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Art, commerce, and josei

June 28, 2010 by

If you haven’t already done so, please go read the excellent Komiksu: Marketing Art Manga roundtable over at The Hooded Utilitarian. As the week progressed, the manga under consideration was redefined as “awesome manga,” meaning stuff that falls out of the contemporary shônen-shôjo mainstream, so “art manga” ended up being only a portion of the comics under consideration, which is all to the good, in my opinion.

Two of the participants, Deb Aoki and Brigid Alverson, mentioned Mari Okazaki’s lovely office-lady comic, Suppli. It’s mainstream josei in Japan, but the category is still rather anemic in translation. After publishing three volumes, Tokyopop put the highly regarded but perhaps commercially shaky property on hiatus, but they’re resuming publication, and the (combined?) fourth (and fifth?) volume(s?) goes on sale in comic shops this week.

Since I love the book, I thought I’d re-run my Flipped column on Suppli, originally published at The Comics Reporter.

Update: In the comments, Derik (Madinkbeard) Badman points to his great, image-heavy look at the visuals of Suppli.

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I like escapism in my comics. It’s fun to watch characters do amazing things in places I’m never likely to go, set in a vividly imagined future or carefully recaptured past. Sometimes, though, it’s just as pleasurable to settle in to a comic set in the here and now and get the sense that you could know the characters and live their lives.

That’s one of the qualities that’s so enjoyable about Mari Okazaki’s Suppli (Tokyopop). It’s about the uneasy balance between work and the rest of a person’s life, and Okazaki evokes that familiar tension with a lot of fidelity and detail.

Writers of contemporary fiction will at least know what their characters do for a living. It’s part of meeting the minimum hurdle of suspension of disbelief, of answering readers’ questions as to how these fictional people pay their bills and keep roofs over their heads. Many don’t go beyond that, though. Gainful employment informs everything about Suppli.

Minami Fujii, Okazaki’s 27-year-old protagonist, works in advertising. Her career is a lot of cubicle toil and drudgery spiked with infrequent moments of glamour and triumph. Okazaki takes the reader through the endless meetings, long hours, and petty frustrations that fill up Fujii’s average day. The young executive finds even more time to devote to her career when her longtime boyfriend dumps her.

Before you conclude that Okazaki is punishing Fujii for her professional dedication, she’d been waffling about ending the relationship herself. It was clearly in Woody Allen’s “dead shark” territory, and the end was inevitable, but nobody likes being beaten to the punch. Even if the relationship wasn’t inspiring, it was reliable, and its conclusion leaves a void. It also triggers a string of unpleasant realizations in Fujii.

Hard as she works, she senses that she hasn’t invested anything meaningfully personal in her work. She barely knows her co-workers, and she hasn’t really mapped out any kind of professional trajectory. While Fujii doesn’t settle on a specific destination (professional advancement, marriage, both, neither), she dedicates herself to work and to connecting to her colleagues. The development seems to be equal parts avoiding thinking about the break-up and a genuine desire to fully commit to work. It’s one of many examples of Okazaki giving her characters multiple, concurrent motivations, and she does so without judgment.

Fujii can look at an older woman co-worker with a mixture of admiration, pity, and fear for her own future. She can contemplate the romantic possibilities presented by her male co-workers without appearing calculating or flighty. She can invest herself fully in projects that go nowhere or let details derail a promising pitch. Even buying a purse can be a journey fraught with peril and indecision. In Okazaki’s world, there’s nothing wrong with ambivalence.

Okazaki has a lovely way of showing as well as telling. Panel composition and page layout almost function as a sort of mood ring, reflecting Fujii’s state of mind. Workplace sequences have a crowded angularity that communicates the frenzied demands of her day. Reflective moments have a more fluid quality, and a quietness that can relax into sensuality with the track of Fujii’s thoughts. The sexy moments (and Fujii does manage to have a sex life) combine all of those qualities, half hot, half awkward. Okazaki has a wide range of tools in her aesthetic kit, and she applies them all with style and a unifying sensibility.

Suppli conveys a specific woman’s life with both microscopic detail and emotional sweep. Fujii may feel like her life is out of balance, but Okazaki’s portrayal is keen and clear.

On the down side, it’s impossible to know when readers might see more of it. When Tokyopop experienced its drastic reversals last year, Suppli was one of the titles that wound up in scheduling limbo. Only three volumes are available in English, and there’s no indication of when (or if) the next will be released. That’s no reason to deprive yourselves of what is available, of course. As Okazaki argues so persuasively, uncertain outcomes are no reason not to try.

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Filed under: Flipped, From the stack, Linkblogging, Tokyopop 9 Comments

Good girls don't

June 23, 2010 by

I’m not sure why I’ve seen as many productions of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as I have. Social obligation tends to force me into a seat watching a play I detest. I mean, I really, really dislike this play. I can’t even credit the effort of various directors to contextualize the story of breaking a woman’s spirit in ways that make it tragically tolerable. (I’ve never seen this work.) I don’t have the inclination to accept the play’s plot as representative of its time, because there are other Shakespeare plays that don’t make me sick to my stomach, so why bother trying to squelch active disdain?

So I’m not really inclined to appreciate Kim Dong Hwa’s The Color of… trilogy as an accurate representation of its time. I’m not a cultural historian, so I have no idea what things were like for women in pre-industrial Korea. I just know that I don’t really care for its portrayal of “good” women as passive and patient, no matter how elegantly drawn it is. “I think that the process of a girl becoming a woman is one of the biggest mysteries and wonders of life,” the creator said in an interview. I wish he had thought harder about that mystery and hadn’t imposed what strikes me as such a male notion of wonder upon it.

Young Ehwa lives with her widowed mother, who keeps a tavern in the countryside. Mom advises Ehwa on womanhood, pounding in the notion of the woman as flowering shrub, patiently waiting and gently blossoming until a male pollinating insect will deign to settle upon her, and all will be well. Just look at Ehwa’s friend, the porcine Bongsoon, who actually lets curiosity lead to action. Bongsoon is less attractive than Ehwa, and her mother clearly isn’t giving her the lecture on the botany of desire or instructing her that true love waits. You can be damn sure that, should Bongsoon find a man stupid enough to marry damaged goods, birds won’t fly from the trees and every bell in the countryside won’t ring when that marriage is consummated. Bognsoon is an object of ridicule and contempt because she has the nerve to act on her desires.

That’s so gross to me. And it unfortunately reminds me of an episode of The Gilmore Girls, another tale of a young single mother and a beautiful teen-aged daughter. The mother, Lorelai, is eavesdropping on a conversation between her beautiful daughter, Rory, and her daughter’s less beautiful friend, Paris, who is telling Rory about her first sexual experience. Lorelai breathlessly waits to see if Rory confesses any particular kinship with Rory, and while Rory doesn’t judge Paris, she reveals that she’s not ready yet. Later, Lorelai privately celebrates the fact that she has raised “the good kid.” I liked most of The Gilmore Girls a lot, but that sequence rang so endlessly false to me, given Lorelai’s circumstances and her honesty and willingness to act on her own desires. (Maybe the creators realized how icky this sequence was, given the circumstances around Rory actually losing her virginity.)

I wouldn’t be inclined to excuse The Color of… as a period piece. It’s relatively contemporary in terms of when it was created, so it reads more as an exercise of nostalgia for a time when good girls remained pure. I’d much rather read something like Morim Kang’s 10, 20, and 30, another tale of a single mother and daughter, that actually respects female desire and development and the ways unique women deal with it.

(The Color of… trilogy is the subject of the inaugural Manhwa Moveable Feast. Visit Manga Bookshelf for a list of links and resources.)

Filed under: First Second, From the stack, Manhwa Moveable Feast 15 Comments

Spaceshippers

May 26, 2010 by

When Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra… (Vertical) was first released in English, I remember there being one of those mildly contentious discussions about branding. The publisher seemed to be marketing it as shôjo (comics for girls), which led to a prompt reminder that the series had originally run in a shônen (comics for boys) magazine, Asahi Sonorama’s Gekkan Manga Shônen. While Takemiya is undeniably one of the founders of modern shôjo, the original target demographic for To Terra… was undeniably shônen.

The original demographic of To Terra… presents some interesting topics of discussion. While a number of women work in shônen, I strongly suspect that wasn’t the case back in the 1970s. This adds another aspect of Takemiya’s status as a trailblazer. She was also one of the very first creators of shônen-ai, manga that focuses on romantic attachments between two men. I find Takemiya’s shônen-ai inclinations very much in evidence in To Terra…, a flavoring that feels wonderfully transgressive in retrospect.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know exactly what the regular readers of Gekkan Manga Shônen might have expected when they cracked open a new issue of the magazine. It was also home to Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, so one might reasonably guess that it trafficked in ambitious science fiction and fantasy. But back then, was it commonplace for shônen fans to see so many boys making eyes at each other?

It is now, of course, or at the very least there’s an open invitation for some fans to overlay whatever kind of sexual tension they like on protagonists and their allies and rivals of the same sex. The fujoshi phenomenon of imagining what non-canonical pairings has gone from subversive to seemingly inherent in manga marketing, at least in some imprints. (It’s hard to believe anyone at Square Enix thought the audience for Yana Toboso’s Black Butler was exclusively composed of young male fans of ass-kicking domestics. Interestingly enough, Square Enix published the reprint of To Terra…)

It’s always dangerous to assume intent on the part of a creator. To Terra… is clearly about yearning, for home, for family, for connection. Perhaps that pervasive wave of need is leading me to project more personal yearnings onto the characters. But what I know of Takemiya’s creative history and what I see on the page leads me to conclude that I’m not making such a big leap.

It’s easy to view Jomy Marcus Shin, leader of the telepathic rebels who long to take their place in Terran society, and Keith Anyan, the ultimate product of humanity’s repressive methods of breeding and upbringing, as (forgive the pun) star-crossed lovers. There’s a connection between them that transcends their individual symbolism, and there’s a degree of tragedy that doesn’t seem confined to their representation of warring generations. I believe that Takemiya is calculatedly leading the reader to wonder what might have been between these two if they’d been allowed to make their own choices, if they hadn’t been burdened by racial, spatial destiny.

And let’s face it. Keith is kind of a man whore. Wherever he goes, he seems to draw the hypnotized eyes of frailer male figures. I can’t be alone in seeing the just-kiss-already tension between Keith and Seki Ray Shiroe, the brash young man who rejects cultural norms even as he excels in the point-by-point qualities that society seeks to foster. Seki seems obsessed with Keith beyond his standing as a rival; their encounters are deliciously charged with a desire to transgress, if you know what I mean.

Also among Keith’s conquests is Makka, a closet Mu, if you will, who demonstrates a self-destructive level of loyalty to Keith at the expense of his genetic kin. Keith’s dismissive control of Makka is one of the more unsettling aspects of To Terra… for its cruelty. Keith recognizes Makka’s fascination, and he uses it. He’s moved beyond the cat-and-mouse business with Shiroe to something more functional and more unsettling.

But, of course, the core question is whether or not Keith and Jomy can overcome their respective societal programming to reach some kind of accord. I’m reluctant to spoil the answer to that, but I will just note that To Terra… is a tragedy. And back in the day, shônen-ai, even when cloaked, didn’t offer many happy endings.

I tend to be of the opinion that accurate characterization of a comic’s demographic matters mostly in the way that knowing that allows you to trace the evolution of a those demographics over time. The fact that a noted shôjo creator was able to create a long-form science-fiction epic for a shônen magazine and infuse it with so much shônen-ai tension is a part of the fascination of To Terra… It suggests fluidity and evolution in the medium, and it suggests that the work was both ahead of its time while being very much of its time.

Filed under: From the stack, Manga Moveable Feast, Vertical 10 Comments

First Kang, then Gargamel

May 22, 2010 by

Up has kind of been down this week, and I ended up deciding to make a spite purchase outside of my normal boundaries. This would be the first issue of Marvel’s latest Avengers relaunch, written by Brian Michael Bendis, illustrated by John Romital, Jr., inked by Klaus Janson, colored by Dean White, and lettered by VC’s Cory Petit. (This is another reason I shifted over to manga: fewer creator credits.)

Sean T. Collins assured me that the comic wasn’t half-bad, and he’s right; it’s not. There are some funny bits that I really liked, and they were funny because they fit the characters that delivered them. But it’s still not what I’d describe as a particularly good Avengers comic for the same reasons the last major relaunch wasn’t a particularly good Avengers comic. It’s not really about people doing things that define them as Avengers; it’s about people talking about being defined as Avengers, and not in any qualitative way, even by this author’s tell-don’t-show standards. It’s even more insular, assuming sufficient previous knowledge so that they don’t even need to trot out any shorthand. The reader is being reassured that this is just as Avenger-y as anything they’d previously liked about the franchise, which indicates a certain degree of insecurity, and that insecurity isn’t unwarranted.

The scene where Steve Rogers, the former Captain America, tells everyone why they’re there, just killed me. It opens with this:

And then moves on to this, because maybe the reader couldn’t intuit this stuff on their own and need to be told:

First of all, where are the big office chairs with the trademarked character logos on the back? The only chair at all is that spindly Shaker thing under Hawkeye, though it kind of looks like Wolverine is also sitting down, though he could be on a chaise. I also love that Thor looks like Brittany from Glee – tall, blond, stupid and bored half to death. He looks like he’d be texting if he had his phone handy. But beyond those nitpicks, I’m totally reminded of another big cartoon franchise thanks to Steve’s insistence on reducing his team-mates to catch-phrases. I really couldn’t help but think of the Smurfs.

If you want a more in-depth and serious consideration of the comic, please read this entertaining round-table over at Comics Alliance. I’m going to get to work on my Unified Smurfette Theory of Super-Team Rosters.

Filed under: From the stack, Linkblogging, Marvel 2 Comments

Earth's mightiest pirates

May 9, 2010 by

The fourth omnibus edition of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz), collecting volumes 10 through 12, gives me the chance to talk about Oda’s sometimes counterintuitive pacing. This is one of my favorite aspects of Oda’s storytelling.

In “I have a dream” shônen, character and plot milestones can be as much of an ordeal for me as a reader as they seem to be for the protagonists. When it takes two volumes for a character to climb a set of stairs, I start wondering what Sawako is up to in home economics class. When chapter after chapter is devoted to the hero’s awesome new power-up and just how he achieved it, complete with color commentary from every other character in the comic, I start calculating how long I’ll have to wait for the next volume of Ôoku. I’m increasingly convinced that Oda feels the same way.

Luffy, the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates and the star of One Piece, wants to be King of the Pirates. To achieve this, he has to enter the Grand Line, which is where all the big pirates earn their reps. Since this is a big milestone, the part of me that still didn’t fully trust in the ways that Oda is a different kind of shônen storyteller expected it to be a protracted ordeal to read. It takes about a chapter. It’s a fun chapter, but the efficiency with which this milestone is presented convinces me that Oda is much less interested in the obvious epic beats, the stations of the shônen cross, than he is in building unexpected milestones out of side stories and throwaway bits that become huge when you aren’t looking.

This approach is entirely consistent with Luffy’s, who runs entirely on instinct or, if you prefer, a tendency to be distracted by something sparkly. There’s a joke in it – that Luffy’s short attention span actually ends up leading him closer to achievement of his goal. The adventures that result from his distractions make him and his crew stronger, and they strengthen the crew’s bond and their trust in his leadership. And that trust isn’t founded solely in Luffy’s ridiculous luck. He has force and authority as a leader largely because he trusts in his crew and will fight like mad to protect them and further their interests.

Another aspect of series that really rings a bell for me is that it’s an excellent team book. This may be more relevant for someone like me who’s read a lot of Avengers and Defenders and Justice League stories over the year, but Oda strikes just the right character balance. The Straw Hats are a mix of heavy-hitters like Luffy, swordsman Zoro, and lethal kicker Sanji, and smart and sneaky types like sharpshooter Usopp and thief Nami. As the best Avengers writers did back in the day, Oda lets everyone contribute to a successful resolution, and everyone gets a great moment or two that’s driven by their essential natures. Since they’re kind of spoiler-y, I’ll highlight a few after the jump.

Here’s poor old Usopp enjoying a moment of triumph and neatly articulating his place among the Straw Hats. Like Hawkeye in the Avengers, he’s justifiably insecure about how he stacks up with his teammates, but his smarts and craft help him come through in the clutch.

Anyone who can combine the culinary and the kick-ass is fine by me. While you normally shouldn’t tenderize fish, Sanji’s approach here can be forgiven.

It’s almost impossible to pick one page from Zoro’s utterly fabulous solo sequence in volume 12. The rest of the crew has overindulged in food and drink, leaving him to contend with a town full of bounty hunters. The battle demonstrates both Oda’s ability to keep things moving with a mix of high action and comedy, and it’s also just a great example of Zoro being really, really awesome.

Filed under: From the stack, Viz 7 Comments

From the stack: Satsuma Gishiden vol. 1

May 3, 2010 by

I don’t know if thoughtful ultra-violence happens as often as its creators think it does. In fact, I generally think that imposing deep-think-y stuff on splatter usually has the effect of making the think-y stuff look dumb while taking the air out of the splatter. When I do run across brainy splatter, it tends to have come from Japan.

The latest example in this (for me) narrow field is Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse), written and illustrated by Hiroshi Hirata. It opens with a group of samurai playing some feudal version of rugby that involves trying to extract the liver from a criminal. It’s a morale-building exercise, you see. And while it’s muscularly drawn – snorting horses, thrusting spears, blood splatter that would keep the casts of five hour-long crime procedurals busy for a week – it’s also got a purposeful grimness that suggests to me that Hirata isn’t going to be blindly celebrating the samurai’s path.

The orgy of violence is part of a social studies lesson, you see, illustrating a strangling caste system and its consequences on individuals and their culture. The full-time samurai look down on the citizen soldiers, who can barely eke out a living. The citizen soldiers resent their apparent betters, and the highest tiers are oblivious to the strife. The system of education is designed to prop up the caste system and promote a dehumanizing form of patriotism.

Hirata shifts between displays of physical prowess and the ways it can be brutally applied and less moist passages that provide the context – the whys and wherefores of how liver soccer became a sport. The history and sociology lack the sleekness and force of the bloodshed even more than you might normally expect, but they serve the useful purpose of making that bloodshed seem less like an end in and of itself. I say “less like” because there’s too much relish in those sequences and they’re too protracted for anyone to believe that they’re entirely essential to the plot.

Still, evident as the relish for a well-drawn impaling can be, choppy as the political maneuverings can read, there’s genuine feeling here. These things matter intensely to the characters, as they should. And sometimes the pondering and the splatter work in perfect conjunction. In one sequence, the lower-class samurai take ruthless revenge on their oppressors. To call these pages beautiful is probably deeply wrong, but they work like you would not believe. They have gruesome visual fascination and substantial narrative force.

Unfortunately, Dark Horse has published only three of the six volumes of Satsuma Gishiden. They’re keeping it in print, as I picked this up via an “offered again” listing in Previews. Maybe a second bite at the apple will generate enough interest to get the rest into our hands. I know I’m going to read as much of it as I can.

Filed under: Dark Horse, From the stack 12 Comments

The Manga Moveable Feast: Mushishi

April 26, 2010 by

Ed Sizemore is hosting the current installment of the Manga Moveable Feast over at Manga Worth Reading. This time around, the focus is Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey). Here’s a Flipped column on the series that I wrote for The Comics Reporter. I’ll be posting more Mushishi-related content later in the week.

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In a chapter of Yuki Urushibara’s elegant, episodic drama Mushishi (Del Rey), master of ceremonies Ginko informs a boy that mushi, the mystical bugs Ginko wrangles, “aren’t your friends. They’re just some strange neighbors of yours.” That’s as nice a tonal summary as anything I can concoct.

Mushi are an ancient part of the environment, and their influences can be extremely malignant to their human neighbors. Mushishi (or “mushi masters”) like Ginko help manage the interactions between humans and mushi, mitigating human suffering when possible. Sometimes no such mitigation is possible, and that’s one of the many intriguing aspects of the series.

Ginko isn’t an exterminator. He’s a scholar and a physician of sorts. He’s also a wanderer in the tradition of Kung Fu‘s Caine, traveling from village to village to learn about little-known mushi and aid and educate their human neighbors. Aiding and educating feel secondary to Ginko’s own quest for knowledge; he’s not precisely mercenary, but he isn’t sentimental or especially altruistic. He isn’t a particularly nice person, and I like that.

I also like that he isn’t entirely predictable. In many of these wanderers’ tales that are more about glimpsing the places and people they visit, the wanderer can be the least interesting element of the narrative, carrying the camera and reacting to what he finds. Ginko certainly fills those functions, but he’s also an agent of change, assessing the situations he finds, divining their sources, and determining appropriate action, if any is actually warranted. In addition to being kind of a grouch, Ginko is also a realist, and not every situation can be fixed in any meaningful way.

Ginko, with his trench coat and ever-dangling cigarette, isn’t on a quest. There’s no fixed end point to his work, as there will always be new things to learn about mushi and people who run afoul of them. It’s a job, and it’s one he’s particularly suited to doing, but he doesn’t demonstrate any pilgrim’s fervor or scholar’s mania. He’s got a matter-of-fact nature mixed with an arch inscrutability that spares him blandness. He also attracts mushi, which keeps him from lingering anywhere for too long.

Urushibara demonstrates great creativity and variety in the manifestations of the mushi. Some scenarios can be quite gruesome and perilous; others are benign and almost pastoral. Her approach is a patchwork of bits of folklore, spikes of horror, an appreciation for setting, an undeniable environmentalist bent, and a keen eye for human nature. Like bacteria, the mushi have no particular motive beyond survival, but their side effects can be terrifying.

Intriguing as the effects can be, Urushibara doesn’t settle for a blend of fantasy and horror; she seems much more interested in viewing the mushi and their effects through the prism of human relationships and society.

In one particularly gruesome story, a strain of mushi devours and impersonates human children, and a mother cares for them with the same fervor she would lavish on her own children. In a gentler but still disturbing outing, a girl is granted the gift of sight by a mushi that lives in her eyes, but things progress to the point that she can never stop seeing, and the gift becomes exhausting. Some mushi have an ironic knack for uniting lovers at an awkward or untenable price. But only some of the tales traffic in monkey’s paw irony; Urushibara is just as taken with quaint, unsettling oddities as she is with life-and-death drama.

Urushibara is not quite the artist she is a writer, but her writing is so deft and subtle that saying she’s not as good at drawing is almost a compliment. The strongest visual elements of Mushishi involve its varied settings. Ginko travels through snow-covered mountains, misty valleys, craggy seashores, swamps, and serene farms, offering a rural visual feast. Her renderings aren’t strictly realistic; Urushibara isn’t composing picture postcards. But the settings are unerringly evocative. They have moods all their own.

There isn’t as much variety in her character design. The people who populate her stories generally look average, even a little fragile in the context of the rural vistas they inhabit. But they are average people living generally simple lives, so the choice is appropriate if not especially eye-catching. And Urushibara does grant them a full palette of expression and emotion.

That isn’t to say that she isn’t capable of some breathtaking flourishes. My favorite comes in the second volume, when Ginko visits the mushishi library. Its frail, fetching copyist is infested with mushi that enable her to do her work. When Ginko’s stimulating presence leads the mushi to act up, the results are stunning. Words fly through the air and leap across the walls. Since the sequence is grounded so well in the copyist’s sad history and her ambivalence, the effect is even stronger.

With intelligent writing and often lovely art, Mushishi is an excellent episodic series. Aside from occasional glimpses of Ginko’s past, there’s little in the way of subplot or undercurrent. The drama is contained in the individual chapters rather than in wondering what happens next or how it will all end. That makes Mushishi a vivid and satisfying read, and also a relatively undemanding one. You can pick up a volume at random and not worry about being lost. So many multi-volume series feel like they demand a level of commitment and investment, but Mushishi lends itself to casual reading. That said, I can’t imagine picking up one volume and not wanting to read the others, at least at one’s leisure.

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Filed under: Del Rey, From the stack, Manga Moveable Feast 1 Comment

From the stack: Black Blizzard

April 1, 2010 by

Yoshihiro Tatsumi has a reputation for providing bleak and deep comics that delve into the worst aspects of human behavior. I’m not going to try and refute that reputation, but I would add that his stories in collections like The Push Man and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly) are eminently readable in addition to being grim. His content may be dark, but his presentation is… well… snappy. I know that’s a weird adjective to use about stories where fetuses routinely float through sewers, but it’s true.

If you’ve been curious to see the work of one of the founders of Japanese comics for grown-ups but have found characterizations of that work off-putting (and I can totally sympathize, as I held off on reading his work for a while), Drawn & Quarterly has an alternative for you: Black Blizzard.

It’s one of Tatsumi’s early works created for the then-booming rental-manga market, a period discussed in fascinating detail in the creator’s autobiography, A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly). It’s a straightforward genre thriller about two prisoners who go on the run while cuffed together. One is a young pianist accused of killing the abusive father of his young muse. The other is a career criminal who’s had enough of life behind bars.

As they flee pursuing police officers in the titular snowstorm, the escapees bond in a way. They also ponder ways to get rid of those pesky cuffs. There aren’t many deep undercurrents, just fast-paced drama mixed with effective flashbacks of the pianist’s various misfortunes. It’s designed to entertain, and it succeeds.

The best way I can describe it is to liken it to one of those one-hour drama anthologies from 1950s television. It could feature an introduction from a dapperly attired Fred MacMurray and be brought to us by the good people at Pontiac. It’s solidly crafted suspense, perhaps not conceived to be ageless, but it holds up well. Even if you aren’t interested in Tatsumi’s early work, Black Blizzard is a fine example of diversion of a certain vintage.

Filed under: Drawn & Quarterly, From the stack 3 Comments

Kirihito reprise

March 29, 2010 by

Vertical is releasing Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito in two paperback volumes, so I thought I’d take the arrival to revisit my review of the book. This column was originally published on Nov. 6, 2006, at Comic World News. Any updated thoughts will be in italics.

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What is it about Osamu Tezuka?

How is it that his works don’t seem to age? How can he embody so many graphic idioms, from four-panel pratfalls to grisly realism, and have them cohere into such an effective and singular style? And how can he execute a theme like “What does it mean to be human?”, so potentially earnest that typing it makes me cringe, and turn it into something sprawling and gripping?

Ultimately, I think it’s passion. There’s no arguing that manga wouldn’t be what it is today had it not been for his desire to elevate comics beyond an amusement for children into a medium that could offer something for every audience. But focusing on his impact as an industry figure, substantial as it is, can tend to obscure his accomplishments as a manga-ka.

Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of the vibrancy and range of his creations, from Astro Boy (Dark Horse) to Phoenix (Viz) to Buddha (Vertical). I think Vertical’s recent release of Ode to Kirihito offers the best evidence yet of Tezuka’s standing as “the God of Manga.” [Since Ode to Kirihito was originally released in English, Vertical has published MW, also recently re-released, Dororo, and Black Jack, each of which is excellent in distinct ways. Vertical has also announced the English-language release of Ayako.]

It’s Tezuka’s first effort in the gekiga category of comics for adults, summarized here by comics scholar Paul Gravett. Part medical thriller, it’s mostly a meditation on human weakness – cruelty, greed, racism, destructive ambition, hypocrisy. The disease that drives the action, Monmow, causes humans to physically degenerate into dog-like creatures, but Tezuka finds humanity’s moral degeneration much more alarming.

Tezuka’s protagonist, young and moral physician Kirihito Osanai, is searching for the disease’s origins under the guidance of politically ambitious Dr. Tatsugaura. Osanai’s supervisor believes Monmow is contagious, perhaps viral; he also believes his research will be a ticket to power and influence in the medical community. Osanai suspects Monmow has an environmental cause, and his forthright efforts to prove this put him in terrible danger.

They also lead him on a world tour of some of the worst human failings. It begins in the remote village of a Monmow patient, where Osanai contracts the disease himself. From there, it’s virtually impossible to succinctly describe what the good doctor endures in his quest for truth, vindication, and revenge. That’s partly because the book is packed with event, but it’s also due to a reluctance to spoil anything.

Osanai goes from peril to peril, tragedy to tragedy, fending off the impulse to succumb to despair with varying degrees of success. As he does so, colleague Dr. Urabe endures an equally dangerous journey, though it’s largely spiritual. Urabe faces external and internal corruption; his nobler impulses are often overwhelmed by an unexpected capacity for brutality.

[Urabe is] capable of compassion, as with a nun suffering from Monmow. He recognizes Tatsugaura’s myriad failures of character and suspects the lengths his superior will go to in service of his ambition. But he’s selfish and weak in big and small ways, and each forward step he makes toward morality and responsibility is matched or surpassed by a backwards one. He’s a fascinating character, even more than Osanai, because there’s no certainty. While Osanai isn’t exactly a plaster saint, he’s got a moral core. Urabe is unmoored.

[Ode to Kirihito is] a richly populated work, which should come as no surprise, given Tezuka’s profound humanism. He unflinchingly portrays the worst kind of human behavior, but he refrains from portraying anyone as entirely evil. As extreme as their actions may be, no character in Ode to Kirihito is a cardboard monster. There’s always a kernel of humanity, which makes the portrayal of their venality even more effective. [It has been argued to me that Tezuka is much more cynical than humanist, that his portrayals of the depths of human depravity indicate a lack of faith. I still think that Tezuka’s examination of the horrors people can commit doesn’t indicate condemnation so much as frank appraisal in the context of how people can persevere.]

There’s always some dissonance for me in Tezuka’s illustrations. Profoundly influenced by the animated films of Walt Disney (and by film in general), Tezuka’s art has cinematic energy and pacing, informed by a cartoonist’s imagination. Page layout is often imaginative and expressive, and passion is evident on every page. But Tezuka is also one of the progenitors of “big eyes and speed lines.” His repertory company of frankly adorable figures is playing out deadly serious drama, and the counterpoint can be startling. But ultimately it’s a happy, effective dissonance because of Tezuka’s passionate sincerity as a storyteller. [Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon provided a wonderful commentary on the things that Tezuka does so well.]

By all rights, the sheer weight of Tezuka’s reputation and his idiosyncrasies as a creator should make his work seem like museum pieces. But when reading his work, I almost never find myself viewing it through a “for its time” prism. In this case, it may be partly due to the fact that the failures of response to Monmow and the ostracism of its early victims that Tezuka portrays have an eerie prescience when one compares them to the beginnings of the AIDS crisis a decade after this story was published. The beautiful production by Vertical, particularly the sleek and stylish cover design by Chip Kidd, doesn’t hurt either. [I’m sure Vertical’s production values on the paperback versions will be equally exemplary.]

Ultimately, I think it all does come down to passion. Tezuka not only loved the potential of graphic storytelling, he clearly loved the act of it, and that’s so evident here. I may know what to expect from Tezuka in simple terms – the style, the worldview, the scope – but I’m constantly surprised by the way they manifest themselves.

*

You can view a lengthy preview of Ode to Kirihito at Vertical’s listing page.

Filed under: Flipped, From the stack, Vertical 2 Comments

This will end in tears

March 28, 2010 by

Not Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz). That’s more likely to end in elation, if it ever actually ends. I’m talking about this process of writing about it all the time. I just know that these intermittent blog posts about the series will end up reading like those chapter breaks from Genshiken. They won’t make any sense to anyone who isn’t as hooked as I am, and I’ll start using some ridiculous numerical code to discuss character awesomeness.

We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we’ll talk a bit about Nami.

She’s the navigator of the Merry Go, the ship of Luffy’s Straw Hats pirate crew. When we first meet her, she’s a thief who specifically targets pirates, presumably because she doesn’t think very much of them as a group. (Contempt for pirates isn’t a barrier to joining Luffy’s crew. Swordsman Zolo was a bounty hunter who specifically targeted pirates before he signed on with the Straw Hats.)

Nami initially strikes the reader as your typical shônen girl. She’s cute, but she doesn’t smolder. She’s keenly aware of her compatriots’ intellectual shortcomings, but she’s a good sport at the end of the day. She pitches in when things get rough, and she provides some eye candy for the girl-crazy characters (and the fanboys). She seems destined to settle into life as a Straw Hat, dutifully serving as the big sister.

Then she robs them and takes off in a boat while the Straw Hats are getting their asses handed to them.

In the third omnibus edition, collecting the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes, we find out about Nami’s association with a considerably more traditional group of pirates who rely on Nami’s navigational skills and aptitude for deception.

Then we find out why Nami is working with Arlong’s brutish, greedy crew, and we see the lengths she’ll go to in service of her goal.

And by the time all of these things have happened, the reader realizes just how formidable Nami is. She’s playing a very dangerous game, and she’s playing it as well as a person of her age and experience can, but it’s evident that this will end in tears.

But there’s also Luffy, and while Nami is providing the best example yet of Oda’s facility for genuinely moving drama in the midst of wacky mayhem, Luffy is proving that there’s more to the dim rubber kid than there seems. He’s already demonstrated his ridiculous confidence and his ability to clobber much more formidable opponents. With Nami, he displays another essential aspect of his nature, that being his excellent ability to judge the character of others. As Nami’s mystery unfolds and his crewmates are flailing around trying to solve it, Luffy is mysteriously at his ease. He’s waiting, but for what? That’s after the jump.

Luffy is an idiot in a lot of ways, but he knows how to be a friend, and he knows when to be a friend. These pages kill me. If this sequence was just about the bossy girl admitting that she needs the tough boys to save her, it would suck. But it’s about Nami, the character, finally and fully accepting the friendship of Luffy and recognizing the depths of that friendship.

Filed under: From the stack, Viz 5 Comments
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