The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

From the manga stack: PLANETES Vol. 1

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“A Stardust Sky,” the first chapter or “phase” of PLANETES Vol. 1, is one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read. Haunting, mournful, romantic, tense, funny… it’s a story so complete and so precise in its control of tone and mood that it’s bound to make you wonder if creator Makoto Yukimura can maintain that level of quality for the rest of the collection.

Yukimura can and does. Juxtaposing small, human stories against the vast, empty backdrop of space, PLANETES is utterly its own creation. It isn’t just a patchwork of genres like science fiction and drama and comedy. It somehow transcends those labels. There’s clearly a very humanist vision behind this manga, and it finds wonder wherever it looks.

It’s about orbital garbage collectors, snagging debris and derelict satellites from Earth’s orbit. The job is grueling and risky and unglamorous, but it’s vital. As Earth’s population expands outwards (partly in search of resources to replace the one’s they’ve depleted), space junk poses life-and-death risks. It’s grunt work, done in a setting that inspires awe.

On first glance, the crew sounds like a collection of stock characters: ambitious optimist Hachimaki, hard case Fee, and haunted veteran Yuri. But Yukimura makes them indelible. Hachimaki may be an optimist, but he’s having a hard time holding onto his illusions of wonder and adventure as he hauls jetsam. (He’s also accident prone.) Fee smokes and swears, but she cares about her work and her crew-mates (even if that means slapping them upside the head). Yuri has endured a horrible loss, and it defines him in many ways, but it doesn’t isolate him. In fact, he seems determined to strike a balance between honoring his memories while forging new connections.

The art is amazing. Even in black and white, Yukimura manages to convey the scope and wonder and texture of space. At the same time, he doesn’t prettify the conditions for the people who live there. (If there’s a weakness in the art, actually, it’s the people. I noticed some slight inconsistencies, and some individual characters are a little indistinct visually. But those are quibbles.)

To say anything specific about the plots would be to take away some of the sense of discovery. And, while its characters aren’t explorers, discovery is the defining theme of PLANETES. It’s just a quieter kind of discovery that takes you from the mundane to the majestic and everywhere in between.

What's my damage?

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So I’m reading the Avengers Disassembled interview at the Pulse, and, naturally, my thoughts turn to the move “Heathers”.

And the Marvel offices transform into a Cleveland high school. Bendis, Quesada, and Millar are walking around in minis and too much lip gloss, and they’re taking the daily poll on weather the Black Widow is a moaner or a screamer. They play cruel pranks on Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza.

And Tom Brevoort is totally the Veronica, wearing too much eye-liner and wishing he could just write in his journal and sit with Kurt and talk about their favorite issues of TOMB OF DRACULA and why ETERNALS never should have been inserted into continuity. But he can’t, because he’s one of the cool kids now, and it’s all he can do not to scream when Brian makes him pick three Avengers to kill off and say how cool it will be when Venom joins.

Mercifully, this line of thinking stops before I cast someone in the Christian Slater part. Pity me.

From the stack: AVENGERS/THUNDERBOLTS 5

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Warning: comments below contain spoilers.

The Avengers and Thunderbolts stage an issue-long intervention with Moonstone, who has absorbed a great deal of “transnormal energy” and launched into a fit of destructive pique. The gathered super-beings try ineffectively to either talk or beat her down as she hurls off a string of barbed psychological critiques and crushes them with gravimetric energy.

There seems to be a central assumption in this series – the Avengers should have given Baron Zemo the benefit of the doubt — which I find impossible to swallow. Since, despite the title, it’s essentially a Thunderbolts story, the narrative almost demands that they be in the right, that the reader believe they could have handled the situation but for the Avengers’ blundering, self-righteous interference.

This ignores the fact that no sane person in the Marvel Universe would trust Baron Zemo, given the ledger of his actions over time. It also glosses over the fact that the Avengers have already given Zemo and the Thunderbolts an extraordinary amount of freedom to demonstrate their intentions and only intervened directly when the scale of Zemo’s ambition seemed to grow exponentially. From any sensible view, the Avengers would be irresponsible not to at least investigate the situation.

There’s also an odd moment when Moonstone decries the Avengers’ “ridiculous lofty standard,” as if the Thunderbolts have cornered the market on redemption. That she spits this charge at a group of Avengers that includes a charter member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, an android created to destroy the Avengers, the former henchman of an enemy spy, an intermittently mad scientist given to dangerous psychotic breaks, and a recovering alcoholic in a battle suit undermines her position to a crippling extent.

The smartest choice of the issue is the choice of Songbird as this chapter’s narrator. (The perspective has shifted with each issue.) Songbird is the character who rests most uncomfortably between the two teams, closer to the Avengers in terms of ideology but tied to the Thunderbolts emotionally. Unfortunately, as with previous issues, the story is overwhelmed by psychological evaluation.

Whether it’s blistering diagnoses from Moonstone or Songbird’s narrative observations, all of the Thunderbolts are under the personality microscope. Zemo, Vantage, and Hawkeye get in on the act, which amounts to a great deal of telling what these people are about and very little in the way of showing. Even when somebody does act consistently with their described nature, there’s accompanying narration to make sure we don’t miss the significance. Of course, the premise doesn’t really demand any balancing evaluation of why the Avengers do what they do.

The timeline of the issue is odd, too. While it’s essentially a long fight scene (verbal and physical), there’s time for one character to change armor (mid-sentence) and another to be contacted (through a third party) and travel from a different planet entirely without any explanation of the means used to do so.

I have to admit being affected by the context for this series. Starring one group of characters whose title was cancelled over a year ago and another who are about to be revamped to the point of obsolescence, this could have stood as the last “traditional” Avengers story. (Chuck Austen’s run on the Avengers’ own title hardly counts, as he could rarely be bothered to focus on the title characters.) While writers Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza couldn’t have known this at the time, the story they’ve crafted just stacks more kindling on the pyre, playing the Avengers as outmoded in morally ambiguous situations, shouting “Avengers… assemble!” in the midst of a mess of their own making.

It’s all supposed to be about issues of trust and redemption and shifting alliances, but it ends up being too exhaustingly chatty to achieve that. It’s convoluted instead of complex, and it doesn’t create any balance between the opposing forces. It’s a mess, honestly.

Bloggers are so dreamy

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Bless you, Graeme of Fanboy Rampage. While it certainly can’t be good for you, digging through message boards of every ilk, your distillations of what you find are really, really entertaining.

And bless you, John Jakala, for keeping me up to date on the twisted performance art that is ADLO!

And last, but not least, bless you, Scott, for giving such a detailed answer to my question about the influence of television advertising for prescription drugs.

Splish splash

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Newsarama has posted the first 23 pages of AVENGERS 500, and I’ve got to say, this might be THE comic of choice for fans of wide screen destruction porn. “Blowed up real good” seems almost too demure a descriptor.

On a marginally related note, to read the Newsarama discussion threads is to know fear. Seriously.

Blah blah blah Ginger

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You are now entering a disconnected ramblings zone.

What a lean week for comics. The only thing I’m particularly excited about is SLEEPER SEASON TWO. (And maybe EX MACHINA, if Gary was able to re-order it). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I’ve decided to limit the number of comics I review in an average week.

After writing eight of what I think of as full-length reviews last week, my inner slouch objected. So for a while, at least, I’ll be cutting back to four or five per week, trying to focus more on titles in transition. By that I mean books that are either significantly better or worse than they’ve been lately, new titles, titles with different creative teams, titles I’ve arbitrarily decided don’t get enough attention, and titles meeting any one of a number of other vaguely defined standards I haven’t thought of yet.

Of course, spending less on American comics means I can justify stocking up on more manga. I’m in the midst of the first volume of PLANETES (liking it lots), may have another volume of IRON WOK JAN! in my file, and can always heed the siren call (“Gero… gero… gero…”) of SGT. FROG Vol. 3. Plus, lots of folks have given me some great recommendations for other titles to try.

Or, I can just go back down to the basement and waste more of my life with BALDUR’S GATE II: THE SHADOWS OF AMN. Honestly, I’ve never been much of a gamer in the traditional sense. I didn’t have much patience for the dice-and-notepads style of Dungeons and Dragons when I was in high school, though the hacking and slashing and zapping and looting always appealed to me. The BG games spare me all that math, though I’m continually impressed with the level of calculus I’ve seen other people employ to achieve maximum gaming satisfaction.

Oh, and on the subject of BG II, I recently had a feline-related problem. While playing along (hack slash zap loot!), one of my cats walked across the keyboard and made the game menus disappear. With no idea how to correct this problem, I turned to the Web, e-mailing technical support and also posting a query to alt.games.baldurs-gate. Within hours, a kind soul at the newsgroup replied with a friendly “hit the ‘h’ key,” leaving off the deserved “you idiot.” Days later, technical support answered the same question by suggesting I upgrade my video card.

Try before you buy

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Okay, so maybe providing previews of comics in their entirety isn’t the brightest marketing move Marvel ever made. I’m still glad to see that Marvel’s included two of its most promising new titles in the program.

The Advance Marvel Previews section at MileHighComics has posted SHE-HULK 5 and DISTRICT X 3 for your perusal.

SHE-HULK is a smart comic look at a law firm that specializes in the super-heroic. It’s also a nice take on the title character, who’s forced to spend more time than she’d like as a “puny human.” While Jennifer Walters navigates the choppy legal seas of capes and cowls, she also seems to be learning that you don’t need to be big and green to be a super-woman.

DISTRICT X is the X-book that isn’t. While it addresses many of the major themes of the X-line (prejudice, minority identity, etc.), it takes an approach that’s largely free of any cumbersome continuity. Set in New York City’s mutant neighborhood, it stars mutant cop Bishop, working with the local law to keep the peace. It also tells a bunch of smaller stories about the kinds of mutants who won’t be putting on spandex and fighting crime any time soon. With a rich sense of place and a humanistic approach, this book is shaping up to be something special.

Click. Peruse. Enjoy.

Summer reading

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The invasion of Pokopen continues apace in SGT. FROG Vol. 2 (Tokyopop), if, by “apace,” you mean “entirely haphazardly.” Let me give you an example of what you’re missing if you haven’t given this quirky and hysterical manga a try. Junior high-schoolers Fuyuki and Momoka have stumbled upon the secret underground headquarters of the Pokopen invasion force (conveniently located under Fuyuki’s suburban home). Missiles are flying through the corridors of the heavily defended facility. On one of the corridor walls is a sign, featuring a jaunty and winking drawing of Keroro (the amphibian sergeant in question), and the text: “Please… keep horseplay to a minimum.” And that’s just one of the throw-away gags.

I’ve actually come across a Christopher Moore book I don’t like. Having read and really enjoyed Lamb, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and Practical Demonkeeping, I’ve struck out with Coyote Blue. I think the problem is the protagonist, who lacks the off-kilter decency Moore usually gives his leads. It just seems like a rather shrill, long yuppie joke.

I did much better with Guard! Guards!, one of Terry Pratchett’s reliably wonderful Discworld books. I’m devouring these at an alarming rate, but there are still plenty to come. How did it take me so long to find out about these?

From the stack: MYSTIQUE 16

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Warning: comments below contain spoilers.

It’s hard to say too much about this title, which is smack in the middle of an ongoing caper arc. I picked it up based on Sean McKeever being assigned to writing chores. I loved his late, lamented INHUMANS run, and I was eager to try his work on another title. Happily, he’s still telling the kind of complex and balanced stories that won me over in his past work.

Mystique continues her investigation of DermaFree, in part because they’re using unwilling mutants as test subjects, but mostly because they’ve gotten their hands on her own stem cells. The issue is a solid blend of action sequences, mutant-themed espionage, and touches of humor.

Art by Manuel Garcia is just what a title like this needs. He draws distinct faces and body types, which is pretty much a prerequisite for a comic about a shape-shifter. He also excels at action sequences, keeping chaotic, fast-paced events clear and dramatic.

I’m kind of surprised Mystique works as well as she does as the book’s protagonist. She’s had some fairly inconsistent characterization over the years, but the take here is just about perfect. Still selfish and caustic, she’s also pretty dedicated to the well being of other mutants. There’s an undercurrent of unpredictability, too; she may work for Xavier, but she’s obviously far from being fully domesticated.

Special bonus points: this book has the best “Previously” page going. With fairly twisty plots being the norm, that’s really useful.