Children of the Sea

Having grown up pretty much on the beach (a one-and-a-half–minute walk from it at any rate), I’ve long held a certain affection for the sea and all it holds. While a special joy for me surrounded the quality of the morning air that hangs so heavily in coastal regions, the creatures that inhabit the ocean, both at depth and in shallows, also struck a deep chord of interest. In second grade, I was elated when my class spent a three-day field trip at a marine institute on Catalina Island. Beyond snorkeling and seeing firsthand many species in their native habitat, I was wrapped in lectures and labs and hands-on treatment of piles of marine life. I was exultant.

Sadly, as I grew older and other concerns began to jockey for my attention, I experienced a waning of interest in the sea as anything other than the locale of some of my favourite youthful pastimes (skimboarding and boogieboarding). It’s not that the undersea world no longer held any interest, but more that the magic of girls and videogames and comics were novelties expressing an entirely more visceral kind of power over me. I still found sea hares, -horses, and -cucumbers completely intriguing, but there was this wholly other kind of unshakeable mystery wrapped up in the lines, curves, and movements of Lori Loughlin, Kathy Ireland, and the woman on the car in that Whitesnake video. Sea cucumbers, for all their strange wonder, really couldn’t compare.

When I first saw Children of the Sea on a shelf at Borders (RIP), I was intrigued by the physical mass of the book. It sat unobtrusively on the shelf alongside the other manga digests. There was only a single copy available, dwarfed in number by more popular (and now I know, more banal) series. It was, however, nearly twice as thick as the average manga volume—which helped it stand out. Picking it up, my early love affair with the oceans and their bountiful life came rushing back. This book was clearly something special. However, having a paucity of discretionary income at the time (my daughter had just been born), I left it on the shelf, intending to return to it as time and money permitted. Recently, I saw four volumes available through VIZ’s iApp and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to both experience an interesting title and poke around a new comics-reading application.

Poke.

VIZ’s Signature line continues to distribute worthwhile books, series that challenge popular or common notions of what the medium is capable of or best-suited for. While most of the medium still adheres pretty strongly to genre conventions (crime, romance, superheroes, autobio, sports, horror, et cetera), there are still some books that seek to craft something truly literary. It’s easy to recommend a book to someone who likes noir detective stories, books chronicling the zombie-apocalypse, or even Austen-esque period romance. What’s difficult is when a friend tells me they like the works of Bolaño or Murakami or Hemingway or Salinger or David Foster Wallace or Alice Munro and would like to read a graphic novel in similar vein. These friends aren’t looking for a particular plotline. Instead, they’re looking for something thoughtful, critical. They’re looking for something that looks at the world and has something to say. They’re looking for more of what they like: challenging literature. And while I wish I could easily rattle off a list of comics that land squarely in that kind of category, it’s a pretty tall order. Certainly things are getting better and there’s more of interest available now than there was ten years ago, but the truly worthy books grow pretty sparse along the comics landscape. Fortunately, Children of the Sea looks like it just might be another entrant into that canon of valuable, interesting books that defies genre classification and holds its own as a thoughtful approach to the world.

(Of course, we’ll have to wait to see how well it traverses such lofty heights as the book seems to have gone on hiatus with the completion of volume 4, by which point (and after more than 1300 pages) only the barest threads of the narrative have been established.)

Children of the Sea tells the story of, essentially, two young teens: Ruka and Umi. Ruka appears the not atypical daughter of a broken family. She lives with her mother but hides out at her father’s aquarium. Umi is a boy who, along with his brother Sora, was found as a toddler being raised by dugongs (a.k.a. manatees, a.k.a. sea cows). Both Umi and Sora are more at home in the water than on land and their bodies have specially adapted to deep-sea free diving and swimming incredibly long distances with an ease unheard of by normal humans. Ruka shares with them a special kind of vision, a way of seeing the ocean and its inhabitants. There is a sense of reverence and oneness between these three and the creatures of the deep.

Strange things are at play in the world of the sea and Ruka and Umi seem to be at the heart of this mystery. While Children of the Sea could have very well established itself as a race-against-time adventure of discovery and world-saving (and romance?), it instead develops much more organically, evolving its story in unexpected directions at a gradual, contemplative pace. Information about who Umi and Sora are, about what the ghosts of the sea are, about the histories of various support characters, about where any of this is going—it all trickles in while the reader is busied with absorbing the beautiful seascapes with Ruka. The series seems to have at stake various questions of identity and an exploration of the human/animal place in the universal scope of things. These are bold directions for a comic to take—since, honestly, for all the talk about comics having come of age, they’ve really still got a ways to go.

When I first saw some of the awkward character designs, I was hesitant and wondered exactly what the book would have to recommend itself. Within a handful of pages, however, I was sold and I now count Daisuke Igarashi as one of my favourite comic artists. Visually, Children of the Sea offers readers an illustrative feast—double-page spreads of whales, rays, turtles, schools of fish that impress through their sheer cinematic scope. Igarashi uses an unpolished style of drawing that breathes life and sense into characters and situations. These characters aren’t just cartoon sketches; their dimensional presence (as rendered by Igarashi’s homegrown technique) is essential to allowing the reader to understand this as a worthwhile story aiming at deeper purpose rather than the sea fantasy it might appear to be. Our goal in taking in Children of the Sea is to absorb it and be absorbed by it—to find a certain spiritual unity with the work—and the art assists this aim immeasurably.

The greatest tragedy is that there aren’t currently more volumes available. Children of the Sea is one of the most exciting works unfolding in contemporary comics and the fact of its apparent hiatus is heartbreaking. There are a handful of comics whose production is intended to evolve over the course of years and whose production I will follow doggedly. Jason Lutes’ Berlin. Adam Hines’ Duncan the Wonder Dog. Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze. And now, hopefully, Children of the Sea.

 

 

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