Picture a world where people gather and interact in joy and
harmony, where groups of gaily-clad youths break into spontaneous song and
dance at regular intervals, where spontaneous conga lines of diverse peoples
stretch for blocks and wind through the market stalls, where merchants sell and
people buy with easy affability and business is brisk, where people debate the
topics of the day with great thoughtfulness and passion and the powers-that-be
listen to the people-at-large. The Twilight Zone? Are you some sort of philosopher,
or something? Well…no and yes. I just spent a weekend at my first New York
Anime Festival at the Javitz Center in Manhattan and I found myself
intermittently amused, bemused, overwhelmed, and overjoyed.

Think about it. Everyone has watched an animated something
in their lifetime, no matter how old. From Looney Tunes to Disney to
Hanna-Barbera to Pixar, we’ve experienced this media and it has been used for
everything from pure entertainment to social commentary. Much of what was seen
in America during the ‘60s and ‘70s was actually from Japan – Speed
Racer, Kimba the White Lion, Astro Boy, Gigantor, Tobor the 8^th Man
– some of which are now known to a new generation only via CGI-heavy
feature films. Yet this is far from past-tense kiddie land. With the global
economy, the on-line connecting of the worlds, and all the ways we
cross-pollinate each other’s cultures, just as Americans seem to be everywhere,
so are the Japanese and the growing connections between East and West, from
McDonald’s to manga.

My professional friends, The Anime Chicks, brought me into
the anime fold only about three years ago with Rose of Versailles and The
Legend of Basara, and a wise one passed along to me the original Full Metal Alchemist (also see subbed on
hulu and other sites the new Full Metal
Alchemist: Brotherhood, now up to ep 26 in Japan, which follows the manga
more closely as anime and manga had diverged with the common delays between the
two medias), which is sometimes too great for words and, as I’ve happily
discovered, it’s consistently named in the top 5 anime ever in many fan and
professional polls. This encouraged me to explore more: Death Note, Trinity Blood
and, God help me, the never-ending Bleach,
all enabled by my colleagues, our very own Scooby Gang. This lead to Saturday all-nighters on Cartoon Network with Moribito, Ghost in the Shell: 2^nd
Gig, Code Geass: LeLouche of the
Rebellion, Blood+, Big O (2^nd season), and Cowboy BeBop. (more…)

Where would comics be without the
stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble
together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it
would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you
want to – when you can have all of the moody, or conflicted, or ridiculously
innocent teenagers with amazing abilities you ever thought of? Like the main
characters of these three books, for example…

Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales, Volume 1: Sanctuary
Written by Melissa Marr; Art by
Xian Nu Studio
Tokyopop/HarperCollins, May 2009,
$12.99

Wicked Lovely is the name of a novel by Marr, and it also seems to be
the umbrella title for her novels about teens and faeries (and teen faeries,
and faerie teens) in the modern world. The novels seem to be about a girl named
Aislinn – no self-respecting teen-novel heroine ever has a name like Doris or
Mabel – and her travails in high school and the Faerie Courts. But this manga
volume – it says on its back cover that it’s “manga,” if you don’t believe me,
and never mind that it reads left-to-right and was written by an American – is set
somewhere in the western desert, where once-mortal Rika lives quietly, trying
to avoid both humans and the local faeries.

Rika was discovered and turned –
not exactly “seduced and abandoned,”
since she wasn’t able to give him what he wanted – many years ago by the Summer
King, Keenan, who turns up early in this book to give an excuse for some
backstory and to fail to get her to swear fealty to him. She refuses, of course
– she’s solitary now, and happy that way. What does it matter if most of the
solitary fay are nasty enough to make “mischievous” a very weak term to
describe them?

But they’re just there for spice;
this is a series for teenage girls, which means Rika has to see a cute boy –
Jace, who paints, like she does – and save him from those nasty fay, who try to
kill him for no good reason. He’s sweet and innocent enough to stare wide-eyed
at her abilities – those nasty wild fay don’t give up, or there wouldn’t be a
plot here other than “elf girl and artist boy meet cute and gaze into each
other’s eyes,” – and the book is low-key enough that they’re just mildly
kissing by the end. (Which seems awfully tame for a fairie who’s hundreds of
years old.)

Wicked Lovely: Desert
Tales: Sanctuary has too many
colons in its title and a thin plot, but I have to expect that it’s just the
kind of thing teen girls will want: a bit of angst, a wish to be alone that
doesn’t actually lead to loneliness, and a cute boy that the girl gets to
protect and pursue. I’m just twenty years too old and the wrong gender to
appreciate it properly. (more…)