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Retentive… probe… etc.

March 1, 2008 by

I can’t really call Kei Azumaya’s All Nippon Air Line: Paradise at 30,000 Feet (Juné) a good comic, but there are a lot of things I like about it.

It’s a yaoi comedy about a company that takes gay friendliness to new heights. (I apologize for that, but there are so many puns in this book that there’s something of an infection vector.) Proudly known by its acronym, A.N.A.L., the all-gay airline is dedicated to customer service and to the pleasure of its all-male, all-gay employees.

This is no mere flying brothel. The thing that strikes me most about the book is how sex-positive it is. Aside from one unfortunate short where a straight pilot is “persuaded” to sign on with the airline, everyone gets to pursue their own tastes, whether it’s a beautiful boy, burly jock or balding salaryman. The employees are so cheerfully randy and the passengers so appreciative that it’s easy to buy into the spirit of the proceedings.

There isn’t much in the way of proper characterization. The short stories and jokes are built almost entirely around the playful juxtaposition of types and tastes (and the incessant A.N.A.L. puns). Azumaya pulls off enough of the jokes that the underdeveloped cast isn’t really that much of a detriment.

The best bits involve ambivalent passengers winding up on an A.N.A.L. flight by necessity or accident. My favorite featured a recent college graduate traveling with his amateur manga-ka sister on an athletically themed flight. There’s nothing unexpected about the story’s outcomes, but the execution is smart and ultimately rather sweet.

Most of the collected works are doujinshi, self-published comics, and those origins show. It feels more like Azumaya is riffing for a friendly audience than creating anything for the ages, but that’s part of the book’s charm. She’s playing with yaoi conventions in ways that assert that sex can be fun and travel can be glamorous. It’s a nice change of pace.

Filed under: From the stack, Juné 1 Comment

Season liberally with pepper and salt

February 20, 2008 by

I have an easily documented history of mocking the culinary philosophy of Sandra Lee, or at least her zealous enthusiasm for its outcomes. I can’t deny that there’s truth in her claim that adding something real to something packaged can change the outcome for the better. Next time you make brownies from a mix, try replacing some of the water with good coffee that you’ve brewed and cooled, or add a tablespoon of real vanilla extract to a packaged cake mix. You probably won’t, as Lee swears, camouflage the formulaic origins completely, but the result is more complex and satisfying.

It’s true of comics as well, and it’s appropriate that one of the most striking examples I’ve come across recently is the next volume of Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi’s Kitchen Princess, due this week from Del Rey. It took a couple of volumes for this series to grow on me, and it took the most recent installment for it to become manga crack.

Here’s the story so far: a plucky orphan (I know) enrolls in an elite private school (bear with me) to find the boy (yes, there’s always at least one) who gave her hope when all seemed lost. She overcomes the snobbishness and resentment of her upper-crust classmates (that crowd again) and catches the eye of the school’s cutest boys (insert feuding bishônen here) with her good heart and nigh-supernatural skills as a pastry chef. (If this were shônen manga, she’d want to become the world’s greatest creator of sweets and set about crushing all rivals when not recruiting them to her entourage, but it’s shôjo, so she wants to use desserts to make people happy, smooth the course of young love, reconcile broken families, and heal the sick.)

So how could a series so transparently formulaic become anything but pleasant, predictable fluff? The secret ingredient is cynicism. (There are spoilers after the cut, so be warned.)

In the fifth volume, Ando and Kobayashi reveal that they aren’t the only ones capable of exploiting orphan Najika’s Cinderella story. In fact, the school’s director (father of Sora and Daichi, the feuding bishônen mentioned above) has been manipulating Najika from the beginning. He brought her to the Seiji Academi with the intent of thrusting her into the spotlight via culinary competition, then trotting out her tragic past for media attention and sympathy, then using her as the poster girl for the academy’s new culinary division. If that level of craven self-interest isn’t distressing enough for you, it turns out that dream-boy Sora has been helping his father with the scheme.

So basically everything that has gone before has been staged, to an extent. Though real to Najika, there’s been puppetry in play, which should force her to re-evaluate her choices and relationships. Sora claims that he’s developed genuine feelings for Najika in the course of executing his father’s crafty, unscrupulous plan, and that he didn’t understand just how low his father was willing to sink. I remain unconvinced, though optimist Najika forgives him and proceeds with the competition. (Participating serves Najika’s ends, at least. She can further hone her skills and honor her parents, gifted pastry chefs who died too young.)

There’s nothing meta-textual about the revelation. Nobody laughs smirks and notes that Najika’s background is “straight out of a shôjo manga,” and that’s good. In a series with so many shôjo staples already in place, that level of self-awareness might be detrimental. Instead, the twist seems heightened but real… a character demonstrating self-serving media savvy in a way that cuts the sweetness of the series without completely demolishing it. Moments like this (which are increasingly frequent though none quite this severe) make Najika’s optimism and generosity seem hard-won instead of… well… simple.

I wish the art had some of the sourness of the plot, but it’s pretty much all pretty sweetness. It’s perfectly competent, and the food illustrations can be mouth-watering, but the visuals are generally too sunny to capture the moodier narrative elements. Those elements aren’t to be overlooked, because they elevate a pretty good shôjo with a fun premise into something much smarter and more interesting. I hope Ando and Kobayashi keep the unpleasant but surmountable surprises coming.

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

Filed under: Del Rey, From the stack 4 Comments

Pop art

February 10, 2008 by

While sharing his terrific cover for the next issue of Shojo Beat, Bryan Lee O’Malley makes me feel good about my taste in manga by saying the following:

“As well as Nana (the best thing ever), Shojo Beat also puts out one of mine and Hope’s new favorite manga: BEAUTY POP by Kiyoko Arai! I realize these shojo titles can kind of blur together after a while… flower this, beauty that, something pop, but this is the one about the best hairdresser in Japan!! I urge you to start picking it up.”

There are some really good manga about girls who don’t really give a damn that they’re surrounded by handsome boys. Ai Morinaga’s My Heavenly Hockey Club (Del Rey) is reliably hilarious, and I really need to read more of Bisco Hatori’s Ouran High School Host Club (Viz), but I think Beauty Pop is probably my favorite of this subgenre.

This is in spite of the fact that I only like about a third of the large supporting cast and would welcome an incongruous serial killer plot that took out another third of it. (On the plus side, there’s snack-obsessed nail artist Kei and lanky, apologetic massage therapist Kenichiro. On the DIE, DIE NOW end of things lurk pronoun-challenged aromatherapist Iori, and particularly Chisami, the painfully shrill little sister of the lead boy. Aside from being too stupid to live, Chisami refers to herself in the third person, which I almost always find affected and hate a lot.)

The price of admission for the book is consistently paid by lead character Kiri Koshiba, the most unsentimental shôjo heroine I’ve ever seen. As just about everyone around her panders and flails for status and attention, Kiri is all self-contained focus. She’s a doer instead of a talker, and she has a marvelous sense of perspective and justice. Her pure, effortless coolness can carry me through the most idiotic of plot arcs, and Beauty Pop certainly has its share of those.

In the sixth volume, she runs afoul of a grasping piece of egotistical trash and, pushed to her limit, stares him down and says, “You’re despicable.” No tears or shouting, just a flat declaration of sublime disdain. Her cold fury is as imposing as the bellowing rage of a dozen other manga characters combined.

Filed under: From the stack, Viz 1 Comment

Absolute boy, friend

February 9, 2008 by

The almost-human robot has been a regular figure in fiction for ages, and the complex bonds formed between everyday people and almost-human machines have been thoroughly explored as well. There are executions that lapse lazily into the realm of cliché, and others that invest the tropes with enough heart and intelligence to feel classic. Yuu Asami’s A.I. Revolution (Go! Comi) is in the latter category.

Asami introduces schoolgirl Sui, the daughter of a robotics expert who has developed a new prototype. Vermillion is virtually human in appearance, and his artificial intelligence has the capacity to evolve. Sui’s father wants her to introduce Vermillion to the world, putting his programming through its paces. Initially, it’s an entertaining chore for Sui, but her affection for Vermillion deepens as his personality becomes more complex. There’s no romance (yet), but their evolving friendship gives the story a satisfying core.

With that established, Asami uses her protagonists as triggers for the emotional evolution of others – a girl who lost her father to an out-of-control robot, a sickly boy whose scientist father is much less benevolent than Sui’s, even another robot cut from the same cloth as Vermillion. (Kira, the other hunky boy robot, is amusingly jerky, and I was happy to see him become a fixture in the cast.) Sui and Vermillion’s relationship, her thoughtful acceptance of the other, and his fresh point of view allow others to evaluate their own feelings of grief, loneliness and disconnectedness. Since Sui and Vermillion are developed so well, they’re effective touchstones without being reduced to simple catalysts.

Relationships aren’t the only ingredient, though. Asami peppers the volume with corporate espionage. Ostensibly affable researcher Sakaki reveals a creepy, conniving side when he realizes that Vermillion’s potential extends beyond becoming a genial companion. He’s an effective villain because his worldview is so narrow and functional; everyone, robot and human, is a means to an end as opposed to an independent entity worthy of respect. The tone of the story changes when he pops up, but the themes remain the same.

The book’s classic feel is carried heavily by the visuals, which are lovely and elegant. Those qualities aren’t immediately evident, as Asami favors a larger number of panels per page than I’m used to. She’s also more given to dialogue than monologue, internal or otherwise, so there are quite a few word balloons. Those elements never make the pages look cluttered, as Asami’s sense of composition is very strong. The visuals are sharp and jangling when they need to be and smooth and lyrical at the moments that call for those qualities. She never wastes a head shot either, taking advantage of the varied palettes expressive humans and more muted robots offer.

There are lots of little things about the book that add to the pleasure. Asami can be very funny when it suits, and her hilarious after-word makes me hope she’s done a flat-out comedy that’s waiting to be licensed. I’ve praised the script previously, and it certainly bears repeating: Translator Christine Schilling and adapter/editor Brynne Chandler capture all of the nuances.

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

Filed under: From the stack, Go! Comi 5 Comments

In defense of art historians

February 8, 2008 by

I was glad to see Greg McElhatton’s critique of Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert (NBM), the second in a series of graphic novels inspired and sponsored by the Louvre. It’s a fascinating project, and I’m glad that NBM is offering the books in English. Unfortunately, I can’t share Greg’s enthusiasm for this installment.

It’s obviously a matter of taste, but I think the most effective satire comes at least partly from a place of affection. It’s a quality I find singularly lacking in Mathieu’s descent into the bowels of the museum and the psyches of its caretakers. While Mathieu cleverly (perhaps too cleverly) examines the contradictions and quirks of curatorial scholarship, there’s no flip side in evidence… no acknowledgement that these cultural repositories provide a vital resource and that the people who toil in them might do so out of a love for that culture.

It’s as though Mathieu’s critical lens is as myopic as the one he ascribes to the Kafkaesque bean-counters who absurdly and ineffectively tend and catalog the museum’s holdings. They’re just counting the dots in a Seurat painting instead of standing back and absorbing the cumulative effect, plodding down an obsessive-compulsive path that’s both endless and futile. It’s a bleak assessment and ultimately, I think, a false one.

Of course, art is subjective, and it’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting Mathieu’s intent, or that I’m responding too severely to a level of satirical rigor that’s just not to my taste. I certainly share Greg’s appreciation of Mathieu’s skill as an illustrator and of the Louvre’s evident commitment to freedom of artistic expression. It’s just that Mathieu’s argument as I see it is shallow and too easily contradicted. The mere fact that the Louvre conceived of this graphic novel project, a synthesis of the contemporary and the classic, is telling enough, isn’t it?

Filed under: From the stack, NBM 3 Comments

From the stack: Shortcomings

December 21, 2007 by

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed reading about someone’s discomfort quite as much as I did in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly). Ben Tanaka is underemployed and in a relationship that’s clearly on its last legs. He and Miko have reached that phase where they spend more time dissecting each other’s behavior than connecting in any meaningful way. The precision of their criticism and the passivity of their mutual aggression is strangely breathtaking.

Under normal circumstances, it would be simplicity itself to just point and laugh at Ben’s many dysfunctions. His best source of comfort seems to be the reliability of his discontent, his desire for things he doesn’t have and reluctance to let go of what he does, no matter how dissatisfying it may be. So when Miko leaves Berkeley for New York for an internship, Ben is torn between inertia and opportunity.

He takes the opportunity of Miko’s absence to explore an aspect of his nature that he’s spent a lot of energy vehemently denying exists – an attraction to white women. Ben doesn’t really take any pride in his Japanese-American identity, but it still trips him up. It’s another thing to blame when life goes wrong, and something resembling pride bubbles up when it can make an uncomfortable situation worse.

His attempts at courting blondes go about as well as you’d expect, and Tomine isn’t even slightly above punishing Ben for his ambivalence. But Tomine isn’t wagging his finger and saying, “See? This is what happens when you step outside of your comfort zone.” He’s just showing what happens to someone like Ben tries to hedge his bets.

If I didn’t end up liking Ben (he’s a liar and a hypocrite), I did find him absolutely engrossing. He’s a perfectly conceived jerk, and his skill at deflection and contrarianism almost qualifies as a mutant ability. There’s never a “Poor Ben” moment in the book, though Tomine persuades me that Ben’s not entirely to blame for his circumstances. The bits of comeuppance Ben endures are funny and resonant, and I felt like I’d been watching him stumble for years instead of a hundred pages or so.

Add in Tomine’s clean, absorbing art and his pitch-perfect mini-satires of so many worthy targets (the art scene, academia, independent film, and so on), and you’re left with one of the most readable books of the year.

Filed under: Drawn & Quarterly, From the stack 2 Comments

From the stack: The Saga of the Bloody Benders

December 5, 2007 by

I’m so crazy about Rick Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murder series (NBM). The Saga of the Bloody Benders is the latest, and it upholds the excellent standard that Geary has set.

I do find them kind of difficult to review, and I think that’s because Geary makes what he does seem so effortless. I know it can’t be; the books are meticulously researched and wonderfully drawn. But the chapters of history Geary chooses are so engrossingly grisly that it’s hard to imagine how they wouldn’t make a good comic.

In this case, his subject is a murderous family of Kansas settlers who set up shop in a relatively bustling byway. Unwary travelers check in to the Benders’ grocery and restaurant, never to be seen again. Even after their reign of profitable terror is ended, mysteries remain, and Geary spends a good half of the book examining the rumors and theory that swirled around the crimes.

Geary uses the crimes to articulate qualities about their era, which deepens the pleasures of the comics. There’s a subplot in The Murder Room by P.D. James about how certain crimes could only have taken place in their given historical era and setting, and Geary seems to be an adherent to that philosophy.

While I love comics like Action Philosophers (Evil Twin) that make use of the outlandish possibilities of cartooning to educate, I’m equally taken with Geary’s straightforward approach. He resists the urge to embellish or put words in people’s mouths, and he doesn’t need to. The facts in evidence and the way he presents them are gripping enough that they don’t need flourishes.

Filed under: From the stack, NBM 2 Comments

From the stack: Glister 1 and 2

November 29, 2007 by

Andi Watson’s Glister (Image) is set in one of those places I kind of want to live. Chilblain Hall is a big old wreck of a country house filled with oddities, yet it’s strangely inviting. Weird things happen there, but the worst of them never come close to being menacing. Irritating, maybe, but they’re nothing the titular heroine can’t handle, and life would be dull without them.

So when a haunted teapot arrives and dictates the most tedious novel imaginable to poor Glister Butterworth, she rolls up her sleeves and works towards a solution, one that hopefully won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. When a stuck-up neighbor makes disparaging remarks about Chilblain Hall and it wanders off in a huff, Glister’s imaginative coping skills kick in again.

Charming without being sickly, witty without any bite, these are really delightful comics. This isn’t really a surprise, given Watson’s track record for tremendously appealing work. His heroine sets the tone for everything – sensible but not completely without sentiment, quick-witted, and ready to roll with whatever her strange home and life present.

For all of the weirdness, the comedy is very low-key. It’s almost observational, except Glister deals with pushy bridge trolls and tourists renting the dungeon for war games instead of the line at the DMV or bad cell phone connections. What’s the opposite of magical realism? Because that’s what Glister is.

(I haven’t even tried to describe Watson’s illustrations, mostly because Tom Spurgeon described them so well and anything I wrote would seem kind of pitifully derivative.)

(Oh, and I have to admit that when I looked at the back cover and saw that this had been published by Image, my first thought was, “No, really? Image? Not Oni? Do I even have a category for Image?” My second was, “Good for them.”)

Filed under: From the stack, Image 2 Comments

From the stack: Human Diastrophism

November 22, 2007 by

In the stories collected in Heartbreak Soup (Fantagraphics), Gilbert Hernandez erected the Central American town of Palomar and populated it with an indelible citizenry the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in comics. In the stories collected in Human Diastrophism, Hernandez lays siege to Palomar and its residents, introducing a daunting array of outside forces that threaten the apparent idyll. Archeologists, surfers, leftist ideology, and even a plague of monkeys chip away at the community.

The most obviously sinister is a serial killer who seems to be targeting victims at random. There’s the obvious threat to life and safety, but the crime wave is most telling in its individual effects. As one might suspect from Hernandez, it’s less a mystery or crime drama than a catalyst for personal and sociological seismic waves. There are moments that have the tension of the thriller, but these chapters are most notable for the personal and moral conundrums they trigger.

I’m perpetually amazed at how well Hernandez can juggle seemingly disparate narrative elements. The cast is absolutely sprawling, but no one gets lost. With figures as outsized as Luba, that heartbreaking, voluptuous monster, or passionate, impressionable Tonatzin, searching and failing to find the thing that will fill the void, it would have been simplicity itself to put someone in the driver’s seat. And while that still would have resulted in a marvelous comic, Hernandez’s shifting focus and diffuse point of views make things even richer.

It’s all ultimately about Palomar, even when it isn’t set there. The bulk of the second half tracks expatriates from the hamlet who are trying to build new lives in the United States but keep getting drawn back to their home, either emotionally or physically. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the bittersweet connection to a place be articulated as well as it is here. And since the characters have been impeccably and richly conceived, there’s no limit to their possibilities.

The short pieces are also marvelous. My favorite follows sexy, outgoing Pipo as she goes from being the prettiest girl in Palomar to a woman of surprising power and substance. Broken down in sixteen-panel grids, Pipo narrates her personal journey as a sort of film strip unfolds visually.

I really can’t say enough about these comics. The world that Hernandez has created is so rich in detail and possibilities, and the characters are so engrossing, even when they’re horrid. If you’ve never read these stories, you really should, not because of their place in some abstract comics canon, but because they’re spectacularly, richly entertaining.

Filed under: Fantagraphics, From the stack 3 Comments

From the stack: Maybe Later

November 21, 2007 by

I think I’m impossibly picky about autobiographical comics. I tend to resist them when the creators give their lives too much of a narrative arc, because it always strikes me as kind of fishy, but I also don’t like to feel like my time has been wasted with meandering, disconnected episodes. Self-deprecation is always welcome, but not at the expense of some core of sincerity and self-expression. And introspection is appreciated, as long as nobody loses perspective.

At the same time, I’m reluctant to sit down and say, “I’m sorry, but your life is just kind of dreary,” or “You really don’t tell your own story very well.” I mean, how awful is that? (I realize that it’s an artificial distinction, because surely creators care at least as much about their fictional constructs, and I have no problem digging into the strengths and weaknesses of made-up stories. Still…)

I’m also fairly results-oriented. I’m not especially interested in the creative process as I am the creative product. I tend to edge towards the door when people start talking about “the work” or “the process,” and I think there’s probably a circle of hell devoted to nothing but repeated airings of Inside the Actors Studio.

But I was really taken with Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian’s Get a Life, Drawn & Quarterly’s collection of their Mr. Jean stories. So I put Maybe Later, Dupuy and Berberian’s comic journals of the creation of a volume of Mr. Jean stories, on my wish list, and someone was kind enough to send it to me.

Alternating chunks of chapters from Dupuy and Berberian, who take an entirely collaborative approach to Mr. Jean, skirt most of my autobiography aversions. D&Q’s cover text warns that, “Above all, it’s about the creative process,” which should have had me running in the opposite direction, but my faith in the creators’ companionable charm was rewarded.

I don’t know that I’m any more informed on the actual process of creating Mr. Jean, but it’s good fun to read Maybe Later and speculate as to how the creators’ individual personalities intersect in their shared fictional creation. Berberian takes a lighter, more caustic approach to his journal entries, though he does sneak in thoughtful, amusingly framed bits on why creative people create. (They end up involving archers, divers, and the Dynamic Duo. It’s weird, but it works.)

Dupuy is more of an introspective bent. He’s got marriage problems, health problems, work problems, depression and insecurity. (He’s even a bit undone by the finished quality of Berberian’s early contributions to the journal.) His chapters are more serious and sincere, but they stop short of being mopey. It’s hard to explain, but I think if you added Berberian and Dupuy together and divided by two, you’d get Jean. I’m sure the reality is nowhere near that simple, but I like the idea all the same.

And their disconnected approaches actually end up being mutually supportive. Dupuy’s darker musings balance Berberian’s sharper, more satirical bent. I can’t really decide which I liked better, because they’re so distinct, but they flow together quite nicely.

It’s not a finished narrative by any means, but the episodes and the reflections do accumulate into something that stands on its own. I liked it quite a bit.

Filed under: Drawn & Quarterly, From the stack 5 Comments
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