Momo Kanchou no Himitsu Kichi
Captain Momo's Secret Base

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Captain Momo's Secret Base is for sure an interesting read. If you're a fan of existentialism in space, cats, alcoholism and cute girls, you're in for a treat! I personally really enjoyed it, being a huge fan of Tsuruta's work already and generally enjoying these types of manga. However, not everybody may enjoy this story for a few reasons, mainly one being that there is nudity and softcore porn throughout 98% of it, which I didn't see much warning for anywhere, but maybe that's just my experience. If you're the type of person to be embarrassed by that sort of thing, I suggest reading where ... nobody can see the pages! The story itself has nothing to do with said topics, still managing to be heartwarming, funny, and stress-inducing while maintaining a near constant state of unspoken fan-service. It's definitely more in-your-face than Tsuruta's other works, but this manga still contains his classic, beautiful artwork and intriguing plotlines. At the time of this writing only 2 volumes have been released, but with the most recent twists and turns I can certainly say I'll be anxiously awaiting any future updates.

This is a manga about a girl slowly losing her mind in a disassociative, cluttered, lonely, feline-occupied spacecraft, where she is constantly at the mercy of piles and piles of books that'll suffocate her in her sleep, and the electricity going out, leaving her in total darkness, with her only source of companionship being the cat, and some broad, who may or may not be a voyeuristic stand-in for the viewer if the ending illustration is anything to go by. This is a manga that I like a lot. A hell of a lot. And whilst it's not the most groundbreaking, unique or sophisticated book ... in the world—actually, quite the contrary—it's precisely the type of artistic, self-indulgent splurgery I love the most, from the mangaka I love the most: Kenji Tsuruta. To preface, I’m reviewing this manga without actually having "read" a single chapter since the only hosted scans I could find past the second page of google were all in Chinese, fortunately, Tsuruta is one of the few real artists whom I trust to convey his message, heart and ideas entirely through sketch, and to no one’s surprise, Momo managed to do just that. Unfortunately, Momo looks like a one-volume deal—despite the "publishing" status MAL has it listed as—which has me not only worried for the state of this manga going forward, seeing as its release was in 2017, but also for the future of Wandering Island. But I digress. On to the review!

Captain Momo's Secret Base is the usual Tsuruta artful affair: cute, thin, dishevelled, sleep-deprived girls, in varying degrees of clothe, pouring over old books and drinking wine with the cat somewhere in frame. And yes, that's THE cat. Not, A cat. THE cat. You know, the cat, as in, "get that fucking cat out of here," or, "for crying out loud, the cat is driving me crazy," or, "has anyone seen the fucking cat?" Point is: the cat is there, and it may or may not be the same cat from La Pomme Prisonnière, or Wandering Island, or wherever else it shows up. Funnily enough, it was only after "reading" through Momo once already that I actually spent the time to find some quality Japanese scans and found out the cat's name was actually old man John, but "the cat" just has a nicer ring to it, don't you think? However, these scans had little to no furigana, so trying to ascertain the happenings of the, admittedly limited, story through the Japanese text did little to help, aside from the fact I could now comprehend Momo's frustrated are's, kono's and mattaku's whilst shes trying to flip a light switch or something, which is nothing I couldn't have already inferred from the Chinese scans.

Really, nothing much of substance goes on in Momo's narrative, but, of course, I wouldn't really know now, would I? However, the lack of narrative, or my lack of ability to understand the narrative, is of little importance. Like Tsuruta's other works, Momo's is more of a tone piece, as some chapters go by entirely without a single text bubble, letting you soak in the impeccably crafted atmosphere, akin to something like a TKMZ manga, just without the depressive overtones and instead with more erotic undertones—which might not even be the right word to use, but, well, you'll see. For a majority of Momo's first and only volume, the titular Momo is unapologetically bare and vulnerably naked, so unless you're into voyeurism—which is very much the crowd this manga caters to—you're not going to really get the appeal, and you certainly won't have the same experience you had with your beloved Emanon. But don't worry, later on, Momo does her hair into a cute ponytail and adorns a military uniform which gets me all kinds of diamonds like you wouldn't believe. Military uniforms just do it for me. I don't even know why—the authority? Anyway, after wearing the best and only clothing I'd like to see her in—this is also with no pants, mind you—she goes back to being naked and laying around with the cat for a couple chapters. Momo remains that way for the rest of this manga's tragically short 15 chapters; lying around with the cat, reading old tomes and manuals, doing the laundry, getting stuck in the laundry door; and little by little, losing her mind as she imagines an army of cats overrunning the space station. It's a good read, trust me.

The character art is pretty standard for Tsuruta, just with a lot more nudity, which is interesting, as Momo is never really doing anything sexual, like, at all. The state of her being naked isn't inherently titillating either, which is why I say the manga has a distinctly and uniquely voyeuristic feel to it, despite that particular format not being new to Tsuruta fans. However, unlike the comparison I made to the works of Jiro Taniguchi in my Wandering Island review, Momo doesn't exhibit the same charming stoicism that comes with Tsuruta's distinct take on sex appeal the way Amelia does, and is more a vessel for this displaced feeling of subdued ennui—for lack of a better term. Momo's funny and cute, don't get me wrong, but there's an underlying suffocating, bleak, forlorn loneliness in her eyes at times, which is something you don't often see from Tsuruta's heroines. Back to the art, though—his designs, or the general way he draws people, is what got me initially hooked on his stuff. His characters don't look conventionally beautiful; there's something slightly off about the way he draws them, and I really like that about his style. I like Kenji Tsuruta's art so much that I wish my actual, real-life job would be a professor at some mid-level university, analysing Tsuruta’s art, and as awful at that as I may be, it’d certainly be the dream. Man, I really gotta get his art books one of these days, at least one of them, maybe not all of them.

The background art is actually pretty different from most Tsuruta stuff, which is more often than not cobblestone streets, canals, lampposts, old maps and laptops—oh, and cats—whereas this is obviously more sci-fi; cold, dreary, sterile, empty sci-fi. The only stuff in his catalogue I can compare it to is that one part in Spirit of Wonder with the steampunk spaceship, but this isn't steampunk and feels more in line with something like Girls Last Tour than anything else I can think of. I also get a pretty profound 1979 Alien feel from the setting—a woman and her cat, alone on a deserted, frigid spacecraft, in the middle of, figuratively and literally, nowhere—which is good, as Alien is one of my favourite films of all time. Tsuruta's choice to tap into the not absolutely skin-crawling, hair-raisingly terrifying aspects of that narrative was an excellent choice for the setting, though whether or not that's just pure coincidence or deliberate attention to detail is entirely up to you.

To summarise, I really, really like this manga a lot. A hell of a lot. The art is astounding, Momo is a delight (from what my limited Japanese allows me to glean), and the tone, ambience and atmosphere are irreplaceable. Tsuruta's characters may suffer from severe, severe sameface, but they're all so, so pretty to look at, so no matter what they're doing, whether it be drinking, smoking, reading, sleeping, sitting behind a monitor or flying a plane to a mysterious island floating around the pacific ocean, I'm kept engaged from beginning to end thanks to the one of a kind, idyllic, nostalgic, simplistic tone his works often elicit. Thankfully, Momo kept that tradition.