Powerful Panels: Halloween Edition Part II - What You Can't See Will Scare You: The Unseen Terrors of Naoki Urasawa

by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us

-Georges Bataille

While Jesse has taken a look at some of the more terrifying moments in the venerable horror comics genre, some of the scariest comics I've ever read aren't horror comics at all, but are sci-fi manga. Books like Otomo's Akira--seriously maybe the most terrifying thing I've ever read--and Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys and Pluto are frightening not only because they ask important questions about the possible ramifications of technology, but by their creators' ability to create an atmosphere of dread centered on some unseen and terrible power.

This technique of enhancing fear by occultation certainly isn't new and it is flawed insofar as eventually you've gotta show just what it is that is so scary. Urasawa manages to avoid this flaw and thereby redefine what is scary in comics in a couple of ways. First, he doesn't rely on suspense to move his stories forward and instead reveals the nature of the threat early on--like, you know what it is but you don't know what it's going to do. Thus Urasawa's is a terror of suggestion and dread, a psychological fear which is far more awful and satisfying than mere "heart-pounding" suspense. Urasawa also stays ahead of the need to simply reveal his monsters by constantly changing the stakes in his stories, demonstrating repeatedly that everything that readers might have thought was sacred up to a certain point no longer matters at all.

20th Century Boys:

Each of the three panels shown here depicts the apocalyptic robot weapon created by the Friends cult to terrorize Tokyo in December 2000. Though each panel illustrates the same beast, each is terrifying in different ways in large measure due to their context.


20th Century Boys Volume 2

The first couple of volumes of the series are concerned with laying down the basics of the story and readers are just becoming accustomed to the rhythm of the series's jumps in time. The panel from volume 2 comes as the derelict-prophet Kamisama recounts one of his prophetic dreams. Thus readers are getting one of their first real tactile tastes of the devastation that is in store for Kenji and his friends and it is massive and foreboding.


20th Century Boys Volume 4

A lot has happened by the time we get to the next panel taken from the final pages of volume 4. Kenji's convenience store has burnt to the ground; he has been branded a terrorist by the Friends-infiltrated government; and he and his friends are now living underground preparing to fight an enemy they know next to nothing about. As Kenji and his childhood friend Otcho are led by the Friend himself into the warehouse where the robot is being stored, the scale of the thing is apparent. Kenji's observation that the thing's glowing eyes seemed to be watching them pretty much nails the terror in this panel.


20th Century Boys Volume 5

Volume 5 of 20th Century Boys is a prime example of Urasawa's tendency to change the stakes in the middle the game. This final panel comes early in the volume, right after the group's abortive attempt to kidnap the Friend's right-hand man, now an important government minister. The date is December 31, 2000, zero hour for the Friends' millenarian plans. But when you see that robot moving through the streets of Tokyo, just at the moment Kenji and his group seem at their weakest, you cannot help but think, this isn't the way this is supposed to happen. The good guys are supposed to stop the nefarious plans of the villains and go on to live happy lives, right? In short measure it becomes clear that this isn't right at all and this is precisely why Urasawa is so good at terrifying readers again and again.


Pluto:

Each of the panels or pages I've scanned from Pluto also depict the same thing, even though they sorta don't. At a basic level, each panel shows Pluto, a robot bent on destroying each of the world's most advanced robots. The reason for my equivocation, however, is that as Pluto develops, it becomes clear that the identity of the eponymous character is a bit more complex than it first appears.


Pluto Volume 1

This page, taken from the early pages of the series's first volume, show the robot detective Gesicht reviewing the memory chip of a security robot that was destroyed. As the page indicates, the robot's attention was distracted for a split second by what appears to be a human, jumping from one building to another so quickly that the robot only registers it as a blur. That suggestive blur, so minuscule and yet powerful enough to distract a robot-cop sufficiently to allow a drug addled hoodlum to destroy him is among the series first terrifying moments.


Pluto Volume 2

This next page also depicts Pluto, in this case as he prepares to destroy the Turkish warrior robot Brando. Pluto's obscured appearances in these early volumes is terrifying not only because we never get a complete picture of the thing, but also because of his ability to summarily destroy what are supposed to be the world's most powerful weapons. Finally, take another look at the close-up of Pluto's eyes; there is a humanity to them that enhances the terror, an effect that will be magnified in later illustrations.


Pluto Volume 3

This panel from volume 3 is a bit of an oddball, since it only becomes clear later in the series that the giant in the desert is probably Pluto. At this point in the story, however, all we know is that this terrifying silhouette was seen by a small Persian boy just after his village had been completely destroyed in the war. The terror of this image comes from a compounding of the creepiness of the obscured image itself, the massiveness of the figure and the disabling terror that the image has wrought into the little boy.


Pluto Volume 6

The final page, coming near the end of volume 6, shows the confrontation between Pluto--or what we've known as Pluto for most of the series--and Gesicht. What is terrible about the images on this page is not just those horrible gnashing teeth at the top of the page, though they are frightening enough, but even more those eyes, that look of terror, anguish and recognition that is so very human. As I mentioned above, you get a suggestion of this in the panel from volume 2, but in this case it is more extreme. At this point in the story, we have a better idea of what Pluto is, his origins and identity and thus the suffering in those eyes is more devastating. With this volume, as with volume 5 of 20th Century Boys, Urasawa completely changes the stakes and it is unclear what direction the series will take in volume 7.

Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys Volume 3

There is a moment in volume 3 of Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys in which Kenji, the book’s unlikely hero, goes to confront the mysterious leader of the dangerous “Friends” cult at a concert attended by thousands of the charismatic figure’s followers. The scene is masterfully played and epitomizes the surprising concision of Urasawa’s recent work.

In the 30-odd pages taken up by this episode, the series quickly emerges from the slow burn of the previous two volumes and into the action that will define the rest of the book. Kenji enters the concert confident that once he exposes the cult leader’s crimes, his followers will recognize that they’ve been duped and put an immediate halt to his murderous plans. Of course this confidence is based on the flawed assumption that aside from various cosmetic differences, all people are basically the same and hold essentially the same values. When he finally emerges from the venue after a confrontation with the masked “friend,” Kenji has been stripped of this and several other illusions and given a new awareness of the awesome challenge that he faces.

Naoki Urasawa is kind of a big deal right now. This is unsurprising considering the simultaneous issuing of Pluto, his 21st century update of Tezuka's Astro Boy tale "The Greatest Robot on Earth," and 20th Century Boys, which was originally published in Japan around the turn of the century but withheld in this country at Urasawa’s request until the completion of his mid-nineties series Monster. It helps also that for these new series, Viz has eschewed the wildly inappropriate shock-horror design scheme of Monster for deluxe, signature editions that are more fitting to the books and their ostensible readership.

For a host of reasons, so obvious they hardly seem worth adumbrating here, Pluto is grabbing the lion's share of the attention in this country. Ultimately this is fine; Pluto is a great book--unquestionably one of the two or three great series being published right now. Be that as it may, 20th Century Boys is shaping up to be an incredibly fine, self-assured book and the simultaneous publication of these two series on the heels of Monster gives readers an opportunity to chart the development of one Japan’s true comics masters at the apex of his powers.

Volume 3 feels transitional. The first two volumes of the series were largely concerned with laying out the basic story and character details and it is only as this third volume comes to a close that the plot has begun its first upward development. Urasawa, it seems, has eschewed the typical multi-volume series format in which each volume contains a more or less complete narrative that fits into the larger whole in favor of one story that is structured across the whole of the series. This is an incredibly ambitious strategy that risks putting off readers who have come to expect a certain quota of narrative action in a series from the first volume.

The payoff, of course, is that in the hands of a master capable of pulling it off, a narrative of this scope provides a lot of space in which to tease out all the little details that make reading complex stories rewarding. It’s the same principal that makes Fassbinder’s adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz or even a season of The Wire so much more satisfying than the typical television mini-series or crime show. The question of course is whether Urasawa can pull it off. Monster is structured more traditionally, with each volume drawing a complete narrative arc. 20th Century Boys and Pluto, on the other hand, both seem to be developing more unitary structures.

One way in which Urasawa deals with the threat of reader alienation is by introducing new characters in a volume’s final pages. He did this most famously in the first two volumes of Pluto, introducing Atom and Uran, respectively, in those volumes closing pages. Volume 3 of 20th Century Boys ends with the introduction of the mysterious Shogun.

Aside from being one of those great, generally benevolent but sorta dark characters that populate Urasawa’s books, Shogun epitomizes the incredibly effective subtlety of Urasawa’s art. Like a lot of successful manga artists, Urasawa has developed a drawing style that conveys a lot of energy and subtle detail within its surface simplicity. Consider the episode in volume 1 of Pluto in which Geshicht is charged with informing the robot wife of a police robot of her husband’s destruction. By some artful combination of panel layout and general manga voodoo, Urasawa is able to chart the descent into sadness and despair on an unchanging, obviously robotic face.


Urasawa’s greatest strength, however, is the human face. With a scant few scratchy lines, Urasawa presents characters that are usually either plainly sympathetic or threatening. Occasionally, however, he throws readers a curve, giving us a character whose face is more inscrutable, belying conflicting elements. Grimmer, from Monster, is one such character—the smiling openness of his face betrays hints of the darkness that lies in his past. Shogun is another such example—the delicacy of his features and his kindness toward the Bangkok prostitutes that he counts as his friends are complicated by the aura of brooding violence that surrounds him.


In his recent memoir Too Fat to Fish, Artie Lange asserts that the only unforgivable crimes are those committed against children because childhood is the only opportunity we have for unsullied happiness in our lives. Lange's point here shines light on what might be the major concern of Urasawa’s comics, which is that the events of childhood can have unexpected and devastating consequences. Children play a major role in Urasawa’s books and he uses them to effectively highlight the tragedy of modern life and the threats that we face.

Urasawa complicates this theme in a number of interesting ways in 20th Century Boys. As we learn in volume 3, the leader of the Friends cult is the father of Kenji’s niece Kanna. Thus the tension between this opposed pair becomes personified in this toddling child. Even more interesting is the fact that the struggle at the center of the book comes down to how different people can take the same childhood events, in this case the innocent fantasy play of children, and take them in wildly different directions. Kenji’s childhood imaginings of a band of boys who will save the world from an evil genius’s nefarious plans become the basis for the friendless Sadakiyo’s plot for global destruction.

Indeed, Kenji’s own struggle centers on his failure to live up to the dreams of his childhood, symbolized by the ¥26,000 guitar that is consumed in the King Mart that, for its part, consumed his dreams of rock stardom. The persistence of questions by his former classmates and teachers about his music career confirm this as a central focus of the book.

As Kenji sits dumbfounded at the Friends concert, the lead singer of the performing rock band chanting, “I Rock You!,” one cannot help but think of the opening lyrics to the T Rex song from which the book takes its title: “Friends say it's fine, friends say it's good, everybody says it’s just like rock & roll.” Kenji’s objections to the contrary, there is a disturbing similarity between charismatic religious figures and rock stars. As Kenji allows life to get in the way of his realizing his dreams, the Friend rises to his own perverted version of stardom and threatens the world in the process. It’s hard to say what’s more difficult, saving the world or living up to one’s dreams, but Urusawa’s figured out a way to equate one with the other and it promises to be a satisfying read.