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krpalmerA post on my reading list passing along the attention of an online critic for who manga is just one part of a speculative whole and seeking to pick up that title too turned my own attention towards a series that had been running for a while, the distinctively titled Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction by Inio Asano. While my manga-reading habits often seem to amount to “either jumping on board with new series or just letting them pass me by,” this title might have looked just interesting enough with the attention from unusual directions to start me speculating about trying to catch up. At the same time, I’m aware of recent comments about translated manga being bought up quickly to become as elusive as “comic books older than a month” once seemed to be to me. When I did some searching on the online store Right Stuf, though, all nine volumes in print by that point were in stock. As I make large orders from that store all for the sake of “free shipping” (and pile up anime faster than I can watch it), I was willing to take a big chance on the series.
It was only a bit later, though, around the time I received the order, that I really reflected on having read two “complete in one volume” titles by Asano. I’d liked Solanin, a sort of “hanging around living an ordinary life” story that had worked for me where others of that kind don’t quite as well (which can bring to mind some unfortunate older thoughts of plugging through certain comics from this side of the Pacific). However, A Girl on the Shore, about two perhaps-not-quite-friends definitely getting benefits during a protracted cheap summer fling, had been a bit much for me and I’d got rid of my copy at a used book store, a little embarrassed as the clerk riffled the pages to check on their condition. There’s also the uncomfortable thought “had the character designs been in a more conventional ‘manga style’...” I suppose that pushed me towards starting to read the manga then and there instead of setting the stack of volumes aside until I knew I had the complete series, something I can fall into when I don’t dive into fresh first volumes as soon as I have them.
As the first volume got under way with an elaborate alien mothership hanging over an elaborate Tokyo cityscape, one of the ordinary high school students below having a definite thing for one of her teachers and getting to hang out at his place raised some uneasy thoughts in me, something accentuated when I happened to pick up Viz had put “mature readers” stamps on the cover. By the end of the volume I supposed that warning had been a preemptive choice, though, and I did start settling into the story. The distinctive, “cartoony” character designs could be seen as similar to my recollections of Asano’s artwork in the previous titles I’d read yet developed in an oddly appealing way, and the “trying to get by as smaller flying saucers are shot out of the sky to crash into neighbourhoods” story did manage to keep me reading and at a fair clip. The colour plates that lead off each volume present a “manga within the manga,” with certain anticipations of what’s to come in the larger story, called Isobeyan (“So Hilarious You’ll Bust A Gut!”) that has me thinking of my acquired-by-hearsay impressions of the more wholesome Doreamon and also pondering “the really popular all-ages manga and anime that just doesn’t make it over here.”
A few volumes in, I was becoming aware an apocalyptic conclusion was being mapped out well over the heads of the characters as those small and unthreatening aliens who do manage to make it to the ground are hunted down and smashed by soldiers and deputized vigilantes alike, protest groups shout about official policy but avoid real alien contact and can’t spread empathy, and authority is distinctly incapable. It was familiar enough, and “all art must encourage positive change through positive examples” could get tedious and itself ominous, but it wasn’t necessarily pleasant. Before I quite got to the bottom of my pile, though, an extended flashback started developing a different science fiction concept. Once I’d got used to “having to deal with something not set up in the initial suspension-of-disbelief moments,” I did get more interested. It might only be meant as a dark illustration that “we’re all flawed rather than ‘the wrong people’ getting into authority or authority itself spoiling people,” but I’m not quite as certain about what ominous anticipations I should hold. Of course, I don’t know how many volumes are left before I have to face how these thoughts, built up over a relatively short period, might all be wrong.
It was only a bit later, though, around the time I received the order, that I really reflected on having read two “complete in one volume” titles by Asano. I’d liked Solanin, a sort of “hanging around living an ordinary life” story that had worked for me where others of that kind don’t quite as well (which can bring to mind some unfortunate older thoughts of plugging through certain comics from this side of the Pacific). However, A Girl on the Shore, about two perhaps-not-quite-friends definitely getting benefits during a protracted cheap summer fling, had been a bit much for me and I’d got rid of my copy at a used book store, a little embarrassed as the clerk riffled the pages to check on their condition. There’s also the uncomfortable thought “had the character designs been in a more conventional ‘manga style’...” I suppose that pushed me towards starting to read the manga then and there instead of setting the stack of volumes aside until I knew I had the complete series, something I can fall into when I don’t dive into fresh first volumes as soon as I have them.
As the first volume got under way with an elaborate alien mothership hanging over an elaborate Tokyo cityscape, one of the ordinary high school students below having a definite thing for one of her teachers and getting to hang out at his place raised some uneasy thoughts in me, something accentuated when I happened to pick up Viz had put “mature readers” stamps on the cover. By the end of the volume I supposed that warning had been a preemptive choice, though, and I did start settling into the story. The distinctive, “cartoony” character designs could be seen as similar to my recollections of Asano’s artwork in the previous titles I’d read yet developed in an oddly appealing way, and the “trying to get by as smaller flying saucers are shot out of the sky to crash into neighbourhoods” story did manage to keep me reading and at a fair clip. The colour plates that lead off each volume present a “manga within the manga,” with certain anticipations of what’s to come in the larger story, called Isobeyan (“So Hilarious You’ll Bust A Gut!”) that has me thinking of my acquired-by-hearsay impressions of the more wholesome Doreamon and also pondering “the really popular all-ages manga and anime that just doesn’t make it over here.”
A few volumes in, I was becoming aware an apocalyptic conclusion was being mapped out well over the heads of the characters as those small and unthreatening aliens who do manage to make it to the ground are hunted down and smashed by soldiers and deputized vigilantes alike, protest groups shout about official policy but avoid real alien contact and can’t spread empathy, and authority is distinctly incapable. It was familiar enough, and “all art must encourage positive change through positive examples” could get tedious and itself ominous, but it wasn’t necessarily pleasant. Before I quite got to the bottom of my pile, though, an extended flashback started developing a different science fiction concept. Once I’d got used to “having to deal with something not set up in the initial suspension-of-disbelief moments,” I did get more interested. It might only be meant as a dark illustration that “we’re all flawed rather than ‘the wrong people’ getting into authority or authority itself spoiling people,” but I’m not quite as certain about what ominous anticipations I should hold. Of course, I don’t know how many volumes are left before I have to face how these thoughts, built up over a relatively short period, might all be wrong.