Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Wandering Assassins

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  • December 7, 2007

gin-5066764Manga are just as full of fossilized genres as any other popular media, as I’m coming to discover. A case in point is this week’s haul: three series, all from the same publisher, all of which can be vaguely characterized as being about a wandering assassin.

OK, I’m stretching the term too far with the first book, Gin Tama. Our title character, Sakata Gintoki, is a samurai on a near-future Earth economically dominated by aliens, where carrying a sword has been outlawed. He doesn’t actually go around killing people for money – though he will kill them along the way to doing other things, if they really deserve it – but instead works various odd jobs, which tend to require violence by the end. At the beginning of the book, he picks up a sidekick, our viewpoint character, Shinpachi – who was also trained to be a samurai, but has few skills and is in the book mostly to be the reader identification character (pop-culture- and food-obsessed, slightly overweight, glasses wearing – these Japanese creators know how to pander like no one’s business). They pick up a third member of their team in the middle of this volume, but I shouldn’t give away her secrets ahead of time.

Gin Tama doesn’t take itself all that seriously; it’s clearly a historical story (set in the Meiji period, more or less) moved bodily into a SF setting, with only minor changes to make things fit. And, like a lot of comics, it’s easier to enjoy something mildly silly if it knows that it’s silly – Gin Tama is quite aware that it’s quite generic, and quite hard to believe, but it’s ready to entertain anyway. I appreciate that, even if I find the winking at the audience and obvious melodrama a bit much. This isn’t the greatest samurai comic out there, but it’s a fun samurai comic that I don’t expect will ever get terribly serious, and there’ll always be a market for that.

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Manga Friday: Girl Boy Girl

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  • November 30, 2007

There are only two books for Manga Friday this week; I promise to do better next time but the end of the week snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking. (And I didn’t really have a third book that fit so nicely with my theme, anyway.)

There have been sex comedies since the days of the ancient Greeks – every culture does them, and every culture thinks slightly different things are really funny. (I’ve mentioned the common manga shorthand horny = nosebleed before; it is impressively visual, but it can look really weird to Western eyes, particular when exaggerated.) But sex comedies tend to cluster around a few major ideas – for some cultures, it’s cuckoldry, but in most of the modern world, the major plot line is about a horny young man and one or more attractive young women. That simplifies things down enough that the standard sex comedy travels internationally better than more culturally specific kinds of comedy.

(Or maybe I’m just babbling for a while before I get into the specific bizarre plots here. Well, let’s stop wasting time.)

The set-up in Strawberry 100% is straightforward, if a bit unlikely: fifteen-year-old Junpei Manaka accidentally sees the strawberry-bedecked panties of an attractive girl in his school when she falls on him up on the school roof. (I said “straightforward,” not “makes a lot of sense.”) He immediately falls in love – or maybe lust – with this girl whose identity he’s not sure of. And then, very soon, he starts dating his gorgeous classmate Tsukasa, mostly because she tells him that she wears strawberry panties.

But we the readers strongly suspect that class brainiac (with her hair in a bun, glasses, etc. to keep her from appearing sexy) Aya is actually the panty-wearer of Junpei’s dreams – and the two of them start studying together.

So we’ve got a classic love triangle: boy is in love with girl, but not the girl he thinks he is, and is entangled with girl #1 while girl #2 is quietly crazy about him. A wonderfully serviceable plot that’s kept plays and novels and stories humming along for a few thousand years now. Kawashita doesn’t mess with the successful formula all that much, but he uses it for as many panty shots as he can squeeze in (can you blame him?) and lots of close-ups of people looking longingly at or thinking about each other. It’s not quite as madcap and zany as Love Hina, but being within the realm of reason isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strawberry 100% is a cute sex comedy for teenagers; it’s rated for “older teenagers,” but that’s mostly because there’s sexual attraction involved. (There’s no actual nudity or violence, though it does get quite suggestive. (more…)

Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings Review

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  • November 29, 2007

Yoe is really the editor of this volume, but he’s credited as the author. Admittedly, he did write all of the text (except for a foreword by R. Crumb), but the art is entirely by other hands. And the art, of course, is the whole point of this book.

As you can guess from the title, Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings collects pin-ups, gag cartoons, convention sketches, private commissions, and other various bits of risqué art from artists not generally known for such things. The artists run the gamut of comic book, comic strip and animation names, from Carl Barks and Chuck Jones to Milton Caniff and Dan DeCarlo. And the art itself is mostly mild: there are some sex gags, but the art is mostly just nudes rather than anything like a Tijuana Bible. For some that will be a positive and for some a negative; I’m just reporting it. Crumb’s foreword touches on this aspect of the book, seeing it as a gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered – and declaring, if anyone could disagree, that he knows just what a “dirty” cartoonist is, since he is one. (And Crumb’s full-page drawing by his foreword is probably the most sexually explicit piece in the book.)

There are seventy cartoonists included in all – many with just one page, and none with more than five pages of work – in this book’s 160 pages. Some of them are somewhat out of place – such as Dean Yeagle, best known for Playboy cartoons, and Adam Hughes, whose work often looks like pin-ups anyway and doesn’t really add nudity here – but most of the guys (and a tiny handful of gals) included here are regular mainstream sequential art folks who only very rarely did anything risqué. (But Yoe has ferreted it all out from its various hiding places, and assembled it all for the ages.) (more…)

Jack of Fables V2: Jack of Hearts Review

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  • November 27, 2007

Brand extensions can be tricky things. Sometimes you end up with Lucifer, but sometimes you get Witchblade Takeru Manga instead. Jack of Fables, from DC, was a clear attempt to extend the brand identity of the Fables series, written by Bill Willingham and mostly penciled by Mark Buckingham, with a companion series about one of the more interesting characters from that world. As far as brand extensions go, it hews most closely to the Sandman Mystery Theater model: the writer of the main series is involved (though it’s always difficult to tell, from the outside, just how much involvement that is) and the tone and style is very close to the original.

I wasn’t completely thrilled with the first Jack of Fables plotline (which I reviewed on my personal blog), finding it a bit too heavy-handed and dark. Jack is an unrepentant rogue, and to care about a rogue, he has to either not be too nasty to people, or mostly run into much worse folks than himself. Either way, he has to have a lightness of touch – the story can’t focus on his worst impulses. (See Jack Vance’s novels The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel the Clever for one of the best examples of the form.)

Jack is mostly acted upon in the title story of this volume, which is good: a rogue off balance is more interesting, and his scramblings add a feeling of urgency to the proceedings. But that’s actually the second story in this volume, so I have to backtrack.

Jack of Hearts, the book, starts with a two-issue story called “Jack Frost,” framed as a tale Jack tells some of his fellow escapes from the magical prison from the first volume. They’re hiding high in the mountains from those who would recapture them, and Jack mentions that he was once Jack Frost…and so of course has to explain. (more…)

Manga Friday: Boy oh Boy

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  • November 23, 2007

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…)

Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality Review

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  • November 21, 2007

Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)

Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)

But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people. (more…)

Boneyard, Volume 6 Review

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  • November 19, 2007

Boneyard is a series about a guy – Michael Paris is his name – who inherited a cemetery way back in issue #1, and arrived to find it full of various monsters from myth and legend. Luckily, the vampire, werewolf, troll, gill-woman, and so on were friendly, and convinced him not to sell out to evil forces. As you can see from the cover, we’re up to the sixth collection by this point, so the series has settled into itself, and is somewhat predictable. (On the other hand, these are all thin collections, of about four issues apiece, so we’ve only gotten up to issue #24 – it’s not in any huge rut, just a comfortable status quo.)

The major overall plot of the Boneyard series involves the machinations of Certain Forces – culturally literate readers might take Mayor Wormwood’s surname as a major clue – to buy the cemetery from Michael or to obtain it in some other way. (For nefarious reasons, of course.) The main subplot centers on Michael’s very, very slowly budding romance with Abbey, the cute ancient vampire. (Given that much of Boneyard creator Richard Moore’s other work is pornographic, I find it amusing that his characters either immediately have sex upon meeting or are too shy to even talk to each other.)

This volume, though, isn’t really about either of those plots – it touches slightly on Abbey’s long-time rivalry with Lilith (another ancient, powerful vampiress), but it’s mostly about the cast going to a big dress-up party thrown by a previously unmentioned ultra-powerful supernatural being called the Luminary (who is called the Illuminary on the back cover). (more…)

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MW: A Review

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  • November 17, 2007

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It’s difficult for an American to appreciate the place Osamu Tezuka held in Japanese popular culture. Tezuka created the first massively popular character and storyline in manga, Astro Boy – something on the level of Siegel & Shuster’s Superman. But he also owned that character, and ran a studio to produce stories – something like Will Eisner. (And he went on to create more adult, complex works later in life, also like Eisner.) But Tezuka was also a major force in animation – roughly the Walt Disney of Japan. And he was massively prolific for forty years; his “Complete Works” (collecting just over half of his manga) runs 80,000 pages through 400 volumes, and his animation work was similarly large. So his impact is absolutely colossal; I’ve seen some commentators claim that every single Japanese comics sub-genre derives from something Tezuka did.

I’ve only read a few of those four hundred volumes – in my defense, most of them aren’t available in English — but I’ve found Tezuka an interesting but quirky artist. (I’ve reviewed the first six volumes of his Buddha series on my personal blog, and here at ComicMix I’ve looked at Ode to Kirihito and Apollo’s Song.) MW is another graphic novel in the vein of Apollo and Ode: dark, adult, violent and occasionally sexual. It’s from the late ‘70s, several years after Apollo and Ode, and originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine Biggu Komiku (whose name I never fail to find humorous).

Unlike Ode and Apollo, MW has no supernatural element, and it’s even bleaker than those two works (neither one terribly cheerful). Fifteen years before the story began, a massive, horrific event occurred on a remote Japanese island, and that event bound together a boy and a man. When the story begins, the man, Garai, is a Catholic priest – from what I’ve seen, Tezuka was fascinated by Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, returning to its iconography and doctrines over and over. The man is tormented because of his relationship with the boy Yuki, who has grown into a dangerously attractive young man – and who was warped into a sociopath by the event they lived through.

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Manga Friday: Romance Is in the Air

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  • November 16, 2007

Manga Friday continues to go backwards and forwards at the same time; this week, I read the first volumes of two very popular and long-running series, and the latest volume of Path of the Assassin, a lesser-known samurai series from the creators of Lone Wolf & Cub. Our theme this week is young love…but this is manga, so we’re talking about lots of panty-shots, blood spewing out of noses, gigantic sweat-drops, tasteful nudity, and utterly gormless young men. So let’s dive right in:

Ai Yori Aoshi, I’m informed by its foreword, is a romance comic for young men. (They don’t put it quite that way, of course, but that’s what it is. And it shows just how big the Japanese marketplace for comics is when even the odd niche of a love story in a boy’s magazine is filled.) Kaoru, a young student, ran away from his terribly rich, terribly powerful, terribly conservative, and terribly controlling family some years ago, and is now in college. Aoi, his incredibly sheltered childhood sweetheart – who is the scion of a similar family, and who was betrothed to him at a very young age – runs away to find him, since she’s utterly in love with this man she hasn’t seen in a decade (or at all as an adult). They meet cute, she goes home with him – not like that, get your minds out of the gutter – and then the engine of plot complication starts to chug along.

Kou Fumizuki, who created this series, does make Aoi believable, which is not an easy achievement – she’s confused about nearly everything to do with Kaoru and modern life, and that’s the main driving factor of the plot. Kaoru is more generic, the usual audience-identification character (smart enough but not too smart, hardworking ditto, and so on), but he works, and centers the story reasonably well. I suspect that over-controlling rich families and arranged marriages are mostly things a generation or two in the past for the Japanese public, which makes them fodder for melodrama and comedy. (If they were still living institutions, stories about them would be drama.) (more…)

Manga Friday: Out of the Past

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  • November 9, 2007

This week, Manga Friday heads into the past…sort of. I picked up the first volume of two extremely popular manga series, to see what they’re all about. But we’ll start with something even less likely.

Siku is the pseudonym for a British cartoonist of Nigerian heritage who’s worked extensively in the British comics industry for the last ten years, including the obligatory stint on Judge Dredd. But he’s done something very different now – a book called The Manga Bible. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a retelling of the entire Christian Bible, in a manga-influenced art style, in two hundred pages. The script was written by Akin Akinsiku, another Nigerian-British comics creator, and there’s a lot of script.

Now, I’ve read Bible comics before. (You might not know this, but your humble Manga Friday correspondent won his church’s Bible Olympics two straight years back in his ill-spent youth.) There was a set of ten or so books that I particularly remember from that time, which adapted the entire bible, one chunk per book. And even those comics were pretty wordy – folks in the Bible tend to talk a lot (even with a New International Version translation, like the Manga Bible uses), and descriptive captions are often required to explain what’s going on and who all of these people are.

The Manga Bible is extremely wordy; each page is nearly covered in captions and dialogue balloons, to the detriment of the art. Yes, the characters are drawn in a manga-influenced style, but the storytelling doesn’t owe much to manga at all. It’s exceptionally compressed, like an early ‘60s Superman story, without the expansiveness and flowing layouts of real manga. The art is eye-catching, though not so stylized as to appear completely alien to American eyes. So it’s a shame that it’s so cramped, shoved into small panels by the relentless flow of words, words, words. (more…)

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