fools!”) Convinced that it’s all just a natural disaster and “American soldiers” will show up soon and save him (one of the few bits of political satire in Drifting Classroom, although Umezu is very positive towards Americans in his other manga and even in a later sequence in Drifting Classroom involving NASA), he shows no mercy to anyone who stands in the way of his survival; perhaps he survives longer than the other adults because he himself is sort of a man-child, at home neither among the adults nor the kids, combining the worst of both worlds. In one lengthy sequence he goes temporarily insane and regresses to infancy, blubbering like a baby.

Sexual characteristics are also impenetrable barriers in Umezu’s work: adult men are drawn like walls of bricks, a tiny head on a huge suit on a huge wide chest, while his women are beautiful and slender in the ’60s fashion. Sho’s mother is one of the major good guys, repeatedly saving Sho’s life through their mother-son bond which seems to travel across time, but her obsession with her son goes beyond heroic and into scary: a mad mother-energy which drives her to do anything, to abandon her husband, cut her own wrist and attack another grieving mother, whatever it takes to save her son. Adult women in Umezu’s work are savages: pretty on the outside, but ferocious within, like the malfunctioning Marilyn Monroe android who appears briefly towards the end of the story (an indication of Umezu’s fascination with the feminine glamor icons of his youth, along with the factory robot named Monroe in My Name is Shingo, and the fact that Umezu cribbed the plot of Orochi: Blood from the 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). Behind that lipsticked face are slavering teeth, or perhaps the fairy-tale horror of the withered crone, the final fate of the “girl bully” who tries to take over the school, boasting of her age and maturity (“At our age, we’re more developed than you boys, physically and mentally!”)

In fact, all the world—the adult world, that is—is savage, as every kid knows: a world of carnivorous, cannibal lusts, like the penultimate volume’s vision of the sea bed crawling with tentacled, starfish-like mutant monsters, eating one another and being eaten. “They’re turning into beasts!” Sho cries out in the end, as his classmates erupt in their final orgy of Lord of the Flies-esque violence, but Umezu has already literalized this in the subplot in which some of the students mutate into four-legged monsters with a face growing out of their backs—the body-intelligence overcoming that of the vestigial brain. No biological explanation is really necessary; it’s a Japanese horror trope that one can “become an oni” when driven to extremities of madness or hatred, something Go Nagai depicted in Devilman and Violence Jack, and that Umezu would depict again in Fourteen (a semi-sequel to The Drifting Classroom) when, faced with the imminent end of the world, human beings’ outward appearance starts to reflect their inner evil and cruelty.

But although the world of The Drifting Classroom is cruel, it is not random. The many often gratuitously pointless deaths, the ruthless winnowing of the student population, are not rolls of the dice in an uncaring universe as much as a long test of judgment and pain—collective, like when the students must jump across an ever-widening ravine, or individual, like when Sho must endure an appendectomy without anesthetic. The characters in Drifting Classroom never ask “Why us, out of all the people on earth? Why me?” Perhaps they feel the same sense of guilt that Sho feels throughout the story, beginning with his guilt of being rude to his mother, to another moment where he feels guilty for killing a fish (a summary of humanity’s relationship to the environment), to the slowly building but very important subplot in which he is accused of having caused the school’s time-jump by setting off a stick of dynamite under the school. This is the ultimate revelation: the school’s time-jump was not random, but a sort of punishment for a misdeed, with the sentence collectively delivered upon them all. “I wanted the school to go away! That’s why I planted the dynamite!” cries the culprit. “I always yearned for some place where there was no one,” says Nishi, sharing the responsibility for their fate. Nor is the future world’s devastation the result of mere entropy and decay, or even something something out of the average person’s control, like a nuclear war (although that was the reason for the disaster in Jun Kazami’s 1986 novelization of the manga); the end of the world must be due to human guilt, due to pollution, the corruption of humanity (adulthood) made physical. Japan’s Environmental Agency was founded in 1971, and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster came out in the same year, so the time was ripe for The Drifting Classroom to show manga readers a blasted vision of humanity’s collective guilt for ruining the world. This devastation is all OUR FAULT, something Umezu would double-underline, again, in Fourteen, in which humanity’s evil is implicated not only in the destruction of the planet, but through an escalation of Umezu-logic, of the entire universe.

One of the impressive things about The Drifting Classroom is that it manages to balance this dream-logic with some semblance of believability. Unlike in Fourteen, a work which suffers from the aging Umezu’s degenerating artwork (and apparently his continued pride in that artwork, since most manga artists would have just used assistants), painfully slow pacing, and a willlful refusal to change his style by adding even a fraction of the realism or research Umezu’s aging readers expected in an “adult” manga, The Drifting Classroom mostly reads like a natural extrapolation of real environmental anxieties (at least as a 14-year-old might understand them) rather than a purely animistic morality-tale of nature’s revenge on human beings. In one of the early scenes, the students find a flower in the dirt only to discover it’s a plastic imitation and that only bits of plastic and polyethylene (mistranslated as “polyester” in the Viz edition, a mistake which I, the editor, embarrassingly missed) survive scattered across an earth that now looks like the surface of the moon. When the students manage to plant some vegetables, Sho has the sobering realization that they’ll have to fertilize the flowers themselves, presumably with Q-tips or something, since there are no longer any butterflies or bees. Other scenes stray farther from science, the monsters and time-travel of course, but also “educational” moments like one students’ declaration that there is a scientific basis for rain dances (“It always rains after a big fire! Soot and smoke make the clouds burst! And when we sing loud, our voices resonate against the air!”), an idea probably borrowed from a scene in Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix. The details don’t matter as long as we get the general idea, like in the emotional but fanciful scene at the end, when the students discover that the corpses of their dead classmates have become a fertilizing bed for plants somehow growing directly out of their bodies. (“That means that they didn’t…they didn’t die in vain! Someday, this desert will turn to green fields!”) Umezu’s world is not a realistic one, even nominally; it’s a world of sympathetic magic, where a flood of water can rip off a girl’s head, where a single stick of dynamite can trigger time-travel, and where another stick of dynamite can somehow trigger both a volcanic eruption and an underground spring of water. In such a world, it’s hard to know what to make of Sho’s speech in volume 3, in which he chastises the little kids for believing a rumor that one scapegoat was responsible for their exile and if they just sacrifice that person, they’ll go home (“We (kids) know that anything can happen. That’s why we’ve managed to survive. On the other hand, because we can believe anything, we might believe things that aren’t real, and fall prey to superstitions!”) Since in the end we discover that one person really was responsible for the whole mess, in retrospect, it’s hard to blame them, but what the kids don’t understand is that one person’s sins are just a microcosm of everyone’s: we’re all responsible, and we’ve all got to be willing to sacrifice ourselves. It’s also an example of how cleverly Umezu foreshadows future events, and how deviously he, as the god of the story, upholds, then mocks, then upholds, then mocks (?) his hero’s purehearted morality.

This repetition is one of Umezu’s principal tools as a mangaka. The imaginary monsters which appear in volume 3 teases and foreshadows the appearance of the real monsters in volume 7. The initial split of the school into two warring halves in volume 3 paves the way for the more violent split in volume 5 and the cataclysmic split in volume 9. Even the crucial plot element of Sho’s apparent psychic connection with his mother (irrational explanation #1) turns out to be just a buildup for the revelation that Nishi, the girl with psychic powers (and possibly Sho’s future partner and future wife-mother?), was present at all their communications and was actually the one making the connection (irrational explanation #2, which is slightly more rational, having the genre-honored excuse of psychic powers rather than simply the emotional explanation of a mother’s love conquering space and time). These repetitions come off not as mere dead ends or pointless power-escalations (“worked once, might work twice”) of the kind shonen manga is infamous for, but as deeper and deeper layers of the onion, or multiple layers of paint enriching Umezu’s themes. For a story which was drawn in 20-page segments in a commercial magazine (though most of the 20-page segments have been sewn up into longer chapters in the graphic novel edition, something no longer common in manga), and that would presumably have had to end abruptly if it became unpopular in the readers’ polls, this is extraordinarily deep plotting. Repetition of image is also an Umezu specialty: the slow, creepy, ever-increasing closeup of some shocking visual, often ending a chapter and beginning it on the same note, to grind the image into our minds (but rarely if ever just photocopying the panel, the way American newspaper story strips were eventually reduced to doing). Sometimes, particularly in his later work in the ’80s and ’90s, Umezu was criticized for the extreme slowness of his pacing; one does wonder, was volume one’s six-page sequence of three consecutive two-page spreads, showing the school principal staggering into the room with blood on his forehead, intentional, or did Umezu run out of time and have to stretch the scene out to six pages? But there are few slip-ups like this in The Drifting Classroom. His extreme visual realism and detail (even if the perspective is askew and the poses stiff) makes his dreamworld believable, the opposite of Tezuka, who used cute childish art to make his adult stories more palatable. The incredibly visual nature of Umezu’s manga makes many of his stories work even if you can’t read the text (or at least so I told myself, while I was struggling to read his manga with the tankobon in one hand and a kanji dictionary in the other); in 1997, before translations or scanlations of Umezu, Patrick Macias passed me untranslated copies of his manga like they were pornography or copies of the Necronomicon.

One of Umezu’s favorite artists is Salvador Dali, although Japanese fans have compared Umezu’s style to Mannerism (which according to Wikipedia, like Umezu’s work, “makes itself known by elongated proportions, highly stylized poses, and lack of clear perspective.”) Dali’s dream-logic and coexistence of grotesque opposites is very childlike, and very Umezu; for in contrast to many other artists who glorify childhood, like H.P. Lovecraft in his early works (“An artist must be always a child—that’s why I tell you never to grow up!—and live in dreams and wonder and moonlight”), Umezu does not tidy up the world of children for the sensibilities of adult Romantics. As the creator of the poop-obsessed Makoto-chan, he’s happy to mix terror with moments of childish low comedy: Gamo the genius trying to climb onstage and sliding his big egghead noggin across the floor; Hatsuta, who’s drawn like a bucktoothed gag manga character, trying to bite open a can of pineapple and shouting “Oww!” He even manages to work a baseball scene into the story, this being the days when baseball manga was king. He has a memory, too, for the casual cruelty and obscenity of childhood: the scene when the bully’s stooges strip down a kid and stamp on his naked crotch is more disturbing than the immediately preceding scenes of children being run over by cars, eaten by giant insects, throttled by homicidal adults, etc. (It might also be one reason why the Viz edition of the manga is labeled “explicit content: for mature readers.”) And yet The Drifting Classroom is much less transgressive than Umezu’s later works; it has nothing on Senrei/Baptism, when an aging woman transfers her brain into a young girl and tries to seduce an adult man, let alone some of the scenes in his later manga.

As an ironic result of being labeled “18+” in the English edition, and thus kept out of the hands of actual children, The Drifting Classroom occupies a weird space between the worlds of children and adults. In this way it’s like Umezu himself. I’d like to know what an actual 12-year-old would think of it if they read it, but as shown over and over in Umezu’s own works (Again, Baptism/Senrei, Fourteen) for an adult to try to re-enter that world and become a child again is at best comedy, and at worst, obscene horror. Like Sho’s mother, adults can watch, but not really interfere; the worlds of children and adults can never meet, except possibly (does he really think this?) in the person of a eternal child like Umezu. Even if Sho and Nishi prevail through their many trials and become sort of a couple, like the two children who raise an artificially intelligence factory robot in My Name is Shingo, Umezu can never show them “growing up.” One of the biggest concerns of the children in The Drifting Classroom, before they even worry about their own survival, is knowing whether their parents are dead. (“I just couldn’t believe that my mother had died, that she didn’t exist anymore. I couldn’t believe that could ever happen!”) The parents’ survival in the story reminds me of a possibly apocryphal quote attributed to Woody Allen: “Death is hereditary. If your parents died, chances are you’ll die too.” As long as the mothers of Sho and Yu and the others are alive, they are still children, and on some level, everything will be all right. It is this note of reassurance that “ties the present with the past,” that makes mothers Mothers and fathers Fathers, the makes The Drifting Classroom a story of guilt and exile and suffering, but not meaningless suffering.