Supersonic Angel Engine

Author: Motoni Modoru
Imprint: Asuka DX
Publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
ISBN: vol. 1: 4-04-853235-9;
vol 2: 4-04-853328-2

Reviewed by Jeanne

You know how it is with kids, right? One of them gets a cold or pinkeye, they all get a cold or pinkeye, and what are you gonna do about it, huh? And you know how it is with mangaka, right? One of them starts drawing angels and demons, they all gotta start drawing angels and demons. One of them starts drawing evil angels who hunt demons, they all gotta draw evil angels who hunt demons. And what are you gonna do about it, huh?

So here we have Motoni Modoru taking on angels-- evil angels who hunt demons. The settei is laid out nice and clearly on the first page. 'In this world there are humans and angels and demons. There are more humans than angels, and more angels than demons. Because the demons get hunted down.' Of course, we seem to be looking at a demon who's attacking an angel, but that's for laters. First we have to get through a middle-aged angel like the principal in Rika strangling a teenaged female demon in the middle of sex, who actually dies of it, engorged face and protruding tongue and all, cause oops she wasn't a demon she really was a human like she kept saying she was. This is three pages into vol 1, and at that point I lost sympathy for Motoni.

I'd been feeling sorry for her, you see, because she has to draw Rika, and if translating Rika is anything to go by, drawing Rika is as much fun as a splinter in your foot. I'd been sympathetic to her desire to drop the BBG series in order to go off and do something cheerfully rambunctious about (as the cover of vol 1 says, under the dustjacket) 'school, angels, demons, humans, vomit, bloodshed, dissection, disorder, shape-shifting, wings, passion, violence, hope, love, death'-- and the kitchen sink, presumably. Well hell, I thought, if she's going to draw middle-aged angels murdering teenaged humans, she could just as well have gone on drawing Rika, cause there isn't that much difference. Occurred to me later to check the issue dates on the episodes. And indeed, ep 1 came out the same month as Rika was betraying Anji to Miyamae. Drawing Rika really is bad for the soul.

Having finished the first two volumes, I must conclude that the worst thing about Rika for Motoni was the fact that she couldn't let go with the violence. It had to be carefully controlled and kept under wraps, with a corner lifted now and then on the hideousness to achieve the maximum impact. Supersonic Angel Engine is Motoni letting go. The pages are littered with bodies and awash in gore. People are stabbed and kicked and dismembered and mutilated in great vivid black and white arcs of action that sprawl across the width of both pages. I hope it's all made her feel better, because it sure doesn't do an awful lot for me.

More detailed discussion and spoilers below

In this world the angels and the demons are undercover, pretending to be human. They look like school kids and act like school kids and wear uniforms like school kids, and no wonder they're so violent. Angels ijime humans; angels ijime demons; demons decapitate angels and drink the blood from their necks. You get to see all of this happening. The angels, in best Angel Sanctuary tradition, commit genocide on the demons. We get to see our main demon, Renji's, family hacked to bits when he was a kid. (Renji's the blond with the crazy expression.) They slaughter the all-demon boy's date-club and its human owner, just to make a point. They kick a female demon to death- or maybe she was human after all, and does it matter? The angels can tell a demon because demons stink, and the angels say so endlessly, making for some unpleasant subtextual references to our own happy history of racism. And of course, they discriminate among themselves. Our angel hero, Sumire (the brunette who hangs out with the crazy blond), is a different kind of angel from the others, and not just because he has a demon as his best friend. Something unusual about his birth that means the other angels have it in for him- and in this world almost everyone, it seems, is an angel. Unless they're a demon, and then they have it in for Sumire too. Who can you trust? Nobody. Your best demon buddy is insane and tries to throw you off a balcony for leaving the tap running when you brush your teeth. You may decide for yourself whether all this strikes you as black humour, or simply black.

Demon Renji is peculiar as well. He doesn't smell, and at times he drops black feathers here and there. Demons don't have wings, but Renji does indeed have prototypic wings of his own. Which by me makes it kind of pointless for him to cut off Sumire's wing early on so that, as he says, the two of them can be the same at last and thus become best buddies. (Wing envy, I tell you, it gets you every time. Unless the whole thing is a take-off of Seimaden, which is also a possibility. See below.) But Sumire seems to agree with Renji. Certainly, he doesn't spend much time lamenting his lost wing. Just goes off to dinner at Denny's, leaning on Renji's shoulder while bleeding softly. Lots of castration imagery in SSAE, by the way, among the more blatant nastinesses. There's an angel, Karen Juri, who first appears as a long- haired beauty in a fur collared coat. The human boy whose eyes we're occasionally forced to see through thinks he's Michael Bird, the hero of the latest video game, come to save him from ijime. He isn't. He's come to use bullied boy as a decoy to catch Renji. Our heroes take exception to this behaviour, beat the crap out of Renji, shave his head, and call him Baldy thereafter. They then go off to dinner at Denny's leaving their purported human friend still tied up and bleeding from his ijime and calling after them, begging for help. I'm a little bemused at the notion that this may be intended to be funny. It's pretty revolting taken at face value.

Comes the question, should you take it at face value?

Gotta say, it's hard not to. The surface of SSAE is so unignorable. The artwork shrieks at you. The violence is in your face. It feels like Rika gone berserk, and if you find Rika hard to take, I'd say don't go near this one. You get all the Rika thud-in-the-guts nastiness without the sense of there being a *reason* why we're seeing this happen-- none of the narrative artistry which was what made Rika both bearable and fascinating. SSAE's 'plotting' seems always secondary to the presentation of violent images. For example, volume two gives you a lot of visual unpleasantness involving odd appendages coming out of and going into people, and then it's sort of explained by the existence of a secret society with a secret scientific project that's designed (maybe) to turn humans into angels or possibly bees, and turn angels into super angels (maybe), using angel body parts and/or demon secretions (maybe). The explanation is murky and confusing, the graphics **RIGHT THERE** staring you in the face. Motoni, let it be said, is never one for obvious narration. You gotta work to figure out what's happening in her manga. Sometimes- Rika and Aoneko- the story repays close study. Sometimes- Koi ga bokura wo...- it doesn't. My gut reaction is that this is the latter case. If there's meaning hiding under the out-of-control artstyle and the out-of-control violence of SSAE, it's hiding pretty damned well.

And yet, and yet, as Shiki said...

You know how it is with mangaka. One of them starts doing riffs on role-playing games, they all gotta do riffs on RPGs. Motoni is no exception, as you might have guessed from the series' very title. And she isn't the first mangaka I suspect of having imported the bloody and amoral ethos of RPGs whole-hog into her manga, presenting it realistically and up close and asking her readers How do you like your boss fight now, huh? You cut through that guy with your light saber, you got guts on the floor and blood on the walls and the sweet stink of burning meat. Neat, yes or no? (Of course, I also don't know if mangaka present unreal violence realistically for the sake of making this moral and didactic point. Could be they just want to draw the invigorating violence of an RPG in their own fashion.) In any case, most of volume two is a real-life RPG carried out in a labyrinth at the school, with our two heroes berating Baldy at every turn for not knowing the first thing about gaming. He has my sympathies. Neither do I, and it makes for confusing reading when you can't spot obvious visual and verbal clues. Is this brilliant parody or is it just dreary gag? Who knows?

Incidentally, Juri's symbolic castration has had the effect of turning him into an Anji clone whose position as head of the student council is in danger (along with his life.) In this topsy-turvy world, he thus becomes an ally of sorts to the demented main characters. Like Anji, we still don't know whose side he's on at book's end-- but he does a rather good job of stealing the series from the purported protagonists, who're looking more and more like mere Devices by comparison.

Devices for cultural injokes, mostly. On top of the RPG riffs, the guys keep making running references to various 80's anime, which are as much over my head as the RPG tropes. I've heard of some of them- Time Bokken, for instance- but I didn't get the point of the joke, if there was one. I assume all the overdone mugging and reaction shots have something to do with the content of the anime, too- unless they're an in-joke reference to something else entirely. There are few things more frustrating than trying to understand a work that runs off of genres you know nothing about. That SSAE does it constantly is one factor that makes the series uncongenial to a western reader.

However. SSAE has one reference to something I do know, Hissatsu Shigotonin, because that's not an anime but a famous jidaigeki series. Set in late Edo, about a bunch of mostly lower class types who are potters or metalworkers or bumbling low-ranked policemen by day and deadly assassins at night. The point is that they're democratic assassins. When the common folk have their kin murdered by arrogant samurai officials or untouchable yakuza, they can hire a hissatsu shigotonin (secret-slaughter work-person) with the little pittance they can afford, and the shigotonin will take out the badnasties to the strains of a rather neat flamenco guitar. Here- Renji has a pal, a demon mangaka called Iida, who seems to have some idea of what it is that makes Sumire different. We first see him (hear him, actually) on a condolence visit to the parents of a demon boy killed by angels, who are saying 'The police are calling it an accident but we know it wasn't.' Story segues off into other things- mangaka meets Sumire and Renji, and we get into the demon date-club and Yao the pathological angel client of same, and Yao about to take Renji out after a number of plot twists. And suddenly there's Iida sending a nasty weighted metal slingshot through Yao's head. Mission accomplished, he says, and then makes arrangements to dispose of the body ('You can have the wings, I'll take the rest of him yum yum.') Sumire is appalled at Iida's business sideline- angel corpse recycling- but Renji sets him straight. 'Iida's sideline is revenging powerless demons- in short, he's a hissatsu shigotonin.' And we see the boy's parents standing at a distance with the mother crying happily into her handkerchief.

The whole Iida story is pretty violent and hard to take, but put it into the context of the fantasy chanbara violence of Hissatsu and it looks immensely lighter. Hell, I watched people get garrotted and sliced up and have sharpened hair ornaments thrust through their necks every Tuesday evening for half a decade, and never felt a bit the worse for it. For all I know the other cultural references in SSAE have the same effect- reducing Motoni's visual horrors to the level of unreal RPG graphics or stylized anime violence. The whole thing could be one grand send-up of various genres and tropes. (Groaning- those demonic angels.) But that's if you can both read the Japanese and get the point of it. For poor picture readers, especially those with weak stomachs- enh, I'd give this one a miss.