MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 4 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 4 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mass suicide among first graders convinces Sho he must set up the school as a nation. First he defeats Princess in a very close election, then he sets about establishing his cabinet He knows that the insect monster from the wastelands is soon to attack. The working out of just what this monster is is the most implausible portion of Umezu's story so far, although the use of the term "implausible" here must be relative.

Monster defeated, many lives lost, almost a return to normalcy in the Nation of Yamoto Elementary School, but unfortunately the monster has laid eggs and they are hatching. These kids just can't get a break.


View all my reviews

MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 3 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 3 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story becomes complicated by a parallel time episode involving Sho's mother. I suspect this will become a more common motif. Back at the school, enterprising pre-adolescents have decided that blood sacrifice is the way to solve their problem and they have picked out an unpopular kid for a victim. But there is a new boss in town, the leader of a girl gang who delivers possibly the best line ever spoken by a sixth-grader, "Mind your own fucking business. Bitch, no one calls me a gang leader.  If you've got to call me something call me Princess!"

And a giant insect monster is roaming the wasteland.


View all my reviews

MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 2 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 2 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Things are getting worse for the children of Yamoto Elementary School. Not only has their school vanished into a sandy wasteland, but they must now contend with a power-mad cafeteria worker with visions of controlling the school by controlling the food supply. He is not above clubbing, stabbing, shooting, or incinerating students and faculty. While the students discover that the school has moved forward in time, one of their teachers begins a methodical murder campaign. A trip into the wastelands with the murderer ends with Sho and his friend discovering the buried city of Tokyo, and Sho makes a psychic connection with his mother still alive in the past.

Umezu's work is a distillation of everything that would frighten a child -- separation from parents, insane adults, no lunch --  without any of the sweetening that would go into the American version of such a story. In fact the kids are dropping like flies. Perhaps Umezu is trying to work his way down to a more reasonable quantity of characters for the eleven-book series.


View all my reviews

MONDAY MORNING

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: TROPIC MOON, by Georges Simenon

Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, murder, privilege, racism, and all the nastiness of French Colonial rule in Gabon circa 1930. The only thing that could make this book more satisfying would be if it was only 130 pages long. Wait -- it is 130 boozy, feverish pages long. A perfect afternoon read.


View all my reviews

   

BOOK REVIEW: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (GRAPHIC NOVEL), by H.P. Lovecraft, adapted by I.N.J. Culbard

At the Mountains of Madness: A Graphic Novel by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

H.P. Lovecraft wrote, or more accurately, overwrote At the Mountains of Madness in 1936. (That "overwrote" in the preceding sentence already has me on the bad side of avid Lovecraftians.) I read the original years ago when I did most of my Lovecraft reading, and it was never one of my favorites, crucial as it may be to the Cthulhu mythos. Since the Guillermo del Toro film has been canceled, this graphic novel seemed like a good way to revisit the material.

The drawings emphasize that this is a 1930's adventure story. Brave explorer/scientists, as a child one of my favorite hybrids in literature and movies, go to explore the further reaches of Antartica. There they discover the remains of "The Old Ones," those intergalactic drifters who settled on earth millions of years ago, inadvertently set in motion  terrestrial life, and then  had some sort of internal battles and disappeared into the depths of the sea. I don't remember all the details.

I.N.J Culbard's pages are in saturated colors, varying from arctic blue, to the dark browns of the explorers' camps, to the unearthly jade green that dominates the city they discover. That city, as described by Lovecraft and pictured here, never seems particularly well designed for the squid-like creatures who lived there. Why did squids want skyscrapers? One Lovecraftian trademark, not too well served here, is to announce the manifestation of an "indescribable horror" and proceed to describe it for one or two pages. Lovecraft's descriptions attain pulpy grandeur, but the glimpses of a giant amoeba with a bunch of eyes we get here is a letdown.

Self Made Hero, the publisher of this version, has a series of Lovecraft anthologies planned. One volume is out, and with the diversity of artists invovled it promises to give more outrageous visions of Lovecraft's cosmic terrors.


View all my reviews       

BOOK REVIEW: CITY COME A WALK' by John Shirley

City Come A-Walkin' by John Shirley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the introduction to the 1996 edition of Shirley's original 1980 novel, William Gibson refers to Shirley as the Patient Zero of Cyperpunk. I'm in no position to contest that assertion, and it goes a ways towards explaining why the novel, while never seeming dated, seems so familiar. Shirley's imagined San Francisco of 2008 has the post-punk feel, vigilante dangers, and cynical corporate plots that are now the mainstay of sf in books, movies, and television. Shirley does seem to have gotten there first, and at the age of eighteen while fronting for punk bands in Oregon.


Reading about Shirley threatens to become more fascinating that reading him, but I am saying that on the basis of this one, early book. Gibson refers to him as one of the people who have survived themselves. Punk rocker, and still a lyricist for Blue Oyster Cult, periodic resident of Oregon, San Francisco, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and currently the San Fernando Valley. He has written sf and horror,a sympathetic biography of Gurdjieff, the screenplay for the original Crow film, and has a bibliography that runs to just over 30 novels and seven collections of short stories. On Vimeo you can watch his short, thoughtful film called The Spiritual Quest that interviews philosophers, Wiccans, Gnostics, and Eastern Orthodox Priests residing in the San Francisco area/


And what of City Come A Walkin'? Stu, owner of Club Anesthesia, sees a customer one night that stands out from the voguers and punks. He is a man in a trenchcoat, homburg, and reflective sunglasses that disturbingly disappear under his skin. Stu asks his star performer, Catz Wailen, to psyche him, something she is apparently able to do, and she discovers that he is not a man but the city of San Francisco itself. He has a job for Stu.


The following sf adventure story must have been, as they say, mind-blowing at the time, but now simply provides a good read. I want to read more.



View all my reviews