Great find from Pedro, who sent me a link to a Brazilian review of Kingdom Come — in the form of a comic strip!

Here is the rest of the strip.

And Pedro has kindly translated the text from the Portuguese, as follows:

British author JG Ballard became known for the 1973 novel Crash. The book, filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, presents a group of people enjoying sexual pleasure in car accidents.

Another famous work is Empire of the Sun, about a boy who’s separated from his parents during the Japanese occupation of China in World War Two. The book was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. (Balloon: Cadillac of the skies!)

Ballard comes back to the violent stylings of Crash in his new novel, Kingdom Come.
(Balloon: Technology and consumerism affect the middle class.)

The work is narrated by Richard Pearson, a forty-something unemployed adman going through a midlife crisis.

Pearson has just lost his father in a shootout in the food court of a mall in Brooklands, a suburban city around Heathrow airport.

Arriving in Brooklands to investigate his father’s death, Pearson finds out that the city revolves around the mall, the enormous Metro-Centre.
(Balloon: It’s the St. Peter’s square of the shopping world.)

Aside from being a commercial center, the Metro-Centre attracts nationalist hooligans, dressed in St George’s cross t-shirts who riot and persecute immigrants of any ethnicity.
(Balloon: These chinks and turks are fouling up the country!)

Later Pearson discovers that a group of local notable figures that hate the mall might be behind his father’s death.

While the mystery remains unsolved, Pearson participates in Metro-Centre campaigns starred by David Cruise, beloved Brooklands actor, and transmitted through the mall’s own cable TV channel.

A bomb attack in the mall takes Cruise to the locale, in a sort of fascist State coup.

A series of events leads the Metro-Centre to be surrounded by the army, with the novel’s main characters and other three thousand people taken as hostages. The ending is cinematic.

Ballard explores well the dark side of the English suburbs, but his naive allegory of the effects of capitalism and publicity is undercut by the messianic tendencies it so criticizes.
(Balloon: Shopping as religion: the root of all society’s evils)

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Audiopollution! They said it’d never hit us here…’
+ ‘Now Zero’ vs Death Note
+ ‘Enigmatic Engineering’ in the Wind from Nowhere

Martin Pichlmair has written an interesting article for Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV considered as an Atrocity Exhibition’, that draws parallels between the controversial GTA and Ballard’s most experimental work:

This review outlines the intersections between Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) and the British novelist J.G. Ballard’s experimental text “The Atrocity Exhibition”. Obvious parallels like the dominant roles of cars and carnage are supplemented by more subtle similarities. Grand Theft Auto is an “Atrocity Exhibition”, a deliberately instigated scandal, and a cynical masterpiece.
…
J.G. Ballard is convinced that science fiction authors should pursue the exploration of inner landscapes rather than be writing about adventures in outer space. Not unlike Grand Theft Auto, he seeks to articulate the pathology that underlies consumer society… Most of his novels exhibit civilisation in a state of disintegration, dystopian landscapes and protagonists unable to shake off their past. The hostile landscape acts as an expression of the personal struggle of the hero, its inhabitants gradually regressing into savages. The protagonist is the only constant, stubbornly sticking to his foredoomed path while elegantly sidestepping all dangers. Grand Theft Auto also tells the story of a man who keeps his path in a world bare of illusions.

Without wishing to distract from Martin’s eloquent argument, I wonder why Crash wasn’t considered alongside Atrocity (to which it can be considered a sequel) and Ballard’s 1968 exhibition of crashed cars, which Martin does refer to. Indeed, Atrocity blueprints the later novel in its chapter entitled ‘Crash!’, which, as Ballard explains, ‘was written a year before my exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, and in effect is the gene from which my novel Crash was to spring’. Elsewhere, Atrocity records the first, enigmatic appearance of Vaughan, Crash’s ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’. In effect, Crash amplifies the tensions Martin rightly identifies as underpinning the Atrocity dynamic, such as ‘the psychotic principal character … who regards all other people as inhabitants of his mental landscape’.

Interestingly, the connection between the hyper-aestheticised violence of Crash and the elegant carnage of autogeddon-style computer games is something Matt Bittanti drew upon in his experiments with gamics, ‘the combination of comics and videogames’:

I love the idea of gamics, but I’m not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. “F.E.A.R. I.K.E.A.” combines the fetish for IKEA’s catalog with Monolith’s awesome FPS. “CRASH” is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard’s stories; “WAR/GAMES” is about the ideology of games, while “SIM-BAUDRILLARD” is about… well, you get the drift, right?

ABOVE: Matteo Bittanti’s Crash, part 2.

Further to Mike Moorcock, Frendz and Hawkwind all turning up in Mike Bonsall’s brilliant excavation of Ballard’s neural motorway, and then the passing away of Jim Cawthorn, let’s return to John Coulthart.

John, who has designed a few Hawkwind record covers in his time, has unearthed a comic strip from the November 29th, 1971 edition of Frendz. It’s written by Moorcock and illustrated by Cawthorn, and features Hawkwind as sonic supermen.

See John’s post for more detail, and also the next page of the strip.

SONIC ATTACK
by Hawkwind
lyrics by Michael Moorcock
sung by Bob Calvert (with Lemmy)

In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules:
If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm
simultaneously.
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,
but do not panic…

Use your wheels. It is what they are for.
Small babies may be placed inside the special cocoons,
which should be left, if possible, in a shelter.
Do not attempt to use your own limbs.
If no wheels are available, metal, not organic, limbs
should be employed whenever possible.

Remember, in the case of Sonic Attack, Survival means every man for himself.
Statistically more people survive if they think only of themselves.
Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones.
You have only a few seconds to escape.
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.
Do not panic.
Think only of yourself…

These are the first signs of Sonic Attack:
You will notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating.
You will notice a vibration in your diaphragm.
You will hear a distant hissing in your ears.
You will feel dizzy.
You will feel the need to vomit.
There will be bleeding from orifices.
There will be an ache in the pelvic region.
You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter.

These are all signs of imminent Sonic destruction.
Your only real protection is flight.
If you are less than ten years old, then remain in your shelter and use
your cocoon.

But remember:
You can help no-one else, No-one else, No-one else…

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

J.G. Ballard, 1990.

Earlier, I noted the similarities between the manga New Engineering and Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere. This is a connection that was flagged by the minicomic artist Tom Kaczynski. When I pressed Tom on this, he told me that although he wasn’t quite sure the similarities were deliberate, he thought they were still remarkable enough to be unpacked.

Wind is the ugly duckling of Ballard’s novels. With its generic plot and decidedly rushed feel, it’s been disowned by its author, left to feed off the crumbs of Ballard supporters looking to drill further down into the man’s back catalogue. Which is why I was amazed at the thought that something so obscure and unloved could have inspired anything let alone a node of the total cultural fission that is Japanese manga.

You wouldn’t think it could happen again, would you? But over at sub_divided, they’re claiming that Ballard’s 1959 short story “Now: Zero” is the basis for the 2003 manga Death Note! Unlike Tom Kaczynski, sub_divided doesn’t merely see this as an interesting coincidence; no, sub_divided is claiming direct inspiration:

“Now: Zero” was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.”

Of Ballard’s shorts, “Now: Zero” is perhaps Wind‘s equivalent, described by John Boston as “about as inconsequential a story as Ballard has published”. It tells the tale of an office milquetoast who discovers that if he writes about someone, they die, so he sets about eliminating his enemies via the act of writing. The twist at the end of the story is that the reader is supposed to die, too. As John remarks, there are Poe overtones, notably in the air of supernature and in the ornate language, yet there are also sub-Ballardian themes, almost but not quite hatched, including intertwingled concepts of the tyranny of time and the erosion of free will and the notion of the writer bringing into being parallel worlds of the imagination that challenge the structural integrity of the real. Plus, when the protagonist tries to wipe out the inhabitants of the town where he was born, a faint whiff of the messianic madness of The Unlimited Dream Company might take you. I also like how the twist in the tail is one that actually kills the reader, corny in itself but clever if you look at it as revenge on the type of story Ballard might have felt obliged to write at this stage of his career, the type that would only be bought by a magazine if it had the twist, a device demanded by readers of the day. But I’m stretching, because the 29-year-old Ballard was clearly still finding his voice and this story is, formally at least, an experiment that would soon be abandoned.

Panels from Death Note 0, by Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator).

Now read sub_divided’s full post for some interesting commentary on the ways “Now: Zero” collides with Death Note, including this:

In the pilot, there’s a mention of an incident that occurred in the mid-seventies in which a bank branch was forced to close after a series of ‘accidental’ deaths. The first two people to die were the branch manager and assistant manager, both from heart attacks. The rest of the employees all died in accidents until, finally, the last remaining employee of the branch committed suicide. After the last employee died, it was found that a lot more people involved with the employee (but completely unrelated to the bank) had all died in accidents. It’s only very briefly mentioned so that two detectives have an incentive to further investigate a series of heart attacks that happened at a school in Tokyo. But it just strikes me as being quite similar to the beginning of Now: Zero from what I’ve read here.

And this:

[In "Now: Zero"] you have:

1. A cowardly person with a tedious desk job who uses a notebook to kill people. This person doesn’t have the sense/imagination/diabolic mind to disguise what he’s doing, and only thinks of killing his coworkers and other people who have personally affected him.
2. Police who suspect that these “accidental” deaths are too coincidental to be accidents, and who suspect that the killer was someone who knew the victims.
3. Main characters who panic when the police start asking questions about them and resolve to get rid of the evidence. In both cases, they decide to burn the notebook.
4. Surprise “meta” twists at the end.

Then combine the company that shuts down, and…can there be any doubt? It seems like the only really new thing in the Pilot is the idea of different people using the notebook in different ways. One policeman says he’d use it to rise in the ranks (like in Ballard’s story) and one says he’d use it to improve the world, the way Light attempts to in Death Note proper. It’s presented as a flawed idea — but it seems like the author has to think about it for a moment, which is honestly kind of scary.

The comments provide further hardcore analysis and plot detail of both works, even if a good deal of the readers hadn’t heard of Ballard before. That’s OK, I hadn’t heard of Death Note either, but those comments almost had me convinced that Tsugumi Ohba knows his Ballard.

Luckily, I’ve found an online archive of all Death Note manga, including the pilot story, which is apparently the one with all the “Now: Zero” protein. I’ve flicked through the pilot and I can tell you that there are definite similarities, even though the nerd is now a Japanese schoolkid who is bullied and the supernatural elements have been enhanced to include a demon from the netherworld who lost his “book of the dead”, which the schoolkid finds and which she believes to be a blank diary someone has lost. It could be influenced by Ballard, or it could be a coincidence. I’m not positive there’s conclusive evidence either way, especially given that, as sub_divided points out, Death Note focuses on the eerie quality of the notebook whereas:

“the focus in Ballard’s story is not really the notebook (it’s an old one the narrator digs out of his closet). The focus is really the concentrated resentment of the narrator — what if his outlet, his written fantasies, really did have the power to kill people. So, although the narrator himself eventually concludes that the problem lies with the notebook, and resolves to burn it, you can say that the notebook isn’t really the issue at hand.”

I’ll get back to you after I’ve read Death Note‘s pilot in full.

But for now there’s one bizarre assertion that sub_divided makes that I feel I must set to rights to preserve Ballard’s good name. Sub_divided claims that “One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters’ relationships, which are generally ‘pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night.’”

Hmmmmm, I know Ballard likes a Scotch but he’s no alcoholic from what I’ve read. And can you imagine his passive cypher-characters getting into an abusive argument? After digging I find that in fact sub_divided is referring to crime writer Jim Thompson, who, according to Wikipedia:

“drank heavily; the effects of alcoholism often featured in his works… Donald E. Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for the screen, observed that alcoholism had a great role in Thompson’s literature, though it tended to be inexplicit. Westlake described typical personal relationships in Thompson novels as pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night; behavior common to the alcoholic Thompson’s style of life, but which he ellided from the stories.”

Sort yourself out, sub_divided!

Over at Transatlantis, Tom Kaczynski ruminates on the relationship between Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering manga, and — of all things — Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere. It’s apparently a good fit, as Tom notes the similarities between Yokoyama’s ‘massive architectural projects … realized by gigantic machinery’ and the construction of the giant pyramid in Wind.

Tom doesn’t really say, but could it be possible that a Japanese manga artist was influenced by Ballard’s most obscure novel?

[Ballard's] description of the building process has an uncanny resemblance to the [sic] Yokoyama depicts the massive feats of engineering in his stories.
…
Ballard totally dispenses with a human perspective. The construction is apprehended from a series of unnatural vantage points that allow us to experience the massiveness of the endeavor. Humans at this scale are “like frantic ants.” Since Ballard doesn’t have any visuals accompanying his prose, we have to imagine the scene. With Yokoyama, we are provided with vague glimpses.
…
What distinguishes New Engineering from The Wind from Nowhere is that Ballard eventually tells us what is being built and why: a gigantic steel pyramid designed to withstand the force of the wind. Hardoon, the builder, hopes not only to survive the catastrophe but thrive in it as well. But his motives aren’t entirely clear and sometimes the reader is led to believe the pyramid exist solely so Hardoon can comfortably sit in his steel cage, watch the world turn to dust and listen to the savage howl of the hurricane.

Hardoon is a typically Ballardian character who transforms and adapts as best he can to circumstances on the ground (disasters in this case and in his early novels, but in his later work modernity and technology are enough). We encounter these characters in what we recognize as ‘our’ world, but they already belong to another, hidden world, emerging in our midst like one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. And with the new world come new psycho(patho)logies. This is what’s missing from Yokoyama’s structures. The author consciously avoids depicting the psychology of his world.

The post ends with a meditation on the role of Dubai’s ‘context-less plastic mega-structures’ and is well worth considering.