Magical Manga Opera FIRE KING!King Gonta's long-awaited follow up to the magnificent Souten Kouro came out back in October, and I quickly grabbed the first two volumes and utterly failed to read them, put off by the slightly childish, less polished looking artwork.
I SHOULD NEVER HAVE DOUBTED THE KING.
This shit is fucking AMAZING.
I mean, just take his design for Enma. Shoulder length bead covered cornrows decked out with a fucking Chinese court hat and HEAT GOGGLES. Pimpin' red coat and tails, shoes that curl up at the end, giant glowing outie bellybutton peeking out over the glowing demonic eyes on his pimpin' beltbuckle.
And the dude is only in the fucking prologue!
Enma finds a human baby, is impressed by what a bad ass the baby is, and gives it powers before sending it to live with a fucking dimension hopping con artist, who happens to be in a fucking Ferrari driving at top speed down the highway when he sees all the signs change to The Sixth Gate and a FLAMING BABY appear in the air down the highway barely far enough for him to spin the fucking car while opening the door in time to snatch the fucking baby out of the air!
The story proper kicks off when the kid is ten, and by sheer dint of always going in when told not to and/or some place is dark, and not being afraid of anything, winds up earning the respect of a giant fucking monkey god and visiting the land of the monkeys where they appear to be having some sort of epic war with the evil bird people.
Kikazaru hides in the kid's thumbnail to recover, and Iwazaru and Mizaru take him to see the monkey king.
The monkey king is dying - he is so impossibly huge he communicates entirely in 48 point font, a sentence at a time thundering across vast vistas of pages with the kid's replies in microscopic unreadable scratchings until the junior monkeys form a giant chain of monkeys from the kid to the king's ear.
At which point King Gonta makes a mic test joke.
Night falls, the sky fills with birdmen raining deadly wires down upon the feeble force fields generated by the 33 Wise Ape-Men's Conference.
Now it is 12:30 and I have volume two looking very tempting.
Volume two was also god damn amazing. The latter half has a fucking hyperdimensional fight against a pair of beast gods that involves flinging them in and out of assorted dimensions, the very panel structure of the page functioning as the transition from one reality to the next.
ReplyDeleteThe entire series has this same demented energy, with everyone talking at once and reacting to each other within the course of a single panel, creating a sort of off the cuff Altmanesque overlapping feel to the dialogue and events so that three or four things are always happening at once and nothing you're seeing has ever been done before.
This sounds far too amazing and/or stupid to remain in Japan.
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