Author: Andrew Wheeler

Ambition, all by itself, is neither good nor bad. The greatest artistic works wouldn’t exist without vast reservoirs of ambition, but ambition by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Even ambition combined with proven ability isn’t necessarily successful. And just because one work by a particular creator (or creators) was transcendently wonderful, that doesn’t mean the next related work will be equally so.

And that brings us to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the Tom Sawyer, Abroad of our day – a book that should have been something really special, given its predecessors’ pedigree, but which instead is self-indulgent and shows signs of existing purely because of contractual reasons.

But let me back up. There have been two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories so far, both of which were excellent pulpish adventure, homages to writer Alan Moore’s favorite British stories from the turn of the last century. There was something of a tendency to paint the lily even there, though – to cram in references every which way, to show either how smart Moore was or how much genre fiction he had read. But the references were only rarely important to those two stories, and the times they were – the revelation of the first “M,” for example – they were very obvious references, which nearly every reader of the comic would grasp quickly. Neither of the first two League stories was great literature, but they were excellent adventure stories, though they did imply that Moore took old pulpy stories more seriously than perhaps he should.

Black Dossier is not the third major League story; that’s still to come, in a year or three, from a different publisher in an unlikely format. It’s instead a weird hybrid of story and background, with a League story set in the 1950s wrapped around a collection of documents from the past of that history; those documents, of course, comprise the titular dossier. In the frame story, a young blonde couple steal the dossier and run away with it, pursued by nastier fictional characters. To understand the villains, the reader must recognize James Bond (not too difficult), remember Harry Lime (somewhat tougher), and have some idea who Bulldog Drummond is (exceptionally difficult). (more…)

Since last week was steeped in girlyness, I thought it was only right to go entirely the other way this week. So, in honor of the weekend American men spend eating and watching football on TV, here are three manga about racing cars, slaughter, mayhem, flying blood, secret fighting techniques, and other topics of interest primarily to the male gender.

Now, I’ve never seen The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, but if anyone who has seen that movie wants to claim that it’s nothing but a rip-off of Initial D, I’d be ready to believe it. It’s set in a small provincial town, where about the only exciting thing for teen boys to do is to race cars down the local mountain. And so they do – and, even more so, they talk about racing, and cars, and the mountain, and racing techniques, and whose car is faster than whose, in interminable detail. There definitely is an audience for this, but I’m not it.

Our hero is one Tak Fujiwara, the typical semi-oblivious protagonist of a million contemporary manga. He’s developed excellent driving techniques without even realizing it – hey, this story seem to say, shamelessly, to its readers, maybe you have also learned some really cool skill and you don’t even know it! (And all the readers over the age of sixteen harrumph.)

On top of that, I found the art unpleasant – the cars and backgrounds are lovingly detailed, as you would expect, but the people stand stiffly and are drawn clumsily. Their mouths in particular draw attention for all of the wrong reasons. If you are absolutely nuts about cars, you might well enjoy Initial D. For the rest of us, though, it’s a bit too much of a muchness. (more…)