Brian Nicholson | August 6, 2024
The most memorable character of Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo is not the one for whom the 1967 manga serial is named. Dororo is the name of the sidekick, a child who insists he is the greatest thief alive, and accompanies Hyakkimaru as he makes his way across the countryside killing demons. Hyakkimaru is the figure with the premise that gets you on board: Born a featureless slug of a human who is floated down the river as an infant, having had his body parts sold to demons by his father the night before he was born. A doctor outfits him with prosthetic parts, making him a proto-cyborg of the Sengoku period, doing battle with monsters as a way to win back his organs and so become whole, like a variation on the Pinocchio story designed for the video game mechanics of leveling up through combat. If it’s not the best Tezuka comic, it is the one with the most straightforward appeal for lovers of cartoon violence.
In 2018, a monthly magazine called Tezucomi debuted in Japan, where contemporary creators paid homage to Tezuka by remaking his work. Atsushi Kaneko launched Search And Destroy within its pages, basing it on Dororo. The familiarity of American audiences with the original Tezuka work (published by Vertical in three volumes and later collected into an omnibus) surely makes Search And Destroy a more commercial prospect than other work of Kaneko’s, who hasn’t seen print in English since an aborted attempt at releasing his first series, Bambi And Her Pink Gun.
Kaneko has updated the setting, presenting a version of Dororo that removes the yokai elements that originated from Tezuka responding to the popularity of Shigeru Mizuki’s Kitaro. While Hyakkimaru was arguably a cyborg in a time period before cybernetics existed, in Search And Destroy’s science-fictional quasi-post-Soviet setting, the monsters being confronted are cyborgs as well. The game of telephone is now one more step removed. We still receive the pleasures of action storytelling, with violence intensified and sequences where the only thing to translate is sound effects this side of Yuichi Yokoyama. Yet the greater satisfaction found in Volume One comes from seeing how the Dororo mythos is plugged into this more materialist milieu, what elements are retained and what are remixed.
I entered into the book wondering if there would be an analog to the character of Dororo in it at all. Is there room in the world of this gritty reboot for the cute kid? It turns out that’s him on the cover with the ushanka hat and buckteeth. The variations in style between past and present have his proportions seeming shorter and squatter in relation to the rest of the characters than in his original incarnation. My use of pronouns should be considered provisional – Tezuka’s manga eventually revealed Dororo to be a girl and Kaneko could eventually play the same move here. However, one of the changes made between versions has Hyaku (the shortened name given to the tough cool killer looking to regain their organs) being female here.
While this series is drawn digitally, Atsushi Kaneko’s original tool was the brush pen, and Hyaku’s character design, with its fur coat and long hair swept to the side, seems to be made of the wisps of ink the brush is adept at, and that a style could be built around. With the thick eye makeup factored in, Hyaku’s look approximates the sort of homeless/glam rock look of Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema: Iconic enough for a cartoon character, but disheveled enough for the retributive violence to feel politicized. His use of thick fields of black with white highlights is equally adept at showing off when a woman’s form-fitting outfit is made of shiny material, but such indicators of wealth are reserved for the villains’ bodyguards.
If one is looking for an artistic context to slot Kaneko into, check out the list Kaneda Junko provided in Natsume Fusanosuke’s article about Taiyo Matsumoto of mangaka that “really fashionable girls” in 1990s Japan loved, where he gets named alongside such personal favorites as Matsumoto and Kyoko Okazaki, as well as the still-obscure Minami Q-Ta (whose Not All Girls Are Stupid was published by Star Fruit Books recently) and Kiriko Nananan (whose Blue was published by Fanfare/Ponent Mon over a decade ago). These readers presumably also liked the shibuya-kei music of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five; we really have to to conclude their taste was impeccable.
Kaneko’s appeal to such a crowd would seemingly be premised on his style being built on a curation of international tastes, much like Taiyo Matsumoto’s postulating a “world comics” style, or the influence of tropicalia and the Beach Boys on the music of Cornelius. Kaneko, then working with the brush pen, cited such visual influences gleaned from American rock album cover art as Coop and Frank Kozik, alongside names better known for their work with Fantagraphics, like Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting Kaneko read these artist’s comics in translated form; the influence, like that of so many American comics creators seeing manga in the eighties and nineties, is purely visual.
Not for Kaneko is the disquieting surrealism of a Black Hole or Velvet Glove, but rather the rock and roll aggression implied by Burns’ cover art for Iggy Pop’s 1990 album Brick By Brick. Better still, of course, is the Raw Power of the Stooges album with the song, Search And Destroy, on it. (Weirdly, the Catalonian writer Pol Guasch’s novel Napalm In The Heart comes out in English this month, making this a big summer for the same Stooges song having made its way abroad and getting its lyrics translated back into English as the title of books.) This is an action comic, and rather than a delicate examination of a protagonist’s loneliness, here the emotional state of its main character is summarized repeatedly as simply being very angry. While Clowes and Burns have a visual baseline built around silver age DC and romance comics, Kaneko’s take on their influence ends up going full circle to resemble contemporary American cartoonists influenced by manga, and faces here, specifically reminding of James Harvey and Cristian Castelo.
It’s a handsome book, although smaller in its dimensions than one might like. At a reduced size, the main word that comes to mind to describe the art is crisp. The pacing is cinematic: Cutting away from scenes at the turn of a page as tension escalates, panels that alternate between a subject’s gaze and the thing they’re looking at. In this volume, Hyaku gets her eyes back, replacing the sensors, which we get a few glimpses of through a interlaced-filter effect. One of the things that’s funny about the book is that while Hyaku has this narrow range of emotional affect – rage – her enemies luxuriate in the sensuous pleasures granted them by their evil. Her tongue, when implanted in another cyborg’s mouth, slurps oysters. A line as mustache-twirlingly villainous as “These eyes long to see beautiful things … The most beautiful things in the world are human tears. And selling weapons is a fine way to make so many tears flow,” is, within its pulp context, borderline philosophical, invoking the name of beauty, if not its spirit, for a moment that’s just as involving as seeing the speaker of this line eviscerated a few dozen pages further down the line.
Another cyborg villain with mechanical eyes says, “My eyes don’t see things I can’t use. That’s what I love about weapons. Each part has a purpose.” This book, with anger as its animating force, gets to be its own weapon, presenting all the satisfaction of parts sliding into place, paying off whenever a bad guy get his head split open. The small size of the book tamps down the aesthetic pleasure Kaneko’s art could present, emphasizing instead each image’s narrative context, where it’s powered past through the hate in Hyaku’s heart. You get to enjoy the velocity of the confrontation: a sequence where Hyaku, clawing atop the roof of a moving car, gets shot at by someone riding inside. It should not constitute a spoiler to say this scene escalates until an explosion occurs.
It should not be surprising that there is, at least so far, little room here for Doro, the shortened name given our thieving child. Our two ostensible main characters have yet to bond. Hyaku is a largely uncommunicative character here, with few intimates. Her name is instilled upon the reader’s memory via a flashback where she refers to herself in the third person repeatedly. She’s driven by an animalistic entitlement, presented in-story as wholly justified. People repeatedly comment that she’s angry, and the main thing she has to say for herself is, “That’s mine.” Once her eyes are restored, her only observation of the outside world is the self-evident truism, “So … dirty things really do look dirty.”
The comic draws a parallel between seeing with clear eyes, having rage, and being present in the moment. A body is attained through these means. The political context changes, from 1967 to 2018, from feudal Japan to post-Soviet-bloc, and from the land where these comics were drawn to where they can now be read. My favorite sequence in the original Dororo had Hyakkimaru taking his sword and slashing plain through the panel borders. This manga achieves a similar immediacy.
English (US) · 