Legion

My next foray into Western horror is Legion by Salvador Sanz.  Legion is one shot comic set in Buenos Aires with a very unique take on the apocalypse.  In the beginning we are introduced to three characters, one is an artist named Blue who has discovered a new color being called ultrabad.  The second is a sculptress who has done a sculpture that closely resembles one of Blue's paintings.  And the third is guitarist who has unknowingly spent 24 hours composing a song.  Soon after these introductions, Buenos Aires is plagued by horrible phenomena.  Blood starts raining from the sky, a face appears in the clouds, buildings appear overnight made from human body parts.  An army called Legion is butchering people to make these structures and takes several characters captive where we learn that they were key in bringing this forth.  "There's a melody that should never have been played, a color that should never have been seen, a shape that should never have been sculpted."  The story ends with Blue being crowned queen of Legion, with a crown made from her arms, and the unnamed guitarist the prince.  Though it's not the last line the real kicker and summation of the theme of the story was this.  "Imagine a world, darker than our own where art is a destructive force.  The motor of war and annihilation.

 Though Legion was the second Western comic I chose to read, it had more in common with the Eastern comics I've read.  It was, like all of the comics I've read so far, a supernatural story.  It compares far more with The Drifting Classroom than it does The Walking Dead.  Legion goes to great lengths to create an unknown world; a terrifying scene of horror and destruction, intended to cause fear in the characters and reader.  It establishes this quicker than Drifting Classroom or the similar Uzumaki.  What it does not do is go very far into the psyche of the characters.  This may be because it was shorter but it eliminates the psychological aspect of horror and focuses more on imagery, symbolism and portraying and particular theme.  In this case this is the idea of art being something that causes destruction.

Based on what I've seen in movies, Western horror focuses a lot on action.  While Legion has its action segments, the impact is not really in those scenes and none of the main characters' actions are very effective.  They are given no power of these events or creatures.  The shock lies in the creations of Legion; body parts pieced together to create beautiful intricate patterns that are at the same time revolting.  Body horor is something that crops up Eastern horror more than Western horror.  When gore is involved in Western horror, it is usually more messy and less constructed.  This is an assumption I've drawn from what little I've read and what movies I've seen of course so it may not be true in all or in fact most cases.  With a bit of surprise, I've noticed that these are artistically opposite in the way they are rendered in what I have read thus far.  In Hideout, Drifting Classroom and Uzumaki, the gore has been rendered in a very splattered style.  The way it it inked hides any of the detail.  In The Walking Dead and Legion, gore is displayed in great detail where we can see ridges and tissues in the body very clearly.

The fact that Legion is not, in fact, an American comic but instead created in Argentina might have an effect on how this differs from what I have read so far.  Since I have carried on in the same thread of supernatural stories, though not intentionally, I am going to continue that for my last couple of entries.

Obviously one entry per week was not feasible so my goal is to get at least two more comics in before I write my concluding statement.  I may or may not continue this blog after the class is over.

The Walking Dead

For this entry I decided to read The Walking Dead, based on the popular AMC television series.  I started at volume 2 by the way since I've seen the beginning of the television show and did not want to compare the two of them.  

Humanity's descent into destruction plays a key role in The Walking Dead.  Towards the end, one of the characters talks about how he wonders about the lives of each of them before they became zombies.  The survivor's struggle with accepting the world as it now exists is one of the things that drives their interactions.  While there isn't a constant onslaught of zombie action, the fact that the human race is now "walking dead" looms over the characters' and the reader's minds.  Just when they think they're safe for a moment, someone dies or someone starts a fight over control and it is a long cycle of chaos.  

The Walking Dead follows the current trend of zombie and post apocalyptic stories that seems to have cropped up recently.  A quick google search showed that there have been at least 40 zombie films released in the past 2 years, and that's just counting movies.  As far as the genres listed in my last entry, I'd put The Walking Dead under paranormal and speculative fiction.  Speculative fiction, as defined by the source linked here, is "an umbrella term covering everything from science fiction and fantasy to magical realism."  This is a pretty broad term.  Interestingly, the wikipedia page for the comic lists it as "post-apocalyptic" and "zombies in comics" which doesn't really seem like a genre at all.  Also of interest is the fact that, on the cover of the volume, it calls itself "a story of survival horror."  Upon researching the term "survival horror," I found that is is almost only applied to video games.

I have a little experience playing survival horror games, particularly recently.  A debate I have been having with a friend becomes particularly relevant when looking at this entry and the past few: how does asian horror differ from western horror and which is more effective?  Which is more effective is obviously a matter of taste.  However there are a couple prominent differences that have cropped up in both mediums.  In The Walking Dead, the scares focus a lot on surprises and shock values.  While asian horror is the same such as in The Drifting Classroom, Hideout and Uzumaki, these are more of a creepy nature or focus on body horror rather than gore and jumps as The Walking Dead did.  The television show takes some of these routes but it seems the comic does not.  It is highly action packed and even borderlines on being more of a drama than a horror in my opinion.  There are very few moments where I actually felt scared because of the zombies and many more moments where I felt scared because of the interactions between characters.  I actually question whether or not this can be considered horror or might be closer to suspense and drama.  

Regardless, the parallels drawn between games and comics can be seen if we compare The Walking Dead to a game like Dead Space.  Dead Space is a sci-fi that sets the main character on an abandoned ship in space where the crew has been mutated into strange monsters.  They must fight their way out and find a way to repair their ship so they can escape.  In both, the characters have a lot of ammunition and abilities to fight the paranormal.  The main characters are very in control so that there is a lot of action.  There are, again, many jump scares in both.  We can compare The Drifting Classroom to a game like Silent Hill.  The various monsters, which I had not gotten to during my last entry, are fueled by the character's psyche in both.  Every monster in Silent Hill games is a metaphor for the main character's fears or past regrets.  In The Drifting Classroom, there is a monster that is said specifically to stem from on student's imagination and to get rid of that monster, they must kill the student imagining it.  While there are psychological aspects of both The Walking Dead and The Drifting Classroom,  both put characters in a supernatural situation and observe the reactions, Asian horror seems to delve far more into the root of what is causing the fear rather than using jumps and multitudes of monsters to create action and drama between characters. 

One thing that has been very consistent throughout every reading has been the art style.  Each relies heavily on high contrast images with very dark shadows.  This lends a gritty appearance to the horror genre and has been near constant so far.

The Drifting Classroom

I've been slacking a bit here, I missed a week but my second entry is The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu (which doubled as my class reading for this week).  It begins with a elementary school boy named Sho who is having an argument with his mother over something silly.  He leaves for school on bad terms with his mother.  We leave Sho to follow a classmate of his as he returns home quickly to get his forgotten lunch money.  Sho declines and continues on to school.  From this classmate, we learn that the school has in fact, disappeared.  When we return to Sho, we find his classroom is in a strange dimension surrounded by a desert with no visible end.  It is unclear whether or not the desert can be travelled; a boy ventures out only to fall and stop moving without any clear reason.  The teachers of the school try to calm the panicked student body with little success.  One stabs his own son with a shard of broken glass as a threat to the students if they don not calm down.  The question of how long the people in the school can survive also becomes apparent as one of the faculty locks down the kitchens and hoards all the food, taking a student as hostage should someone try to take any.

A quick bit before I get into genre, I found the sound effects in this story to be really interesting.  You can see above how sound effects are used as a literal visual noise to create breaks and disturbances in the layout.  Both in the image above and below, there are visual effects use to strike fear or foreboding. Though I cannot read them, it's easy to tell that one is some sort of agonized wailing and the other is something heavy and surprising.  Manga does this often with sound effects but I particularly like it to build tension in horror.

This week's reading was very similar to the last one.  It is a story in which normal characters are put in a situation out of their control.  In this case, it was something presumably supernatural.  I also did a little bit of research this week to find generally accepted sub-genres of horror.  The list I found most relevant can be found here.  Genres listed on this site are:

• Supernatural
• Dark Fantasy
• Sci-Fi
• Psychological  
• Lovecraftian
• Gothic
• Splatterpunk
• Satanic/religous/occult
• Erotic/ paranormal romance
• Weird fiction
• Speculative fiction

Without delving too far into these, The Drifting Classroom makes itself apparent at supernatural horror. I might also say it is a bit psychological but that is not as prevalent.  Last week's entry, Hideout, was certainly psychological and it is interesting to see how these two stories differ.  People reacting to high stress situations is definitely an important part of both and also a pattern I am beginning to see in manga particularly which is where I am beginning my exploration.  

My jumping off point was the manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito.  It just so happens Ito's work was heavily inspired by Umezu's.  I will not be doing an entry of Uzumaki simply because I have read it many many times.  Though Uzumaki has a lot of body horror, the psychological bits were the parts I found the most frightening.  I can see Umezu's iinfluence easily, particularly in the part of volume three where citizens of a trapped town decide to use other people who have become less than human as a food source.  Despite all the body horror, I found this part the most terrifying.  Below is an excerpt from Uzumaki.

In Hideout, the psychological aspects were much more clear because there was nothing paranormal being dealt with.  An already insane character's life being threatened causes a much more heightened and less realistic situation for the reader to put themselves in.  Despite the paranormal being involved, the ordinary characters make this a much scarier read for me.

Next week I will be trying to push away from manga for the time being and read some Western comics.

Hideout

For week 1 I chose to look at a manga called Hideout by Kakizaki Masasumi.  I had seen very striking images from it online and had been meaning to read it for a while.

Hideout is told as a memoir by the main character Kirishima Seiichi.  It starts out very ominous, it is very obvious from the beginning that things are going to go horribly wrong with this character's story.  We see him bloody and tied in a chair with the constant imagery of these eyes like those shown on the cover.  The reader begins by being very sympathetic towards the main character.  It is soon revealed that he is taking a vacation to heal things with his wife after the death of their son.  The wife, Miki, is very hostile towards Seiichi and blames him for the death of their son.  We can assume this hostility has been going on for a long time.  In chapter 1, he decides to kill his wife.

After this, none of the events in the story go according to plan.  Miki escapes and the two of them find themselves in a cave with the owner of the iconic pair of eyes that has shown up several times in the story already.  This man ultimately ends up kidnapping them.

As a horror story, Hideout aims to be eerie and at the same time psychological.  Not in a mind puzzle type of way, but in a way that it tries to get the reader to examine aspects of what they might do when faced with trauma.  Every character in this story is faced with horrible things and ends up a horrible person because of it.  Despite Seiichi and Miki having already shown a monstrous nature, they call the emaciated old man in the cave a monster and consider themselves better.  

There are points where I think this comic tries too hard.  Seiichi is an unlikable character from the get-go and it is hard to sympathize with him past the first few pages, which makes his transformation into a despicable character have far less of an impact.

Where I think this comic is really successful is in the art.  It is high contrast and extremely detailed in a way that makes it very memorable.  The art made far more of an impact on me than the storyline which is okay for a horror comic I think.  Imagery can be just as effective as a shock tactic as plot can and in this case I think the plot comes off  very strong and could benefit from a bit more subtlety.

Since this is the first comic I have looked at I cannot say yet how it compares to other horror comics aside from ones I have read in the past which are very similar.  Next week I will probably have something very different so I can compare similarities and differences.