While The Comics Journal calls Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Volume 1 an “antic comedy,” and cites Asano’s interview which calls the manga an “attempted diversion from reality,” in the story that we have in front of us, the science fiction is not only over the top, it’s a grotesque intrusion in a slice of life / coming of age manga, as if the Author is using science fiction only as an arrow to direct the reader’s attention toward serious contemporary themes. The comedy is more a part of the backdrop than the plot and the action, so that while the tragicomic apocalypse unfolds, the heroine deals with the disappearance of her father–an uncertain deletion which is never coded as death or abandonment–as well as the assertion of her teenage sexuality, so that she is herself becoming an uncertain double being that wants to do what is right while feeling it is right to do as she wants.
So what we have at the core of Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction V1 is not unlike Goodnight Punpun, another dream-wrecking arc of desire launched from childhood, if with the additional vectors applied by a teenage, space-age dread. Unlike many teens in the throes of a mid-Millenial crisis, Kadode Koyama’s existential dread is mirrored by the catastrophe science fiction trope of hovering UFOs. But does the (sur-)real dread of alien spaceships shadowing her city trivialize her teenage angst or better dramatize it, by providing an absurd and tragicomic contrast?
Not that these are the paternalistic aliens of Childhood’s End, but the creepy alt-right voyeur aliens of 2018, a floating stockpile of possibilities impending over humanity, symbolizing nothing other than the weaponized dread of life in the modern world, as if the shadow of the gun-loving U.S.A. clouds Japan. In harkening back to sinister and silent aliens uninterested in communication, Asano seems to borrow from H.G. Wells.
Like Wells in The War of the Worlds, Inio Asano is quick to depict the alien arrival’s sublime terrors inspire human evil, but with a post-postmodern shift of the focus to banal inconveniences and temptations. Whereas Wells shows how an alien invasion would bring out, in riots and looting, the worst that humanity has to offer, Asano shows how an alien invasion would bring out the tendency of people to torment themselves with doubt and dread. While Kadode’s father vanished in the apocalypse, her current preoccupation is with fanning the titillation of her teacher and doing her best not to think about the possibility of going to college. And when Kadode leaves her teacher’s house with her virginity intact–mainly through the integrity of her teacher–Ontan shouts at her, “Are you OK with that…you moron?”, then goes on to pummel her with repeated shouts of “dummy!”, then, at the bottom of a two page spread depicting the largest image of the UFO so far, hugs Kadode.
Kadode’s tiny smile in the shadow of not only the UFO but Oran’s vast disappointment tells us that she rejects her friend’s equation of the imminent threat of apocalypse with a no-consequence lifestyle. Ontan’s tantrum not only demonstrates Kadode’s significance to her friend, it charges her own life with personal meaning. In that embrace, as well as in her impulsive hug of her teacher earlier that day, Kadode has a taste of what she is living for–not the momentary satisfaction of the sexual impulse, but in her attraction to life. “What would you do if you could fly?” asks the teacher, to which Kadode answers, “I’d fly straight to Ontan!” “My memories of today will help me get through life!” Though the aliens hit the pause button on the apocalypse to savor our sweat; though Kadode feels her life is not only on hold but trivialized by the threat of extinction; and though her own father is presumed missing in an early act of alien terror; Kadode and Oran treat the end of the universe as their rite of passage to mine for artifacts of personal meaning that would not only not survive the apocalypse, but would likely not survive their banal lives.
While there is no doubt that Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is intellectually provocative, raising many more questions from the get-go than Goodnight Punpun due to its intersection of slice of life and science fiction, and while the characters are well-drawn, I can’t help but wonder if the No Author / No God represented by the aliens and accepted by Kadode will give Asano as much mileage as the Author / God created by Punpun in a savage assertion of personal meaning. While Goodnight Punpun shows us the powers and limits of creative nihilism for an ordinary person to shape a far from ordinary life, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction’s aliens are a negation of nearly eschatological power, if not ending the world, then destroying meaning, and leaving only the transactional paths navigated by desire. While Kadode clings to her life-wish, that spark marks a closed circuit between herself and Oran, outside of which is the Apocalypse, which to them is not a future event but the present annihilation of meaning. While Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is a charged narrative with emotional weight, Asano has already used his best trick—symbolically ending the world—in its opening act, unlike Punpun, which he sustained for seven volumes before Punpun and Pegasus were at last on that existential precipice.
Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is on shelves now, or you can order it through Viz Media.
Viz Media sent the review copy.
