House of 1000 Manga

Detroit Metal City

Detroit Metal City

"They start feeling like prisoners, helpless/Till someone comes along on a mission and yells, bitch!"
—

Warning: this is a manga where the main character's power is to say the word "rape" 10 times in one second. Detroit Metal City is the one of the filthiest, most offensive comedy manga ever translated. At least it's upfront about it: the first dialogue on the first page is "I am a terrorist from hell! Yesterday I raped your mom, tomorrow I fuck your dad!" It's not like some of those shonen and shojo manga where they act all ages-13-and-up for a couple volumes and then spring the adult content on you, is it?

Not Detroit Metal City. This is an 18+ manga about bad, evil things: this is a manga about heavy metal, man. Johannes Kra II is the vocalist/star of Detroit Metal City, Tokyo's most infamous metal band. Covered in white pancake makeup like the love child of King Diamond and KISS (whose song

But backstage, Kra II takes off his makeup and becomes someone totally different: Kahimi Karie, vintage clothing, the movie Amélie and Paris fashion. And though onstage he sings about rape and dry-humps a middle-aged man in thigh-highs and a ball gag, in real life he has a crush on a girl: Yuri Aikawa, his college friend, editor of the music magazine Amore Amour. But how can Sōichi ever show her his shameful 'metal side,' she who is the embodiment of cute, socially responsible hipster purity? Can he ever become the kind of musician he wants to be? Can he achieve his greatest dream: "One day my song will be used in a soda commercial!"

Detroit Metal City is a superhero story. Not one of those superhero stories like Superman and Spiderman, about having the power to save the world, but more like

So that's the kind of manga this is; that being the case, at times it's really, really funny. The absurd premise is played for absurd laughs and the profanity is insanely obscene. DMC's female manager keeps pushing Sōichi to new heights of depravity, getting off on their sound ("Yeeeah ha ha ha! Fucking crazy, guys! DMC! I got raisin pussy I'm so wet!") and beating Sōichi up when his song lyrics aren't good enough. ("This is a fucking poem for gay toddlers! Poetry doesn't get my clit hard, you dick fuck!") Sōichi's bandmates are considerably less metal; the drummer, Camus, is a creepy

True metalheads won't find this manga to be a particularly in-depth about metal; Wakasugi isn't here to make obscure references or talk about the differences between Black Metal and Death Metal and Grindcore. The music and the bands, like the characters, are broad stereotypes. This being a manga, of course there has to be a tournament, so Kra competes against other bands like Deathism (a Scat Metal band whose lyrics are all poop-related), Kiva (a rapper) and Kintama Girls, a "man-hating fem-core band". ("This one's for the dickless shitheads talking about raping women and calling us whores! DMC! Dickless Momma's-boy Cherry-ass! Crush, crush, crush, crush their balls!") In battle-of-the-bands style, Kra fights Jack Il Dark (played in the movie by Gene Simmons), the "Father of Metal" who never performs without his two cobras and his Death Metal Buffalo. As the manga goes on, the storylines get more complicated, and Kra fights deadlier opponents like his predecessor Kra I (real name: Gaylord Kitahara), who can say the word "rape" twelve times in one second. As in all battles in the world of DMC, the losing musician gets bent over and butt-slammed on stage by the winner. Even inanimate objects are not safe from Kra's virgin libido: he rapes a tambourine. He rapes Tokyo Tower. He gets drunk and threatens to rape his Amélie poster (("Whadderyoo laughinat Amelee? You gonna mock me cuz you're so hip?") In one scene, he rapes the air.

By "rapes the air," I mean "pelvic-thrusts the air," of course. When Kra dry-humps someone onstage with his pants on, it's obviously sexual assault in real life, but for all the repetition of the word "rape," the actual sexual content of Detroit Metal City isn't much harsher than the sort of "accidental breast-grabbing" and other trivialization of harassment so common in less notorious shonen and fanservice? Please write the answer in a 2000 word essay.

Unfortunately, Wakasugi is not as self-aware or as clever a cartoonist as Ryan, and/or a premise that works for a 20-page one-shot is too hard to stretch over 10 volumes, so in the second half of the series Detroit Metal City starts to get increasingly repetitive and old. If you've only got two hours, the 2008 Japanese DMC live-action movie is perhaps the perfect distillation of the manga, leaving out the most mean-spirited parts, or at least not repeating them over and over. (It was reportedly optioned for a US remake, but there's still no signs of one, six years later.) This is a sexist fantasy for introverted nerds, a parody of that fantasy, an intentionally ridiculous and over-the-top comic, a comic full of stereotypes, a comic that made me laugh out loud. It is what it is; all I can do is describe it. If I told this criticism to the main character, the odds are 50-50 that he'd apologize for making such a shameful comic. The other 50% of the time, he'd get mad and Hulk out—I mean Kra out—and say, like he does: "You're fucking with the wrong shiitake farmer's son, bitch!"