SUICIDE KINGS OUTLINE
ISSUE 1
ISSUE 1: Kusuriuri gets to know his new shinigami partner for the job, Spitfire, but they both hoard more secrets than they can say, and a vague air of distrust simmers between them. The two prepare themselves to hunt down and exorcise their mark, but they both get lost in their own traumatized consciousnesses having to face the suppression of their own memories of being hunted when they were human before they became shinigami.
Now in the opposing position as the hunters, they can't help but question the time when they were prey subconsciously in their psyches as their memory unfolds on the page.
This issue introduces the format which is designed to be heavily schizophrenic stream-of-consciousness with the visual depictions of alternating psychological horror from suppressed traumatic memory. It ends with an interlude explaining what a suicide king is, and the inherent queering of a gender defined by self-slaughter, which is that for a suicide king, they are a suicide before a man or a woman.
ISSUE 2:
Kusuriuri washes his face in a fancy hotel bathroom after having "captured" his mark, who actually cheerfully followed him out of boredom and insatiable, manic curiosity. He and the mark talk while Spitfire waits below the building outside on the sidewalk. Kusuriuri calmly pulls a gun on the mark, who then leaps out the window of the 11th floor, the seams of mouths on her stomach and hands opening wide to swallow up and cannibalize Spitfire smoking cluelessly below.
Before she can, though, Spitfire's shadow possesses him and transforms into an inferno, spewing out of his limp body and restraining the mark as her mouths bite pieces off his limp meat body while the attached spiritual body strangles her.
Kusuriuri picks up a special white gun and shoots a cartoonish candy like pill bullet into her throat, after which she falls asleep, and he brands her with his signature crosshair and moon symbol to signify he was the one to accept her into the fold of shinigami.
ISSUE 3:
Se-bin, the previous mark, adapts quickly and cheerfully and seamlessly into shinigami life with her signature malicious Cheshire smile, but behind the scenes, she confesses her deep loneliness and feverish longing for suicide and cataclysmic devastation and cries in Kusuriuri's arms, wanting to be held and protected. She tells her story about being raped by her mother and her aunt and tossed around by her family like some kind of unwanted mongrel until her brother dies in a shootout and her gang boss dad wanted to kill her, who despite being transgender was clever enough to threaten the succession of his favorite young bastard son from his mistress.
She talks about how the moment Kusuriuri pulled that gun and she realized she was going to die, she felt like she would rather kill than die.
Then, Kusuriuri realizes the truth about shinigami: those human prey who are hunted down by shinigami for "exorcism" are simply killed dead, but the humans who choose to kill instead of die become shinigami themselves.
ISSUE 4:
During a quiet night over Vietnamese coffee, Kusuriuri tells Spitfire about what he learned regarding the nature of shinigami. Spitfire asks about something Kusuriuri had mentioned before, about being a berserker. Kusuriuri recounts the events of surviving a death match in a warehouse after watching his whipping girl die, the girl that was punished to emotionally torture him when he failed in any regard.
Kusuriuri killed everyone, friend and foe there. When the whipping girl turned out not to be dead, the first thing she did was deliver the final blow to herself in fear and terror of Kusuriuri, who she had loved. Kusuriuri and Spitfire caress and comfort each other.
ISSUE 5:
Spitfire has been having many nightmares lately. Kusuriuri's story sounds familiar, but different. He can't tell if it's the truth or an illusion, but he begins to hallucinate the smell of smoke and see flames flickering everywhere he goes, and he loses it one night feeling so, so alone and Kusuriuri catches him as he's about to bury himself in the river, screaming and sobbing.
Kusuriuri holds him and cradles him and takes him to the nearest safe house cottage shack by the train tracks and the lake and they whisper to each other, playing make-pretend about a fairyland where they are safe. They hold each other.
ISSUE 6:
Se-Bin has been clinging to Kusuriuri more and is extremely jealous of Spitfire and fiercely temperamental and cruel to him, wanting Kusuriuri's attention, who is unusually dense and oblivious in this regard, until Se-bin tries to push Spitfire's face into the flames of the burning gas stove, and then Spitfire's inferno spirit possesses him and snaps Se-bin's arm like a twig and tries to break her teeth and smash her head into the wall.
Kusuriuri is completely, frighteningly blank and for once has no idea what to do. He can only watch as his most beloved people try to kill each other. It's at this moment, this lapse of concentration that Se-bin's father storms into the bar with a full gang army and it becomes a shootout.
Automatically, Kusuriuri starts shooting on the defense to get the escape advantage, but he's madly confused, and he's distracted, looking for Se-bin and Spitfire everywhere.
He finds them in the cellar, Spitfire furious but sobbing, terrified and cowing, scratching his own arms and screaming, and Se-bin with a dull, bored expression shooting him to death and her stomach mouth chewing on his shot-off limbs with mild disinterest.
Kusuriuri blacks out after that.
When he comes to, everyone is dead.
ISSUE 7:
Kusuriuri travels through his own psyche full of distorted and disturbing moments. After a long psychosis he seems to wake up from a long period of convalescence in a private hospital bed. He leaves the empty white rooms and empty, liminal space world, and he draws pictures using Vietnamese sandalwood ash and charcoal pencil, portraits not just of Se-bin and Spitfire, but every shinigami character that ever shows up in the comic.
They are funerary portraits with no magical or fantastical elements. Purely to mourn the dead. The realistic portraits are framed and arranged to pay respects to the dead. In this scene, Kusuriuri looks at the world with no magical realism filter. There has never been magic to begin with. No gods, no monsters. Only human beings.