Comic review: Tokyo Ghost #1- Old Man Fear

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Sean Murphy
Creators: Remender/Murphy
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 16th September 2015


I used to love Stephen King, but the last book that I read coming from his ever-prolific mind was about cell-phones and how people will turn into zombies if they use them too much. The idea was dull, easy, and I expected better out of King. I read the entire book and my lasting impression was of an out of touch, out of ideas, old man, looking at the world outside of his mansion, and having a bit of a ill-considered, lazy moan about it all.

That book was called ‘Cell,’ and this book by Rick Remender, is pretty much the same thing. It is drenched in ‘cool,’ with a cool name, a cool protagonist and cool artwork, but the mind-set that it’s all coming from is pretty much the same as Cell. The difference is slight. Cell was about cell-phones making people violently anti-social, whilst ‘Tokyo Ghost’ (see, told you it was cool) is about computer games and the Internet making people violently anti-social.

I’m calling BS on the entire idea that modern technology is making us violent and anti-social, not because I like modern technology, but because I remember the time when all of this technology didn’t exist, and here’s the truth, people were just as anti-social back then, and a whole lot more violent as well.

The only difference between now and 1991 is that in 1991 people hid behind books, Walkmen, newspapers and magazines, whilst today they hide behind iphones. People in big cities ignore each other. That’s how it has always been. If you want some social interaction then move to a small village where people still talk to each other. It’s not about technology. It's about the modern capitalist rat race life, and urban isolation. The violence in these books is just for dramatic effect. It makes the story more exciting, that's why it's there. In the real world it's the isolation that gets you, not the violence, which is actually quite rare today in comparison to the recent past.

Having rejected the initial premise I’m left to fall back on the characters within the book to get some enjoyment out of it. Unfortunately the main protagonist is that ubiquitous protagonist that you always get in comic books these days, that being the attractive young female (normally a cop, or special agent, as she is here) who goes around beating up intolerant, racist, sexist men. In this book we have another perfect specimen of a middle aged writers PC mind, outfitted in hotpants, with the requisite punk haircut and a good line in banter as she roars up and down the highstreet dispensing instant justice to all of the nasty men that she finds. She has a boyfriend in tow, he sucks, and it’s her job to rescue him from not sucking anymore. This boyfriend is a stand-in for an on-line gamer, so the message is clear. Boys suck, they spend too much time on the internet playing computer games, and it’s up to their social justice warrior perfect girlfriends to save them from themselves.

This protagonist girl (I forget her name, but she’s pretty much identical to Tank Girl from the early 1990’s) is the only person in old Rick’s universe that is not plugged into the Internet. Strange that, because in the world that I live, the most plugged in people to the Internet are not men, but young girls. Men are starting to abandon the Internet, and it’s the females that are stuck to it like wars to a government, but you’re not going to see that reflected in a comic book, because in the world of PC delusion the saviours of the world are always pretty young girls.

The most asleep, clueless, half-witted people on the planet today are social science educated young, feminist, liberal girls. They see none of the tyranny of our times, and are used to divide and conquer the population with identity politics nonsense. Their ideology comes from government approved university Marxism, an ideology that reduces everything to class, skin colour, gender and sexuality, thus missing all of the important issues that we need to sort out in order to enact some real change in the rapidly declining western world.

So, yes, I’m fed up of seeing pretty young girls portrayed as saviours in my comic books when in the real world they are anything but.

Rant over, I’ll try to be nice now. So why would anybody like, or enjoy Tokyo Ghost?

I know why. I do. People will like the art, and they will think that it’s addressing important issues about technology and how it’s isolating us from ourselves. They’ll think it’s smart, funny, cool and fun.

I (obviously) have a different opinion on the book. My opinion is that it’s liberal tosh drenched in cool, that says nothing, has a wonky premise, and features a generic protagonist that you’ll find in just about every other ‘independent’ comic book on the market today. So, is it worth buying? If you are a feminist liberal type, yes, go for it. However, for anybody else, for anybody that has broken free from the mainstream paradigm of feminist liberalism, don’t bother, it will annoy the crap out of you, and will make you long for the good old days when comic books still had genuine diversity, and when Stephen King still pumped out genuinely exciting, fresh, insightful and enjoyable books.



Rating: 5/10 (Dripping with generic cool, and not half as clever as it thinks that it is)


 Special thanks to John at the Incredible Comic Book Shop for recommending this book to me. I didn’t like it, but I got a lot out of it, and it gave me perfect ranting material, thanks mate. 
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