Speed Grapher, Vol. 1

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): **½

The word that best captures volume one of Speed Grapher is "naughty." At first I thought "tawdry," but that's taking it too seriously. It's as if I can sense the creators trying to one-up each other by inventing fresh lewdness to unleash on us. And I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be shocked and secretly titillated by it all.

In the initial episodes, a photojournalist stumbles upon an elite, evil, secret club which holds to some sort of extreme hedonist creed. Its main purpose is to satisfy the desires of Tokyo's mega-wealthy men, all of whom apparently desire to have a teen girl dressed like a sleazy Frederick's of Hollywood rendition of a poodle (I'm not making this up) float down from the ceiling and tongue-kiss them. (Believe me, "tongue-kiss" would not ordinarily be my choice of words, but we are treated to a long, slow close-up of the tongue and...well, it's the only appropriate term.)

For some odd reason the photojournalist intervenes just as the young damsel is about to "tongue-kiss" (sorry!) yet another nearly naked, grotesquely fat man in a party mask (chivalry and all that), and for his trouble is promptly killed by a gaggle of very rotund leather-boy henchmen.

This photojournalist, having been frenched by the poodle girl just before death, revives and finds that his beloved camera has taken on the properties, roughly speaking, of a very, very large rocket launcher; anything he takes a picture of explodes, impressively. And so, though the writers might have hoped to hide it with all the naughtiness, Speed Grapher is poised to become a perfectly ordinary action show. Judging from the pedestrian action and flat emotional tone of this first disc, it seems likely that the potentially interesting metaphor of the killer-voyeurism theme will be squandered.

Needless to say, character development is not a high priority here. Take one incidental moment from the second episode: A young girl collapses at school because her amazingly wealthy (hence, wicked) mother does not allow her to eat lunch. One of the girl's teachers, incensed, resolves to give the mother a stern talking-to before the girl returns home. Later, when the girl finally does come home, she finds her dastardly mother having sex with her teacher -- very loudly, I might add. Why did her mother do this? Well, because she's evil, of course. To be fair, she does mention something about a lesson, something about money buying anything in this world, but all we've really learned (the writers surely hope) is that girl-on-girl action is hot. All attempts at depth are similarly undermined and clearly half-hearted.

The inevitable comparison is probably to Gantz, another ultraviolent boobs ‘n' grenades shocker aimed squarely at younger males. But Gantz, for all its sometimes unintentionally funny prurience, had a good reason for its grim fascination with violence (and yes, sex as well), and in the end it did meet the questions posed by the reality of human violence quite unflinchingly. Speed Grapher could redeem itself in a similar way, but in the first volume at least shows no sign of wanting to seriously explore the themes it tosses around.