Slightly Biased Manga

I think the only explanation we’re ever going to get for Drifting Classroom’s events occurred in this volume.  At one point, Sho holds an assembly and one of the little kids asks him what happened to all the adults.  Sho said the adults all died because they weren’t willing to accept the weird situations like the kids were.  So there you have it, any weird situation that comes up won’t ever be questioned by any of the characters, which I think is a great device.

Because I thought things couldn’t get any more insane than last volume, this volume strives to beat it and succeeds.  Most of the first part of the volume concerns Sho communicating with his Mom in the past (sometimes via telephone) so that she can bury a dagger in the wall of the hotel he’s struggling in.  He digs said dagger out in the future and escapes his predicament.  It took me awhile to figure out that’s where things were going (for a minute I thought his mom was going to enter the past), but I was in total disbelief when I finally figured that out.  His mom makes for a great raver.  She runs all over town in her nightshirt, not paying for things and throttling people in hotel rooms when she thinks she might be able to help Sho.  At least he comes by it honestly.

There are some weird gag characters drawn in this volume.  One is a strangely cartoony boy who tries to bite into a can of pineapples, and the other is Gamo.  My roommate was very fond of Gamo, and spoke of him often.  I can certainly appreciate Gamo’s value as a gag genius character who criticizes everyone in a very adult way and comes up with weirdly logical explanations for things like… time travel and whatever.

What else happens… a boy who had been attacked by the homicidal teacher crawls through the desert and dies at the gates of the school with a leaf clutched in his hand.  Everyone is touched that he went through so much trouble to let them know about an oasis, and the escaped crazy lunchroom delivery guy does the kids the favor of escorting them there against their will, beating the crap out of them the whole way.  They find a crab-monster who eats kids instead of fruit, except the crab-monster is kind of bad at eating kids.

Because the lunchroom delivery guy was locked up all volume, and the crab-monster is bad at eating kids, to make sure that there is enough punishment for the reader of Drifting Classroom, a female bully is introduced in the last chapter who administers brutal beatings to anyone that talks to her.  Right when she is snapping a kid’s fingers one by one though, the population of the school is distracted by suicidal first graders who start jumping from the roof of the school.

I’m… ah, still not used to the violence against children, though I can certainly appreciate the value of this series.  I love it for its unprecedented level of insanity, and I love it even more since it was actually meant for a ten year old boy to read alongside… I don’t know, whatever the equivalent of Detective Conan was back in the early seventies.  I love you, Kazuo Umezu.