Page 45 Review by Stephen
“If you’re experiencing hallucinations, take a dip in the tranquil, hidden Hot Springs of Nirvana.”
Which is itself a hallucination, albeit one of the least alarming here.
“Aishin Pharmaceuticals – making your dreams real with science.”
It’s a line that works because we are all such utter morons.
What’s real? What’s a drug-induced delirium? And what is but an insidiously hyper-realistic advertisement which lies through its shiny, corporate teeth?
With Koike’s crisply delineated figure work and expansive panoramas, coupled with imaginative, intricate and elaborate choreography, it’s often as impossible for us to tell as it is for his protagonists. This is especially true for young Cub who struts, stumbles or flails about from one grinning fix of Peter Pan to the next – or, preferably, something even more mind-blowing.
The scenes where Cub and his mate quite figuratively take off through the window, walls or roof of his flat are balletic – balletic! – for this is the sort of action-orientated, neo-classical draughtsmanship rarely seen from Japan (on these shores at least) outside of AKIRA’s Katsuhiro Otomo or TROPIC OF THE SEA’s Satoshi Kon. And Keichi Koike is giving us his all, every page rendered with such evident, unstinting relish
Welcome to a world where we have ditched our pints, Pims, wines and whiskies for jabs of other drugs, equally legal under most circumstances and given the socially acceptable thumbs-up through being served in pump bars by nattily dressed medical professionals with all the bar-tending pride, creativity and panache of a waist-coated mixologist. Ours has come up with a Nova Express.
Even so, there is a black market for everything; always an entrepreneur outside the system hustling something somewhere or other. Cub finds his on a park bench. Cue: Ultra Heaven,
It’s all going to get transcendental on his ass.
Oh yes, sorry, it’s not all pharmaceuticals. Some go for brain amplifiers like the Mantra IV.
“Open your chakras! Level Up Your Evolution! The Dawn of a New Human Race!”
Personally I recommend a walk in the countryside.
But it is public knowledge that I was once personally responsible for drinking the European Wine Lake dry. So I don’t have a leg to stand on, and certainly didn’t back then.
Bonus: includes some perfectly pert male buttocks. Mary Whitehouse would have loved those.
