Tagged: Manga

Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

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  • January 11, 2008

This is another complicated bit of backstory: in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto started a series of epic fantasy novels about a warrior-type named Guin who woke up amnesiac with a leopard mask permanently affixed to his face. There are at least a hundred and eighteen novels in the main series, plus some unspecified number of “side stories.” (I don’t know what makes them “side stories,” either.) One of those “side stories” was adapted into a manga series, and collected into three volumes. Now Vertical is in the middle of publishing the manga based on the side story based on the main story of the leopard-headed warrior named Guin. (Who lies in the house of Bedlam, Elizabeth Bishop would add.)

The first two volumes are out in English already; the third is scheduled to follow in March. And I read those first two volumes today (Thursday), to let you, the manga-starved hordes of ComicMix, know what they’re like.

And they’re OK.

Hm. You probably want more than that, right? All right. Guin is your standard post-Conan mightily-thewed barbarian type, with impossibly bulging muscles and a big sword he whips out and swings around phallicly at the appropriate moments. In the manga, his leopard “mask” looks just like a head – the jaw moves, the eyes move, and the whole thing is disconcertingly too small for his overmuscled body. Also in Conan fashion, he’s hacked his way to being king of a civilized nation, marrying the beautiful princess along the way. (Unlike Conan, though, the princess is not exceptionally enamored of her husband.) (more…)

Manga Friday: Monkeying Around

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  • January 4, 2008

I’m often most interested in the decadent phase of an artistic movement, the point when it starts turning on itself. Snarky parody, convoluted derivative plots, art that’s clearly a rip-off of someone else’s style – this and more amuses me. So I’m happy that I finally gave in to temptation and picked up Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga.

I found it on the “how to draw” shelf, which sort-of makes sense: it’s a parody of books about how to draw manga. But I tend to doubt it’ll find many readers over there; I expect the people looking for drawing guides are serious, devoted, dour young folks who won’t be in the mood for zany humor. (The fact that this book was published in 2002, and one lonely copy was still poking around on the shelf, tends to support that idea.)

But, if you do manage to find it, Monkey is quite funny. In it, fictionalized versions of the creators (Koji Aihara, 19 years old and Kentaro Takekuma, 22 years old, as they’re billed in the book) talk about how they’re going to conquer the world of manga, in a very funny overwrought style, full of full-face close-ups. (Which are also essentially the same in every single episode; there’s some very obvious humor and some sly hidden humor in this as well.) Takekuma, the older, seasoned manga pro, then proceeds to teach Aihara the lessons of manga – this book contains the first nineteen of them. (There’s a second volume promised at the end; I don’t know how much more material appeared in Japan.)

The lessons start with the very obvious and basic – drawing borders, facial expressions, and then figures. (Takekuma recommends copying from other artists to do that last one, gleefully insisting that everyone does it.) Then Takekuma moves on to explaining where ideas and stories come from – everyone else’s stories and ideas, of course. After that, there are a series of lessons about particular manga genres, which are in turn shows to be completely cliché-ridden and obvious. (more…)

Manga Friday: Look! A Mammoth!

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  • December 28, 2007

mammoth-8034044I’ve long harbored a suspicion about the “Mammoth Books” – you’re familiar with them, right? Big fat reprint anthologies, on a wide range of subjects (fiction and nonfiction, photographic and comics) published by Constable and Robinson in the UK and imported to this side of the pond by the now-defunct Carroll & Graf? – were put together somewhat on the cheap. (This was based on my encounters with their historical reprints, which I kept thinking should be called things like The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories That Are Out of Copyright.)

But this book, I hasten to say, is made up of new material, as far as I can tell. All of the works are copyrighted 2007, though the book doesn’t say where, if anywhere, any of this appeared before. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of a problem – if this is the Best New Manga, surely that’s in comparison with other manga, and implies that this stuff was previously published?

These are the kind of problems I always have with the Mammoth Books — they’re generally nice anthologies, but aren’t quite what it says they are on the tin.

OK, so here’s what I think this book is: a collection of all-new stories, in a mostly manga manner, by creators primarily from the UK. It doesn’t actually say that – the introduction, by one-named editor “Ilya,” spends most of its time burbling about how cool manga is and how wonderful the world will be once we can all manage to sell more and more copies of more manga books – but it’s the most likely scenario. (If this really is an anthology of previously published works, and those works are “manga,” then the fact that they’re nearly all British and that none of them are, oh, Japanese, becomes much more puzzling.)

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Manga Friday: In Medias Res

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  • December 21, 2007

We all want to get on the ground floor, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, we find ourselves walking into a movie two reels in, munching popcorn and whispering to each other “And who is that guy?” In honor of those confused moments in all of our lives, this week Manga Friday read Book Two in a short stack of manga series, and tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

First off is Spiral: The Bounds of Reasoning. The division into volumes is a bit odd here, since the first section of Vol. 2 is the third and final part of a locked-room mystery. So we get that old-fashioned mystery-plot staple: the detective explaining everything and talking at great length to all of the characters, who wonder why he’s gathered them all there. It’s very talky, of course – that’s the whole point of that kind of exercise – but it summarizes the first two parts of this particular story well enough for me to understand the ending.

After that are two one-part stories and then a two-parter, which explain a bit more about the premise, and expand out the cast a bit. The detective from the first story is a teenager named Ayumu Narumi, and he’s the other stereotyped manga teen boy: the uber-competent whiz kid (as opposed to the amiable slacker – no manga teens that I’ve seen are just pretty good at a couple of things). He’s both a deductive genius and a world-class pianist, but is tortured because he’s not as good at either of those things as his older brother, who disappeared mysteriously (swell ominous music).

The antagonists are a group called the Blade Children; we don’t learn all that much about them in this book, but they all are missing one rib (surgically removed in early childhood), are even more tormented than Ayumu (and linked to him and/or his brother somehow), and possibly have some kind of secret over-arching plan. Two major Blade Children are introduced in this book: Eyes Rutherford, the goth-y English teenage piano sensation (the world within a manga is a deeply silly place, sometimes, full of people named “Eyes”), and the sneaky, monologuing Kousuke Asazuki. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to be villains, per se, which might explain why they’re not terribly frightening – or comprehensible. All in all, I could follow the main plot of Spiral, but the first volume might have explained the point of it all in a way that I really needed. (more…)

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…)

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…)

Manga Friday: Superpowers

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  • November 2, 2007

alice-2476961Only two books for Manga Friday this week; the deadline crept up on me and found me with a smaller “read” pile than I expected. But they’re both pretty good, and both are brand-new, which may make up for it.

First is Alice on Deadlines, which is the first time I’ve hit a concentrated dose of that Japanese-comics staple, the panty shot. Lapan is a Shingami — essentially an angel of death, or one of a legion of Grim Reapers, or something in that line of work. He and his co-workers travel to Earth to bring back dead souls who don’t come on their own, which sometimes requires a lot of “persuasion.” Lapan is also a fine example of that stock manga character, the horny creep. (We first see him absorbed in a dirty magazine at his desk.)

And, on the other side, Alice is a voluptuous young woman — presumably in high school. She’s terribly normal and average, except for being gorgeous (and it looks like all the other students of her all-girls school are also gorgeous).

Due to a mix-up, Lapan ends up in Alice’s body instead of the skeleton he was supposed to inhabit. And Alice is bounced into the skeleton. Wacky hijinks ensue, mostly involving Lapan-in-Alice’s-body trying to find a quiet place to fondle himself, and falling all over the other students. Along the way, the two of them do manage to take care of a few shishibitos (souls that cling to life instead of moving on, and which sometimes manifest magical abilities).

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