Author: Andrew Wheeler

Most of us, it’s safe to say, will never be told that our sin is our very being. (Unless we were brought up in the Deep South, in which case we’ve heard it twice a day and five times on Sunday.) We’re also not going to learn that the odd new girl in our high school is actually an android. Nor will we find that we’re trying to stop the extinction of mankind, along with our brother, with only our innate psychic powers to guide and aid us. That’s what manga is for – in a manga, those things are only to be expected, and it would be a bland story without something like that happening by page five.

Pandora Hearts, Vol. 1
By Jun Mochizuki
Yen Plus, December 2009, $10.99

Oz Vessalius, scion of one of the four great dukedoms, has arrived at the mansion that his family uses only for coming-of-age ceremonies to be officially proclaimed heir to his non-present father, along with a large semi-feudal entourage. (Though this book is set, as best I can tell from the floppy, ornate manga clothes and the background details, no earlier than the late Victorian.) It seems like an awfully big place to only use for a few days every generation, but I’ve learned not to let logic get in the way of my enjoyment of a manga story.)

However, all does not go smoothly – there are signs, portents, and other weird events that don’t make a whole lot of sense – and the ceremony is interrupted by a group of knife- and chain-wielding hooded figures, who seem to be about to kill Oz for the sin of existence. But he’s saved, sort-of, by a girl named Alice, who is also a giant black rabbit, and both of them are cast into the Abyss, a punishment dimension from which no one ever escapes.

Pandora Hearts skitters about like a bean on a griddle, so it doesn’t then do anything as predicable as settling down to tell the story of how Alice and Oz travel across the Abyss for a few dozen volumes and come to trust and confide in each other. No, they get out of the inescapable Abyss in time for afternoon tea – with Oz still very suspicious of Alice’s intentions and power (and rightfully so) to meet and confront the hooded folks, who are some manner of secret police.

This is a confusing book, with explanations shouted during battles and other confrontations that don’t actually explain much, and are often written in manga shorthand that substitutes Ominous Capitals for clarity. The Alice in Wonderland parallels so far seem limited to Alice’s name and other form, and there’s no particular significance here to Oz’s name, either. Pandora Hearts is messy and loud and disheveled, like a sorority girl at 3 AM on a Friday, but it – like that sorority girl – remains oddly attractive even then. It’s not a great story, but I have hopes that it will make sense, one day. (more…)

Manga-format comics have a tropism
for high school even stronger than that of sunflowers for the sun – it is possible to find manga without a hint of high-schoolery in
them, but serious digging is required. But you couldn’t loose an arrow in a
manga warehouse without hitting at least one book about girls in sailor outfits.
(Hm. Did I just inadvertently explain the appeal?) So we reviewers have to
specialize even further. This week I have three a) second volumes in series b)
set in high schools c) with female lead characters who d) have amazing and
unexpected powers.

Even there, I’m sure a devoted
reader could name a dozen or more series that fit qualifications b) through d)!

Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 2
By Shinobu Ohtaka
Yen Plus, October 2009, $10.99

Ohtaka’s comedic piss-take on the
“martial arts high school” genre here veers more towards the overwrought drama
and fighting technique minutia of its targets than the tight, original satire
of the first volume, which is disappointing – there’s a center of gravity of
standard manga traditions that has the force of a black hole in Japanese
comics, dragging every outlier to be closer to the generic standard. And so the
supposed main character of Sumomomo, Momomo – Koushi Inuzuka, scion to a great family of karate
champions, who only wants to be left alone to study and become a great
prosecutor – is either pushed aside entirely or relegated to running and
cowering, like any other weak young man in a manga. (If this is opaque to you,
perhaps you need to drop back to my review of the first volume.)

Oh, it’s still funny – very funny
at points, particularly when it’s picking on the ex-Olympic gymnast gym
teacher, Daigoro, who is a fine self-satisfied gym rat caricature and gets shown
up repeatedly by a cute little girl. And the new enemies this volume are fun as
well: teenage Yakuza hit-girl Iroha Miyamoto and her overly emotional sidekick
Hanzou. But Iroha falls in love with Koushi nearly the moment she shows up, and
is under the impression that Koushi is in love with her. And so Sumomomo, Momomo comes one step closer to being yet another harem manga.

I hope I’m wrong, and that
the next volume sees more of Koushi being a budding lawyer and talking his way
out of problems, and less karate and pretty girls throwing themselves at him.
But I know which way to bet when it comes to manga! (more…)

Of course, we all know that comics can be for adults now…but
they don’t have to be. Some of the best books
out there now were made for kids – which is just the way it was fifty years
ago, come to think of it. Now, I’m not claiming that these three books are the
best out there – my reading has been slipshod and random this year – but they’re
all worth reading for the right audience:

Tiny Tyrant: Volume One: The Ethelbertosaurus
By Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice
Parme
First Second, May 2009, $9.95

Trondheim is a prolific French cartoonist for both younger
readers and adults, with books like Kaput and Zosky and A.L.I.E.E.E.N. for the rugrats, the Dungeon series (with Joann Sfar and others) for various
audiences, and books like his diary comics (Little Nothings) for adults. Tiny Tyrant sees Trondheim in full kid-pleasing mode, with pint-size
King Ethelbert of Porto Cristo running amok and terrorizing all the adults
around him (with the possible exception of the nearly unflappable Miss Prime
Minister).

This volume collects six stories of King Ethelbert, as he
discovers dinosaur bones, avoids assassination, engages in an
all-crowned-head-of-state motor race, meets Santa Claus, chases his favorite
author, and replaces all children in his domains with robot duplicates of
himself. Nothing ever turns out as he hopes, of course, but the stories have massive
amounts of verve and energy along the way, propelled by Parme’s stylish and
classy art (reminiscent of the UPA style).

Ethelbert is the kind of fictional character we’re all
deeply happy is purely fictional – he’d be a massive pain in person, but he’s
utterly funny and lovable when contained between the pages of a book.

(One note to consumers: this volume contains
exactly half of the stories published in 2007 in the book just titled Tiny
Tyrant. In publishing as in
business, the name of the game is putting together things that were originally
separate, and then separating things that were together. Repeat every few years
until interest runs out.) (more…)

Red Snow
By Susumu Katsumata
Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95

From a Western perspective, it
would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics
stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since
the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to
be set in the modern world, that gekiga
is a literature of urban ennui and the
dislocations of modern capitalism.

But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its
masters, and his collection Red Snow is
filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with
bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building
of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these
are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull
and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.

A few of these stories have
supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the
role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as
being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet
another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to
have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he
has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.” (more…)

The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all
want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and
sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics
creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few decades
now – since the undergrounds, if not before that – and the autobiographical comic
is now its own cliché. But there’s still room to do interesting things with autobiographical
materials – at least, I hope
there is, since it seems that we’re destined to be deluged with books of true
stories…

Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, March 2009,
$14.95

Trondheim mostly makes fictional comics – Dungeon and Kaput and Zosky and Mister O and many more – but he also has kept a comics blog
in French, mostly focused on the small moments of his life. Three collections
from the blog have been published in his native France; the first two have been
translated so far for the English-speaking world. (I reviewed the first one
here back in March of last year.)

For the “Little Nothings” blog, Trondheim works in
watercolor, mostly in single pages – each one the record of a single event, or
a short conversation. The emphasis is on observation – each strip is a crystallized
instant, and clearly the blog as a whole is not intended to seriously chronicle
Trondheim’s life. As with the Dungeon
books, all of the people are drawn anthropomorphically – Trondheim and his
family are various kinds of bird, and most of the others look like different
kinds of mammals – rats and dogs and cats. (In the usual unsettling way of
anthropomorphic comics, Trondheim’s family also has a pair of real cats, Orly
and Roissy, and other actual animals show up from time to time.)

Either Trondheim travels an awful lot or travel is more
conducive to diary comics than his regular life, since a clear majority of the
comics here are about trips – to the Angouleme comics festival (a year when he
was the Guest of Honor), several other comics events, and vacation in Greece,
Guadeloupe, and Corsica. That does keep Prisoner Syndrome from being a succession of Trondheim-sitting-at-his-desk
pages – there are a number of those, of course, since that’s where a cartoonist
spends most of his time – and ties nicely into the title. In one of the early
strips in this book, Trondheim learns about “Prisoner Syndrome,” in which
people who spend all of their time in the same place gradually get more and
more tired from doing less and less – and so he decides to go to more comics
festivals, to keep himself healthy.

There are no grand gestures in Prisoner
Syndrome, no deep thoughts or big
moments – the series is called Little
Nothings for a reason. But there
are many thoughtful little moments, of the kind that make up all of our lives,
and Trondheim is an artful and nuanced portrayer of his own internal life. It’s
a lovely book of the small things that go together to make up an everyday life. (more…)