MANGA MANIA: 7 BILLION NEEDLES Vol 1, by Tadano

7 Billion Needles, Volume 1 by Nobuaki Tadano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tadano's manga announces that it is a homage to Hal Clement's Needle, a novel published in the early 1950's. The change is tone is obvious from the titles. Note Clement's title is "Needle," singular. I guess for today's manga market you need to up the ante by 6,999,999,999 extra needles.

Clement's novel was possibly the first to concern an alien living in a symbiotic relationship with an earthling. He's a "good alien" chasing a "bad alien," a motif that has been worked so often in the past sixty years that Tadano's nod to Clement, given how radically transformed the material is, is polite but hardly necessary. Clement's novel is good but a bit Hardy-Boyish. The gelatinous alien enters the boy's body while he sleeps on the beach, and the narrative is an SF detective story where boys out on their bicycles are always careful to be home in time for dinner. In the opening scene of the manga, Hikaru, a disaffected teenage girl who seldom takes off her headphones, is blown to pieces by the alien's crash landing. He knits her back together and explains that he and she must search out and destroy Maelstrom, the bad alien, before it kills all life on earth. Hikaru's response is, "Leave me alone."
She is more willing to pitch in after a massacre in the gym, during which Maelstrom briefly manifests itself as a dinosaur-like monster. "How about this!" he screams. "Humans tend to fear this kind of form."

Tadano's action sequences are as incoherent as any in a Michael Bey film. There's no build-up of tension, just lots of explosions and bloodshed. His best artwork are the cityscapes, schoolyards, and suburban neighborhoods that set up each scene.

Good triumphs, but there are four more books in the series so I assume Maelstrom will be back.


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BOOK REVIEW: SHOW UP, LOOK GOOD,, by Mark Wisniewski

Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This may be the book that gets me into and out of the Rumpus Book Club in a single month. For the Rumpus club, you pay good money for an advance copy of the book of their choice, and then have the chance to discuss it on forums and eventually have a live web chat with the author,

I was left so cold by Show Up, Look Good that I am not inclined to participate in either of those activities. The advance copy come slathered with praise from notable readers who possibly read a different book than I did. I did not find it the "laugh-out-loud romp" described by Ben Fountain. Wisniewski's was not Jonathan Lethem's "riotously original voice." T. R. Hummer is right that the book is "part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, and part Elmore Leonard," but those parts never come together in a dynamic way.

The opening paragraph promises all the readerly pleasures Wisniewski's book delivers at best half-heartedly.

I know of  a secret murder, and  I have loved a speechless man, and sometimes I'd like to tell someone about how death and love have changed my life, but any of three thoughts give me pause. For one, if I talk about the murder, I myself could be killed. I can't know how true this is, but the speechless man said it was, and even though he disappointed me, I trusted him. Two, if someone's murdered, she's murdered, and talking about her will never change that. Then there's the reality that very few people care to face: unless you have majestic beauty and power, your secrets rarely matter to anyone but yourself.

That's the best part of the book.

Michelle is a thirty-something who breaks up with her boyfriend of eleven years when she catches him masturbating with a plastic vagina. She leaves Kankakee, Illinois for New York City, and promptly begins to live the life and have the kinds of -- somehow adventures doesn't seem the right word -- that Midwestern transplants should have in their twenty's. There's the offbeat, bizarre yet friendly living arrangement that must be traded in for an apartment shared with posers possessing their "MFA's from NYU." She nonchalantly earns money by scalping tickets to David Lettermen. She moves in with a an older married couple in Astoria who have so much love in their marriage that need to share it with others. (She really should have seen that one coming.) She works for a horrible boss in a Queen's supermarket. Back in Manhattan she moves into a tiny apartment where her only job is to free it up for lunchtime and afterwork assignations between businessmen and their pick-ups. And there is that murder.

When towards then end of the book, Michelle proves be an unreliable narrator, the revelation does not cast the preceding events in a more interesting light, they simply make her more irritating,



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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 7 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom Vol. 7 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far these kids have endured the following: The transportation of their elementary school to some future wasteland. A maniacal cafeteria worker. Homicidal teachers. Mass suicide among first graders. A giant bug that laid eggs that created little bugs. Pre-adolescent power struggles -- and those can get nasty. Bubonic plague.


Did I leave anything out? I must have.


In this installment, the rain that allowed their garden to grow brought with it a proliferation of mushrooms. Are they edible? Those who eat them experience strange feelings of power followed by dementia. The kids decide they should pray for help, and in one of the most non-American moments so far, one child asks, "Who should we pray to?"  They settle on a bust our hero, Sho, made of his mother in art class. Meanwhile the mushroom eaters make a one-eyed idol of mud who proves to be the more receptive deity and manifests itself as a tentacled monster.


Umezu's drawings are the most storyboard-like of any of the manga artists I've read. His action sequences, consisting almost entirely of dark pages with kids grappling, shattering wood, raised weapons, and close-ups of kids shouting "aaaargh" and "gyaaah" are genuinely exciting in their own ridiculous way. When Yoshikawa, formerly one of the good kids, eats mushrooms and goes down on all fours to scurry out of the schoolyard to her new god, it is genuinely creepy. Takamatsu, the cafeteria man, who has gone from a threat to a retarded man child, and now back to an incredible danger, looks like a deranged, overweight Desi Arnaz -- the very essence of horror.


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BOOK REVIEW: RED LIGHTS by Georges Simenon

Red Lights by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third of Simenon's roman durs that I have read, and even though it is my least favorite so far I admire the lean prose and psychological complexity. But at times the story read like an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Steve and Nancy Hogan, Long Islanders who work in Manhattan, head out on Labor Day Weekend to pick up their kids at Camp Walla Walla in Maine. Even by the lax standards of the 1950's, when the novel takes place, Steve has a "drinking problem."  He sneaks extra drinks when his wife isn't looking, though she is hardly unaware of his habits, and once on the road he stops for quick shots at roadhouses along the way. He insists he drives better when he has had a few. At his first stop, he finds that Nancy has not waited for him in the car. She has left behind a note that she is taking the bus the rest of the way. Steve's drunkeness sidetracks his attempt to catch up with the bus. He stops at another bar to further "clear his head." He is drunkenly voluble with a silent man seated next to him at the bar. Although it stretches credulity is comes as no surprise that this man, whom Steve finds waiting in his car, is the armed-and-dangerous escapee from Sing Sing discussed on the televisions in the bar. Steve gives him a ride, blathering all the time about true manhood and the qualities he imagines he shares with the criminal.

The novel has attitudes towards alcoholism and sexual assault that will not sit well with contemporary readers, which is perhaps why the ambiguities at the end of the novel seem more unsatisfying that intriguing. But Simenon's style remains impeccable, and Steve's delusional drunken consciousness is presented in excruciating detail.


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MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 3 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

Parasyte, Volume 3 by Hitoshi Iwaaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The presence of flesh eating parasites inhabiting a certain proportion of the population is becoming more difficult for the authorities to cover up. Shin is fortunate that Migi, the parasite possessing his right hand, is an easy-going sort. The others, like the one that ate Shin's mother or the one posing as a new kid at school, are a different matter entirely,

In Volume 3 of Iwaaki's manga, secrecy begins to break down. Shin discovers the mild superpowers he is developing with Migi's presence in his body. Shimada, the new parasite student, goes on a killing spree at the school. And Shin continues to have girlfriend trouble.

Iwaaki's visual style comes to life only when he depicts the aliens' fantastic transformations. His human characters tend to open their mouths into enormous gashes when screaming, which they do a lot, and the least to the most extreme situations make them break out in globules of sweat.

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MONDAY MORNING