Looking at the back of the Tokyopop manga, the blurb promises “a suspenseful tale in which two centuries-old enemies fight together” along with something about a drug called “Zone-00” that turns people into monsters. It’s certainly a tired premise, but so long as we get some neat characters and cool action, no problem, right? Unfortunately, in the barrage of cleavage, blood and preening pretty boys, anything resembling a coherent narrative never seemed to emerge in a sea of rapid-fire pop culture references. It’s one of the rare manga I have seen where I had no idea what was going on at any given point.
To be fair, artist QJO knows how to draw some very pretty people. Muscle-bound guys wearing tight leather pants and chains; DD-cup gals wearing loose mini-skirts with tight panties; even a dude wearing a ridiculous tailor-made Space Invaders hand-bag—all seemingly sloshed across the page like the wall-graffiti cool of The World Ends With You by way of the gratuitous hyper-sexuality of Jim Lee. Each page is buried in unnecessary text, side-quips, and even labels defining which character is speaking. It all proves distracting from the main story.
First and foremost, a comic is supposed to tell a clear story. That’s not to say that a page can’t be full of quirky details or extraneous text. Sometimes that can be done to a powerful effect, as can be seen in Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. With Zone-00, all of the little touches just clutter.
Complicating matters on the readability front is the frankly flat translation and adaptation by Nan Rymer and Ysabet MacFarlane. Perhaps it’s too easy to pin problems in a manga on a lackluster translation, but this takes it to another level. For instance, a couple of characters talk in regional dialects – in this case, Kansai, the Japanese equivalent to a Southern drawl, and Okinawan, comparable to Hawaiian Pidgin. Yet, the translation makes no effort to reflect this. It can be distracting to see a wacky accent pop up, but when I can barely tell what word is being uttered from what character’s mouth, some variety in voice would be nice.
The killing blow however, comes with the various cultural notes that are strewn about the manga. You see, the characters in Zone 00 talk like a Japanese fever-dream version of Quentin Tarantio. References to pop culture and flavor-of-the-month celebrities abound; in one case, husky-voiced actor Hiroshi Abe gets repeatedly mentioned as if it’s going to actually become funny anytime soon.
Even worse, rather than trying to make the joke or reference work for a Western audience, Rymer and MacFarlane lazily throw even more clutter on the page in the form of a footnote, making the story even harder to follow. Unlocalized cultural points have their time and place, but it wouldn’t kill the artistic direction to change a relatively vague reference into something more universal like James Earl Jones, especially when the focus is on hunky guys and curvy gals beating up monsters.
And that perhaps is the single most frustrating thing about Zone-00. It manages to take such a simple and timeless idea and muck it up with excess baggage. What could have been a forgettable mediocre funny book becomes a hair-pulling travesty. The occasional specks of originality or genuine coolness – like twin siblings who transform into cursed Harley Davidson motorcycles – are few and far between. If the would-be reader sees Zone-00 as little more than a collection of pictures of ambiguously gay boys and sexy girls to cosplay at the next convention, I guess you could do worse.
But as an involving story, this zone is an absolute waste of space.
Final Rating: 2 out of 10
Random Fact: Even though Zone-00 is Kiyo QJO’s scattered brain child, there do seem to be actual fans of this series. You can find some of them on the Zone-00 Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zone-00-Anime/121981349144
