It is a sad fact of life that everything has to end sometime (except, apparently, for superhero comics).
And now, ever since Tenmaku Cinema, The Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins and Fabricant 100 have all ended, Shonen Jump has been kind of fumbling for new material.
I mean, God knows they’ve tried with this spate of new sports manga like Martial Master Asumi, Green Green Greens and Dogsred, but, deep down, some part of me has been hungering for something new and wild and kind of creepy.
Does anyone else have any fond memories of the Battle Royale manga written by Koushun Takami and illustrated by Masayuki Taguchi? Well, Taguchi also did this one really weird horror isekai where people were apparently sent to some other dimension and began to mutate into half-animal monsters and had to survive against the harsh wildlife and each other. It was called “Lives”. I’ve only read one volume, but it was so weird that it really stuck with me.
And now, apparently, it’s been reborn in the pages of today’s modern Jump as Rin Matsui’s new series “Dear Anemone”.
After the standard opening of a guy exploring an unknown island and getting killed by some seriously creepy Body Horror monsters, we cut to a year later, following high school student Gaku Hachiue on a ship in the Atlantic.
It turns out that the ship in question is ferrying 15 people to the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago that, due to being formed fairly recently, has had no contact with other lands in its early years, thus apparently leading all life on it to evolve independently of everything else in the world.
The more you know.
And did you know that the Galapagos were actually where Darwin first came up with his theory of evolution?
Well, apparently some tragedy occurred on the island a decade ago. Some sort of explosion that wiped out the entire population and soaked the island with all kinds of unknown chemicals and pathogens. Days before our story takes place, said virus and chemicals had apparently diffused enough to allow for humans to enter and investigate the island once more…if any of their special teams had ever made it back.
So Gaku and his 14 teammates are going to spend a month combing this island to try and rescue the missing research team, as well as receive a financial reward for doing so. But Gaku has his own reasons for coming: one of the missing team members was a friend of his from high school, a budding young biologist who taught him not to give up.
But a lot of good that lesson will do when you’re faced with a bird-gorilla capable of voice mimicry (with creepily disturbing humanoid teeth) and a chameleon whose camouflage powers are so advanced that it can literally shapeshift into a human being, maybe even one you know…And they’re both in an alliance to eat you.
And did I mention that they can tank machine gunfire, crush your rifle with their bare hands and can rip off your head with their freaking tongues?!
Yeah, it’s that kind of manga.
Think Toriko plopped right into the Gourmet World, or Gon plopped right onto the Dark Continent. Only they have no superpowers.
After a moment of indecisiveness, Gaku finds his grit and tries to fight one of the monsters to save a teammate. Naturally, this does not work; it merely forces the monster to change targets. But, in true manga/anime protagonist fashion, Gaku gets saved by an astonishing coincidence: some of his blood falls onto a nearby anemone flower, and it grows into an androgynous humanoid vine-creature that resembles Hisoka, killing the bird-gorilla creature and saving his life.
Now, I’m just a humble Midwestern data clerk, but I’m pretty sure real-life evolution is very different than that. To my understanding, it works more like this: Somewhere on Earth, a single giraffe is born with a slightly longer neck, which can help it reach the tree leaves better than its regular fellows. Elsewhere, somewhere else on Earth, another long-necked giraffe is born to another set of parents. Soon, more and more long-necked giraffes are being born, to the point where the short-necked giraffes have begun to go extinct and the long-necked giraffes have become the new norm.
By that logic, more of these monsters would theoretically be being born across the world.
But this is just me showing off my knowledge of stuff; I can suspend my disbelief a bit for the sake of coolness.
Not that the series is without its problems, of course. Early on, one person (a “Ryuichi Yashiki”) gets irate at the mysterious government backers for their lack of explanation, and, a few panels later, we see what appears to be that Ryuichi himself talking to Gaku and seeming to react to what he himself just said, as if he hadn’t been the one to say it.
And yes: my trying to understand that (after multiple readings) was as hard for me as reading that last sentence (and probably this one) was for you.
(Or so it would seem: on my fourth or fifth read through, AS I WROTE THIS VERY ARTICLE, I spotted the character’s finger pointing at Gaku, saying that [Gaku] was the one with “the eye of the tiger” who “snapped” and not, apparently, himself. Whether that was from my own obliviousness or a problem with crammed manga panels or something, I’ll let you decide.)
And, if there’s any motive to the government’s knowingly sending in unqualified people, fully expecting them to die (besides the typical sociopathic “wanting to see what will happen for the sake of curiosity/science), then I’m not getting it. They make some more talk about how cruel and beautiful evolution is, but that’s about as close as we get in the first chapter.
But, because this is only the first chapter, there are theoretically any number of ways that the story can evolve (if you’ll pardon the humor).
Perhaps it’s because, as I said, the vine creature resembles noted creep Hisoka, that it could be in a creepy “love” with Gaku for creating it. And is it male or female, or does it even matter because flowers can be both at once? Could it be ripening him up to eat (again much like Hisoka), or will it be more of a back-and-forth between two reluctant allies on this adventure?
Given what I know of anime and horror stories, I’ll wager that the Japanese government were the ones to cause the initial explosion on the Galapagos, and have plans to create more monsters to take over the world. The monsters may also actually be mutated human beings, one of which would likely turn out to be Gaku’s old friend, who he will have to tearfully kill for survival (“of the fittest”, if you’ll pardon a bit more humor).
But we will see soon enough, as the second chapter is just on the horizon.
Or, at least, I will. But I sincerely hope you will, too.
