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He enjoys being a girl

August 27, 2008 by

Given that the first translated volume shipped four years ago, and that I’ve been intermittently pining for the second volume ever since, it was possible that Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret (now at Tokyopop) might not have lived up to expectations. Maybe it was just the fact that I couldn’t get my hands on a copy of the second volume that made me so eager?

I’m happy to say that I liked the second volume slightly better than the first, and I liked the first a lot. It’s now my second favorite manga series that deals with jumbled gender issues among high-school students, and since first place for that category is owned now and for the foreseeable future by Setona Mizushiro’s addictive, disturbing After School Nightmare (Go! Comi), there’s no shame in taking the silver medal.

But back to Secret: the awkwardness escalates slightly this time around as shy-guy Uehara and rose-with-thorns Momoi adapt to life in each other’s bodies. Morinaga builds on elements introduced in the first volume, particularly in the delightfully pansexual romantic quadrangle among Uehara in Momoi’s body, Momoi in Uehara’s, Momoi’s pretty best friend Shiina, and Uehara’s pal Senbongi. Momoi, loving life as a boy, has Shiina as a steady, and Uehara isn’t immune to Shiina’s charms either. Nor can Uehara ignore the persuasive wooing of Senbongi, much as Uehara might wish he could.

Much as I enjoy the sitcom antics of Morinaga’s My Heavenly Hockey Club (Del Rey), the character-driven farce of Secret gives it the edge. There’s a constant emotional ebb and flow, with poor Uehara torn between his desire to get his own body and the nagging rightness of his current situation. Brash hypocrite Momoi continues to amuse, holding Uehara to standards she has no intention of upholding herself. And Morinaga manages to juggle a bunch of potential narrative trajectories and keep them just about equally likely. I’m never quite sure where the series is going, but all of the possibilities that Morinaga has teased are appealing.

Filed under: From the stack, Tokyopop 1 Comment

Head, shoulders, knees and toes

August 8, 2008 by

I’m really excited about the upcoming arrival of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack from Vertical, but I shouldn’t let that excitement lead me to neglect Dororo, another Tezuka title currently in release. I know it’s not Tezuka’s masterwork; it’s not even close. But there are a lot of things I really love about it that became even clearer as I read the second volume.

First (though not foremost) is Tezuka’s ability to render graphic violence in a way that’s exactly to my taste. When something horrible happens, which is fairly often, it’s undeniably horrible, but it isn’t exploitatively so. It’s like Tezuka’s tone dispenser is perfectly calibrated. (By “tone” I mean mood, not weird hexagonal eyeball screens.) Adventurous moments, ones featuring protagonist Hyakkimaru dishing out pointy, sharp-edged justice, are allowed to look cool. A group of hapless villagers being murdered is rendered with the appropriate tonal effects in mind – shock, disgust and sadness.

But that’s just a smaller reflection of the thing I really love about Tezuka – his ability to shift his highly stylized approach in illustration to suit a wide range of narrative beats but to still keep the visual feel of the book coherent. There’s the aforementioned violence and adventure, but there’s also low comedy, unspeakable cruelty, tense secrets, immense sadness, lush landscapes, and even moments of peace. There’s great visual variety, but it all fits together.

It’s not just in the visuals that seemingly incompatible elements can cohere. In Dororo, Tezuka hops back and forth between lively quest adventure and dysfunction and sorrow. Loss pervades the whole thing, and it isn’t trivialized. But it’s side by side with moments that are undeniably fun and exciting. And they fit.

I’m a little sad that there’s only one more volume. There’s a twist in the second volume that begs to be rendered at leisure, even in addition to the book’s basic premise. For those who have forgotten, Hyakkimaru is hunting the demons who claimed various parts of his body at birth. A supporting character suggests that limb recovery is all well and good, but it doesn’t really constitute a life’s purpose so much as a project. I was just amazed when I read that sequence, because it seems really audacious. A lot of shônen protagonists have essentially selfish motives, and to see one called on that in the midst of a perfectly sound shônen character arc was perfectly Tezuka to me.

(Comments based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Filed under: From the stack, Vertical 3 Comments

And a partridge in a pear tree

July 21, 2008 by

The tenth volume of Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! (Dark Horse) offers the following diversions:

1. A desperate race to find a bomb planted by terrorists
2. A shocking double execution
3. A shocking single execution
4. A high-speed chase
5. The introduction of new characters
6. The return of old characters
7. Weighty discussion about the nature of life, sentience and evolution as they pertain to a creepy virus that turns people into crystal
8. Two big explosions
9. Inter-agency tensions in the criminal justice arena
10. Citizen protests
11. Subdued but affecting portrayals of grief
12. Mildly gratuitous nudity that manages not to seem exploitative or too forced, which is probably the best kind of gratuitous nudity
13. Giant robots

I think it’s fair to say that’s a whole lot of stuff to try and put into even 232 pages of comics, but Endo manages it with his customary confidence and force. I continue to be amazed at how he can weave from thread to thread and theme to theme and not lose me even a little. He’s clearly managed to craft characters with enough specificity and depth that I remember them even after a long absence, along with scenarios and arguments persuasive enough to linger and resonate as they propel the story in new directions.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend starting with volume 10, because you’d probably end up being impressed with Endo’s craft and Dark Horse’s production values but hopelessly lost by the story. I would recommend starting with volume 1 and enjoying the story as it progresses, demonstrating forbearance during the shockingly trite drugs-and-hookers mini-arc in the middle, and celebrating as the series returns to form after the pushers and pimps are dispatched.

Filed under: Dark Horse, From the stack 6 Comments

From the stack: Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro

July 4, 2008 by

I have a confession to make. Interested as I am in new players in the manga market, I haven’t delved too deeply into the catalogue of Yen Press. I admire Keiko Tobe’s educational soap opera, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, and I’m thrilled that they’ve absorbed ICE Kunion’s manhwa titles (particularly Goong and Forest of Gray City), but the rest of their titles seem kind of generic. And I can barely keep up with the generic manga I already enjoy. (If I’m missing something spectacular, please let me know.)

The one solicitation that was able to crack my indifference was Satoko Kiyuduki’s Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro. Between the charmingly odd title and the fact that it’s in the four-panel strip form, I had to take a look. I’m glad I did. I’m partial to low-key weirdness, and this title offers that quality with aplomb.

Taciturn Kuro is wandering the countryside toting a coffin and investigating rumors of a witch. She’s accompanied by a talking bat named Sen and, later, a pair of rambunctious, cat-like twins named Nijuku and Sanju. Between the coffin on her back, her secretiveness, and the almost-unrelieved black of her wardrobe, she’s not an especially winning presence, and she’s got too much on her mind to concern herself with charming strangers. She manages, though, in an unassuming way.

That’s because Kiyuduki has populated Kuro’s world with people who are kind and curious rather than superstitious and stingy. They share information, and turn to Kuro with their problems, triggering gently uplifting adventures. Kuro’s got substantial burdens of her own, but she helps when she can. There’s a streak of benevolent self-interest to her adventures as well, and it’s fun to watch her multi-task.

If Kuro was merely glum and resolute, she’d be kind of dull. It’s nice that Kiyuduki gives her a sarcastic side and allows her to indulge in the occasional fit of temper. As for Sen, if you’ve seen one talking-bat sidekick, you’ve seen them all, but I tend to find talking-bat sidekicks welcome more often than not. Nijuku and Sanju are charming kids. They’re funny, inquisitive, and occasionally bratty, and Kiyuduki doesn’t overplay their moments of kid logic. Their growing dependence on Kuro and Kuro’s almost reluctant fondness for them is moving and subdued.

Kiyuduki’s illustrations are gorgeously cute, rich in detail with just enough darkness to suit the book’s tone. Character designs are imaginative, and Kiyuduki is particularly adept at facial expressions, from small, nuanced shifts to the full-on tantrums and wide-eyed wonder of the twins. Even without the generous sprinkling of color pages, the landscapes Kiyuduki creates are homey and welcoming.

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro is one of those books that feels just right… the right blend of humor and sadness, clarity and myster, charm and creepiness. I really recommend it.

Filed under: From the stack, Yen Press 6 Comments

Happy-go-lucky

July 3, 2008 by

Patsy Walker: Hellcat #1 (Marvel) isn’t bad. It’s got a punchy, stand-alone story by Kathryn Immonen about a C-list heroine as a stranger in a strange land, and it’s got attractive art by David LaFuente Garcia. Immonen takes the “less is more” approach to continuity, focusing on her protagonist’s abilities and personality rather than her convoluted backstory. In other words, she tells you everything you need to know, and barely a scrap more.

Patsy is a refreshingly angst-free heroine, and when Iron Man gives her a gig as the official super-heroine of Alaska, she accepts with a minimum of grumbling. Her mandate is vague, so she follows her (quasi-psychic) intuition to identify a potential trouble spot in the vast, forbiddingly beautiful, largely unpopulated landscape. Trouble is duly found, and that’s about that.

Immonen’s Hellcat seems almost like a Marvel Adventures version of the character. Her noteworthy traits are what they’ve always been when the character as been put to best use – spirited, likeable, a chatterbox, and game for anything. The chatter is cute, but not always coherent. The dialogue seems like it would flow better if it was performed than read off of a page, but there are cute bits.

I also wonder if Immonen might have stripped things down a bit too much. Patsy’s background is positively byzantine. She started as a mainstay of Marvel’s teen romance comic line, resurfaced as a spunky divorcee who became a super-heroine through pure luck and force of will, had a healthy run as a member of Marvel’s weird super-team, The Defenders, got married again, died, and came back to life to resume her career as a super-heroine. There’s no need to reference even a fraction of that, but a sense that she’s an experienced adventurer and had gone through some serious crap with her outgoing optimism intact might have added some appealing layers to the book, which tends to skate on charm.

Now, if you want to read some really delightful Hellcat stories, I strongly recommend you start with the Avengers: The Serpent Crown collection, written by Steve Englehart and drawn by George Perez. This is where Patsy went from wannabe to perfectly legitimate candidate for the Avengers. (I’ve always wondered what would have happened with her fictional career if Englehart had stayed on the title.) Then move on to Essential Defenders Volume 3, by a whole bunch of people. In addition to the best Defenders story ever (Steve Gerber’s bizarre, long-form arc pitting our heroes against the manipulations of the Headmen and an interstellar self-help guru), you’ll also get Hellcat’s introduction to the team, which is followed by a very snappy tale of the Defenders versus a new incarnation of the Zodiac. That arc also features what now might regrettably be called a “bromance” between Nighthawk and Moon Knight, who apparently found abiding solace in the fact that they were both guys with glider capes, sarcastic personalities, and not much else to acquit them.

Filed under: From the stack, Marvel 1 Comment

Pantheon highs and lows

June 26, 2008 by

Many theologians have wondered how a benevolent divinity can allow evil in the world. Tapari and Yoshikazu Kuwashima’s Kamisama Kazoku (Go! Comi) offers one possible answer: God’s really busy trying to help his son get laid.

Samataro, the son of god, is attending an average school with regular humans. Any hopes for a normal life are dashed by the fact that he’s got every educational administrator’s worst nightmare: omnipotent helicopter parents. Even his most off-handed whims are made real by his mom, dad and sisters, with reliably humiliating results for all concerned.

With its cuddly-cute cover and fun premise, KK sounds like an endearing coming-of-age comedy. Unfortunately, the creators have a penchant for creepy fan service. A lot of it involves Samataro’s hot goddess mom popping up naked. I anticipate future volumes to portray Samataro’s extensive therapy, or at least a belated call to Godchild Protective Services.

For bonus philosophical points, the creators also address the issue of free will. It turns out the pantheon is pretty much against it if it keeps their golden boy from getting what he wants. To his credit, Samataro is opposed to the undue influence his kinfolk exert on the object of his affection, a blandly pretty newcomer named Kumiko, and the volume ends with his request to be a regular human, free of divine interference. It’s hard not to sympathize with him.

But it’s even harder to overlook the seedy titillation that seems to be the book’s primary selling point.

Mercifully, Go! Comi has also rolled out another new series that’s much more to my liking, Takako Shigematsu’s Ultimate Venus. I had been feeling a bit of a void since the conclusion of Shigematsu’s snarky, sparkling Tenshi Ja Nai!! (also from Go! Comi), so this is a welcome addition to the publisher’s roster.

Shigematsu seems to specialize in stories that feature a spunky everygirl thrown into high-end, high-stakes new social spheres filled with hunky but morally ambiguous boys. This time around, orphan Yuzu moves in with her grandmother, a sexy corporate mogul looking for an heir. Yuzu has been tossed into the deep end of a pool filled with sharks, but she has her late mother’s down-to-earth advice to see her through the tricky spots.

As Danielle Leigh noted in her review over at Comics Should Be Good, Shigematsu’s skills lie in making shôjo tropes sparkle with fresh energy. Like so many in the shôjo sisterhood, Yuzu has a big heart and an impulsive nature. She also has better-than-average instincts and a rewardingly low tolerance for other people’s crap, and it’s those qualities that really drive the story. Yuzu is a modern Cinderella; she doesn’t want to fit in and make everyone happy. She wants to stick to her own values in a setting where values are vague and shifty at best.

(Reviews are based on complimentary copies provided by the publisher.)

Filed under: From the stack, Go! Comi 2 Comments

Pat the bunny

June 12, 2008 by

The other day, I expressed the suspicion that Simone Lia’s Fluffy (Dark Horse) would be “super, super cute.” It didn’t turn out that way, but it’s a very successful book for the qualities it does have.

On the surface, it’s about a single man and his talking baby bunny. Underneath, it’s about denial and avoidance. That kind of counterpoint could invite flagrant metaphor abuse, but Lia tends to skate past the obvious. (I strongly suspect that Fluffy is a bunny to avoid tricky questions about a bachelor raising a human toddler, beyond the cute diversions a bunny provides. Whatever the reason, Fluffy simply is what he is, and he doesn’t distract.)

Michael is bored with his job and a little alarmed at the attentions of Fluffy’s nursery school teacher, whose devotion is entirely out of proportion with any encouragement Michael has offered. He and Fluffy head off to Sicily to visit his parents and sister only to find that avoiding one set of difficulties sometimes places you right in the middle of new ones.

Michael’s sister is bored with her marriage and irritated with their mother, who is spending her golden years as a reinvigorated Catholic. (Where better to pursue that hobby than Italy?) Fluffy refuses to accept that he’s a bunny, and Michael’s father spends most of his time in a slightly baffled haze, absorbing and amplifying the anxieties of his family.

Despite the weight of these issues – unrequited love, familial conflict, marital ennui, crises of identity – Lia manages to be both lighthearted and respectful in her handling of them. She’s too smart to offer clear closure to these messy lives, and she’s too sharp a comedienne to squander the possibilities of overlapping, interlocking tensions. But she’s generous enough to offer some happy moments, while withholding happy endings, and clever and restrained enough to get away with it.

There are amusing flights of fancy (exposition provided by a dust mote being one of my favorites), but they don’t pull the story away from its emotional core. The book has a very serendipitous feel to it, like all of its elements kind of blithely fell into place in the right way. I’ve always admired the ability to create that appearance of effortlessness, and Lia manages it while actually having something interesting and engaging to say. The book may have confounded my superficial expectations, but it was surprisingly satisfying.

Filed under: Dark Horse, From the stack 1 Comment

Head and shoulders

June 2, 2008 by

It’s hard for me not to like a comic about invasive parasites that take over humans and turn their heads into shape-shifting weapons so they can eat uninfected humans. Throw in a parasite that doesn’t quite live up to its potential and ends up trapped in the hand of a high-school student, and my resistance weakens even further.

Okay, so the art in Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte (Del Rey) isn’t all it could be. So the high-school girls look to be around 40 years old. So there are more mullets than might be strictly necessary. Even those minor pitfalls give the series an early-1990s charm that ends up working in its favor.

I always prefer science fiction or fantasy with a healthy dose of character development, and Iwaaki is extremely conscientious on this front. Beyond the human-eating peril the parasites present, there are interpersonal tensions that develop as a result of the extreme circumstances. While the third volume features a great deal of gore, Iwaaki doesn’t neglect smaller moments, even sweetly surreal ones.

The third volume offers weirdness to spare, and it’s delightful. The concluding chapter looks at the response of media, government and law enforcement to the emerging crisis, and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in months. And it’s intentionally funny, no less, which makes for a nice change of pace in an otherwise tense narrative.

(Based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Filed under: Del Rey, From the stack 6 Comments

"And you know that their little lives can become such a mess"

May 26, 2008 by

I’ve got a big pile of comics I plan to write about, and many of them are much better than the second volume of Miyuki Eto’s Hell Girl (Del Rey). But it’s a marked improvement over the first, and I find myself a little fixated on the book’s weird morality.

For those who aren’t familiar with the book’s premise (originally developed by The Jigoku Shoujo Project), characters in distress can log onto a web site and consign their tormentors to hell. The cost for this service is rather high, as the consigners agree to spend eternity in that insalubrious locale as well. (What if they end up in the same part of hell as their victims? Awkward.)

In the first volume, there wasn’t a long-term thinker in sight. Otherwise decent people, pushed to the point of desperation, decided without hesitation that their own damnation was worth it if they could punish their enemies. If the book had been about the pitfalls of immediate gratification and the fruitlessness of revenge that would be one thing, but those subjects never came up in the first installment.

Eto is a little more nuanced this time around. There’s a charmingly nasty story about a conniving ice skater who’s trying to use the urban legend to her advantage without suffering the consequences of the bargain. Two other chapters present Hell Girl as a means of protecting the innocent from a malignant influence rather than avenging innocents after the fact. Best of all, Eto picks up a waiting-period aspect from the anime, giving clients time to do a costs-benefits analysis before committing themselves.

Hell Girl still isn’t brilliant by any means, but the added uncertainty does elevate it from being just a bizarre curiosity. And it’s still enough of a bizarre curiosity to maintain that kind of morbid interest.

(Review based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Filed under: Del Rey, From the stack 2 Comments

From the stack: Disappearance Diary

May 19, 2008 by

I’m not quite sure where I got my predisposition against autobiographical comics, as I’ve enjoyed most of the ones I’ve read. But somewhere in my brain lurks the suspicion that the ones I haven’t read are littered with self-aggrandizing self-indulgence and cartoonists turning an unreturned text message into tragedy.

If I’m that anxious about autobiographical comics created by people who don’t really have that much to complain about, imagine my reluctance to dive into Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, due from Fanfare/Ponent Mon in the late summer of this year. It’s a detailed account of the manga-ka’s bouts with homelessness, abandonment of all responsibility, and alcoholism. Would this be a warts-and-all confessional where the reader is invited to admire how much character the warts actually give an otherwise undistinguished countenance?

Surprisingly, Disappearance Diary is one of the most cheerful portrayals of dispossession and substance abuse you’re ever likely to encounter. Azuma focuses on three periods in his life. In the first, he abandons a family and successful career and becomes homeless, collecting partially smoked cigarettes off the sidewalk and food from the trash. In the second, he abandons family and career again to become a pipe fitter for a gas company. In the third, he’s committed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment of his profound, life-threatening alcoholism.

It seems inconceivable that the mere facts of the book aren’t enough to render Azuma utterly unsympathetic. I think it’s the fact that Azuma never tries to justify his actions; he just portrays them. The book is very much a diary, skirting the shape of dramatic arcs in favor of an anecdotal approach. Azuma figures out how to build a stove out of trash. He deals with irritating co-workers at the gas company. He draws quick sketches of the other oddballs in the alcoholics’ ward.

The book’s absence of narrative arc works very much in its favor. I think that any attempt on Azuma’s part to cast his disappearances as some kind of protagonist’s journey would have failed to some degree, probably disastrously. In portraying them via a series of off-handed observations, Azuma has largely spared the reader (or at least this one) the chore of judging his behavior. Since he never apologizes, there’s no onus to forgive. The reader just travels along with him through experiences that are mundane, unexpected, and distressing.

I never quite reached the point of chuckling, “Oh, Azuma, you scamp,” but I found myself coming uncomfortably close. Part of this is undoubtedly due to his crisp cartooning and cherubic character designs. It has the aesthetic qualities of a charmingly conceived comic strip, along with some of the same rhythms. Chapters are short and focused in comic-strip (and diary) fashion, and the book bustles along from event to observation.

For as much of a prig as I can be about the behavior and morality of fictional characters, I found myself unexpectedly complicit with the Azuma portrayed in Disappearance Diary. I certainly can’t support the choices that yielded these experiences, but I got quite a bit of reading pleasure out of watching Azuma chronicle them. Perhaps he viewed his failures as such a given that it would have been redundant to dwell on them. Perhaps he really isn’t contrite in the least.

Whatever the rationale behind it, the decision yielded an immensely readable comic. The counterpoint between style and content is absorbing enough on its own, and Azuma’s blunt-but-coy choices never fail to engage.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher, with special thanks to Deb Aoki at About.Com.)

Filed under: Fanfare/Ponent Mon, From the stack 5 Comments
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