Another week, another pair of good examples as to how DVD extras can enhance, deepen, and illuminate a previous viewing experience…especially when the subject matter is show business itself.

First stop, north of the border, and one of Canada’s best television series. For years I’ve been enjoying Slings & Arrows, the tragicomedic travails of a Shakespearean Festival Theatrical Troupe. Created by some of the same folk who made the hit Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone, and The Kids in the Hall, it has been consistently engrossing in its three seasons (of six episodes each).

In the first season, we were introduced to the core cast as they tried to get the theater on its feet and mount a memorable production of Hamlet. Season two saw more complications amid the cast and crew as they battled the “Scottish Play (Macbeth).” Arriving on DVD this week is the third (and most say, last) season, in which a production of King Lear is the focal point.

The first two seasons set the bar high in terms of Shakespearean drama and human comedy, but this third season does not disappoint in any way. In fact, it manages to resonate the first two seasons as well as cap off the tales of once-institutionalized artistic director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), the love of his life Anna Conroy (Susan Coyne), the troupe’s financial director Richard Smith-Jones (former Hall Kid Mark McKinney), and the ghost of the former artistic director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) … and, yes, you read that right.

In addition, each season features a new cast of actors who play actors who are brought in to star in the season’s featured play, and, if anything, the third time’s the charm. William Hutt, a beloved Canadian actor, stars as Charles Kingman, a beloved Canadian actor who takes on Lear in more ways than one (in fact, Hutt died shortly after completing his role as a dying actor playing a dying King). Playing the actress playing Lear’s honorable daughter is Sarah Polley, the luminous star of such movies as The Sweet Hereafter and director of the recent art house film success Away From Her (she’s also the daughter of Mark Polley, who has been featured in all three seasons of the show as one of the troupe’s supporting players).

Suffice to say that all three box sets of the series are worthwhile. Now, onto the extras on this latest, and reportedly, last season. There’s interviews with star Paul Gross (who you might remember from the Canadian Mountie at large CBS series Due South) and co-writer/co-star Susan Coyne. In addition, there’s bloopers, outtakes, deleted scenes, photo galleries, and even song lyrics, but what makes the extras extra special are uninterrupted, unedited, and extended sequences from the “final” production of King Lear itself, which take on additional dimension once you’ve seen the backstage drama that went into creating them. (more…)

Osamu Tezuka is generally billed as “the godfather of Japanese comics,” which implies a capo di tutti capi and a whole network of manga-kas rubbing each other out that I’m not entirely comfortable with. But I think that means that the Japanese comics industry isn’t quite sure whether to call him a god or their father, so they split the difference. His position in Japan isn’t comparable to anyone in the US; it’s as if Siegel and Shuster, Will Eisner, and Walt Disney were all one person.

Tezuka was also apparently extremely prolific over that period; Wikipedia’s page about him claims that his collected works in Japan stretch to over 400 volumes, which collect less than half of the 170,000 pages he created in his lifetime. And that doesn’t count his extensive animation work, either – the man was amazingly prolific. Some of his work has been published here – particularly Astro Boy, his best-known creation in the English-speaking world – but most of it is still a mystery to those of us who read only English. Luckily, the current manga boom is bringing more and more of his work to our shores, so we can check it out, book by book, for ourselves.

Vertical is a small publishing house dedicated to English translations of Japanese novels and manga, usually with a very refined and exciting design sense. (That’s no surprise, since Chip Kidd, the foremost book designer of our age, is associated with Vertical.) Vertical have published several of Tezuka’s works in English – most notably the eight-volume Buddha series – and seem to be concentrating on his later, more literarily and artistically ambitious works. Vertical aims at general readers, not established manga fans, so their works are in larger formats than typical for manga collections, and are also photographically reversed to read from left-to-right, as Western readers are used to. Ode to Kirihito is a handsome trade paperback, with French flaps and a sliding panel on the front, to obscure one half of the cover art or the other; it’s also well-bound, so reading its immense bulk with a bit of care will leave the spine intact.

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