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Curated by: Obscurities in Miniature (283 videos)
Umezu is an artist I always stumbled across but never paid much attention. I remember seeing his Makoto- chan books all over the place and the author himself seemed to pop up quite often on TV in the 90s and early 2000s. The work that always seemed to get brought up about him was his series "The Drifting Classroom." It always sounded like my kind of story too- a bunch of kids end up stuck in a desolate wasteland and have to fend for themselves against all sorts of weirdness. When I saw that Viz was reprinting the series in big fat collections, I knew it was time to finally sit down with the books. Turns out Sparkletrout told me he had a set of the original translations from a few years back. Could've saved me some money there. Whoops. Anyways, each book clocks in around seven or eight hundred pages. You'll definitely get a good chunk of story out of them! Like many of Umezu's books there's all sorts of wanton violence and deplorable events occurring. There's monsters, mutants, dinosaurs(?), and assorted weirdness on display. That everything occurs to a bunch of children is something I don't think you'd see these days. Many of the kids don't survive, and while it does end on a positive note... I'm not going to spoil it for you, and it's fully in line with how the series progresses. There is very much an undercurrent of environmentalism and anti- consumerism that bubbles just below the surface of the story, but being kids, most of the major characters don't really focus on this, but it's certainly there. Funny how much some of the themes still resonate a good forty some odd years later! I got my copy on Amazon a while back. Get them before scalpers start jacking the prices up to stupid levels! https://amzn.to/3E5rNXu