Brian Nicholson | May 1, 2025
Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. The thought appeared unbidden, of the filtered, feminine voice that speaks the line at the outset of the Spiritualized album of the same title. That record is mostly about drug use and being high, and when I opened Ultra Heaven, knowing it to be a manga also about drug use and being high, and found an image of a man-made satellite on the first page, I felt I was being situated in a mental space as much as I was a physical one.
Which of course ends up being appropriate as the rest of the book concerns hallucinations that move us back and forth between consensus reality and the subjective experiences of people fucked up on fantastical substances. The world of Ultra Heaven is a science-fiction one, not unlike our own, where a variety of pharmaceutical options exist to counteract the mental states that the pressures of daily life have imposed upon the citizenry. This society is more self-aware/enlightened than our own, though, in that the pretense of a psychiatrist is done away with in favor of specialized bartenders with medical degrees. At one such "Pump Bar," catering to a more clean-cut clientele, the bartender tries to avoid having clients become addicted, lest they become degenerates and bring down the high-class atmosphere. The old man working behind the bar has his signature cocktail, Nova Express, named after a William Burroughs novel, either by the bartender or his author.
Keiichi Koike’s author bio flaunts his history of drug intake, and this book, like his previous, Heaven’s Door, is published by Last Gasp, the underground stalwart whose manga selections — Junko Mizuno, Suehiro Maruo — seem likely to communicate with an audience attuned to the habits and attitudes of underground comics. They also recently published a godawful looking self-help manga called I’m Enough, which suggests a bowing to contemporary trends as perceived by an older person with contempt for the way they see the world changing. Say it with me, ruefully: San Francisco ain’t what it used to be!
Ultra Heaven, with its science fiction take on counterculture politics, harkens back to a heyday defined by Philip K. Dick’s presence. Drug experiences might not be mere hallucination, but glimpses of an afterlife, and the story we’re being told of people getting high might be mere recollection from the vantage of some future drug treatment, which might in turn be the government pursuing some nefarious end by experimenting on drug users. All the stuff of A Scanner Darkly, but in comics form the slippage between hallucination and possible overarching narratives is rendered by Koike’s extraordinary technical ability as sheer pyrotechnics. One can see the influence of Katsuhiro Otomo, or notes of Toyokazu Matsunaga’s Bakune Young. Hatching shows the folds of sagging skin, then Koike subjects his anatomically-precise faces to squash and stretch caricature effects, and bends his page layouts to match the expansion and collapse of a character’s mind. It rocks. The reader is compelled onward just as much by a desire to see the artist continue the escalation of his visual imagination as to see how the story will further complicate itself. The drawing is extremely clean, yet so exuberant that it is always making a mess for itself. It should be said that this is a style that looks much better on paper than it does on screen. Viewed online, Koike’s drawings are impressive but little else. In tactile form they’re enveloping, precise to an entrancing degree, moving steadily between different effects over multi-page sequences.
It isn’t all the cranked-volume psych-rock riffage of full flight through inner space. The subtleties of objective observation are rendered just as precisely by the Moebius-indebted linework. Koike will return to portraits of the main character’s face, to show the transformation that occurs from being exhausted by craving to elation as a drug hits. Likewise, he’ll reuse a page layout to show a character showing up at an apartment another person arrived at a few pages before, the cleanliness of the page’s recognizable structure made sordid by the body now off to the side, lost in their private reverie. Certain pages maintain a fixed perspective and rigid tiers, reminding me of Tiger Tateishi’s Cheat Sheets. Other times, when Koike presents a page in tiers, we get something close to cinematic, but while the camera moves around a room to show its subject, with enough continuity to suggest a perspective moving, there is still enough variation present to show he is not just imitating filmic techniques, panning around the room, but is shifting the vertical axis of his vantage point at the same time. This, too, is subject-matter-appropriate: Highs need to be shown as also being lows, depending on shifts in perspective.
If that description of self-reflexivity has too much of an air of square morality, let me instead note that the sights we are shown have a lot of eyes in them. The freakiest orb of them all here gets arrayed in numbers far greater than the theoretical third. Staring bloodshot, these windows to the soul express only their brokenness. Elsewhere they’re swelling, inflating like a blown bubble out the barrel of a policeman’s gun. Entangled in the eye’s membranes and nerves is the violence of apprehending, and the grossness of attendant vulnerability. Behind closed eyes one can situate oneself safely inside a dream, but with lids open the vacancy left behind when one’s mind is elsewhere is apparent for all to see.
The bartender explains that people often attempt suicide by mixing drugs not meant to be taken in combination in Pump Bars, so that they can be saved, after having experienced a near-death experience — a high in itself that they are then left chasing. Cub, the main character of Ultra Heaven, describes what happened when he almost died, seeing his body from above, as “the usual stuff.” Everyone is addicted to looking for the ultimate, their tolerance built up, their pleasure centers burned out. It would be cheap to say the heights Koike brings readers to here are the deliverance they’re seeking, but the vision he has put to paper is an image of this reader’s own wanting. There are two more volumes forthcoming, and I will be back for more.
English (US) · 