As I remarked in my review of Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Volume One, Asano hasn’t varied his formula much from Goodnight Punpun, with the exception that he’s stacking his preferred tropes early, and falling away from, rather than building towards, armageddon. Moreover, as he’s left the spiritualism more or less behind, this is a physical armageddon, albeit an anticlimactic one. While people die—the heroes’ friend Kiho in this volume—Tokyo’s human melancholy absorbs the inhuman whine of the monolithic alien spaceships which may eclipse the heavens and occupy the future, but are obscured by the indulgent angst of our jaded anti-heroes.
My main problem with Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is that, despite the alien invasion, there isn’t a single character with the depth or angst of Punpun, whose world was wrecked not by hovering spaceships, but by his unforgettable glimpse into a girl’s eyes. If one character in this manga saw the spaceships and had an internal crash that compared with the soul-wreckage that resulted from Punpun meeting Aiko, I might like it more. Not that I don’t like it at all, just that my appreciation of it is entirely intellectual, unlike Punpun, which struck many registers of meaning, not just the intellectual, but such a deep emotional level that finishing a volume left me emotionally exhausted.
DDDDD characters pretty much exist on the surface level, not talking and thinking so much as posting, as if they weren’t manga characters, but twitter bots peeping their banal ideas while self-conscious of the limitations of space required by a word balloon or a tweet. Like the talking heads in a Socratic dialogue, there’s the sense that they’re neither fleshed-out characters, nor simple mouthpieces for the author to get on the soapbox of his choice, but a collaborative collective of voices, a render machine which Asano assembled to get at the answer of Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, not unlike the mice’s computer replica of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Speaking of Hitchhiker’s, in my review of Volume One, I made some constructive allusions to The War of the Worlds, but while I was writing this review, I was struck by some parallels between Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction and Douglas Adams’s comedic science fiction masterpiece. Except while we fall to the tedious alien bureaucracy’s bypass in Hitchhiker’s, in DDDDD, the aliens fall to our mind-numbing banality, as if they’ve been bored to death in their hovering saucers. Whether they meant well, like the benevolent overlords of Childhood’s End, or are stocking their larder for their cookbook To Serve Man, it now seems that when they parked their saucers, their brains idled as well.
Not that humanity’s smarts are on display either, with the soldiers stumbling like Keystone Cops through the slums abandoned to the aliens, and killing by their scaredy-catlike reflexes what appears to be either childlike aliens or alien preschoolers. That said, they may very well be humanity’s best and brightest, with our heroes flunking their entrance exams and toying with their hots for teacher, and the human race setting their eyes not on the extraterrestrial war in Tokyo, but on their upcoming bid for the Olympic Games.
While I’ve waxed eloquent on Asano’s art, I don’t mind stopping once again to admire one of the most realistic comic artists currently working, who nonetheless possesses a sense for the Kirbyesque, in that he sees the comedy in raw power, the splendor and vitality of the mundane, the magnificence of ugliness, and the magic of scene. While Asano’s pages crackle with energy whether they depict spaceships or humans, and while the panels track effortlessly between the real and the surreal, I’ll have to say that I’m enjoying his slant on science fiction material, and looking forward to an extended sequence from the alien point of view. That said, I would like it a little more if the story could impact just one character as hard as Aiko did Punpun.
Viz Media sent the review copy.