Nextworld 2

So, to go over the basics of this series: it starts off with a hint of nuclear testing and some weird faerie stuff, then moves into a storyline which is mostly about a war between two countries… largely due to a personal disagreement between Notarlin and Duke Red.  By the end of the first volume, most of the main characters have gathered together in a weapons facility in Duke Red’s country where citizens are worked like slaves to make stuff for the army.

In this volume, the story morphs into what I mentioned earlier, which is where a bunch of spaceships are built (at first by what appear to be faeries, but are actually either a mutant animal species or aliens… I’ll call them faeries to make things simple) to evacuate the planet before a deadly space cloud comes in to kill all life.  You may be asking yourself how this transition takes place.  I’ve read the thing and I don’t know, but I can tell you its magical and seamless.

The faeries decide they would not like to take all humans with them, only around 500, and they wind up grabbing a large group from a Christian church who believes they’ve somehow wound up in heaven, or on Noah’s arc since the faeries have also gathered representatives from all animal species.  Everyone’s broken out of the weapons facility at this point, and Kenichi is in a big group with Rock, Duke Red’s son, and two girls with the faeries.  Because the faeries refuse to let humans know about the deadly space cloud, Kenichi goes rogue and steals a spaceship so that it can be duplicated and everyone can be saved.  There’s a really cute scene where he’s finally reunited with Higeoyaji, then the mass production of spaceships begin.  In a totally random move, Lamp is put in charge of production, and you can imagine that things don’t go well after that.  Things blow up, the cloud comes, and it’s got a really surprising twist ending that I liked a lot.

The one good thing about Tezuka’s cast of characters is that he doesn’t really have to establish their personalities every time.  I know that Duke Red is a softie bad guy, for instance, I know that Higeoyaji will always stick his nose in to do the right thing, and I know that Kenichi is going to go on some fantastic adventure to save everyone.  In stories like this, I know how everyone will react, which makes things a lot more fun somehow.  The only wildcard in this story was Rock, who actually started off as a good guy before getting surly and mean.  But I kind of like that about these short little pieces.

Lamp dies a horrible death here, just like in Lost World.  Not quite as disturbing, but seeing him plummet was not a pleasant thing.

The art is once again kinda good in this really gimmicky, polished way.  It’s really simple and cartoony, as you can imagine from something this old, but there’s a bunch of little flourishes that are appreciated.  A lot of the chapters in Nextworld end with what appears to be a gradual circle wipe transition.  The design on the faeries (which are called Fumoon) is also really cute.

In the essay at the end of this series, Tezuka explains that the titles for this “sci-fi trilogy” (which was apparently a designation by fans and not by himself) all come from… well, not him.  Metropolis is obviously from the Fritz Lang movie though the work itself has nothing to do with it, Lost World is from the Doyle book even though the only common ground is dinosaurs, and the title for Nextworld comes from “Shape of Things to Come” by Wells (well, really the movie version, just called “Things to Come”), translated into Japanese, then translated back into English.   Once again, he only took the title and didn’t actually adapt the work, though they both share the theme of… I don’t know, he says maybe the future of mankind?  He said he actually saw the movie many years after he wrote the thing and thought it was very boring.

But yes.  This has been the best of the Dark Horse Tezuka manga, at least for me.  People who don’t like the random weirdness of Ode to Kirihito or Apollo’s Song might not be as into it, and this one is still probably a little dated and definitely very old, but I still really enjoyed it.