Ultra Heaven

Koike (the Heaven’s Door series) brings readers into a dazzling, drugged-out cyberpunk future in the first English language translation of the series widely regarded as his masterpiece. Cub, a stubble-faced junkie who escapes his grimy apartment through daily drug trips, is a typical citizen in a Blade Runner–esque urban landscape where the populace has been medicated into complacency. At “pump bars,” doctors serve up customized drug cocktails that can deliver any desired mental state; those who can’t afford bespoke pharmaceuticals take street drugs with names like Alice and Peter Pan or trip out on cybernetic VR “amps.” “Who in the world isn’t a junkie these days?” Cub shrugs, risking death for a steady high. But even he fears that he’s taken more than he can handle when a walleyed dealer hooks him up with Ultra Heaven, a hallucinogen that shreds Cub’s—and the reader’s—sense of time, space, identity, and reality. Like Akira as envisioned by Philip K. Dick, this manga uses the language and imagery of science fiction to delve into altered states and transcendental expanses. Koike’s hyperrealistic artwork, which renders the futuristic city in obsessive detail, makes his eye-melting depictions of altered states both hypnotic and disorienting. Fans of new wave science fiction, classic underground comics, and psychedelic poster art will want to take this trip. (Dec.)