Losing Info Through Closure in All You Need is Kill

This is the third time I’ve experienced this story.

All You Need is Kill started out as a Japanese Light Novel (their term for books like the pulp-novel) written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and only expanded out from there. A successful manga adaption by Takeshi Obata followed, an American comic adaption soon after that, and then it all culminated in the release of the big budget Hollywood film Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise.

                Since the manga discussed here is my third time through the loop I have developed a massive paratext. I believe it is because of this that I was very let down by my reading. The film and book are different versions of the same base story, enough that I can easily find the same amount of enjoyment in both, this comic failed to capture me in the same way despite the beautiful art and completely novel accurate depiction of the Full Metal Bitch.

                While this could lead into a very important conversation on comic book adaptations, I think it is much more interesting to note something that I have never experienced in a comic before and might never again. Check out this page:

                Here Keiji Kariya, Rita Vratowski, and the gang are quite obviously doing push ups. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud details closure, the act of observing the parts but perceiving the whole (63). While the physical motion of doing a push-up is never seen, it was easy for me to make a connection between the panels and imagine the workout happening. The familiar positioning of the figures, things like the sweat and the strained faces, as well as the rhythmic counting of the squad are all familiar to a reader as signifiers of push-ups.

                Well I was wrong.

                Going to the novel, “There’s an exercise called an iso push-up. You lift your body like you would in an ordinary push-up, then you hold that position.” (All You Need is Kill 36).

Closure is actually taking me too far in this page. There is no movement in between panels as the figures are holding their pose. I don’t know why they didn’t chose to mention this at any point in the manga but it was really fascinating to me. This paneling sequence caught me off guard even though I’ve read the book and knew about this before hand, even if I might not have remembered. I think it speaks more to the way comics create meaning than the way Obata drew this scene that a minor detail of the novels is lost or unclear here. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter (the movie omitted the iso push-ups entirely) but seeing the standard way a comic is read and how the gutters act for the reader being turned on their head was really cool even if it made me feel like an idiot.

*I would like to note that not every reader would perceive this manga in the way I described, but as a long-time comic book reader I can confidently say that it would not be hard to be thrown for a loop in the automatic process of creating the actions between panels. Readers could make it through the entire manga and the movie without even knowing what an iso push-up is, while it is a neat little detail added to the futuristic world presented in the novel.