FLCL and The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer

The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer is not very much like the great FLCL OVA. It is a 65-chapter [edit*] action adventure in which every plotline is resolved, most mysteries explained explicitly, and the audience get rewarded with a wholeheartedly motivational message.

Nonetheless, in the humour and in the surreal visuals, there’s the spectre of Gainax’s overwhelming bildungsroman. And as TL+BH continues it becomes very much apparent that, like in FLCL, that skewed attitude to reality is being put to the purpose of talking about the business of growing up and taking a place in the big weird world. Only FLCL was a furious race charged by hormonal rage, while TL+BH is a measured journey about finding a purpose in life.

Watching FLCLa was a rush, an exhilarating surprise which dragged me back again and again. TL+BH has been one of those addictive online manga obsessions: coming home from work, starting to do something else, just fitting in another chapter or two of manga instead, finding oneself twenty chapters deep in no time at all.

In other words, what TL+BH takes from it’s action-manga format isn’t just a thematic fondness for nakama and martial arts. It’s that seductive mixture of the grand and the pulpy - a manner of seeming more and more like a massive endeavour even as each chapter delivers gags and battles. The closest comparison I can think of for that feeling of cheerful scale is Fullmetal Alchemist.

In the early chapters the oddball villain designs and confusion of imagery (not to mention the noble struggle of the scanlators to get to grips with certain awkward terminology) lend TL+BH a mystery factor which reminded me of Cencoroll.  As time wears on the mysteries are explained, symbolism is deployed up-front, true heroism begins to shine through. So the manga grows into that Fullmetal Alchemist feeling of grandeur, just a grandeur rooted in warped aesthetics.

Maybe comparisons are cancerous here. Certainly they keep on multiplying in my hands. It’s just that I don’t want to tell anybody the tricks this manga plays, because they’re basically simple and utterly enchanting. This is one of the most gratifying reads I can think of. It’s a manga that brings happiness and admiration. And I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprises. On the offchance that there’s a stranger to The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer still reading the post, I’ll offer this much by way of enticement: the heroine is far far stronger than the hero, an iguana (?) cries manly tears, everyone gets a swing of the bat.