Published in France on September 5, 2018, the first volume of Signal 100 by the screenwriter of Perfect Crime (Delcourt/Tonkam) sets the tone very quickly. The manga will be dark, breathless and will not let the suspense drop once. You will love turning the pages as much as you will dread doing, because what Signal 100 presents you is the hell that a second class lives.
Signal 100
Original title : シグナル100
Authors : Miyatsuki Arata (script) KONDO Shigure (art)
Original publisher: Hakusensha in Japan
French publisher : Delcourt/Tonkam
Release date : 05/09/2018
Number of volumes : 1 volume in France, 4 volumes in Japan
Status : Series completed
Public price : 7.99 €
Synopsis:
Mr.Shimobe, the head teacher and sufferer of an unruly class, shows them a strange film one day. His students then realize that they have just been hypnotized! To perfect his revenge, Mr.Shimobe commits suicide after revealing one last piece of information: There are 100 actions not to be carried out under penalty of death! Their lives take a macabre turn.
The stolen daily newspaper
Mr. SHIMOBE's class, the Second C (2-C) is the worst class in high school, the students are not only turbulent and inattentive in class: they fight, do not respect anything and traumatize their main teacher. It is in this noisy atmosphere that Rena KASHIMURA lives her daily routine. Having no friends in the class to avoid problems, she dreams of a little spice in her monotonous life.
For his part, Mr. SHIMOBE is at the end of his rope: the class nicknames him "stooge", they brutalize him and the principal threatens to send him away if he does not put his students back on the right path. He evokes the experience of the professor in a "famous research institute in the United States" by expressly asking him to use it, something that Mr. SHIMOBE is about to do, but not to raise the level of the class, on the contrary, he wants to send his students to hell!
The teacher shows his true face by trapping his students in the audiovisual room to make them watch a film to hypnotize them by implanting suicide suggestions in their unconscious in reaction to a hundred everyday actions. Which? Students will learn it… by dying. Each action corresponding to a trance signal causes the student who performed it to commit suicide. This is what the class discovers immediately after seeing the film when one of the students tries to hit Mr. SHIMOBE and he bursts – literally – his head against the wall. And this is just the beginning… When another student tries to warn someone about what is happening to her, she also commits suicide. There is only one solution to stop being under the influence of suicidal trances: see all the other students in the class die. Mr. SHIMOBE defenestrates himself and leaves the students alone with the revelation he has just made to them.
"I'll wait for you… in hell! »
The normal life that these high school students led is now over, they will have to live with the fear of performing an everyday action that would push them to commit suicide. How do you live when you don't know if you can laugh, run, wash your hands, sleep?
A survival game that stands out
The principle of Signal 100 is similar to that of Nobuaki KANAZAWA's King's Game (Ki-oon): a class is targeted and must obey specific rules not to die. The difference in this survival game is that the one who established the rules of the "game" does not propose a series of challenges. Here, all participants have within them the hundred signals that lead to suicide and, thanks to the post-hypnotic process, they do not remember these signals. The students of the 2-C must try to survive and for this, they must be very careful because their gestures are no longer trivial, each action could be the last.
One of the strengths of Signal 100 is the flow of the action behind closed doors: only the students in the class are aware of what has happened and what is happening to them. They are not confined to a small space, at least physically, because they are separated from others by their common secret. They are confined to their misfortune.
But the real strength of Signal 100 lies in the care taken by the reactions of the students. The psychological pressure that suffocates them is perfectly rendered as much in their actions as by Shigure KONDO's drawing. More accustomed to working on romantic comedies in Japan, he nevertheless succeeds in making psychological torture visible on faces, in revealing all the terror and shock felt by the students but also the madness of their main teacher, Mr. SHIMOBE. On the scenario side, Arata MIYATSUKI builds complex characters who each think in their own way to avoid dying. Should we ally ourselves with others or stay alone? Some characters who seem banal turn out to be real manipulators, which helps make Signal 100 stand out from the crowd.
The suicides are represented in a very violent way, blood stains the floor and walls, covers the faces and none of the corpses are hidden. From the body with the revulsed eyes of Mr. SHIMOBE to the bloody remains of the first two victims of the hypnotic trances of the first chapter, nothing is spared you. The manga is therefore not to be put in the hands of just anyone.
If you are looking for the thrill of the thriller, the anguish of behind closed doors and death that can strike at any moment but also that you have a strong stomach, then try the Signal 100 experience. Will you last until the release of volume 2 on November 28?
