I don’t think of myself as being particularly conspiracy-prone. As a guy whose entire high school tenure was steeped in the empirical sciences, I want to believe I’m somewhat fortified against their pull. Sure, I’ve watched every episode of Unsolved Mysteries and Dark Matters: Twisted But True and, damn, if they weren’t convincing. Certainly that means nothing.
Certainly.
In an increasingly conspiratorial world, one supercharged by an unprecedented volume of information available to us at a moment’s notice and ecosystems custom built and finely tuned to incentivise and reward increasingly outlandish and tenuous views of reality, it’s worth asking what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such a moment: to be an average, unremarked-upon person one day and to be the center of thousands, tens of thousands, if not millions of people’s online, and offline, world. That is the crux of Flash Point, by Imai Arata.
A spiritual follow-up to his previous work, “F,” both published in English by Glacier Bay Books, Flash Point follows Imai, an out-of-work thirty-year old author stand-in, and Mashiro, his high school age, (now) truant sister-in-law, as they become embroiled in the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Entirely by accident, they become, to Abe’s JFK, both the man on the hill and the Zapruder, watcher and watched, no longer inadvertent bystanders but now pieces on the chessboard.
In Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco meticulously builds a non-existent conspiracy (The Plan) right in front of our eyes, only for it to come true, not because it was ever real, but because it found an audience willing to make it real. It is a prescient work in many ways, notably its thoughtful exploration of conspiracy and also its use of Abulafia, a then-cutting-edge (and somewhat fantastical) personal computer that is used to create the necessary connections for The Plan. Proto-AI, absorbing, imbibing, and then regurgitating all the works fed into it in semi-novel, mostly incoherent, scarily useful ways.
Arata does something similar in Flash Point. Around the one-third mark, Imai and Mashiro come across Shinzo Abe giving a speech in the streets. Mashiro wants food, something Imai somewhat brushes off as he stops to film Abe. Mashiro, known across the internet for her viral “FPI” sign – think YMCA but the letters stand for “Fami-chicken, Pizza bun, Iichiko shochu” – petulantly protests Imai’s indifference to her food choices by showing up in the background making the FP of her FPI sign right before the assassination occurs.
This, in turn, makes Mashiro the cause célèbre for an increasingly large number of conspiracy theorists all in conflict with one another, full of theories which are easy to dismiss when they seem to be nothing but videos on a screen or words in a post, but soon they bleed into the real world and into Imai and Mashiro’s real life. Conspiracies which once took weeks, months, or years to fester and build, limited to small, isolated groups, now swell rapidly within dedicated, insular ecosystems before bursting out into the mainstream.
To say this book is strange to read would be an understatement. Not the work itself or its approach to conspiracy, that’s all familiar. It’s the appearance of a modern political figure at all. A couple of years back, I read some issues of The Avengers from the ‘80s and was surprised by who I saw: President Ronald Reagan. It’s not that it was odd for the President of the United States to appear in a comic but it was odd to see the then-sitting, real-life president appear, in full, with nary an obfuscatory technique employed in an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with him or his politics.
I cannot imagine such a comic in 2025, at least from a major publisher. Is it an attempt to remain “timeless?” Is it the medium’s propensity to favor genre fare over literary realism? Is it simply corporate fear of being too provocative, of alienating one audience or another through the sheer act of pretending the world exists? I don’t know. I certainly don’t know when it comes to manga, where politics seems even more impossible to imagine.
Selection bias plays a part here. Much of the manga market in the United States is dominated by action-horror (or action-comedy) comics aimed at young men, published by three or four major companies, originally running in a few major magazines in Japan. For a long time, that, shojo romance titles, and the occasional classic (Barefoot Gen, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths) were all that could survive. Access to works outside of those genres from the majors or to more niche works from smaller publishers or independent mangaka were limited to non-existent. They still are, though Glacier Bay’s successes and Flash Point’s presence shows a maturation in the market.
I should clarify that when I say politics, I mean topical, current, governmental figures, processes, and decisions. These are what seem to be a third rail in so many published comics works, both here in the States and elsewhere. That’s not to say there aren’t political books, or books that satirize then-current political figures (Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction, for example) but those are political in a “the personal is political” way. The only times I truly feel like I’m reading a work that acknowledges political realities, though, are literary classics, most of which ran in underground, alt titles. In that way, Flash Point is picking up the torch and running with it.
Flash Point is a work inextricably tied to politics – specifically, the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – yet it’s not a political work. It has little to say about Abe-nomics or his party, even though Arata clearly has opinions about him, expressing as much in the interview at the back of the volume. Flash Point is more concerned with the conspiracy aspect; of illustrating, in a larger-than-life way, where we are now and how inextricably tied internet conspiracy culture has become to mainstream political activism.
To do so, Arata spends the first sixty or so pages setting up the relationship between Imai and Mashiro, which provides the bedrock for the entire book. It’s impossible to get enough of these two. A perfect comedy duo: Imai is the straight man, Mashiro is the goofball; Imai, with his old-man back problems, and Mashiro with her boundless energy. The two play off each other in comedic and dramatic (though never too dramatic) scenes with a familiarity that seems like it could only exist in fiction, yet it rings so true, it can’t be.
This is a funny work with a razor-sharp eye for timing. You wouldn’t think something described as “a work about conspiracy and the assassination of Shinzo Abe” would be, but it is. Arata’s dry, off-beat sense of humor bleeds through the page, bolstered by the simple figures and somewhat stiff motion. The lines are clean, a welcomed change from the harder-to-read linework of “F,” but retain the same rough stylization that makes it feel like we’re reading about real people and not sanded-down, corporate cutouts or caricatures.
His paneling is documentary-like, regimented, and brutally effective in its approach to portraying time, lingering on the moments that extend in the mind, that matter to Imai, and breezing through the others in montage-like fashion. Wide-screen panels, most apparent in the rigidity of the grids he employs during the Abe assassination pages and their aftermath, capture the lens of the smartphone camera and the computer screen. Inspired, I suspect in part, by Tatsuki Fujimoto’s work on Look Back and Goodbye, Eri.
It is easy to get lost in Flash Point. One feels as if they’ve stepped through the page and onto the streets of Tokyo with your two friends, Mashiro and Imai. It is a work that resonates because it is real, not because it is rendered hyper-realistically. Life goes on, even with all this nonsense around us, until it doesn’t.
With cameras on everything, a human need to find grand connections in the unconnected, and industries built on manufacturing, and governments taking advantage of, those connections, Imai and Mashiro could be you or me, today or tomorrow. Just a flash point, or a fami-chicken, pizza bun trip away.
SOLRAD is made possible by the generous donations of readers like you. Support our Patreon campaign, or make a tax-deductible donation to our publisher, Fieldmouse Press, today.
Leave a Reply