The Drifting Classroom Vol. 1
Viz
In synopsis, Kazuo Umezu's early '70s horror epic The Drifting Classroom sounds pretty silly: When an earthquake strikes Japan, an entire grade school disappears, leaving only a shallow crater where it once stood. The school itself reappears in a bizarre, otherworldly wasteland. But in execution, Umezu's story is a pressure cooker full of panic, terror and confusion. The hook may seem unrealistic, but Umezu capitalizes on that unreality, using it as a pointy stick with which to poke at his characters. The main one is sixth-grader Sho, who has a feelings-shredding argument with his mom just before the cataclysm. Portentously, it ends with them screaming that they never want to see each other again.
They may get their wish. Stuck in a strange hellscape, the kids and teachers immediately start to break up, some going crazy within the first hours of the event. As in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, much of the horror comes from the knowledge that the characters being forced to shed civilization are simply children.
Things go from bad to worse in this first volume, which ends with the realization that there may not even be enough food in the cafeteria for one day. And behind the melodrama of such concerns lurks the larger question of what exactly is going on. In that respect, Classroom recalls Lost, and, also like TV's No. 1 science-fiction survival show, it shouldn't take more than a single taste to get you hooked.
Phono-gram No. 1
Image Comics
Indie comics about indie music tend to be a bit like record-store reverse-snobs—insufferable in their My Record Collection Is Bigger than Yours condescension. And when a comic book includes both a glossary to its many pop music references and an honest-to-God manifesto (entitled "Statement of Intent") in its back pages, we're looking at a comic book that practically screams not to be read. But that would be a mistake, because insufferable pretentiousness aside, creators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie actually have the beginning of a pretty fascinating story about the intersection of magic and music.
And I don't mean that figuratively. I mean magic literally, as a system of thoughts or practices in which one person tries to bend the world around them to their will. Our "hero," if the word isn't too generous for the preening, womanizing a-hole protagonist, is David Kohl, who talks us through his outfit as he admires himself in the mirror on his way to Ladyfest Bristol to score. While there, he experiences an "incarnation" of "the goddess," who scolds him for his behavior to women, roughs him up and curses him.
Kohl and his associates seem to know more about what's going on then we do regarding magic and goddesses, but the vibe is that of sorcerers in the rock scene; think Hellblazer meets High Fidelity, only darker, and you're in the right ballpark. It's too bad Gillen couldn't give readers enough credit to understand him and his work, as the supplementary materials are pretty off-putting, but the story itself is rather intriguing, and McKelvie's black-and-white artwork is simply perfect. This should be a series to watch.
The Psycho
Image Comics
In 1991, DC Comics published a miniseries of fully-painted graphic novels for adults set in a world where the U.S. government distrusts superpowered people so much they form a special agency just to monitor and hunt them down if they ever become a threat to national security. It wasn't exactly a hit, which may explain why an entirely different publisher is reprinting it. Fifteen years later, James Hudnall's script seems awfully forward-thinking, considering that the same basic plot drives some of the best-selling (Marvel's Civil War series) and most recent (last week's The Boys No. 1) comics. This new edition collects the entire series into one volume, and boasts some early artwork from painter Daniel Brereton, who would go on to bigger and better things with his horror hero series, The Nocturnals.