I Was a Teenage Monkey: The Darwin Incident

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we're talking about The Darwin Incident, Shun Umezawa's award-winning suspense comic. Before that, though, here's some recent news from the anime and manga world.

News

• An anime adaptation of Ikoku Nikki, one of my favorite recent manga, has been announced! Hopefully this means they'll translate the source material into English too.
• There's also another new trailer for the upcoming Mononoke film. (No, not that one.)
• Yoshihiro Togashi is back at work on eccentric Shonen Jump series Hunter x Hunter after a hiatus. I wrote about his struggle on Slash Film back in the day if you'd like to learn more.
• The newest season of My Hero Academia is finally out as of a day or two ago. Also available on Netflix: the first twelve episodes of Time Patrol Bon, a remake of a series by Doraemon creator Fujiko F. Fujio.
• Jonathan Clements retired as Features Editor at the blog of retailer All the Anime. You can dig through the backlog here; hopefully it stays up for the foreseeable future.

Bookmarks

• There's a new mini-documentary up on NHK about the career of legendary anime producer Masao Maruyama.
• For Anime Herald, Lauren Orsini wrote about her cosplay book deal.
• For Tsundoku Diving, Baxter wrote about the excellent science fiction light novel Qualia the Purple.
• Anna Cairistiona wrote about the localization history of "summoned beasts" in the Final Fantasy series.
• For Crunchyroll News, Daniel Dockery is writing about every member of the Straw Hat crew in honor of the One Piece anime's 25th anniversary.
• For The Land of Obscusion, George Horvath wrote a typically detailed piece about various OVAs (original video animation) tied to Akira Toriyama's work.

What I Wrote

• For Crunchyroll News, I wrote (again!) about this spring's bizarre original anime Train to the End of the World.

AMV of the Week

Here's "Ctrl Art Delete" by ManlyMango.

One of my favorite manga artists is Naoki Urasawa, the creator of Monster, 20th Century Boys and Pluto. His comics often start with a high concept–for instance, “what if the boy you saved on the operating table grew up to become a serial killer?” They then spiral outwards into a complicated mess of characters and events. Every chapter ends on a nail-biting cliffhanger that raises the stakes: the boy has a twin sister! And he was raised in an orphanage by Nazis!! That are plotting to take over Germany once more and install him in a position of power!!!

Urasawa’s plots are compulsive no matter how convoluted they become. Part of it is his control of pacing: he gives readers just enough of the big picture to keep them invested. Another is the way he draws people. When an Urasawa character is determined, scared or hiding something, the reader can see it in their face and posture. Their humanity (or inhumanity) is always visible.

Urasawa’s books have won awards and sold millions of copies worldwide. Critics and fellow artists alike adore his work. I’d venture to say, though, that Urasawa’s reputation in the United States is different than in Japan. Here he’s sold as a prestigious author for discerning adult readers. In Japan he’s more like Stephen King–a beloved writer of potboilers who tells big stories about ordinary people caught up in catastrophic events. Urasawa draws blockbusters, not art house movies. 

The Darwin Incident is an award-winning manga series by Shun Umezawa. It is also, from what I can see, a loving attempt at an Urasawa-style suspense thriller. Umezawa starts with the high concept: a human chimpanzee attends high school in Missouri. He then folds in animal rights terrorism, teenage drama, the local police and a slow-boiling scientific conspiracy plot. The fourth volume ends with a cliffhanger so outrageous that it shifts the book into a different genre. For better or worse, it's comparable to anything in Monster or 20th Century Boys.

Umezawa has been drawing manga since the late 1990s. The Darwin Incident is his first series to run over two volumes, and his first to tackle a long-form conspiracy plot. The reason I believe that Umezawa is a Urasawa devotee is the way he draws faces. The expressions of his characters are always readable, and when they aren’t readable, it’s on purpose. Umezawa leans on close-ups as much as Urasawa does. He also draws characters with prominent noses, which is rarer in manga than you might think.

The protagonist of the comic, Charlie the humanzee (human chimpanzee) is drawn in a different style than the rest of the cast. His eyes read as either cute or beady. His mouth is inert. It’s tough to know exactly what he’s thinking at any given moment. It’s a risk; typically a manga artist wants their protagonist to be sympathetic, or at least understandable. But the point of The Darwin Incident is that Charlie is a creature that has never existed before. He’s supposed to make his peers, as well as the reader, uncomfortable.

Umezawa rides the uncanny valley perfectly with Charlie. He’s an alien being that thinks and expresses himself differently than anybody else in the comic. But he’s also an individual with specific wants and needs. Every time a character tries to put him into a box (including the characters we’re meant to like!) Charlie kicks down the walls. Even the villains can only ever guess at what he might do.

The Darwin Incident is a comic about humanity’s innate hubris. It asks questions like: should people eat meat? Can they live without taking more from the environment than they give back? Why are the lives of humans so often valued over the lives of animals? Everybody in the comic has answers to these questions. Charlie has his own answers too, which complicates things for everybody. As a speaking representative of the animal kingdom, Charlie’s words are definitive. But are they, and should they be?

Umezawa has more than just animal rights on his mind, though. The Darwin Incident loops in several hot button issues in the United States and elsewhere: sexism, racism, gun control and global warming to name just a few. I’m impressed by how much Umezawa gets right despite never having been to the country himself. Of course, I’m sure translator Cat Anderson was also crucial to stitching it all together.

When The Darwin Incident gets it wrong, though, it really stands out. There’s a scene in the fourteenth chapter of the comic when Charlie’s adopted father argues with the local police deputy Phil. When Phil says, “it’s a free country, isn’t it,” Charlie’s adopted father replies: “It’s a free country precisely because the police are so heavily restricted.” I couldn’t help but laugh at that line. If Umezawa is launching a no-holds-barred assault on local political controversies, why ignore police violence and corruption? It’s especially bizarre because Charlie’s legal status, and his fraught relationship with law enforcement, is a plot point from the beginning.

Umezawa’s handling of race in the comic can be messy as well. The only prominent black character in the first few volumes, who goes by the pseudonym Max, is a villain. In his early appearances he smiles at characters we like in a false, intimidating way. Later we learn that while he works with the animal rights terrorists, he doesn’t actually believe in their cause. In reality he’s an accelerationist working to destroy society so that it might start over from the beginning.

Umezawa wants to have it both ways. Sure, Max is a frightening psychopath who wants to use Charlie for his own purposes. But he’s also a radical thinker, whose politics (as we learn in a later chapter) were formed by his experiences with racial violence and discrimination. He's a compelling character to follow in that he can be just as disruptive as Charlie. At the same time, I think Umezawa could have given other characters of color speaking roles in the story early on. It's a bit weird that the only black guy in the first few volumes of a story about discrimination and human rights (set in Missouri!) is a Joker-like figure of chaos.

The rest of the cast of The Darwin Incident aren’t quite as memorable, especially compared to Urasawa's standard. Lucy is Charlie’s idealistic friend and love interest. Their classmate Gare is a frustrated animal rights activist. Phil is a deputy who distrusts and fears Charlie. These characters work as sounding boards for the story’s themes. They are rarely as effective at being individual, well-rounded people. In fact, their choices often read as if they were determined by the needs of the plot rather than by their past actions. Only Charlie is believable in this sense.

Umezawa is great at finding the right cultural pressure points when telling stories about the United States. But the smaller details are always fuzzy, particularly when it comes to setting. What distinguishes the town where Charlie lives from the rest of Missouri and the United States? What do his neighbors do for a living? Answers to these questions might help shore up the cast and their motivations. Unfortunately the answers we do receive are half-baked.

My guess is that Umezawa learned about the United States by watching movies and television. To be fair to him, studying a country’s media is a great way to learn its unconscious biases. There's plenty in The Darwin Incident that directly reflects on how audiences in the United States see themselves, or want to see themselves. But those biases can also get in the way. I think Umezawa would find better material if he dug past the country's surface fantasies to the root causes of those fantasies.

In these respects and others The Darwin Incident is a flawed comic. Yet I find it to be compulsive reading. Umezawa puts his finger directly on the question that haunts me and so many other folks I know: is even the utopian future we imagine not transformative enough to save us? I don’t know what answer Umezawa has in mind, but the journey there is exciting. For now that's enough for me.