La Zona Muerta

When I walked into the classroom, that shining day in 1989, she was there, waiting for me.

The one.

Well, maybe not THE one.

That would come later, of course, at a time where I was unprepared and from a direction I didn’t suspect. But for eleven year old me, smart, awkward, head full of imagined romance and imagined maturity, the girl that was, at that time, my pole star, was standing there, waiting for me… for me… with a gift.

She handed me a brown envelope, the springtime sun not half as bright as her hair or smile. “My dad saw these and gave them to me. I thought you might like them,” she grinned, handing me the envelope. It contained three comic books; it may as well have contained gold doubloons or a lost manuscript from Atlantis or fabled Lemuria. My nascent comic fandom, my nascent feelings; everything was engaged.

She was thinking of me.

I thanked her (hopefully) profusely and dashed away to examine what she gave me, wondering if the gift was just a gift (just? Was Casablanca just a movie? Was The Brothers Karamazov just a book?) or if it was something more.

The three comics contained within were certainly ME coded, if that term existed thirty seven years ago (it didn’t), as if she really HAD picked them out for me. The comics were the following:

Issue the first: Batman #420. The final part of “Ten Nights of the Beast,” a Cold War era thriller where the Darknight Detective takes on the KGBeast, a Russian assassin sent to kill ten key members of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, including President Ronald Reagan. The climax sees Batman do something VERY unBatman-like to resolve the story, but I had not read enough Batman comics yet to have that opinion. I believe this was after the revelation I had received over reading Batman: A Death in the Family, as chronicled elsewhere on this site (please click on the comix tag at the bottom of this column for other journeys into panels), but time and memory makes fools of us all; I can’t quite be sure.

Issue the second: The Masters of the Universe motion picture adaptation. I loved this thing, not because I loved the movie so much (it’s alright) but because, for the most part, either by editorial fiat, a skirmish with rights issues or by the simple reality of a deadline, the Masters characters have their actual costumes and looks (I think maybe Beast Man looks like the crummy movie version, but everyone else looks like the characters we all grew up with since 1982).

And finally, the most important component to this little missive.

Issue the third: Area 88 #2.

What the hell was this thing? There were jets rendered with grim realism, people either drawn as pure cartoons or with fashion show beauty, sandy dunes and endless skies.

In the primitive past we call 1989, you have to realize something. American kids, for the most part (unless you happened to have had overseas experience, happened to be a Sci Fi kid exposed to early fandom culture or maybe happened to live in an area with an extensive Asian population), had no idea what “manga” was. It certainly WASN’T the ubiquitous thing it is here and across the world today. We had anime, sure, but back then, it was called “Japanimation,” and it was often relegated to syndicated cartoon packages or exiled at the video store to either the kids’ section or the dodgy spot next to the area of the store segregated by the grotty curtain that held it’s OWN aura of mystery.

I HAD been exposed to manga before, but solely because I lived in a Pacific Rim adjacent state and had a teacher who had travelled to Japan and brought us back comics and seaweed snacks. Most of us didn’t know the term “manga,” that’s for sure, but I knew (to some extent) that there were Japanese comics. I didn’t know that I could have been buying them whenever I wanted at my local Books Kinokuniya, a place that would certainly loom large later in my life. I didn’t know my library had a copy of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics waiting for me to discover the translated vistas within. I didn’t know anything over than Japanese cartoons like Robotech and Voltron and Speed Racer and Transzor Z. Those all had their merits and drawbacks, of course. None of those things were a “pure” Japanese experience.

In 1988, Eclipse Comics, partnering with what would become the pioneering Studio Proteus, and Viz, then (and still) one of the biggest publishers of manga in Japan, aimed to change all that for people with interest in comics by preparing a three pronged attack on the American direct comics market; affordable manga reprints, reformatted from left to right as to not offend Western reading sensibilities, translated to the best of their ability.

The three choices for the first wave of American manga were:

Mai the Psychic Girl, a coming of age story (with psychic powers, ‘natch) which hewed closer to the cinematic world of gekiga manga, more serious than typical children’s manga. Picked because it was relatively short and contained, and judged as “not too Japanese.” Okay.

The Legend of Kamui, DEFINITELY a moody, dark gekiga, featuring ninjas and samurai doing battle in the feudal Edo period of Japan. Seems AGGRESSIVELY Japanese to ME, but, uh, ninjas, I guess?

And finally, there was Area 88, a post Vietnam action / romance story about a conscripted Japanese pilot, Shin Kazama, forced to become a mercenary in a faraway land where he has to kill in order to buy back his freedom. This seemed like a gamble; too pretty to attract hardcore gear heads who bought comics like the ‘Nam and Punisher, too violent for kids or adults looking for something more down to Earth.

And issue two of this potent, peculiar mixture was in my hot, little hands, given to me by my close childhood friend and crush.

You can damn well bet I read this thing cover to cover no less than one thousand times.

The issue starts with a brief explanation of the storytelling engine the book revolves around. When the explanations are out of the way, the story kicks off with Kazama and his friend, American mercenary Mick(ey) Simon, commiserating about a mysterious pilot who sleeps with his lights on, known to be something of a jinx around the base, a man only known as “Boris.” It seems Boris has been the sole survivor of several different combat missions, and the mercenaries at Area 88 give him a wide berth. A squad containing Kazama and Boris are made to sortie against an enemy supply depot armed with a deadly defense called “the Fang,” something I can only describe as a sort of explosively launched swinging scaffolding or fence made specifically to destroy enemy aircraft; the comic is a bit unclear as to what it is exactly. Kazama and Boris only survive the launch of the Fang because, as the dialogue tells us, “of all the combat planes in the world, only the F8E Crusader,” lovingly rendered, of course, with every bolt, plate and buckle drawn in excruciating detail, “can fly with it’s wings folded.” They somehow manage to fly through the swinging labyrinth of the Fang, wings folded, and successfully destroy the depot but upon their escape, enemy aircraft get the drop on them. Mick Simon appears in the nick of time from high above and shoots down the enemies before they can get to Kazama and Boris. The three survivors celebrate and talk about the “prize” money they are due for the successful sortie, but Boris tells them the money will have to be split only two ways. Mick and Kazama jump to the conclusion that Boris is an asshole unwilling to share the proceeds, but he laughs at them, coughing up blood. He (and his plane) copped a packet during the sortie; he won’t be making it back to the relative safety of Area 88. Kazama begs Boris to pull up as his plane begins to nosedive in a tail spin, and Boris simply asks Kazama to turn the lights off in his room, since now he no longer will have to suffer from seeing his the faces of his dead friends in the dark. His survivor’s guilt is at an end.

A bit dark, eh?

I was smitten, and not just because of who gave me the comic.

Conscripted Japanese Shin Kazama, forced to confront death and his own mortality again and again in the burning, endless skies over Area 88. My level best attempt at trying to ape Shintani Karou, and BELIEVE me, it wasn’t easy. The reason the figures sometimes look so beautiful and effeminate? Shintani-sensei really DID work on shojo manga (manga specifically for girls) as a young man

It’s not really into the scope of this article to go into the problems between Eclipse Comics, the translation / packaging folks at Studio Proteus, and Viz would eventually fall out over… suffice to say that at one point, while the manga reprints were a mild success, Studio Proteus asked to look at the accounting books and discovered they were being underpaid for their work in packaging and translating the books. Studio Proteus then severed ties with Eclipse. Viz decided to publish Area 88 in America themselves, first as a monthly comic, and then in the pages of their anime / manga magazine, Animerica, before suspending publication of Area 88 completely. Area 88 went on hiatus… and never came back.

The reprinting of manga in America exactly as they appeared in Japan, as the small and slim budget volumes known as tankobon was YEARS away and Area 88, a publishing victim of being a popular but slow moving comic, fell prey to being too early of a pioneer, as interest dried up with the shift from format to format to format. It remains incomplete in collected form in America to this day, despite there being two successful anime projects (the 1985 OVA series actually being available more or less concurrently with the Eclipse run of the comic, so at least you could get SOME sort of closure even if the OVA has a different, more ambiguous finale than the manga), a video game that most of you reading this have probably played if you grew up with a Super Nintendo in your house (remember U.N. Squadron? That’s a rebadged Area 88 game, chief, and there are minimal regional changes to it) and a series of popular model kits in Japan. This wasn’t the most popular manga of all time or anything, but it lasted for 22 volumes, from 1979 to 1986, and it’s fondly remembered by those who grew up with it.

The book itself is very soap opera-ish; later issues will find Kazama’s fiance being forced to marry a rival pilot, who just happens to be the man who got Kazama drafted into a foreign war. There will also be her attempts to find Kazama’s true fate. There are stunningly realistic depictions of war, death, duty, PTSD (before that term had entered common parlance) and a lot more existential angst than any standard twenty two page superhero comic would tend to have. The cartooning is never less than good and is occasionally excellent; the men and women often drawn in something nearing a shojo style, with beautifully effeminate figures for both men and women, and again, just the most aggressively realistically rendered hardware. It’s a bit slow paced, but that’s more a function of the differences between manga storytelling and Western comics.

This comic stirred something within me, a hunger that continues until this day. I did eventually read Manga! Manga! and discovered that manga ranged from the most infantile gag comics to the most intense, daring and dramatic cinematic stories, and all points in between. Viz (and others) would eventually crack the code of manga reprinting and by the year 2000, every bookstore had an EXTENSIVE manga section (even if there was a bit of a boom and bust in that field; the market grew too fast and almost didn’t survive the contraction and correction). Manga now dwarfs Western comics; kids today probably are more immediately familiar with One Piece than they are Superman or Spider-Man.

My manga journey, my anime journey, my tokusatsu journey, my puroresu journey, my Japanese literature journey, my dabbling and meandering journey in learning (very, very little of) the Japanese language… you can point all of those things to this comic and the spring morning in fifth grade when a blonde haired girl who I followed like a puppy dog handed me a thoughtful gift. I haven’t seen her in twenty something years; I hope she’s doing great. She still has a copy of the Wizard of Oz we (we meaning me and my ACTUAL “the one,” so don’t cry for ME, Argentina) leant her the last time we saw her, DVD now making it easy to do the dumb thing where you sync the film up with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (yes, it sorta works. If you squint). I doubt I ever introduced her to anything that had as profound of an effect on her life that she inadvertently did on mine, but she did (clandestinely) enjoy dorky things, and she and I would commiserate for hours over our love of music, role playing games and board games like Talisman, so hopefully she still has room in her heart for the things we enjoyed while we were crafting our various juvenalia.

Here’s to the childhood crush, the first steps you took into the obsessions that would eventually carry you into adulthood, and to the endless skies.

And now here’s Captain Kangaroo, Candice Bergen and the cast of Newhart to tell you: If you enjoyed this article and learning about Area 88, while the Library of Congress won’t be of much help, unless you REALLY want to track down that issue of Animerica you’re missing, you can visit https://area88.strobez.ca/ for more Area 88 info than you can shake a dead pilot at.

WHERE ARE OUR HARD BOUND DELUXE VOLUMES REPRINTING THE ENTIRE AREA 88 SAGA, VIZ? PRINCE SAKI DEMANDS IT.