Manga Madness #4: E.O. Catalyst

Welcome one and all, to the final week of Manga Madness! It's been a long month, but it's been quite a trip. We've been through an action adventure in an alternate world, the quest of a vengeful young swordsman in historic Japan, and a tale of horror surrounding a cursed police station. Our final stop is by far the most unusual of my stories - it is a tale of "connection". And so, today's final manga is a futuristic drama one-shot called E.O. Catalyst.

Synopsis: In the year 2187, the Great City of Progress looms over the countryside of the European nation no-one took the time to remember. It goes by the name of "Catalyst". An advanced cerebral chip tech known as the "E.O.", which allows people to link their minds directly to digital machinery, was invented and developed here; it is the lifeblood of Catalyst and the reason for its leap in progress. A complacent young girl named Esther Arghause, age 13, lives in this city, believing a world where everyone is connected to be the norm. But her illusion will be broken once she becomes intertwined in the plans of an embittered rebel with a vengeful past, as she comes to realize what truly is the catalyst for "connection"...

Origin:
At some point during my tenure in college - I saw an anime movie called Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo or The Girl Who Lept Through Time. Without giving too much away, it's a story about a girl who, well, gains the ability to leap through time, and the events that unfold around her as she uses this power. It's a wonderful, wonderful movie that I would heartily recommend to any anime fan who has not already seen it. It left a lasting impression on me personally - it was one of the first anime, of both series and movie length, I'd ever seen that moved me to tears. And I fondly remembered the movie as I was brainstorming ideas for the two new manga to follow Gogyouo and Hyozan. For the second, I decided I wanted to try a tale of drama. Not in the format of a series, but as a one-shot movie. My goal was to create the story of an anime movie that was as moving as Kakeru Shoujo - it held a strong influence on my story, which for the longest time went unnamed. However, it DID have the very lame and temporary working title of Middle School Murderer. Why that title? Read on through the Plot section to find out.

Plot/Character:
To explain the history of the working title of Middle School Murderer, I have to explain some of my own history. So allow me to get personal for a moment. I was always an introvert as a younger child. I still am, to a lesser degree, but I was very much an outcast back in the day. I acted a bit differently from the other kids, and because of that I was a target for verbal bullying through virtually all of elementary, middle, and about half of high school. It was a rough time where my family moved a lot (for unrelated reasons) and I kept hardly any friends. I hit an all-time low once out of depression, where I wished I didn't exist. Even though I did not enjoy it and I'm glad those darker times are behind me, I've drawn a lot of inspiration for my stories from them. The past of Sei from Gogyouo, for example, shares several elements from my own. But then there's today's story, which originally started as a kind of "revenge fantasy" against all of the children who had ever bullied me. Actually, I dreamed up this version of the story back in high school, long before I ever saw Kakeru Shoujo - I simply re-purposed it once I began brainstorming for new ideas. The original version of the story was about a man who had been absolutely shunned as a child - he was hated by everyone and bullied both physically and verbally by his peers. He wasn't good looking and he had no social skills - easy pickings. But then it turns into a tale of ugly karma, where this man grows up to become absolutely hateful and full of vengeance. He begins enacting a series of gruesome murders against those who wronged him as a child. It was an extremely basic slasher story from the split point-of-view of the killer and the law trying to take him down. But the horror cop story inevitably went to D/4-Laws; MSM went pretty much nowhere until I re-purposed it later on.

One thing I decided I had to do for this new version of MSM that I hadn't done for any of my other works was: use a female as the protagonist. From there I came up with the girl you see above (whom until now had been unnamed), Esther Arghause. She was now the main character of the story instead of the killer. One day, 13-year-old Esther is held up by some thugs on her daily walk home, but the man thought to be a cold killer appears and saves her life - by brutally slaughtering them. Esther runs in fright but is not sure what to think of the whole situation. Everyone in town knows about the man and that he is killing people, but it was never imagined that he may not be all bad. Keep in mind that Esther is wise for her age, but she is also quite curious to a fault; she is prone to making possibly bad decisions. Spurred by her curiosity, in the following weeks, Esther begins actively pursuing the man, and she eventually finds where he hides away. She decides to keep his hideout a secret from the police because she wants to learn more about the man and find out if he really isn't all bad, and maybe even convince him to stop killing people. From that point, the two develop a morally odd relationship as Esther begins to see the man as a mysterious big brother and the man sees her almost like a daughter to watch over. The story evolves based on Esther's actions and how she handles the idea of a killer that would spare her life for no apparent reason. It was kind of a morally bankrupt love story: two individuals who should not be related or attached to each other in any way do just that, and the story is what tragically culminates of that relationship.

If I may make a quick aside after that last sentence. I say "kind of" a love story because, well......Esther is 13. She doesn't really know what that kind of love is. And as soon as I said "love story" in context to a grown man and a 13-year-old girl, I'm sure everyone will be having certain thoughts, but........it really isn't meant to be anything like that. I just want everyone to know that I'm not positing underage relationships by way of this story - it's meant to be quite innocent, yet visually unnerving. But not in an explicit manner. The focus of the "relationship that should not be" is more on the fact that she's an innocent citizen and he's a convicted killer, not so much their age difference. I know there's no reason to defend myself because it's my own story, but I just want to be as honest as possible since this once hints at a subject some may find quite unsettling. But anyway.....even that story is not quite the final story I aimed to discuss today. Even that is not what eventually became E.O. Catalyst.

Themes:
Well, I'm fibbing a bit. Catalyst, at its heart, is a morally tragic drama about the relationship between two individuals who should never have any kind of relationship in a logical world. That is the heart of the story, but I felt it lacked context. It lacked any kind of world-building that makes this kind of story possible. Esther becomes enamored with a murderer for no reason other than she's a curious young girl. Maybe some people are okay with that level of simplicity, but I felt like the story needed something more to tie everything together. To "connect" it all together, rather. So I found it. There is one pivotal scene of the story in which the man shares his past with Esther on an incredibly personal level. I imagined a kind of merging of souls (again - this is all meant to be quite innocent); a moment where Esther truly was experiencing the pain of this man's past, and it breaks her heart. I took this scene and the idea of intimate connection to another level for the final aspect of the story - the technology. The world of Catalyst is set in a distant future, taking place entirely within the walls of a city (also named Catalyst) that has grown far in technological advancement. Their claim to fame is the "E.O", a data chip designed to be the missing link between man and machine. Many human beings born in Catalyst City are implanted with the E.O. chip (attached to the brain) and interface tools and become a subset of ever-growing test subjects. Everything in Catalyst is digitally enhanced, and human beings possessing the E.O. can reveal a connection wire from a small hole bored into the left side of the skull. This wire can be directly connected to any authorized device in the city; information is sent to the E.O. chip and amplified directly to the user's brain. This device provides the overall theme for the story - connection. In a future where connection has become all about technology and how to continually interface man with the machines they created, suddenly a morally questionable relationship between a young girl and a murderer can be viewed with more meaning. Because it's a REAL connection between two people not brought about by technology. That in a nutshell is E.O. Catalyst: it's a tale that warns against the advancements of technology that will eventually dehumanize the human race. How can we attempt to connect everything, if we forget how to meaningfully connect?

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And that's it, everybody! Thank you all so much for sticking with me for this month of manga stories. These were just sneak peaks into the worlds of my stories, so I hope you enjoyed the little glimpses I let through. As it is currently, I only have these four established stories running through my head, but I'm sure as the years go on I'll dream up more and more. And perhaps I'll share them here, too. But you can definitely count on seeing artwork from all of these stories appearing here at some time or another (though I imagine Gogyouo-Sama will still be my primary focus). With that said, we'll be returning to regular unscheduled updates for awhile, so thank you again for joining me on March Manga Madness!

One quick extra note: I've just added Email Alerts to the blog. Just enter your email address into the prompt on the side bar and submit and you'll be notified whenever I post!

Originally I was planning to do a rather artsy piece. It was going to be very minimalist - just Esther facing away from the viewer with her arms spread like wings before a burst of light, and in the foreground behind her would be a collection of symbolic imagery placed deliberately to convey the mood of the story. This drawing was being planned in my head several months in advance. BUT, I then did the Freebird drawing. Girl with arms spread was out. Then I did the drawing for D/4-Laws, where I tried adding a collection of symbolic images, and it came out ok, but it did not look very profound. That was out too. All I knew was that I wanted to draw Esther, with her attention shifted away from us. I decided to try an angle that I don't often draw full poses for: a direct side angle. It's another one of my weak points, but I think I did well here. As usual I totally fail when it comes to clothing. I can never seem to decide what kind of clothes I want a character to have, so I usually just throw some kind of robes or one-piece cloth on them, because they're easy to draw. One of these days I'm going to meaningfully plan out what a character is going to wear before I draw it, I swear. You can also see my amateur attempt at a "future city" in the bottom left. The structure in the center is supposed to represent the control tower that houses all of the connection wires that keeps Catalyst running. I don't know where a barren clif like this would be inside the walls of a technologically advanced future city.

Also, there is a dog. No reason, there's.......just a dog. I felt like Esther needed a pet sidekick, so I gave her a dog. :p