Domu

Domu (童夢) subtitled 'a Childs Dream' in North America,  is a supernatural manga by Otomo Katsuhiro.  This single tankoubon series was originally published in Japan between 1980 and 1981.

    The story focuses around the police investigations of a series of mysterious deaths at a large public housing complex.  As they investigated deeper into the incidents their own members start to fall victim to the deadly circumstances.  All hell breaks lose after a young girl is almost killed by a resident who was going on 3 years of ronin status.  The police, though, are unaware of the truth behind all the deaths and the sudden conflict between two powerful psychics.  No one realizes that the girl,  who had recently moved to the complex, is engaged in a battle of abilities with the person responsible for all of the deaths.

    It has been a long time since I last read this excellent story by a true master of his art.  Otomo-sensei has an painstaking eye for detail and character design.  You can really see the groundwork he laid out for Akira in this series.  From psychic powers, telekinetic battles and the character designs,  you can pick out things he refined in his master piece.  This is a great stand alone story that could have easily existed in the world of that other series.  But,  lets focus on Domu!  I really enjoyed this,  I think more so the  I did almost 20 years age when it originally came out in North America.  The battle sequences are well done and makes me wish Akira was filled with as much combat as Domu, but then it might have been an over the top slug fest.

    Running a bit under 250 pages in length there doesn't seem to have been enough room to cover all it did.  The central characters were developed as much as needed to make you understand them.  The progression was well paced.  And the artwork is top notch.  Otomo has always made a point of drawing his characters to be somewhat homely,  more realistic than many other artists want to.  I appreciate this dedication to ugly reality.  The characters are flawed and misshapen.  You really have to slow down and breath in the art and story,  which is hard to do given the drive to find out how it will end.  One thing with the story that I thought was excellent was the psychic powers almost staying hidden in the shadows.  Only other children around even noticed the various physical manifestations,  while the adults were completely oblivious.  This is not a coincidence.  The idea was to present it as a hidden realm that people who were more acceptable to wonder could tune into while jaded and distracted adults remained oblivious to the things around them.  It begs the question of who was watching out for who?

    This is a must read by anyone who is a fan of Otomo or well done mature stories.  Its only a shame it has never seen a film adaptation and really puts modern manga to shame with how well its drawn.  The manga has been commercially available in North America since 1996 and is worth the time to track down.