One ingenious scene transition moves from Tooru looking out a window at the rain to the rain traveling down the page to reveal the next location. There are so many moments where I turned the page and gasped because of the beauty and scope of what was revealed. Miyoshi uses layout and page turns to devastating effect. What makes Rabbit Game so effective and the reason I love it so much is that Miyoshi and book designer Emuh Ruh use every aspect of the comic book format in a way that creates atmosphere and draws a reader into the story: everything from the wild cover design that immediately makes me go “what the heck is this!?”, to the use of a zip-a-tone effect which creates an eerie, shadowy quality on each page. The story gradually transitions into very spooky “is this a dream or am I awake” sequences which lead to a finale that doesn’t offer any concrete answers, for which I was very appreciative.
Eventually, Tooru starts to fantasize about Inaba while playing Rabbit Game and begins dreaming about getting sucked into the game’s universe with his friends. Meanwhile, Tooru keeps hearing rumors that Inaba is actually dating their childhood friend Kawamoto (who has, incidentally, joined a cult.) Again, this leads to some extremely well-represented youth-in-love angst.
So they spend a lot of time together, and she gets him to buy a videogame called “Rabbit Game” that may or may not be cursed. This mysterious aloofness causes Tooru to become obsessed with her in the most awkward teen way possible. For example, she tells Tooru that her grandmother was a machine and that she is a princess from the moon. Inaba, as a character, is well-realized as someone who likes to act weird and say wild things to get reactions from her friends. Right upfront you get a teenager, Inaba, bragging to her friend, Tooru, that she’s eaten a rabbit corpse. It is a teen love and surreal horror comic that delivers everything with brutal efficiency. In fact, I can read it with one hand while I sip my coffee.Ī particularly wonderful small book object is Rabbit Game by Miyoshi, published this year by Glacier Bay. I don’t have to struggle to hold a heavy tome open with my carpal tunnel-ravaged hands. Besides, the activity of reading a small book object is a very pleasurable experience in general. The process of getting to the end of a story and closing a book gives me a nice finality to what I just went through and that can cause a great deal of reflection and catharsis. I’d much rather read these stories in the form of a mini-comic or graphic novella (I’ve even considered photocopying the stories into homemade zines for myself to read). Maybe this is some sort of ADHD thing, but I wonder if the story is done a disservice by this format.
I forget to sit with and ruminate on what I read previously. While I’ve had a nice time with these collections, I find that I have difficulty digesting the works.Īrriving at the end of a short story in a large anthology, I feel a need to move on to the next story. All of this has continued to lead me to a greater understanding of manga as a very broad art form.
Find the rabbit game full#
In 2020 they released two volumes of the anthology series Glaeolia, which are full of exciting new work by current Japanese indy cartoonists. Around the same time, I discovered Glacier Bay, the new small press devoted to modern underground manga. In the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed the new compilations from Drawn & Quarterly of Yoshiharu Tsuge and Kuniko Tsurita, as well as Viz’s recent reprint of Rumiko Takahashi’s Mermaid Saga. As manga has been exponentially growing in popularity here in America, we’ve been fortunate to get many great collections of short stories by legendary artists from Japan’s comic-making history.
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