You should be reading: Swallowing the Earth

I just recently finished Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth - just yesterday, in fact. I don’t think it’s going to be something that I’m going to forget about soon.

Beginning serialization in 1968, Swallowing the Earth was Tezuka’s first “adult” work, after a series of kid-friendly successes like Astro-Boy and Kimba the White Lion. And if you’re looking for violence, sex, and even drugs, you’ll find it here in R-rated levels, but you’ll also find one heck of a mind-twisting story to give it reason.

Swallowing the Earth’s generation-spanning story centers around Zephyrus, the ultimate woman scorned. Stunningly beautiful and magnetically charming, she’s capable of seducing any man, making him obsessed to the point of his own destruction. Nobody knows where this enigmatic woman came from or why she’s wielding her womanly wiles (alliteration is awesome!) like this, but all is revealed to us the reader after the happy-go-lucky Gohonmatsu Seki is hired by one of Zephyrus’s former victims to investigate her. Gohonmatsu is a simple young man who cares mostly about drinking and little else, and he turns out to be the perfect foil for Zephyrus, as it turns out he’s immune to her supernatural powers of seduction. However, as he starts to discover more about Zephyrus’s mysterious causes and effects, even he soon finds himself well over his head…

Actually, that only covers about the first few chapters of this lengthy 514-page tome, but I’ll refrain from going further to avoid exposing any surprises. And that’s one of Swallowing the Earth’s greatest strengths; it kept surprising me straight through to the end, as each layer of Zephyrus’s history and scheme is revealed. It ends up being a very complex story, and it doesn’t strike me as something that could have been made up as Tezuka was going along - he must have had this whole thing planned out from the start. Unfortunately, the last couple of chapters seem to bring things around to a rather abrupt end - I’m not quite sure yet if I was satisfied with it or not.

Let’s talk about art. I imagine some manga fans more familiar with newer works may be perplexed by it; in both design and movement, characters bear a stronger resemblance to the rounded, rubbery characters of American gag comics and cartoons from the 1930s and ’40s than they do modern manga characters. Gohonmatsu is almost always shown waking with his legs akimbo in a goofy manner, and his fistfights (which he tends to get into quite often) involve slapstick fisticuffs which wouldn’t be at all out of place in a Laurel and Hardy skit. Heck, the way Gohonmatsu seeks and reacts to alcohol is not at all unlike how Popeye handles his cans of spinach. It’s a far cry from the over-muscular guys and ultraviolent fight scenes more common in manga today. And yet, I personally found it all quite charming and fun art-wise. Sometimes there’s just no skool like the old skool.

Swallowing the Earth is a genuinely complex and mature story told in an exacting way. You, the reader, are along for the ride as Zephyrus’s secrets are laid bare, and it ends up being one unforgettable ride. If you’re ready for a grown-up graphic novel, Swallowing the Earth will satisfy up to - if perhaps not including - the end.