28 January, 2004
FAKE, Vol. 4, Sanami Matoh (192 pp, PB, 199?)
The bulk of this volume is a single, long story. As with the first story in Vol. 3, the buddy-cop aspect is front and center, with Dee and Ryo working to track down a mad bomber what bombs at midnight. (Okay, he actually bombs during the daytime, but I can't very well pass up an opportunity to make a Tick reference.) The first bombing target is an empty outbuilding of Bikky's school--property damage, but no injuries. The bomber quickly escalates matters; his next target is the precinct station itself. When he decides to graduate from bombing empty buildings to cop-killing, Dee ends up trapped in a place which will soon blow up. And this time, Ryo can't rescue him; he can only wait and worry. That's not even the end of it! Afterwards, they have to rush off and rescue the Chief, who's also fallen afoul of the mad bomber.
While the plot is action-based, there's a lot of character development in the story. By this point in the series, it's become clear that his problem isn't simply that he's in denial about being gay -- he's getting over that. His real problem is that he's got a deep, paralysing fear of intimacy. He's terrified of letting anybody get close to him. Dee's near miss forces Ryo to admit -- to himself, at any rate -- how much his partner means to him. The crisis illuminates the relationship between Dee and his pint-size nemesis, Bikky, as well. In spite of their mutual antagonism, they do care about each other. This is not surprising, since Dee was a lot like Bikky when he was a kid, but it's nice to see them interacting without Ryo there to act as an object of contention. Finally, we learn more about the Chief, fleshing out his character beyond that of a standard-issue Gruff Police Captain.
Vol. 4 is rounded out by two shorter stories. One, as always, is a Carol-and-Bikky story. This one is set a full five years in the future of the main story, and shows how the two finally get together. It's very sweet, and the honest openness of their relationship provides a nice break from Dee and Ryo. The final story brings us briefly back to the principals, for a vignette illustrating where their relationship stands, here at the halfway point of the series. Dee is completely, unabashedly in love, and depressed by his uncertainty about whether or not his friend shares his feelings. Ryo certainly does, but while he's finally being honest with himself, the poor, pathetic putz can't bring himself to be honest with Dee. (It's easy for me to be hard on Ryo; he shares some of my worst personality traits, so I'm allowed.)
One thing I want to comment on is my admiration for two aspects of Sanami Matoh's art. The first is her skill in drawing action sequences. There's a really great sense of movement to them; it's very easy to see the action in my head as continuous motion, rather than as discrete images. (This is the point where I wish I had a scanner, so I could provide an example of what I'm talking about.)
The second thing I want to mention is the way Matoh is able to convey her characters' unspoken thoughts and feelings through facial expressions and body language. Obviously, this isn't the only comic in which this is done, but it's the first one in which I've consciously noticed it, probably because it's a really important part of the storytelling in a comic about one guy who avoids expressing his emotions and another guy who tends to express himself physically, rather than verbally. It's given me insight into how the comics medium works -- a prose novel would have gone about conveying the same information in an entirely different way. The characters' inner thoughts would have been spelled out through internal monologues. The "graphic novel" format, on the other hand, can draw on the reader's natural ability to interpret human expressions and leave the unsaid truly unsaid.