Ultra Heaven

Legendary Jean Giraud – Moebius — calls Koike "a magnificent ronin, a warrior without a master, one of the rare authors who resist the cynical formatting of the current manga industry." And no doubt, there are influences of Otomo and Moebius and drugs, something he himself admitted to his publisher: "Except peyotl, I have tried almost everything: hashish, heroin, cocain, acid, magic mushrooms... But from a strictly graphical point of view, LSD is far ahead ... "

He works as a lone artist which is laudable, and an antithesis needed to all the demoralizing AI art dialogue going around. The staggering amount of meticulousness he puts into these pages make them more than just psychedelic relics. Here is a guy who loves, loves, loves what he does. You'll find a perfected organic style, developed range in perspectives and anatomy, his absolute will over them and a flow of narrative that never lets up, never lets you take a breath with the drugged sway in the panels, one page to the next, suck and go whirlpool of lines, ceaseless mounting of imagery, awash with surrealism and absurdity, on and on, pretty much like this sentence, a mixture of drowning and bottomless free fall.

Storytelling structures are chosen with altered perception in mind. A scene transition doesn't consist of cut and change but a motif-based continuity: a droplet is a sweat rope is a lake swim is a zoned out bath. It's trying to mimic the nature of a junkie's mind.

“I want to describe the moment when the boundaries between dream and reality blur. Very particular states of consciousness to which certain substances allow rapid access. All the difficulty then is to realize it. The words, the common vocabulary, the usual narrative logic are inappropriate. We have to invent other frameworks. That's why my stories aren't realistic, they're more trips . . . " which explains why in three volumes of all the dream cream, we've only gotten scattered tidbits of Kabu's past. He has suicidal tendencies, and is much of a cliché addict. You'd think what an overused trope! Nope, not at all. Think of it like this, in Koike's attempt to materialize hallucinations, readers may need a familiar, well-trodden road so as to not lose the way. To an extent, coherence remains intact.

Since in this futuristic world everything is artificial, experiences can be loaned in small pumps or patches of drug doses. So everyone is a potential addict. Kabu loves the Peter Pan. It's a — ah, you guessed it — childlike elation-providing hallucinogen. When he runs out of it, a shady dealer finds him offering a freebie. The withdrawal makes it impossible to resist. Turns out, it's not Peter Pan but a superior "more real than life itself" trip inducing substance. Dreams within dreams. Paranoia imploding total self-worth. Triggered rubble of memories playing off each other. And I wouldn't want to give away too much. There are plot points and set pieces that appear to be created with something in mind. If so, we haven't seen what. Yes, you read correctly, in three volumes, it's not the whole story. It hasn't been officially discontinued either. I wish I could put a quote from Koike about it but I didn't find any. The future of Ultra Heaven hangs in an uncertain limbo.

So, is it worth it? Despite the uncompleteness?

Of course, it is. This is one of those rare instances where how a tale is told hypnotically envelopes what is being told. If you're a sucker for those, you'll love it.