Review, Jirō Taniguchi memorial edition: Icaro

When Stan Lee died in November last year, I was reminded of Silver Surfer: Parable again, his collaboration with Mœbius. Another collaboration of similar titanic proportions was Ikaru/Icaro/Ikarus by Mœbius and Jirō Taniguchi.

Ikarus (イカル / Ikaru, English title Icaro)
Language: German (originally Japanese)
Authors: Mœbius, Jean Annestay, Jirō Taniguchi
Publisher: Schreiber & Leser (originally Kōdansha / Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha)
Year: 2016 (original run 1997)
Number of volumes: 1
Pages: 284
Price: € 24,95
Website: https://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=1169
ISBN: 978-3-946337-06-5

One memorable line of dialogue in this manga is: “Often the most brilliant ideas are bigger than the man who conceived them. And they can be no longer controlled.”

Who knows, maybe Mœbius thought the same way about Ikaru. According to the interview included in this edition, Mœbius created the initial concept, then wrote a script together with Jean Annestay. As with some others of his comic projects, Mœbius didn’t have time to draw it himself, and in this case he wanted this story to be drawn by Jirō Taniguchi. Taniguchi, however, heavily re-wrote and above all radically shortened the script. Furthermore, the magazine serialisation in Morning was not popular enough with the readers to warrant a continuation, so that instead of the 10.000 pages written by Mœbius and Annestay, these less than 300 pages is everything that has ever been drawn of Ikaru.

The premise is simple and striking: in the near future, a child is born with the ability to levitate and fly through the air. The Japanese government takes the boy away from his mother and locks him up in a remote research facility to study (and ultimately weaponise) him. Twenty years later, Icaro, as he is named, rebels and breaks out of his captivity.

Ikaru could have been (and to some extent is) a fascinating science fiction mystery thriller, with great moments of psychologisation associated with the ‘Kaspar Hauser’ motif of a child growing up in isolation. However, Taniguchi didn’t cut enough from the original script so that the manga is bogged down with unnecessary subplots, such as a rebellion of supernaturally powered clones, or the lesbian relationship of the villainous minister of defence.

There is a lot of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira in Ikaru (even though Mœbius downplays this in the interview), from the theme of the child with mysterious powers that is experimented on – reminiscent of Tetsuo, Akira, and the ‘numbers’ who also depend on a regularly administered drug – to the depiction of the clones’ psychokinetic powers. Ikaru also shows Taniguchi excel as a draughtsman with subjects not commonly depicted in his other works. The highlights of the art in this manga are the backgounds that show Icaro’s prison, which looks like a huge old greenhouse, and the scenes in which soldiers try to entangle the fleeing Icaro in ropes.

One more particularly clever little scene needs to be pointed out: in the beginning, one of the scientists is told on the phone that a levitating child has been born. The next panel shows him wide-eyed and speechless holding the phone. The panel after that shows him in the same way (from a slightly different angle), but the whole panel is turned upside-down! Then the phone call continues depicted in the usual orientation. This one panel could be interpreted in many different ways, e.g. that the scientist’s world has just been turned ‘upside-down’ through this discovery, or that ‘up’ and ‘down’ are relative directions for someone who can fly.

Within Taniguchi’s oeuvre, Ikaru takes an odd place as it was made in 1997 in between two masterpieces that defined his style: Chichi no koyomi (1994) and A Distant Neighborhood (1998). Both of these are semi-autobiographical, so a science fiction story like Ikaru, at this time in Taniguchi’s career, seems like a throwback to the 1980s when he made Ice Age Chronicle of the Earth, and if I’m not mistaken, he never took on another science fiction project after Ikaru.

So is Ikaru required reading for the Taniguchi enthusiast? On the one hand, it is certainly interesting and relevant given the circumstances of its creation – the rather peculiar nature of this French-Japanese collaboration – as Taniguchi is often said to have been strongly influenced by French comics in general and Mœbius in particular, and also to have been more warmly received in Europe than in his native Japan. On the other hand, this is also a flawed manga and definitely not one of Taniguchi’s best, and not every reader might want to spend € 25 on a 290-page manga.

Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○

More Jirō Taniguchi memorial reviews on this weblog: Ice Age Chronicle of the Earth, Chichi no koyomi, Trouble Is My Business.

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