Drifting Classroom 8
April 13, 2008
The delivery guy is back to himself, and starts beating the shit out of kids again. Because he needs to feel like a big man and have an army of children he can bully and sacrifice to his whims, he drops Sho and his close friends at the bottom of the well they were digging and leaves them since they are the leaders of the rest. Luckily they’ve dug down far enough in the well to hit the underground train system.
More mutants are running around down there, along with ghost trains which aren’t really explained but are running along the tracks anyway. There is a suggestion that the mutants are mutated humans, and that the children might not be as far into the future as they thought. The children watch a film in secret courtesy of the mutants that explains that the series may have some sort of fucked-up environmentalist message behind it. “DO YOU WANT THIS TO HAPPEN TO YOUR KIDS?! THEN STOP POLLUTING!” That this may be the moral to the story just makes it that much better for me. It would make me mad in any other series, but it just makes Drifting Classroom better because it seems totally unrelated.
They find a man in the underground system that was living off canned goods. This lasts about two pages as he drops over dead from a heart attack and the children move on. I love these really random, one-and-done moments. There’s a lot I don’t mention, which is why I say I can’t really spoil the series. You just have to read it to know how awesome it is.
Another one of these moments happens when the kids are trying to flee an erupting volcano. Sho shouts to get down, and the one kid who doesn’t quite understand and remains standing is blown away in another one of these amazing panels that only Umezu can draw. Such panels perfectly depict terror like no other artist.
April 15, 2008 at 12:47 am
[...] a Drifting Classroom marathon at Slightly Biased Manga, where Connie reviews vols. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. Mangamaniac Julie checks out The First Stage of Love at Mangacast, and back at the [...]