Dragon Head

(Tokyopop, 2006)
™ and © 2006 Minetaro Mochizuki

Teru is an ordinary high-school kid returning from a class trip when the train derails inside a mountain tunnel. The accident kills almost everyone aboard except the injured Ako and increasingly disturbed class loser Nobuo. They’re sealed in with the corpses by rockslides and have to deal with subsequent violent earthquakes, a limited supply of food, water, and light, plus the growing realization that help is not on the way.

It’s a raw combination of Lord of the Flies and Lost, dropping realistic characters into a nightmarish but plausible situation. There’s page after page of blood and darkness where precious little seems to happen, but it’s told in a compelling fashion, especially Nobuo’s rapid descent into madness. He scuttles about in the dark like Gollum, preparing to settle old scores, as something in the dark seems to know him.

Anyone who’s sick of cookie-cutter genre manga should check out Dragon Head. I can’t begin to imagine where this one’s going (though it should be noted that there’s no guarantee anyone is going anywhere).

— S. A. Bennett

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