Dragon Head by Minetaro Mochizuki

 Sorry, can't hear you I'm eating Corn Nuts *CRUNCH* *CRUNCH*



Dragon Head by Minetaro Mochizuki 

Art and story (c)

Minetaro Mochizuki

Genre: Survival, Sienen, Horror
Length: 10 Volumes – 89 Chapters


          The art is mainly realistic, as such it can be a little bracing at times, especially if the last thing you read was more shojo oriented. Still, Dragon Head has a practiced look and there isn't a lot to complain about. Its really the details that get in the way sometimes. At certain points, I felt like I
understood how stressed and worn out the characters were with out so much dirt on their faces or extra bags under their eyes. I mean, art like this can be hard to look at normally, but adding even more "ugly" on top of it doesn't make it any more palatable. The action isn't always easy to follow, either. I know this sounds really negative, and if you look at it you can understand what I mean when I say, I can't really describe the good parts beyond 'it is professional.' Take my word for it, the art is the best part of this if you can stand this more realistic style.
           When a bullet train derails in a tunnel, a single student finds himself alive amid all the corpses of his classmates. What caused the crash, he doesn't know, but he does know he's trapped in the darkness. Can anyone else have survived? Can he survive enough to be rescued? Or will he have to find his own way out before the darkness drives him mad?
           So, do you want to read a manga that’s a lot of philosophizing and pondering about human nature and then, at the end, gives no no answers but just rambles on about the same things it did in the first volume? Yeah, me neither, but I found one anyway. In my defense, the beginning is actually pretty interesting. Dragon Head, though it pulls you along with page turning, intense and engrossing situations, is equally bogged down by pages of exposition about human nature and what disasters do to society. The first few volumes, this balance isn't annoying or slowing, because, as the plot goes, the main character is stuck in a dark tunnel with no idea of why or how and the panic creeps in but when the situation changes, the conversations don't change. Then, instead of giving some sort of concrete answer at the end of things you just have to cobble together all the long winded things you've heard over ten volumes, and even then its shaky whether you really

understand anything at all, let alone the reason you had to slog through it. To pull a Dragon Head and repeat myself in slightly different wording, this manga is just such a long read of the same types of things happening again and again, I can't really say I enjoyed it now that I'm at the end. The look into teenagers trying to survive and understand something like a natural disaster starts out with promise, too, looking at madness and injury and how desperation never fades, but, after a while, things just get more muddled. There's some sort of side plot of people being fed drugs that get rid of fear, but why that was introduced is a mystery to me because it only makes things more confusing. And believe me, I am very confused, still, and have a lot of questions. How do those stitch headed people fit into the disaster? How much of the disaster was actually man made? What the hell did I just read and why did I spend so much time doing so? These answers cannot be answered, and I refuse to spend hours reading Dragon Head again just to try to make sense of some of it. This manga needed to dig a little deeper or at least give some sort of closure, instead of ending so swiftly. I was disappointed by this, to say the least, but as far as a natural disaster story goes, there is a lot of interesting things brought up, especially in the beginning. There is a bit of Japanese geography in it, too, that may have made things a little more confusing, but not much. A less clunky translation may have helped, too, but it was also only a minor problem. I have mixed feelings about how to rate this manga because of how much liked the beginning and how much I hated the ending. If this had ended around the third of fourth volume, as impossible as that would have been, I think I could have given it a three or four, but as it stands...



2/5 Confusing, but with an interesting start.