Manga Review: After School Nightmare, Vol. 6

After School Nightmare, Vol.6

By Setona Mizushiro
Go! Comi, 200 pp.
Rating: Older Teen (16+)

Mashiro’s identity struggle reaches new heights as he (or she, as the case may be) grapples with the notion that his relationship with Kurehara may be purely for psychological reassurance, and that Sou might just be his knight in shining (black) armor. Meanwhile, the mysteries surrounding the dream class only get deeper, as more students vanish and the line between graduation and failure grows thin. With time running out, Mashiro has to choose: stay the “man” he’s always known, or become the girl he very well might be?

The days of willingly suspending your disbelief are over; to fully appreciate just how brilliant Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare is, you’d do better to smack your disbelief out of the ballpark and gleefully watch it sail away. From sex to psychology, the rules of Mizushiro’s sixth installment remain, once again, unnervingly pliable and all the more relevant as Mashiro’s gender struggle finally reaches a turning point. After spending years convincing himself he’s male, Mashiro is devastated to realize that Kurehara is nothing more than a mirror for his idealized self-image–and that this image may diverge severely from his true nature as a female.

Mizushiro knows how to pulp character psych until it hurts, and uses her skills deftly to grill Mashiro over his budding romance with Sou and dying affair with Kurehara. But, of course, this is After School Nightmare, and that means one thing; that every bit of school life psych becomes a very vivid death struggle in the dream world. It’s an almost too-perfect plot vehicle, as adolescent angst transmutes vividly into a world of crumbling cliffs, deadly traps and, of course, plenty of carnage heightened by characters packin’ plenty of baggage. Everyone’s a ball of complexes, and the list of reasons hits every major taboo from incest to rape to plain old gender-bending, making the wan-faced heroines of most every other shoujo look shallow by comparison.

Mizushiro’s art is spot on, from her dreamlike watercolors to her detailed renderings of a world beyond the edge of reason. Her school scenes may not bring up much in the way of new subject matter, but they provide an almost necessary “normal” contrast to the dream world’s school-gone-wild. The shoujo flowers are here too, but are markedly overshadowed by the blood and gore of the dream students. It’s easy to see the “nightmare” aspect of the title when the whole affair smacks of a shoujo setup that accidentally ingested a very dark tale.

The mark of a good manga has always been its ability to do something new; to take a cliché and reinvent it, or to breathe new life into old ideas. After School Nightmare does none of these things– instead, it simply disdains the whole act of reinventing and does something completely new. There is nothing out there quite like it, and After School Nightmare is without a doubt one of the freshest and most impressive titles to hit stateside in quite a while. This is one dream you’ll want to have.

Volume six of After School Nightmare is available now.