Detroit Metal City 4

Kiminori Wakatsugi – Viz – 2010 – 8+ volumes

Oh.  Oh my.  Every volume of this series is like a gift for the reader.  I wonder if it’ll get old eventually, but then the absolute most extreme things keep happening, and it stays funny.  Mind you, I have an extremely juvenile sense of humor, which is absolutely necessary if you’re going to get anything out of this.  But goddamn, this series makes me laugh harder than anything else I’ve ever read.

The first part of this volume focuses on DMC’s next opponent in the Metal Festival, Deathism.  They have… a niche in the metal world.  They are a scat metal band.  This is prefaced by a couple chapters of flashbacks for these characters.  They’re like a regular band, except they have to take a shit all the time, or can’t take a shit when they need to, as the case may be.  They are in a metal rut.  In between sessions where they confer in the bathroom and talk it out with a strange, old barman-type mentor, they wonder how they can differentiate themselves from regular metal.  Then they realize that they shit better than anyone else, and they use that as their hook.

Somewhere in there, the barman encourages them by telling them about how he had a divorce from his first wife.  “I came home drunk one night and left a huge mudslide in the bed.  She divorced me.  At the time, I was embarrased.  Now I’m proud.”  He’s behind them all the way, and so are their fans, who loved being sprayed down by “shit” from a hose the singer holds on stage.

Of course Krauser wins because Negishi has shit his pants while waiting for Deathism members to get out of the bathroom, and coming out on stage in a metal fight with them with his pants covered in shit is “extreme.”

How can this be topped?  The final metal band is Helvete, who want to bring about a metal apocalypse.  They reveal their true identities as celebrities from all areas of popular music, saying that their fans are bound to do whatever they say now.  The leader is a Swedish Pop star that looks exactly like Negishi.  You… you see where that goes.

I laughed so hard I cried at some parts.  The part with Helvete seems to be a kind of climax, since it involves Negishi admitting defeat on stage, and then coming back for a triumphant victory.  It highlights the themes of Negishi’s life, where he would rather play pop music that nobody wants to hear rather than his metal, which is necessary to so many of his fans.  I mean, it does get serious sometimes.  But then he does things like dress up as Krauser and blow garlic breath at a fortune teller that made him mad.  Hilariously, there is a one-shot chapter that addresses his anger at the end of the volume, but of course that doesn’t go anywhere.

Good stuff.  Great stuff.  I left it off my list of best series of last year, but it really should have been there.  I mean… it is so far over the top that it comes back around to bust up from the bottom.  Everything about it is perfectly calculated.  The absolutely obedient fans that make up the most insane shit about the band?  The owner, whose every line is like a treasure?

Never change, DMC.  Rock on.