| January
2008 |
Housui Yamazaki, Mail (Dark Horse Comics); 3 Volumes, $10.95.
by Matt
Dube
Housui Yamazaki’s
Mail
reads like the
dream-pitch DC is waiting for to revive their Phantom
Stranger series. Detective Akiba, the comic’s star and
hero, introduces stories in his chipper way, then passes
the baton to characters who are being haunted to death;
when he resurfaces, it is to quickly dispatch the
malevolent sprits with magic bullets fired from his gun
kagutsuchi. For this reason, Mail
is almost an
anthology title of stories where you know the end in
advance. But the stories themselves are wonders of fright
and visual invention.
Most of the stories work similarly to “Seabed” from the
third volume. First, Akiba addresses the reader directly,
in a pithy, flip manner indebted to Rod Serling or Alfred
Hitchcock on their signature television programs, then the
story switches to Yumi Iwahara and her friends, three
gamine twentysomethings visiting an out of the way beach.
Yumi fears the ocean because as a child she found a message
in a bottle that said, “I’m in the ocean. Come find me.”
The thread of tension effectively introduced, it is
heightened when Detective Akiba calls to tell Yumi he’d
like to meet with Yumi as part of an investigation
concerning messages found in bottles. Waiting for Akiba to
arrive, Yumi is lured into the water and attacked by the
ghosts of dead WWII veterans. When Akiba makes his stylish
arrival, it is on a jet ski, his gun kagutsuchi blazing as
he intones a traditional blessing, this comic’s version of
“ashes to ashes,” here expressed as “from drown, to drift,
to sand.” Akiba always gets in a strange line like this
when he dispatches his unruly opponents of the afterlife.
The plots of most of the stories are very similar, but
feature compelling characters and situations, usually
concerned with young women who confront some embodiment of
the fears of young adulthood: what should I do with my
past, what can I expect from my future, who are my friends,
and does anyone know I am here at all. The settings vary
wildly, from the beach of the story above, to a dilapidated
bathroom in a municipal park, an apartment complex, or a
stretch of nighttime highway. Yamazaki sidesteps the
problem of Akiba’s near omnipotence (he does, after all,
introduce the stories, standing effectively outside of them
from a vantage of safety) by utilizing a split narrative
perspective. When he appears, Akiba is large and in charge,
as shown in the panel above. But the rest of the time, we
are stuck with the unknowing victims of the hauntings, as
this woman is trapped in an out-of-control car, about to be
menaced by the demon whose fingers peek into the windshield
in the last panel. The terror of the circumstances is
transmitted to us through Yamazki’s tight, cramped panels,
making us crave the widescreen safety of Akiba’s
appearance.
The series apparently only ran three volumes in Japan, and
the third volume was released here by Dark Horse in May of
this year. It lacks the kind of resolution that people tout
as one of manga’s selling points; in fact, a new character
is introduced as a helper and possible romantic partner for
Akiba in the third volume, his childhood sweetheart Mikoto,
literally stitched back together and re-animated into her
pre-pubescent body. This plot twist is so strange and
creepy that it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t more
planned for these two characters, but apparently those
stories are not to be. That said, though it is loosely
categorized as horror manga, Akiba’s adventures are a lot
like superhero comics, albeit slightly off ones. Dark
Horse’s trade dress for the series is impressively jarring,
so that the book stands out from both other manga and
superhero comics. It might be that this distinctiveness
quashed the chances this title had for success, given that
the pleasures it offers are so immediate and familiar.
Whatever the reason for the book’s low profile, it remains
a creepy read, and highly worth looking at as one way to
revive horror comics in a world that knows the
Sixth
Sense and the
Saw
movies as
exemplars of the horror genre.
