The Drifting Classroom
Aug. 24th, 2006 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeBuzz works.
Buzz works on me, I should say. The only reason I picked up Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom was that people kept talking about it. Sometimes, all they were saying was "VIZ has a new title out, The Drifting Classroom," but my freakish manga habit is a well-established part of my character, so I probably don't need to explain why that by itself attracted my attention. The persistent curiosity displayed about The Drifting Classroom was what drove me to buy it, shrinkwrap and parental advisory and all, even though I am so nihilism-ed out after Eden! It's an Endless World vol. 3 that I swore I wouldn't go within a mile of anything science fiction horrific.
I am not sorry for buying it, because it's worth looking at for the historical perspective alone. I was initially thrown by the art, which I took to be a retro throwback to a few decades ago, and I had no idea how I was supposed to read that, having only sampled a few works from that era. Then I made it to the back, which contained a six-page retrospective of Umezu's career, with little thumbnails of older works, presented in chronological order--and may I pause to say that this is one of the coolest extras I've ever gotten in a ten-dollar manga, and I might I hope that VIZ someday offers the same for Umezu's fellow VIZ Signature line author Naoki Urusawa?--and it finally dawned on me that this was not a retro throwback, but a genuine work from 1974, which is why it looked thirty years old.
Context helps, and I instantly stopped feeling weird about the art style, and started feeling excited about having a chance to paw through a classic, thirty-year old horror comic, made by a legendary manga-ka at the top of his game. Lots of superficial details stand out: crosshatching like whoa, much smaller eyes with a lot less visible iris, boxy panels as far as the eye can see, punctuated by a surprising number of two-page spreads, and dear god, the speed lines. (It helps so much to know that the speed lines are not there to invoke a nostalgic sense of cartoonishness, but are in fact the technique of an artist reading Osamu Tezuka.)
I feel even lamer trying to comment on the writing than the art, since I know jack about horror, but I will say that while the first volume of this did not raise my heart rate--which really good horror writing has been known to do for me--it was memorably unpleasant in such a way that I'd be surprised if it doesn't feature in my dreams. In both art and writing, I have a sense that this could have been more gracefully, more keenly handled--but even with pioneer artists, one sometimes gets that jaded sense, and it's not entirely fair to compare early works to the works that evolve from them. Rare is the creation that so totally transcends its time and form that it will never feel old or crude after decades, and besides, that transcendence is a very personal sort of sensation: some people can't stand Shakespeare. Despite my occasional frustration with the lack of oomph--my arbitrary sense that this or that panel or revelation just didn't have enough force, wasn't scary or upsetting enough--the whole thing crawls along with a grim, breathless momentum. For lack of a comfortable place to put it down, I read the whole thing in one sitting, and that's something I definitely appreciate in horror.
In the review blurb on the back of the book, The Comics Journal compares The Drifting Classroom to Lord of the Flieswhich freaked me the fuck out when they made me read it back in high school. One significant difference between The Drifting Classroom and Lord of the Flies--I mean, aside from the fact that one's a book and one's a comic--is that The Drifting Classroom has adults--schoolteachers--in it, and I do believe they are doomed, those poor, poor bastards, they'll all be dead or insane within three volumes, I'm sure. The Drifting Classroom certainly has the potential to freak me the fuck out offer psychological and sociological insight into the human condition by speculating on the fate of a quintessentially social institution and its inhabitants, bereft of society, and I might be interested enough to find out.
All in all, it's an interesting, worthy addition to VIZ's line.
Buzz works on me, I should say. The only reason I picked up Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom was that people kept talking about it. Sometimes, all they were saying was "VIZ has a new title out, The Drifting Classroom," but my freakish manga habit is a well-established part of my character, so I probably don't need to explain why that by itself attracted my attention. The persistent curiosity displayed about The Drifting Classroom was what drove me to buy it, shrinkwrap and parental advisory and all, even though I am so nihilism-ed out after Eden! It's an Endless World vol. 3 that I swore I wouldn't go within a mile of anything science fiction horrific.
I am not sorry for buying it, because it's worth looking at for the historical perspective alone. I was initially thrown by the art, which I took to be a retro throwback to a few decades ago, and I had no idea how I was supposed to read that, having only sampled a few works from that era. Then I made it to the back, which contained a six-page retrospective of Umezu's career, with little thumbnails of older works, presented in chronological order--and may I pause to say that this is one of the coolest extras I've ever gotten in a ten-dollar manga, and I might I hope that VIZ someday offers the same for Umezu's fellow VIZ Signature line author Naoki Urusawa?--and it finally dawned on me that this was not a retro throwback, but a genuine work from 1974, which is why it looked thirty years old.
Context helps, and I instantly stopped feeling weird about the art style, and started feeling excited about having a chance to paw through a classic, thirty-year old horror comic, made by a legendary manga-ka at the top of his game. Lots of superficial details stand out: crosshatching like whoa, much smaller eyes with a lot less visible iris, boxy panels as far as the eye can see, punctuated by a surprising number of two-page spreads, and dear god, the speed lines. (It helps so much to know that the speed lines are not there to invoke a nostalgic sense of cartoonishness, but are in fact the technique of an artist reading Osamu Tezuka.)
I feel even lamer trying to comment on the writing than the art, since I know jack about horror, but I will say that while the first volume of this did not raise my heart rate--which really good horror writing has been known to do for me--it was memorably unpleasant in such a way that I'd be surprised if it doesn't feature in my dreams. In both art and writing, I have a sense that this could have been more gracefully, more keenly handled--but even with pioneer artists, one sometimes gets that jaded sense, and it's not entirely fair to compare early works to the works that evolve from them. Rare is the creation that so totally transcends its time and form that it will never feel old or crude after decades, and besides, that transcendence is a very personal sort of sensation: some people can't stand Shakespeare. Despite my occasional frustration with the lack of oomph--my arbitrary sense that this or that panel or revelation just didn't have enough force, wasn't scary or upsetting enough--the whole thing crawls along with a grim, breathless momentum. For lack of a comfortable place to put it down, I read the whole thing in one sitting, and that's something I definitely appreciate in horror.
In the review blurb on the back of the book, The Comics Journal compares The Drifting Classroom to Lord of the Flies
All in all, it's an interesting, worthy addition to VIZ's line.