Disaster movies tend to follow a pretty standard formula. Take a group of otherwise-normal people, put them smack in the middle of a catastrophe, and watch them become as much a danger to each other as the earthquake / fire / alien invasion around them is to them. Throw in some social commentary and some emotional stacking-of-the-deck (kids in danger, pining for loved ones, etc), and you’re good to go.

Metro Survive was put together from the above list of ingredients, but there’s a few things about it that keep it consistently interesting and readable. For one, the mere fact that it’s set in Japan—where earthquakes can be unbelievably devastating, as the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the Hanshin / Kobe earthquake of 1995 demonstrated—gives the social-commentary part of the story a bit more bite than usual. That’s in fact one of the biggest angles that author and artist Yuki Fujisawa takes on the whole thing: do people grow complacent if they don’t have disaster hanging over their heads? Or do they just find new ways to be lazy no matter what the circumstances?