"Swallowing The Earth"

Swallowing The Earth (Osamu Tezuka)

Apparently Tezuka is the "God of Manga", and here's a manga from him. And, uh, it's good. Like Promethea, I feel like I'm doing a disservice to explain too much of the plot, so the very broad outline is that the story kicks off with two soldiers looking for a mysterious woman named Zephirus who's up to no good, with our hero soon turning up in the shape of a drunk named Gohonmatsu Seki, who attempts to figure out what she's up to and maybe stop it in between getting drunk and unloading cargo down at the dock. There's a lot more to it than that;  at heart the book is an adventure story, although individual chapters can be at turns comedic, heartbreaking or - as the book goes on and synthetic skin shows up - skin-crawlingly creepy. The art's very nice, dating from back before manga became very stylized, with a more cartoony flavor to it. The only caveat I'd apply here is that there's a lot of nudity and violence - the book suggests readers over 16 - and that, having come out in Japan in 1968, there's some, um, dated depictions of South Seas islanders and American black people in the book. If you can look past this (or just read disclaimer about this issue, which is among the first things you see when opening the book), you shouldn't pass this up.

Grade: A