The Manga Curmudgeon

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From the stack: Stumptown

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I’ve enjoyed a lot of comics written by Greg Rucka, but I have to admit that I haven’t read one in a while. His Whiteout and Queen and Country books for Oni were very good, and I’ve liked some of the super-hero stuff he’s done for Marvel and DC. I thought he did particularly well with stories set in DC’s noir-ish Gotham City, as those comics always had an interesting texture and sense of place. So it’s nice to have the chance to read a comic written by Rucka that has that same feel without the word “crisis” in the title.

It’s Stumptown (back at Oni), a detective yarn set in the Pacific Northwest, and it gets off to a very promising start. It’s got one of those gender-neutral protagonists, a female private investigator with a lot of qualities that could stereotypically be tagged as male, but there’s no reason they should be. Women can certainly gamble too much and have smart mouths that get them in trouble. Rucka is particularly good at writing this kind of character; they may lack social graces and be prone to excesses, but they’re crafty and determined. They’re solution-oriented, or at least “end the problem” oriented.

Our heroine here gets hired to find a casino owner’s granddaughter. She’s not getting paid, but success will erase her hefty gambling debt (until she builds it up again, one assumes). She’s not the only person on the girl’s trail, and while her rivals are a bit out of sleuth story central casting, Rucka writes them with assurance and some wit. His background in detective prose shows here. He can play with familiar elements and even trot out some hoary contrivances and get away with it, because he knows how to use them. He’s not satirizing or revitalizing P.I. drama; he’s just writing it very well.

He’s helped by the gritty, shadowy but still restrained illustrations by Matthew Southworth, who seems very in synch with the kind of mood Rucka is trying to convey. Characters look right for their milieu, and the settings are evocative. Colors by Lee Loughridge are just right; they really help convey the passage of time in the protagonist’s difficult, complicated day.

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Rucka’s Whiteout collaborator, illustrator Steve Lieber, is doing terrific work on another genre story in pamphlet form, Underground (Image), written by Jeff Parker. It’s a survival adventure set in a not-quite-mammoth cave in the Appalachians starring a gutsy park ranger trying to protect natural spaces from greedy developers. Three issues are available so far, and it’s a lot of fun.

From the stack: Underground

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underground1I find it harder to review pamphlet comics, since there’s less content to consider, but Underground (Image) is a lively genre piece with a number of promising elements. Here they are:

It’s got a strong creative team. Jeff Parker has established himself as a smart writer of a variety of snappy, satisfying genre comics, even finding fresh approaches to timeworn franchise characters. Steve Lieber has a great way of drawing real-looking characters and evocative settings. Ron Chan provides a solid palette of colors that support the visual environment.

It’s set in Appalachia. There aren’t all that many comics that consider rural environments without condescension, and Underground looks like it will be one of those. It’s Appalachia without the menacing banjo soundtrack.

It’s got interesting, setting-specific undertones. The driving conflict is between environmental protection and economic development which, again, isn’t normal narrative territory for comics. Park ranger Wesley Fischer wants to protect the fragile ecosystem of a massive cave. Locals want to make the cave more accessible to tourists, boosting the town’s economy. Self-serving mogul Winston Barefoot may be the most public face of the development side, but that doesn’t mean the effort is entirely unsavory. It’s the kind of issue faced by lots of Appalachian communities, and Parker doesn’t minimize or simplify the conflict any more than he can avoid.

It’s got a strong woman protagonist. Ranger Fischer has principles and the force of personality to act on them. At the same time, she isn’t insensitive to opposing points of view. (Her likely love interest is both a local and a ranger.) She seems more than layered enough to carry the series.

On the down side, the socioeconomic underpinnings seem likely to take a back seat to cave-bound risk and rescue. I don’t imagine they’ll vanish entirely, though, as the creators have demonstrated the ability to juggle various narrative elements.

On the nitpick side, there seem to have been some proofreading lapses in the production process. Some dialogue just doesn’t scan, no matter how you try to read it.

On the whole, it’s a solid first issue of a series with engaging characters and interesting ideas. I’ll stick around to see where things go.

From the stack: Oishinbo: Vegetables

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I’ve enjoyed all of Oishinbo: A la Carte (Viz), but I think the new Vegetables volume is my favorite so far. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Oishinbo is a long-running (over 100 volumes so far), incredibly popular culinary manga written by Tetsu Kariya and drawn by Akira Hanasaki. The A la Carte editions focus on particular culinary themes, like Sake and Fish, Sushi and Sashimi, cherry picking stories from the title’s long, long run. (Viz didn’t concoct the collections; they just translated the existing ones from Shogakukan.)

One of the primary subplots of Oishinbo is the terrible, terrible relationship between its protagonist, culinary journalist Yamaoka, and his father, tyrannical gourmet Kaibara. Each is leading a different newspaper’s efforts to develop a menu showcasing the best of Japanese cuisine. In customary shônen fashion, father and son engage in highly public, extremely acrimonious contests to show who knows more about food.

oishinbovegcoverIn Vegetables, this kind of content is relatively minimal. And while I’ve enjoyed it in the past, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the relative absence of their caustic bickering. The volume starts with a multi-part but still relatively short cabbage battle that’s fairly standard for their showdowns, then moves on to what I can only describe as food pyramid comeuppance theatre. People often bemoan the lack of vegetables in the average diet (when they aren’t wondering how they can possibly consume as many of them as nutritionists recommend), but Kariya and Hanasaki take it to another plateau.

The nationalism that often adds zing to these pages is replaced by naked proselytizing not only on the health benefits and succulence of vegetables but on how to grow them. Because if you do it wrong, you will kill every living creature on the planet and blight the habitat for centuries to come, not even to mention how bad they’ll taste during your last, miserable hours of life. I’m not going to refute that argument, but I will just suggest you pity the characters who take pesticides lightly, as Kariya and Hanasaki ensure that they will pay. (Hilariously, there’s also a chapter where Yamaoka and company conspire to convince someone to sell his land for the building of an automobile factory, because there are no environmental or health consequences there, right?)

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But there’s more to this volume, which consists of what feel like more short tales than usual. In addition to the short-sighted corporate pawns who must suffer for their acquiescence to chemical agriculture, there’s a delightful variety of people whose problems can only be solved (absurdly) by vegetables. There’s the estranged couple and their fateful argument over asparagus, and the child who will never win his class election unless he learns to choke down eggplant. There are mighty to be humbled and humble to raise up through the power of vegetables.

So in other words, it’s preachy and crazy, with lots of good information mixed in and perfectly serviceable stock characters to hold the chopsticks. Even if you don’t consider yourself a foodie or found previous volumes of Oishinbo wanting, you might want to give Vegetables a look. It’s a hoot.

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Note: John Jakala posts one of my favorite panels from this volume, and the weird thing is that it’s fairly representative of the kind of declarations you will find within.

From the stack: Stitches

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Stitches, David Small’s autobiographical debut graphic novel from W.W. Norton, makes me want to use reviewer words like “searing” and “unforgettable.” It makes me want to use those words without irony. It’s just that good.

stitchesAt the age of fourteen, Small checked into the hospital to have an apparently benign cyst removed. After two surgeries, he’s left with ravaged vocal cords and a ragged scar running down his neck. That’s the nut paragraph, but it isn’t what the book is really about. Like the growth on his neck, it’s a symptom of something much more insidious and destructive.

With an almost unnerving degree of understatement and precision, Small describes the parental failings that led him to that unfortunate state. He gradually reveals the depths of his mother’s dysfunction and his father’s ineffectuality, though he doesn’t reduce them to ridiculous monsters. They’re realistic people who are damaged in distressingly recognizable ways, and Small is left to try and escape the generational cycle.

Drawing is young David’s primary source of solace, and Small visually extrapolates on what that means to the child version of himself. In his private or reflective moments, the boy remakes the world and views it in ridiculous and sometimes grotesque ways. Small renders these moments well; they have the feel of a child’s gruesome imagination and, later, a teen-ager’s derisive dismissal of the adults around him. These flights of not-quite fancy fold in well with the more straightforward illustrations, and I feel that makes them more effective.

But honestly, I find just about everything effective about Stitches. It’s as focused and shaped a work of autobiography as I can remember reading. Small has taken pains to craft a narrative that’s effective in the same ways as fiction, and if the reader didn’t know it was based on actual events, I believe it would be viewed as a sterling example of a made-up story.

There’s no self-indulgence or waste evident here, but it’s not skeletal, either. There’s resonance to the characters and impact to the way events are sequenced and facts are revealed. And most of all, there is the sympathetic distance Small the grown-up cartoonist maintains from the angry, bewildered child he was. I cringe a little to say it just on general principle, but Stitches really is a searing and unforgettable book.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

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From the stack: Ikigami vol. 2

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Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit (Viz) is about a governmental experiment in social engineering where random young people are killed to encourage the remainder of the citizenry a greater appreciation for life. The condemned are given 24 hours notice by the bureaucracy. You’d think the most engrossing material would come from how they spend their last day. In the second volume, as with the first, I was much more intrigued by the framing-device functionary who delivers the bad news and tries to make sure the people he notifies don’t do anything drastic.

This time around, our young bearer of bad news is finding that the grind of the job, the minute-to-minute demands and stresses, is blurring his underlying moral concerns. He’s becoming callous to his charges, a soulless paper pusher.

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Scenes like the one above are chilling and very effective. They constitute a small fraction of the book as a whole, but they’re far and away the best reasons to read the book. These scant pages of context say more about a repugnant initiative than the portrayals of its victims.

That isn’t to say that those portrayals are bad, exactly. Creator Motoro Mase certainly has a penchant for melodrama and a reasonable enough aptitude for portraying it, but there’s a bluntness to these sequences that’s much less interesting than the sly, layered glimpses of the system’s operational details.

This time around, we get two contrasting stories. The first strains to teach a valuable lesson about drug abuse in a thoroughly by-the-numbers fashion. In my opinion, Nancy Reagan left addiction narratives dead on the side of the road before I could even drive a car, and Mase isn’t storyteller enough to resuscitate them. Is anybody?

The second is potentially more interesting, as Mase is daring enough to show the end of a life with real potential. In the abstract, it highlights the dreadful arbitrariness of the program and how harmful it can be to society, or at least a corner of it. Moment to moment, Mase is more concerned with the sentiment of the experience, which mutes the story’s potential to condemn.

But I keep coming back to those creepy, bureaucratic moments and the deft handling of tone and undercurrent they display. For now, they’re enough to carry me through the only average majority of the comic for the spikes of sneaky, economical subplot.

From the stack: Astral Project 4

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ap4I don’t usually feel compelled to write a proper review of every volume of a given manga series. There are too many of them, to be honest, and I’m usually too lazy. I have to make an exception for Astral Project (CMX), written by marginal (Garon Tsuchiya, an Eisner winner for Old Boy) and illustrated by Syuji Takeya. For one thing, the series is only four volumes long, which is well within even my parameters for sloth. For another, it’s amazing and constantly surprising, right up to the finish.

To summarize, a young man’s sister commits suicide. He finds a CD of little-known jazz music among her belongings and takes it as a keepsake. When he plays it, his spirit leaves his body. When he leaves his body, he meets a motley crew of other astral travelers, finding companionship, suspicion, and the possibility of romance. As Masahiko tries to understand the circumstances of his sister’s death, he finds that Asami’s suicide was just a small part of a much larger mystery.

After reading the third volume, I had no idea how Tsuchiya was going to wrap things up with so many narrative elements in play – mysteries, conspiracies, secrets, complex relationships, and so on. He manages it with an unexpected display of economy. Everything that really needs to be explained is explained, though it never feels like it’s being explained, if that makes any sense.

So many plot threads in play could come cross as frantic, and that’s not always bad. I often find Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys (Viz) a little on the frantic side, and that’s one of the things I really like about the series. But Astral Project takes its cues from its spiritually adrift protagonists, floating from one thread to another, seeing what there is to be seen. (I should note that I don’t think Takeya is nearly as good an illustrator as Urasawa is, but the pages are never less than competent, and Takeya can hit some nice highs along the way.)

The potential for hubbub is also mitigated by the philosophizing, which ends up being refreshingly character-driven. The underlying theories that inform the work as articulated in this last volume are a little chilling, more than a little scathing, and unexpectedly hilarious. It’s all about real versus virtual life. Having witnessed one online platform clogged to dysfunction by people responding to a short-term failure of another online platform just yesterday, Tsuchiya’s conspiracy theories also seem unnervingly plausible.

But whether you agree with Tsuchiya or not, Astral Project is just a joy to read. It’s smart, rangy in its interests, funny, suspenseful, and even a little sweet when circumstances demand it be so. If your resistance to manga is rooted in its sometimes juvenile concerns and the daunting length of some highly regarded series, then I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.

From the stack: Nightschool

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nightschool1Reading the first volume of Svetlana Chmakova’s Nightschool: The Weirn Books (Yen Press) is a bit like reading an interesting recipe that sounds like it will result in a tasty dish. I’m the kind of person who reads cookbooks for fun, so I mean that as a compliment. Chmakova lists a bunch of interesting ingredients and suggests promising ways they might be combined.

It’s abut a young witch (or “weirn”) named Alex. Her older sister, Sarah, works as a sort-of guidance counselor at a school for the demonically inclined. In these times of scant educational funding, the institution shares space with a garden-variety high school after the sun sets. Alex has opted for home-schooling for as-yet-undisclosed reasons, though Sarah hasn’t given up on persuading Alex to join the weirns, vampires and werewolves that form the school’s student body.

As Sarah deals with weird kids at the school, Alex encounters her own troubles on a self-directed field trip. Alex wants to practice a spell in the field, and brings her inky smudge of a demonic familiar along. They run into a group of trainee monster hunters who are more inclined to eliminate eligible night-school students than educate them. They have their own parallel subculture to the school, which itself is fraught with unexpected perils.

It’s a lot of set-up to juggle, and Chmakova does a very nice job. The sizeable cast and their respective castes get a sensible amount of introduction, and the concluding twist gives a good nudge towards forcing Alex to engage with the school. Alex herself seems reasonably formidable and a bit mysterious.

Not surprisingly, Nightschool is a great-looking book. Chmakova proved her drawing chops on Dramacon, one of a handful of hits that emerged from Tokyopop’s global manga push. I didn’t especially care for that book, but I did find the visual storytelling to be brimming with talent. Chmakova’s work stood out in the way she didn’t seem to be imitating some idea of “manga style.” She’d clearly been steeped in the stuff, but her work had a distinctive look of its own, along with plenty of energy and emotion.

Nightschool carries over the appealing illustrations while demonstrating a smarter, subtler storytelling sensibility than Dramacon. As I said, all of the ingredients are there, and I feel reasonably confident in predicting that Chmakova will whip them up into something appealing.

From the stack: A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge

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adIt’s impossible to capture the scale and scope of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, and a smart creator wouldn’t even try. Josh Neufeld is a smart creator, and he’s a talented one, and I like the approach he takes to A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (Random House). Instead of trying to capture everything, he focuses on the experiences of a handful people who lived through the storm and are muddling through its aftermath.

His subjects offer a socioeconomic mix, from upper to working class. Some of them stayed in New Orleans through the storm, and others watched it unfold from a distance. Again, I don’t think Neufeld is doing this to try and tell “the whole story” so much as to offer different vantage points on what the city and its residents endured.

There’s Denise, who has no means of evacuating, and she ends up at the convention center, waiting for help that seems unlikely ever to come. Abbas sticks around to protect his family’s convenience store. Twenty-something Leo and his girlfriend, Michelle, evacuate, as does young Kwame with his family. A doctor stays put, confident in the sturdiness of his historic home.

Neufeld refrains from imposing a narrative on these survivors, instead illustrating their individual stories and interspersing them as they chronologically unfolded. Their testimonies are all vivid and engrossing, and Neufeld renders them with detail and restraint. There’s terror, anger, and sadness, but there’s also perseverance and hope.

It’s a durable and valuable work, and Neufeld’s illustrations hold up to the content. Like Rick Geary of the Treasury of Victorian Murder series of books, Neufeld doesn’t illustrate for photo-realism. His style is still evident, though he’s scrupulous in rendering people and settings.

I remember text pieces in this vein from my newspaper days, when a sensible reporter would get out of the way and let people tell their stories. (As Neufeld is illustrating these stories instead of merely transcribing them, there’s obviously a higher degree of difficulty.) There seem to be fewer of those kinds of meaty, personal portraits that flesh out major events. I miss them, and I’m glad to see Neufeld translate some of that same journalistic spirit into comics form.

(This review is based on a black-and-white “advanced reader’s edition” provided by the publisher. It’s one of those books with a really interesting provenance, so I encourage you to go read Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Neufeld to find out more. I nominated this book for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list. Anyone can nominate a title, assuming they aren’t one of the book’s creators and/or don’t work for the publisher of the book being nominated. Creators and publishers can certainly nominate the work of others.)

From the stack: Asterios Polyp

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Isn’t that a great page? I love the way images and text join forces to tell you everything you need to know about the characters’ relationship. It’s from David Mazzucchelli’s much-praised, best-selling graphic-novel debut, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon). The book is pretty much front-to-back filled with great pages like that, and by “like that,” I don’t mean “told with the same visual techniques.” I mean that Mazzucchelli seems to have limitless imagination when it comes to finding inventive ways to fuse words and images (composition, line, color, style) to convey character and plot. It’s a tour de force of cartooning.

asterioscoverIn my experience, tours de force, while breathtaking, can sometimes end up seeming a little hollow. The artistry and technique can excuse the fact that there really isn’t very much underneath. My week has coincidentally ended up being about contemplating books with diversely amazing art. For instance, I found Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea (Viz) both visually breathtaking and emotionally satisfying, so that was good. I found the beginning of J.H. Williams III and Greg Rucka’s Batwoman arc in Detective (DC) to be dazzling to the eye and unsurprising in most other ways. Asterios Polyp falls squarely on the Children of the Sea end of the spectrum.

For all of the craft on display, and in spite of the fact that it’s about a male narcissist with relationship problems, it’s a funny and nuanced story. (New rule: let’s only allow graphic novels about male narcissists with relationship problems to be published if they’re this good. We could form a screening committee.) Asterios is an architect and professor; he’s won awards for his designs, but none of them have ever become actual buildings. He’s a paper architect, never transcending two dimensions.

This is entirely appropriate. As the terrific page above suggests, he’s obsessed with dichotomies – life and death, organic and mechanical, order and chaos. It’s no accident that he virtually always appears in profile, a hook-nosed escapee from a cartoon from The New Yorker. It’s also no surprise that his ironically myopic world view keeps him from fully connecting with his fragile, lovely wife, Hana. It’s entirely possible that he chose her to fulfill another dichotomy – left-brain unites with right-brain, urbane weds earthy, Rea Irvin meets Osamu Tezuka. Even his nickname for her constitutes an attempt to wedge her further into his yin-and-yang perception. Fortunately for her and less so for him, Hana is not so fragile that she can put up with a lifetime of that kind of reduction.

Mazzucchelli juxtaposes scenes pulled from Asterios’ past with Hana with his more difficult present. Disaster has followed decline, and Asterios does the sensible thing – he hits the road going as far as limited funds will take him. He winds up in a small town where the people have their own interests and obsessions and are cordially impervious to any stab at condescension Asterios might make. He doesn’t wind up in Mayberry. The wisdom of the people he meets isn’t homespun; at times it isn’t even wisdom. But they have passions and nuanced belief systems, and they’re striking enough that Asterios actually listens to them. For him, it’s progress.

I’m reluctant to mention the plot or character dynamics in any more detail, because Mazzucchelli has a way with contorting familiar elements in surprising ways, and not just in the illustrative sense. Even if Asterios Polyp was just prose, it would still offer plenty of surprises. Of course, it’s about as far from being “just prose” as you can get, and I suppose it would be possible to be carried along by the immense craft of the thing. I don’t think that’s likely, as there’s splendid feeling to the thing as well.

By the way, Ng Suat Tong contributed a comprehensive reader’s guide to Asterios Polyp to The Comics Reporter. As the author notes, “this article will be of limited use to a person who has not read the book.” If you have read the, and I really recommend you do, whether for pyrotechnic displays of cartooning or for the fact that they still manage to serve a moving, intelligent story, go take a look.

From the stack: Tea for Two

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I should note that just because I tend to prefer yaoi about grown-ups doesn’t mean I never enjoy yaoi about teen-agers. There’s an intensity of emotion and a difficulty in expressing it clearly that’s ascribed to youth, and it’s reliable story fodder. If the creator takes a light, smart touch with that material, the results can be charming. Case in point: the first volume of Yaya Sakuragi’s Tea for Two (Blu). It’s a sweet, silly, opposites-attract story.

teafortwo1Tokumaru is a clumsy jock type. His sister reaches the breaking point with the breakage and insists he join their school’s tea ceremony club to “learn composure and grace if it kills [him]!” The club is run by stoic, dignified Hasune, who may have taken composure a little too far. Nobody who’s read a single chapter of a single yaoi title will be shocked to hear that these very different young men find themselves falling for each other, but Sakuragi does a nice job selling the notion that Tokumaru and Hasune are surprised, and pleasantly so.

Sakuragi also does a nice job establishing the couple’s chemistry. Tokumaru isn’t just a klutz, and Hasune isn’t just frosty. Each has qualities that the other can admire, and each displays a nice sensitivity to the other’s feelings. There’s a bit of a courtship dance, but they’re refreshingly frank about their feelings long before reticence gets a chance to become tiresome. The book is as much or more about sustaining a relationship between two very different people as it is starting one.

The look of the book supports the story. The protagonists are lanky and masculine, though they still look like they could be in high school. Sakuragi has more fun with Tokumaru’s facial expressions for the simple fact that he allows himself to have them more often than Hasune does, but she manages to work in some nice slyness and subtext into Hasune’s looks. The book is also reasonably sexy, whether or not the characters are having sex at the time.

There are two bonus stories. I adored the short piece about a fateful meeting between Tokumaru’s and Hasune’s sisters, which provides witty, opposites-repel counterpoint to the main story. The other back-up didn’t work as well for me. In it, the guy who provides sweets and cakes for the tea club, Keigo, makes a classic relationship blunder. Keigo, it’s natural to have a crush on the wrong person, but I beg you, hold out for someone who isn’t quite so high-maintenance.