A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I think the best and least spoilery way to convey the experience of reading Moon Child 12 is to provide a selection of unattributed quotes from the volume.

"Lay eggs. You're the mermaid that needs to be protected."

"Miss... I mean, sir..."

"This nuclear power plant is the pride of the Soviet Union."

"If you can't love me or kill me... Then leave me alone!"

"Rimsky tried to kill my mother with a farming axe."

"Gil got engaged to that awful tramp for money... to fund some strange lunar development project!"

"I had planned to wait until you completely became female."

I remember Mely calling Hot Gimmick the manga of feminist shame. Moon Child is the manga of every kind of shame: an appallingly stereotyped character design for an African... er... alien mermaid, creepy gender politics, the absolutely tasteless use of a number of actual disasters, and incredibly, jaw-droppingly, appallingly sketchy adult-child interactions.

And yet the story is so compelling, I can't stop reading! It is like crack. Pretty, pretty, politically and morally horrifying crack! With bonus intriguing worldbuilding and gorgeous art.

I would not have thought the crack could get more cracky, but volume 8 has one of the most... um... unusual extended flashbacks designed to create sympathy for a villain since Jezebel Disraeli's encounter with intestines in Godchild 7.

If you've read that far, all I have to say is... WEEEN!

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Moon Child continues to grab my attention by the lapels, despite some dubious racial and gender issues (oddly mixed with some cool gender-bending and cameos by totally normal random people of color) and a somewhat tasteless use of real-life disasters. Whatever. It's totally awesome and awesomely insane! I urge you to read it!

It wins the prize for Most Bad Wrong Relationship Ever, given that the heroine is a boy named Jimmy who is supposedly twelve but acts six and is an alien mermaid who is a descendant of the Little Mermaid and was raised on the moon, swam through space to spawn on the Earth, and transforms into a beautiful woman-- with the mind of child!Jimmy-- named Benjamin and is the object of desire in her female form by the abusive Broadway dancer who has adopted Jimmy, and sort of in any form by the male mermaid who is desperate to father his eggs on her. Also, she sometimes wears panties on his head.

The biology of the mermaids is based on clown fish, in which the fish all hatch as androgynous, and then the most dominant becomes female and the second-most male. Others remain neuter. In Moon Child, all the mermaids are absolutely desperate to either become female and lay eggs, or father eggs, or find a father for their eggs. There is also spirit possession, resurrection, the Apollo astronauts, musings on water pollution and nuclear power, amnesia, backstage rivalry, cross-dressing ballet, and bargains with the undersea witch who gave the Little Mermaid her legs.

The art is incredibly beautiful and striking, the (unsurprisingly bizarre) omake are hilarious, and there are random pin-ups of the characters dressed a la the court of Louis XXIV. And endless discussions of "birthing eggs." And giant hallucinatory fish skeletons. Volcanic eruptions. The male mermaid sadly muses that his kiddie true love likes cake better than him. Why are you all not reading this already?

Just when I think I'm inured to the insanity of manga, something like Reiko Shimizu's Moon Child comes along.

This remarkable work combines total freaking insanity with gorgeously surreal images and an astounding amount of plot for a first volume-- concluding with the mangaka's explanation that volume 1 is just a prologue, and the story really gets started in volume 2! I can't wait!

Jimmy is a blonde amnesiac child living in New York City with Art, an abusive, washed-up Broadway dancer who may or may not have a heart of gold. But unbeknownst to either of them, Jimmy is actually Benjamin, the beautiful daughter of the Little Mermaid, who was one of a race of alien mermaids who must return to Earth to spawn by mating with each other and laying eggs!

There are identical twins or clones or creepy illusions of Jimmy, backstage drama, poltergeist activity, telekinesis, demons biting people's heads, giant catfish swimming through the air above Time Square, and dialogue like "Space is like an ocean. I can swim there. That's how I got here, to the Planet Asgard. I was just a hatchling back then, so it took several hundred years."

It reminded me a bit of Please Save My Earth, only with extra bonus insanity.

Warning: the leader of the mermaids is drawn as a bizarrely stereotyped African woman. This is especially unfortunate as Shimizu manages to include other black characters who are not your typical manga stereotypes (a doctor, random mermaids), thus lulling me into a false sense of security.

A complete and hilarious review, with pictures.