MYTHCOMICS: ZEBRAMAN (2004?)

  In my December review of the 2004 Takashi Miike film ZEBRAMAN, I originally wrote the essay without knowing that a manga version existed, so I attempted a quickie correction when I discovered the manga's existence, saying, "Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read."                                                                                                                                              However, according to the automatic translation of a Japanese-language Wiki, it now appears that the movie came about first-- partly celebrating Miike's career, as it was his 100th feature film-- and that the manga apparently came afterward, ostensibly more the creation of artist Yamada Reiji.                                                                                                                                                                                            'Although the basic setting is borrowed, the story and other aspects are almost original to Yamada. In the movie version, the monsters who appear are "aliens who invaded the Earth", but in the manga version, they are "ordinary people who have been brainwashed because they have darkness in their hearts and have committed evil deeds according to their desires". Even the people who "play" the phantom also have loved ones, and the main character's own feelings and conflicts, which are suffering just like the monsters while playing the hero, and the process of the protagonist reexamining himself through battles and awakening to true family love are depicted more vividly than in the movie version, and the themes of "humanity" and "family ties" are more brought to the forefront.'-- Japanese-language Wiki.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm familiar with the fact that manga serials are sometimes responses to anime serials or to "light novels." On this blog, I've reviewed a couple of manga-serials concocted from such prose novels, such as MAYO CHIKI and ZERO'S FAMILIAR. But now that l have read Yamada's version of ZEBRAMAN, it seems to have been designed to oppose much of the content in the Miike films.                         

 First, as the Wiki-article states, the 2004 Miike movie (like its 2010 sequel) takes the view that Shinichi Ishikawa, forty-something schoolteacher in Yokohama, has idolized the "Zebraman" tv show of his youth without knowing that, all along, he has always lived in a tokusatsu world. By the time Ishikawa reaches age forty-two, alien influences abound so much that bizarre entities are spawned, many of whom are strange recapitulations of monsters from the tv show. The same ET phenomenon confers special powers upon Ishikawa, allowing him to become Zebraman and combat the evil aliens. But in the manga, there are no genuine aliens, only human beings who dress up in weird costumes. Some have odd resources, such as hypnotism. but that's the extent of the metaphenomenality here.         

                                                                                            

 Ishikawa's contempt from his family is about the same as what the movie depicts, with a son who finds his father lame, a wife who cheats on Ishikawa with a younger man, and a daughter who signals some weird Oedipal issues by sleeping around with older men. Yamada alters the dynamic between the teacher and his daughter, though, by showing that as a child Midori idolized her father and wanted to marry him. Ishikawa encounters Midori while he's dressed as Zebraman, though when the unwitting hero encounters his first opponent, he ends up saving another teenaged female victim from the TV-monster "Crabjack the Ripper " Yamada doesn't pursue the psychological trope of "knight rescuing damsel" to any transgressive conclusions, though, because the author wants to build upon the film's suggestion that Ishikawa may get the chance to choose between his bad real family and a potential new one.                             

  Ishikawa's relationship to Shinpei, a "better son" to take the place of the real one, stays roughly the same, and the manga even keeps a version of the scene in which Shinpei overcomes the mental block that keeps him in a wheelchair. But Yamada builds up the character of Kana, Shinpei's mother, to the extent that now she's Ishikawa's childhood girlfriend, the "good wife" to take the place of the unfaithful one-- who's never particularly sympathetic, despite the gospel of forgiveness put forth in the late chapters.                             

                                                

Crabjack like Zebraman, is really a forty-something man in a costume. This serial killer, Kitahara, has been dating if not definitely screwing Midori, and he finally decides to massacre her like his previous victims. Zebraman saves his daughter and eventually regains her respect, but Kitahara introduces a new wrinkle not in the film: that he goes after sinful young women because he himself possesses a young daughter he believes to be pure-- which comes up again in later chapters. Kitahara also tells Zebraman that he thinks they both come from "the Galactic Church," founded by a mystery man named "Gray." Yamada will build up the contrast between the opposed "black and white" of the Zebraman-ethos and that of Gray.         

                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

For brevity's sake I'll pass over the next sequence, which more or less duplicates the Midori sequence, but with a killer named "ScorpioDahmer," who preys upon on unfaithful wives, yet targets both the bad wife Sachiyo and the good potential wife Kana. Toward the sequence's end, though, Kana introduces the ethic of forgiveness that Zebraman will articulate later. Before dying, ScorpioDahmer articulates the same ethic of "black and white decisiveness" vs. "gray equivocation" that Zebraman has dreamed of.                                             

   Yamada then introduces his last sequence, which runs through most of the remaining 26 chapters: one in which the emissaries of Gray seek to manipulate children-- including Ishikawa's son Kazuki -- into becoming maniacal killers. During this continuity Yamada introduces two more female high-schoolers, Rin and Sayaka. I found Rin something of a waste of time, and not much better conceived than Kazuki. But Sayaka proves a little more interesting, because she's the supposedly "pure daughter" of Midori's erstwhile psycho-lover Kitahara.                                                                                                               

                                                                                                      Gray's servant "Shrike-Manson" (who wears presumably artificial wings) is another adult employee at Ishikawa's school (and thus another reflection of Ishikawa). He seduces the high-schooler Sayaka in the process of turning her into one of his killer minions, and at one point she even beats down Zebraman himself with some sort of knuckle-dusters.                                                                         

                                         

This part of "the Kazuki arc" includes Zebraman countering Shrike-Manson's pernicious claim that his adherents can take on special powers by serving him and emphasizes the common clay of all human beings instead. Kazuki doesn't forswear his master due to Zebraman's speech, though, so Yamada pivots to the unsolved mystery as to who created the Zebraman TV show and who's the architect of the imitation monsters. Ishikawa then gains access to the final, never-filmed script for the show, which seems to end with the death of Zebraman.                                                                                         

Ishikawa ultimately wins back the heart of Kazuki, and for good measure, Sayaka aids the hero against Crabjack, without even knowing that he's her father Kitahara. After dragging out the "Shrike-Manson" sequence far too long, Yamada then concludes his epic with the hurried revelation that the mastermind Gray was a failed idealist who became frustrated when his television show was cancelled. Gray's reasons for forming his "Galactic Church" and fostering real versions of his fantasy-monsters never makes much sense, and I have no idea why so many of the phony monsters have serial-killer names. At best, Yamada loosely implies that Gray, by making monsters, wanted to bring forth a real version of his hero-- which he did. Zebraman does avoid dying like the hero of the script, leaving him free to decide whether he will stay with his old family or choose the new one.                                                                                                                                                         ZEBRAMAN the manga is thus distinct enough from the film to be viewed as a separate work with its own themes, and a different orientation, hewing closer to the drama than to the film's ironic mythos. The series is definitely uneven, possibly because the author was sometimes making things up on the fly while trying to keep at least a loose connection to his source material. But it's one of the few adaptations of a contemporaneous work that seeks to strongly deviate from the source material, the only other precursor being the Robert Aldrich film of Mickey Spillane's KISS ME DEADLY.