As a plague spreads through the school, the students fight one another with their last dregs of strength! Will they choose a slow death from disease, or a violent death at the hands of their own classmates? Then, Sho and his friends must venture once more into the wasteland, where rusted ships lie beached forever in the desert that used to be the sea...
Kazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor. Starting his career in the 1950s, he is among the most famous artists of horror manga and has been vital for its development, considered the "god of horror manga". In 1960s shōjo manga like Reptilia, he broke the industry's conventions by combining the aesthetics of the commercial manga industry with gruesome visual imagery inspired by Japanese folktales, which created a boom of horror manga and influenced manga artists of following generations. He created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s. He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.
Man sho is a living saint this kid is always willing to help others even if it will cost him his life. So the kids survive the burning building but all of the school becomes infected with the plague. The sweet mother of sho helps her child once again by sending a plague vaccine to the future in the mummy body, its very touching seeing how much she loves her son. Half the school dies from the plague. But after half survives the pool is cracked and they lose all water. The kids start a journey looking for water, when finally the sky rains but its actually a flood and now they have to survive that, its like reading the bible seeing how many calamities these kids have to survive. 2021 Read.
This volume shifts gears to spend a lot of time with mom, who is still and endlessly and frantically trying to reach and take care of her son Sho . . though, and this is how batshit crazy this series is. . . she is doing this from the (near) past. The school, where all the kids and an apparently crazy lunchroom employee are now living and surviving against all odds, through some crazy explosion, blew into the future, where Japan is now some kind of wasteland, most people dead. The survivors are dwindling as Sho attempts to create some semblance of a "government" but they face a few challenges: A quickly dwindling food supply, bug monsters, one large motha bug monster, the Bubonic frickin' Plague, as this volume opens! And this is a bunch of elementary kids who also naturally turn on each other from time to time.
So theire biggest current challenge is the Plague, of course, though he finds a MUMMY (you heard that right) who conveniently has an identifying scar. In a fit of desperation Sho cries out to his mother--who lives in the past--and who apparently is the only person who can hear his cries. ... somehow.... and tells her to get penicillin and stash it inside said Mummy so in the future they will be able to find it and save whats left of their dwindling kid population.
You are imagining several narrative challenges to this scenario. Let them pass like the wind. But mother goes out with a neighborhood kid to look through her town for a guy with a scar (not YET dead, right!) and they do find him.... and he is one of Japan's most famous baseball players, who in a game, gets injured, dies, is embalmed (this is where the mum part comes in) as a national hero, is stuffed with the package of penicillin, which will be found by son Sho who will save the survivors.
I know: When I say it like that, it makes perfect sense, right?
But plague thwarted, it looks like good news happens, when it rains, so young plants they have planted can grow, but as is consistent with this series, the rain turns to a flood, yes, more bad things happen. Mushrooms seem to be popping up--are they edible? Are they the psychedelic ones author Umezu was obviously consuming as he wrote this crazy thing??!
This story is nuts, but it goes VERY fast, obviously, and is now, I think, kind of a COMIC horror comic series, and a fun ride.
This volume dealt with a plague, which was a pretty timely read considering the state of the world right now. I also love the way the story bridges the past and the future. Not time travel exactly, but something similar. One part I did find weird was when a famous baseball player dies in the present, and it's decided to mummify his body in order to honor him for the future. That seems a little odd. In any case this series never fails to entertain and I'm seeing why it's considered a manga classic.
My guts are killing me, I’m at work and in general I can’t be arsed to write one of my long reviews. As general impressions, I’m consistently surprised by, and I admire, this author’s ability to send his characters through an increasing succession of nightmares. He batters them endlessly, forcing them to rise to the occasion against the constant threat of death. If that’s a measure of how good a fictional story is, this series deserves five stars.
After the children managed to beat a supernatural monster in its various forms (a monster that curiously has no explanation according to the notion that the main characters simply got transported to the distant future, not to a fantasy world), they attempted to focus on how to secure water and food to survive. As they were thinking about how to pollinate the flowers when there are no insects, they find out that one of the children had fallen into the pool and was drowning in their very limited supply of water. After they move the kid to the infirmary, the story moved towards one of the main nightmares of isolated communities with very limited supplies: disease. He seems to have some sort of pulmonary disease, maybe pneumonia. There are no usable medicines in the school, so the protagonist and a few of his pals travel to where the ruins of the hospital ought to be. Everything they find crumbles to dust. However, in the basement, in what used to be the morgue, they find the mummified remains of a man. Curiously, this ends up being one of the most memorable characters of these two volumes. The children are terrified, fearing that this is going to become another supernatural threat. In the middle of it, I don’t recall exactly how, they figure out that what the diseased child has is not pneumonia, but the black plague. Fear of contagion spreads. The protagonist and his pals who had been in contact with the diseased child separate themselves from the rest of their friends, and when the knowledge about the situation spreads, the remaining children decide that it would be safer to simply exterminate everyone who might be infected. The protagonist and the other children suspicious of carrying the disease exile themselves. However, when they find out that the murderous group has gathered every kid they didn’t like in a building and are going to set it ablaze, the protagonist comes back to rescue them. In a very memorable, nightmarish sequence in which the children inside have to fight against the flames as well the rocks and spears that get thrown through the windows, the protagonist’s remaining friends use the mummy as a prop to terrify the murderous group, and as they scatter, rescue the other children from the burning building. However, this conveniently spreading plague has affected almost everybody, including the protagonist, and the kid (along with the author) resorts to the trump card that saved the day once in the past: pleading for help to his mother, who somehow is able listen to him thanks to her unexplained, and very convenient, supernatural powers. He demands of his poor mother to somehow send a bunch of plague medicine to the distant future without it getting destroyed along the way. They figure out that since the mummy survived the Apocalypse, although dead, the mother could stuff the plague medicine inside the unfortunate corpse.
The narrative focuses on the despairing, unrelenting mother’s plight. She’s an admirable character, the only one in the present who knows the schoolchildren didn’t die, but were transported to the distant future, and will fight against everybody to make sure her son survives. She gets banned from every pharmacy in town, and although she figures out how to secure the medicine from the local hospital, she finds out that the corpse that ended up becoming a mummy isn’t in the hospital morgue. Of course, there’s no reason why it would be there at that moment, unless the protagonist inhabits an apocalyptic future that happened mere decades after the school disappeared. If that future is set as far away as it seems, dozens of generations would have realistically passed from the mother’s present. In any case, the matter of the mummy becomes the most intriguing dilemma of these two volumes: she casually spots the man who would end up becoming a mummy, except that he happens to be alive. How would the mother manage to stuff a bunch of medicines inside a living man?
In the eyes of that unfortunate would-be corpse, the mother becomes a dangerous stalker. Thanks to the help of a classmate of the protagonist who hadn’t reached the school that original day when the school was sent to the future, the mother finds out that the future mummy is one of the most beloved baseball players of the area. During one of the matches, she witnesses him getting hit hard in the head and knocked out, enough so that he spends some time in a coma. To get legally sent to that same hospital, the woman cuts her own arm [...]
EDIT: I abandoned this review midway through at work some days ago, and now I can’t force myself to finish it. It’s not like it matters anyway.
Several volumes back in this series I was bothered that the elementary school students stranded in the future, their school building surrounded by a desert wasteland, were delighted to find they had a swimming pool full of water for their survival. What about chlorine? I wondered. How can Umezu ignore the chlorine issue.
Such concerns now strike me as petty. In this current installment, our hero Sho re-establishes the psychic link with his mother so that she can embed inside the corpse of a soon-to-be mummified baseball star the medicine the students need to combat the bubonic plague that threatens their existence. The mummy they happen to have found somewhere nearby in their future world.
So the whole chlorine thing no longer seems like such a big deal. I am curious still about certain behavioral traits of Sho's mom. During her single-minded pursuit to save her son, she gets punched several times in the face, although she is capable of giving as good as she gets. But are Japanese men and women so quick to slug one another? To get into the same hospital as the ailing baseball star she gashes her arm with a carving knife.
Meanwhile, the students who claim not to be suffering from Bubonic plague decide to burn down the building containing the stricken schoolmates. But the infection has spread everywhere and it is only the packet of medicine retrieved from the mummy's gut that saves the remaining students.
But with four pages of the book remaining, you know there is plenty of time for something really bad to happen. It does. The smoke from the fire, entering the cloud heavy atmosphere, combines with the celebratory group singing of the survivors to produce an effective rain dance and some much needed rain. Volume 6 ends with flash flooding and quicksand. But at least there is no chlorine in the rainwater.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
But seriously, these kids just can't get cut a break!
Just when something goes there way, what starts out as a blessing turns into nothing short of a nightmare. Sho & Sakiko are two amazing characters. Without them I think the students would have all perished straightaway.
Each book has left off on a cliffhanger of some sort, both a good and bad thing! Good for tension, bad if you don't have the next volume!
The plague continues to ravage it's way through the students, and all seems lost. Sho reaches into the past in hopes that his mother can save everyone.
The violence within this series isn't just confined to the future wasteland where the children are trapped. Apparently Japanese baseball fans can be pretty scary as several threaten to kill Sho's mother and try to crack her skull open with a beer bottle just for interfering with the game! YIKES!
In terms of character action and rendering, this is the most crude of the series so far. I think this style works well for the children and the wasteland but less for adults in the present timeline.
For Sho Takamatsu, it seemed to be an ordinary day of school like any other. In the aftermath of a sudden earthquake, his entire elementary school vanishes into thin air along with all the students and teachers that were trapped inside. The earthquake seemed to be so powerful that it caused a ripple in time, projecting the school into a dark and bleak wasteland where nothing but death, mutants and mind-breaking anomalies await. Sho takes on the role of the leader, trying to keep the other children safe from harm while searching for a way back home.
The Drifting Classroom takes things at a very slow pace. The horror elements don't even begin to seep in until several volumes into the series. While it starts off slow and does drag a bit in places, I think every volume is better than the previous. It took me a while to get into it but I really started to feel invested once I saw the bigger picture of what it was trying to portray.
While the dialogue and reactions of the characters seems a bit clunky and unrealistic at times, it's important to remember that many of the characters are extremely young elementary school students. Most of them haven't even learned how to talk properly let alone think themselves out of life or death situations. Watching children so young and vulnerable get thrown into one nightmare after the other led to some very intense chapters that didn't shy away from showing little kids being brutally murdered, eaten and smashed to pieces. It might not start out scary, but each volume escalates the horror, the violence and the stakes. As hundreds of children are driven mad with fear, hunger and isolation with no adults to care for them, it's only a matter of time until they begin to turn on each other as well. These kids can give the children in Lord of the Flies a run for their money once their minds start to break.
Some smaller things such as the art quality and the sometimes stagnant way the characters and their reactions are drawn feel off-putting and even a bit silly at times, but it's important to remember that this is one of the pioneers of horror manga, written all the way back in 1971. Devilman is another great manga that has some of the same issues. They're both great series, but you can tell they were written during the experimental phase of manga when they were just beginning to find their way into mainstream entertainment. Though certain aspects of The Drifting Classroom haven't aged that well, it was surprisingly ahead of its time in other ways. As the story progresses, it begins to tackle the themes of overindulgent consumerism, industrial pollution, and the greed of one generation causing major issues for the next generation. It goes into dark detail about how every little action we take that harms the planet hurts future generations of children far more than it hurts any of us.
Ketika wabah di sekolah sudah mulai parah dan menulari siswa-siswa di sana, Sho pun yang merasa putus asa langsung berteriak kepada ibunya. Ibunya yang berada di dimensi berbeda, ternyata dapat mendengar suara anak kesayangannya itu. Sho meminta obat penawar dari wabah yang mereka derita dan supaya dimasukkan ke dalam tubuh mumi yang ia temukan. Karena perasaan ibunya sangat kuat, lantas ia menuruti perkataan Sho, meskipun ia dianggap gila oleh orang-orang di sekitarnya.
Si ibu pun dengan susah payah mencari obat penawar dan mencari mumi yang dimaksud. Ternyata, mumi tersebut dulunya adalah pemain baseball terkenal dan mayatnya diawetkan karena dianggap sebagai pahlawan.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
The one thing holding me back from liking this series is the mix of realism and excessive ridiculousness. If this was all out craziness, I think I would be all in.
I was initially excited that a lot of this volume seems to focus on Sho's mother, but her section was the silliest and made me snort a couple times. I did really like ending couple pages, but this was definitely one of my least favorite volumes so far.
mum subplot is officially better than main story now "where are you going?" "i need to find a vaccine to stop the plague!" "you're the crazy one for giving up on your own children so easily! this is what i think of your memorial!" *throws carton of eggs at dead children memorial* sho's mum is the action-hero psychic neighbourhood sleuth mum we all deserve. all sorts of mummification in this volume (chortle)
Каждый раз я думаю, что уж там ещё можно придумать, как автор бросает детей в новую пучину проблем и катастроф. Я даже не знаю, что ещё можно будет придумать в следующих томах. А вообще, прекрасная альтернатива Голдингу.
Re-reading the series, and now that I'm not as impatient with the story when it flashes to the present time, I appreciate Sho's mother a lot more. She's wildly stubborn and emotional in ways that are often too much, but like Sho even though she isn't particularly smart her ability to make difficult decisions quickly and see them through no matter what is what ultimately saves the kids. I wish I could tell her that the stubborness Sho seems to have inherited from her is also what's allowed him to survive and saved his classmates many times.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Another volume that I read in one sitting. I'm glad the Plague has been vanquished; who would've thought all it would take would be Sho's enterprising mother burying streptomycin in a mummified baseball player?! Alas, with the end of the Plague comes the next threat: death by mud and flood.
Another installment in this incredible series. As I predicted, the status quo is beginning to shift here, as roughly half the population is wiped out by plague.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This is the 6th graphic novel in the series of an elementary school that is sent into the future. In this book, the students have to face plague, internal strife and drought. The story is progressing well and stays interesting.