There were a ton of titles TOKYOPOP released around the 2000s, and a bunch of them were bad. However, there were some that were amazing. A few were popular enough to be reprinted by other companies (Fruits Basket, Paradise Kiss to name a couple); others, not so much (Great Teacher Onizuka, Gakuen Alice). Kodansha, however, has brought back some TOKYOPOP titles (Sailor Moon, Tokyo Mew Mew), and they decided to bring back another title and make it a digital one. After getting through the first volume of Dragon Head, I can totally see why.
Teru and his schoolmates were on their way home on the train after their last school trip of the year. Almost all of them won’t make it back as their train got in an accident. As Teru wakes up with some scrapes, he awakens to a horror show — bodies thrown across the room, bleeding or worse. As he tries desperately to find a way out, he discovers the area’s trapped by rocks. With seemingly any way of escaping lost, he tries to keep some semblance of his sanity while running into a nerd who’s always bullied and a girl whom he found hurt but alive.
Dragon Head, which was serialized in Young Magazine in 1995, manages to feel fresh in 2018. Yes, it is a pretty dark apocalyptic tale, where one character goes so off the rails they’re drenched in blood, and there’s a scene where a character’s impaled with some part of the train. But it also sets itself up as a mystery, too. As Teru recounts his steps before everything went to hell, he saw a black cloud over on the sky, then a flash of bright light. So it’s not even just figuring out how to get out but what’s going to happen after he escapes.
For now though, the goal is to stay sane and not go crazy. The characters introduced so far — Teru, Nobuo, and Seto — have trouble with that one, to varying degrees. But they should be having trouble. This is a hard thing they have to overcome, and they might not even get out of it alive. I think how it’s been shown so far has made it fascinating, and I hope they survive. Well, one character’s driving me insane, but we’ll see if that changes.
One thing I do like about the narrative is it making sure it delves into these characters’ backstory. Since Teru’s the main character in volume 1, I suspect they’ll delve into the past of the others, but in this one we get flashbacks to what Teru had before this incident occurred, and they aren’t long. But it is effective though, and I definitely hope everyone that shows up gets a flashback too.
Despite how long it’s been, the art is still pretty good for this manga. From showing just how off-track and destroyed the train is to the character’s emotions as they’re either pissed off or scared, it’s drawn well. In general, Dragon Head is a captivating read from start to finish. There’s little doubt I’d like to find out what these characters will do next or what will happen to them as this manga continues.