A Life in Search of Crickets: Reading Last Chance to Find Duke

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we’re talking about Shang Zhang’s excellent comic Last Chance to Find Duke, currently published by Peow Studio. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• CONTRAIL released the first big trailer for The Mourning Children, the upcoming film by Sunao Katabuchi and Chie Uratani. I adored Katabuchi’s earlier adaptation of In This Corner of the World, so I am very excited for this one, even more so than Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
• The last chapter of Ryoko Kui’s manga series Delicious in Dungeon came out on September 15th, just in time for the anime adaptation next winter. I’m saddened that one of my favorite comics is over, but just as excited to see what Ryoko Kui does next. She’s the kind of artist who can do anything she sets her mind to, but chooses to do weird stuff like “an epic fantasy manga about cooking monsters into meals.”
• Per Anime News Network, the Twitter account for beloved (?) children’s anime series Heybot! asked ChatGPT what they thought about the show. The answer may surprise you…
• Looks like we’re getting a second season of Netflix’s live-action One Piece series. Pretty impressive, considering how expensive the first season must have been.
• Pushkin Press is publishing a collection of Kafka comic adaptations by Kyodai Nishioka, a brother-sister team whose work has been published in alt mags like Garo and AX. While their past works have been made available via the fan translation circuit, this is the first time their comics have been made legally available in English.

Bookmarks

• For Anime News Network, Christopher Farris reviewed BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!!, the wildest installment yet of a seemingly sedate multimedia idol franchise. I’ve heard the third episode of this series is one of the biggest swings of the year…
• At Anime Feminist, Alex Henderson wrote about yuri comics that explore the sexual awakening and maturation of young adults in their 20s, like fan-favorite Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon.
• For Slashfilm, certified Barbie expert BJ Coangelo wrote about Netflix’s new animated series Barbie: A Touch of Magic.
• Baust528 made a list of games released before 2010 that have been localized into English following 2012. It’s smaller than you might think!
• Cayla Coats released her first video in some time, and it’s a doozy: “The Incel to Trans Pipeline and Inside Mari.”

AMV of the Week

Here’s “fujiwarabesque” by HazelNeverTalks.

This piece makes use of panels from Shang Zhang’s Last Chance to Find Duke, for “bragging and review purposes” (to quote the book’s copyright page.)

Last Chance to Find Duke tells the tale of an entomologist known as No. 063. His newest obsession is the Duke cricket, “a rare species that sounds like a jazz piano.” He travels to Country M to discover its whereabouts. Yet each step presents a new inconvenience. His employer, the Institute for Studying Extraordinary Creatures, cuts his funding. His visa limits how long he can legally stay in Country M. He’s left to rely on his own two feet and whatever equipment he can carry. No cars and helicopters for him. One time a giant bird (local to Country M) catches his scent. Another time he slips and breaks his leg, wasting precious days. No matter how hard he works to prove himself to his superiors, the Duke cricket remains just out of reach.

Last Chance to Find Duke is also the story of an archaeologist, named No. 084. 084 is a few years younger than 063, but is already very successful. “Last year he found that huge egg on one of the islands,” 063 says. Now 084 has discovered the bones of a giant stone turtle. He is showered with money, awards and television appearances. He, not 063, represents how ISEC wants itself to be seen by the rest of the world.

Another artist might have made 084 the villain of Last Chance to Find Duke. But 084 isn’t a bad guy. “He talks a lot,” 063 says, “but he’s a good scientist.” 084 has worked hard so that he might one day achieve his dreams of leading an excavation. He’s genuinely passionate about tracking down remnants of beasts once thought to be mythical creatures, such as stone turtles. Certainly, those interests line up exactly with the financial incentives of local governments and the ISEC. But that isn’t his fault or his responsibility.

Still, 084 can’t help but be frustrated when the authorities invade his dig. “I’ve been digging here for four years,” he says. “My opinion doesn’t matter at all?” To which the authorities say, “this excavation is not about you, Mr. 084.” After all, the authorities provided the equipment. They paid for the excavation. They did so partly to advance the cause of science, and to heighten the profile of the ISEC. They also did it so they might stand next to a scientist on television and say: everything this person accomplished is because of me. It all comes back to power, politics and (most of all) money.

If you’ve spent enough time in the world as an adult, I reckon that you’ve experienced the gravitational pull of money. All things flow according to its whims. The bigger and more expensive a thing, the more power it exerts. To ride its current is easy. To move against it is tough if not impossible. The bigger you are and the more money you have, the easier it is to resist the pull of money. But big organizations rarely resist that pull, because they can see their peers are moving in that same direction. It’s left to smaller folks to stand against the current, even if doing so steadily erodes them into nothing.

063 and 084 may live in another world than ours, but they are victims of the same system. 063 sacrifices his health and reputation to pursue the Duke cricket, a small creature that even the locals of its home Country M can’t see the importance of. 084’s career success only entangles him further in a system of privilege and power that uses him to their own advantage. Neither is allowed to function alone as scientists pursuing their passions. Instead they are subject to politics that shape the outcome of their research before it begins. The world does not care for Duke crickets, and so the Duke cricket is erased. The world benefits from stone turtle fossils, and so the stone turtle fossils are produced.

I’ve experienced something similar over the course of my time as a writer. I’m always looking to learn more about things I haven’t heard of before: Taiwanese dramas, tokusatsu serials, indie comics and old records. Uncovering the human stories behind these works always feels momentous to me, as if a part of the world I couldn’t see has finally come into focus. As far as I can tell, though, many people don’t care (or at least believe that others don’t care) about what they can’t see. They want to hear more about what they already know.

Writing about anime professionally means understanding that only a small handful of anime films and series draw attention at any one time. So you might write about those shows exclusively. You might use them as a trojan horse to trick those readers into learning something they might not otherwise care about. Or you might ignore whatever’s popular and follow your own interests, your Duke cricket, even if that means defying the current and incurring the cost.

I’ve seen this play out in other fields, too. In the world of games media, IGN got into some hot water when it released a video claiming that if they hadn’t heard of a game, “we probably wouldn’t review it, and it probably isn’t that good anyway.” My former place of employment SlashFilm ran an ambitious “Movies are Gay” feature series meant to last through Pride Month only to kill it prematurely. Countless online media platforms have shuttered this year due to investors getting cold feet. Plenty of talented folks are filling in these gaps through blogs, podcasts and other means. Some of them are even paid to do it. But the majority are limited by material realities that shape the scale of their work.

As of now, Last Chance to Find Duke is the last title published by Peow Studio, a famous indie comics press that has published award-winning works like Gleem and A Frog in the Fall. Arpad Okay refers to the book’s “consciousness of its own printing process” and “its physical scarcity” in his write-up for ComicsBeat. Even Peow’s own website says the book’s original print run was “a bit timid.” They eventually printed additional copies, including the one I bought last week at Small Press Expo. But there’s something very fitting to me about Last Chance to Find Duke nearly becoming its own Duke cricket, a charming obscurity to beguile desperate comics collectors.

At the end of Last Chance to Find Duke, 063 is saved by the friends he makes along the way. The fact that he travels Country M by foot, rather than by vehicle, helps him to make the connections he needs with the locals. The ISEC rejects his application for further funding, but Country M’s National Institute of Entomology offers him a great opportunity. The moral is clear: build community among your peers, and they will support you even when your job abandons you. But then, 063 never actually finds the Duke cricket. The flower field on Mount Elder where the Duke cricket was last seen was bulldozed and turned into a holiday center. At least 083, despite the compromises he had to make for his career, actually found what he was looking for.

Maybe the best any of us can hope for is to be Dr. 312. A resident of Country M, Dr. 312’s area of study is mysterious sounds from space. When he first meets 063, he’s on the verge of giving up his dreams. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m a scientist who golfs,” he says, teeing up a ball outside his lab, “or if I’m a golfer pretending to be a scientist.” That night, 312 becomes drunk and nearly burns down his lab. He’s terrified that his superiors will fire him once they learn what he’s done. But 063 reminds him of what first inspired him all those years ago: “collecting the sounds of the universe.”

“We hope it all leads to something,” 063 says about Dr. 312 and his own search for the Duke cricket. “Maybe it just leads to a dead end.” That may be true. There’s no guarantee at the end of life that years of hard labor in pursuit of one’s dream meant anything. But we can remind each other that those improbable dreams did mean something once. We can learn to see the world in a new way. It’s a feeling like being struck by lightning. It’s happened to me. Perhaps one day, it will happen to you.