Touring After the Apocalypse, Volumes 1 – 3
by Sakae Saito
translated by Amanda Haley
2022-2023

I randomly checked these manga out from the new release section of my local library and they’re adorable. Youko and Airi are (or at least appear to be) two teenage girls who are traveling via motorsbike around Japan, seeing the sights, following Youko’s older sister’s previous touring schedule, but while the pictures and social media posts that the sister posted look (more or less) like regular posts we might see today, Youko and Airi are seeing the sights after they’re long abandoned and worn down and completely absent any other people. But they’re so excited to see everything!

In each volume, there’s some discovery that to me-the-reader acknowledges the whole tragedy of the empty and crumbling infrastructure of society and what it means that there are so many people not there. To the two girls, it’s fun and interesting and then they move on to the next thing. It keeps the whole mood light-hearted, while also highlighting how much society changes in a single generation as kids who didn’t live the history are accustomed to their lives as being the norm.

There’s a slowly building reveal that something else is going on with these two, but while there are various hints and teases so far, I haven’t figured it out yet.

I’m also really impressed with the translation job since there’s a lot of pop culture references and word games that flow perfectly naturally while I’m reading the English and I can only imagine were incredibly difficult to transpose from the original Japanese.

The Electric State
by Simon Stålenhag
2017

Oof, this is beautiful and moody and horrifying and dark, and it ends in such a way that there’s just enough hope for the future that I think “maybe…”, even though it’s very clear that there’s no real hope. But, just, maybe…?

My first thought when looking at this book was that it was an art book, full of beautiful full page and two-page spreads of various post-apocalyptic scenes. And it is! But it’s also a novella with a story, written in text and full paragraphs and absolutely no text boxes or the like, so it’s more of a picture book than a graphic novel in the way the text and the images interact.

The story is about the narrator Michelle and her companion Skip making a cross country trip in a thoroughly failed cyberpunk society. The setting is intra-apocalyptic rather than post, and oof, does it dip into all sorts of horror, with the implication that at least three types of apocalyptic disasters were all happening at once: war, environmental, and technological. It was reassuring that the events were set in the 1990s with a different history prior to that because this book would have been even more horrifying if it was set in the 2040s. There are a series of flashbacks that reveal the narrator’s backstory, but it’s only in the final third of the book that the reason for trip and Skip’s story are finally revealed, and it’s such a magnificent twist that just twists my heart and stomach.

The differences between these two titles is kind of amazing, just in tone and visualization, especially given how similar the premise and frameworks are. It very much highlights how two people can tell the same story in such different ways that they become two different stories. Reading these two so soon one after another reminds me very much of the Holy Shit! Two Cakes! meme.