Dragon Head Vol. 1-3

Shortly after Teru’s train crashes when Japan becomes host to yet another apocalypse, he meets Nobuo, a fellow student who’s already gone crazy. Teru’s responding anguish manifests as two pages of the motionless train beside the tracks, its outsides lined with broken windows and its insides draped with corpses. Dragon Head is always effectively paced with this slow-burning misery, but it’s frequently at a loss for words. The survivors can’t speak with each other in the face of this horror, and there’s no indication that they could express themselves well in any other circumstances. The end of the world is satisfyingly grim and depressing, but it would be nice to have some better company.

The cause of the disaster is unknown, and since the characters are literally and metaphorically in the dark about the situation, it shouldn’t matter anyway. We don’t know why a train full of students derailed coming back from a school trip, and the total sum of clues for these first seven hundred pages are that it’s suspiciously warm underground and that a cloud of black dust has blanketed the sky. This doesn’t constitute a mystery story at which we can guess, so it’s more a thoroughly grisly horror story. The few surviving passengers find themselves trapped in a tunnel, left to struggle to the surface on their own.

Teru and a female student, Ako, blindly grapple with this newly mad world filled with mad children while capable of little more than cursing and making hilariously banal observations. “Man, it’s creepy in here,” Teru notices as he surveys a lightless train car full of dead bodies and broken glass. At first, he appears to have lost his inner monologue in the crash, and it makes sense that a traumatic experience would have that effect, but it eventually becomes clear that this is how the characters always talk.

Though they are prone to stating the obvious, it’s a terribly engaging obvious. You can almost understand why they act this way. They’re overwhelmed. Rubble spreads across the tunnel walls and atop the train in tremendous detail. Darkness swallows the train and the track as they extend into the distance. The environment forms a fourth main character, and it gets the most caring attention. The survivors’ sole flashlight is the other major inanimate object. It only illuminates a short distance and is frequently isolated in panels. Repeatedly, the flashlight points directly at the reader, flooding the panel with light. The claustrophobia induced by all of these visuals is intense and involving.

What I’m describing here shouldn’t be surprising to regular manga readers. Slow moving plots with hyper-realistic backgrounds in contrast to the iconic-looking main characters are so common as to be unremarkable. The trouble in Dragon Head is that the characters are ciphers. Teru and Ako get some brief flashbacks to their families, but those reveal little about the pair but a common mental disengagement. Nobuo comes off like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Supernatural forces may be twisting his mind, but he looked pretty loony in the first place. Everyone’s so devoid of personality that it’s hard to stay absorbed in their conflict.

Ako’s treatment is additionally troublesome. She’s unconscious for most of volume one, and when she wakes up she discovers that she’s started her period. It’s interesting for being such an unlikely topic for a disaster story to handle, but Teru walking in on her as she scrambles for a tampon is only Ako’s first sexually related humiliation, the next being far, far worse, and the chapter features the baffling title, “Her Handicap”. I hope that’s an awful translation. Ako’s role so far is to scream, run, whine, and cry to Teru and Nobuo, “You two are men, right?! Do something!” Conversely, Dragon Head equates Nobuo’s violence with a twisted, domineering male sexuality, set in opposition to Teru. Teru has a brief moment where he views Ako in a sexual manner, and the thought is foreign or at least unexpected, as if it comes from the same evil that’s corrupting Nobuo. However, with Ako’s over the top dialogue as she removes her skirt in that same moment to reveal shorts the length of a hand, it starts to feel like the scene is playing for the titillation of the reader.

The horror in Dragon Head is ambiguous, which is often the best way to go in the genre. It’s known as “the darkness”, it warps these kids into half-aware psychotics, and it’s all rendered admirably in swathes of black and in the rocks in the tunnel. At the end of the first volume, Teru says, “We need a way to relax. To keep our minds off our situation.” They decide to set up camp outside the train, leading to the bleakest image I’ve encountered in a comic. The scavenged chairs and suitcases sit deserted. Beyond them, on the tunnel wall, is a drawing of a curtained window, presumably made with blood. It’s a strange sight, this poignant evidence of creative thought by the characters, as moving as it is confusing. What did they say when they did this? Why did they have to do it when I wasn’t looking?