In September of 1996, a strange, somewhat crudely drawn horror manga made its first appearance in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump. It was the one-man project of an obscure creator, who had seen little success over his then fifteen year career, and who struggled to continue working while living in extreme poverty. The manga told the story of a severely bullied highschool boy with a love of intricate games, mirroring aspects of the creator’s own life. The troubled young protagonist discovers a mysterious puzzle, reminiscent of Clive Barker’s iconic Lament Configuration, and solves it; allowing a dark spirit to inhabit him. Driven by the spirit to seek revenge on his bullies, the boy challenges those who wronged him, one by one, to a series of diabolic games, with cruel and often deadly outcomes. In short order, the protagonist’s tormentors are themselves tormented; burned alive, electrocuted, poisoned, and in one case, literally scared to death.
For those who haven’t already figured it out, allow me to reveal my trap card. The horror manga I’m describing is Yu-gi-oh. Yes, THAT Yu-gi-oh; the one with the card game and the endless Saturday morning spin-offs. Before it became the twenty billion dollar all-ages franchise it is now, it was something small, and strange, and personal, and dark. It was, in its own extremely niche and occasionally goofy way, challenging. It skirted the line between violent power / revenge fantasy, and being a grisly warning against the same. While not exactly revolutionary, it still managed to push the envelope of good taste and genre expectation; especially in the context of Shonen Jump’s very young, and very male target audience. So what happened? How did Cardcaptor Columbine and his Deck of Many Murders become a staple of children's entertainment, and an endless money-printing machine for the execs at Shonen Jump’s parent company?
The answer to that is Duel Monsters. Or Magic & Wizards as it was originally called. One of numerous games to appear in the original run of the manga, nearly all of which were imagined up by its creator, Kazuki Takahashi, Duel Monsters is the in-universe card game that the real world Yu-Gi-Oh! game would eventually be derived from. A turn of events which took place only after Shonen Jump and Takahashi started receiving masses of letters from young readers, asking if the game was real, and where they could buy it. It’s no secret of course that merchandise sales are where the money is, with the magazine functionally serving as little more than advertising, and Shueisha (Shonen Jump’s owners) immediately started seeing dollar signs.
The rest, as they say, is history. The manga was given a soft reboot, in order to refocus it entirely around the card game; and, more importantly, to eliminate its darker and more challenging elements. To create a sanitized version better equipped to serve as an advertisement for the newly published collectible card game. It should be noted that Takahashi took little to no convincing in all this; but given that he was well into his thirties and living in a dilapidated apartment without electricity, I’ll try to withhold judgement.
Why now, you might ask, have I just subjected you to a Marxist analysis of fucking Yu-Gi-Oh? The reasons are twofold. Firstly, the work we’re actually looking at this week revolves around the Tarot, and a Yu-Gi-Oh! card is kind of like a Tarot card, if you squint. (I promise the second reason is better) Secondly, the history of Yu-Gi-Oh, and its rapid transformation at the end of the last millennium from a small and niche passion work filled with potential, into a bottomless pit of glossy, capitalistic accumulation, perfectly mirrors the history of the internet from that same era.
Josh Urban Davis’ Deleted World Tarot is, at least in part, a meditation (or perhaps divination) on the digital world we could have once had. It provides portents and glimpses of insight from that other, stranger, likely darker, and certainly more radical internet; the one that nearly came about at the tail end of the 20th century. It’s part of a vital and growing conversation about digital technology, what it could be, and nearly was, and why it is what it is now instead.
The short answer to that question is, of course, money. In the late 90s it was firmly believed that there was no viable way to monetize the internet. Under that belief, the early net was allowed to be small, and niche, and personal; beneath the notice of the Neoliberal mechanism. And it didn’t take long for it to become a breeding ground for anti-capitalist potential.
But then came Amazon and its imitators, and others with the newly held belief that there was money to be made; and the rest, as they say, is history. Say goodbye to the strange and the radical, and hello to a billion dollar chokehold on all that might have been. All that remains is the rubble, and the post-mortem analysis of what we almost had.
The Deleted World Tarot’s unique addition to that analysis, other than its potent visual style, is its affective and atemporal approach to the subject. Like all Tarot, it requires interpretation and intent; but in exchange it offers not glimpses of the future, but rather echoes of a former future, now no longer set to pass. It provides insight on the now, not through what might be, but what ELSE once MIGHT have been.
It’s a smart and fascinating take on retro futurism. One which discards mere aesthetic novelty for genuine thematic exploration; swapping out brightly lit atom age modernism or raygun gothic lavishness for shadow-soaked lunarpunk spiritualism. It embraces the techno-pagan undercurrents of the 90s net, with all of the over-earnestness, jank, and oddly optimistic moodiness that it entailed; while still avoiding the trap of becoming too enamored with or reliant upon the now overly saturated web 2.0 aesthetic.
It eschews the easier and now expected path, and instead chooses to remain strange, and dark, and alternately in-your-face and nuanced in turns. It takes fragments of that other net we might have had, and casts them like bones to reveal future, past and present all at once. And importantly, its insight is not limited to the digital, but instead serves as a medium through which we can invoke all the lost futures no longer ahead of us.
Like, perhaps, the funny little horror manga that might actually have had something to show us, if its publishers hadn’t smelled money in the water.
If you haven’t already, treat yourself to Davis’ work, and get a glimpse of the real heart of the cards. While you’re at it, burn your Yu-Gi-Oh! deck, and take a minute to remember that stranger, darker, more radical self you might have been.