Now, my own personal niche interest, like yours, is comics, and, of course, Japan will occasionally produce a comic about comics, or a manga about manga. I've been enjoying the ongoing Now That We Draw, a romantic comedy about two aspiring manga creators, for example, and now here's another manga that is about manga: Minoru Toyoda's Draw This, Then Die!
While Now That We Draw has a romance at its core, Draw This is what Toyoda calls "a high school club story" in the short afterword comic near the back of the first volume. That club is a manga club, and the focus on the book is, once it gets going, more directly on manga and its production. If you read comics, and perhaps especially if you make or have ever tried to make comic, there's a lot to like here. I mean, when I first flipped through it, having picked up because of the intriguing title, I landed on a full-page splash of a character with a clenched fist, sweaty brow and wild hair before a background of speed lines, screaming "YOU REALLY THINK MAKING MANGA IS THAT SIMPLE?! YOU FOOLS!! YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!"
Our main protagonist, and the girl on the cover, is Yasumi Ai, a high school girl who is constantly reading and re-reading her favorite manga that she has borrowed from a lending library in her small community on Izu Oshima. The manga is Robota & Pokota, and, as the woman who runs Teramura Rent-A-Book helpfully exposits, it is "a one-volume high school comedy about the logic-based android Robota and his emotion-based counterpart Pokota working together to learn what it means to be human."
How important is the manga to Yasumi? Well, the character Pokota, a robot tanuki with a beret and a monitor on his stomach that will sometimes generate a digitized heart symbol, has become a sort of imaginary friend to her, always floating over her shoulder and giving her advice.
Like, for example, when Yasumi sees a fellow schoolgirl drop a painting that begins rolling down the stairs right past her, Pokota turns to her and says, "Okay, Yasumi...what would a manga protagonist do at a time like this?"
Before school one morning, Yasumi runs into her teacher Teshima-sensei, a stern-looking woman in black business clothes and glasses, her hair tied back tightly. Teshima scolds her that she is going to be late for school and, later, gives her a full-page lecture on how bad manga is, beginning with "It's a waste of time, plain and simple."
"It's just a meaningless slew of pulpy nonsense, full of cheap, momentary thrills," Teshima continues, "Manga will never get you anywhere in life."
When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble making friends, so I spent all my time reading manga.
But after reading this one, it was like I could suddenly hear Pokota's voice in my own head, cheering me on.
And once I started following his advice, I was able to make real friends for the very first time.
So, you can't say manga's not good for anything.
Things really get interesting when Yasumi learns that Hoshino Rei, the manga-ka responsible for Robota & Pokota, will be releasing a new volume at Comita, a big (and real life) convention of sorts for independent manga artists.
Without even telling her parents, who would forbid it anyway, Yasumi essentially runs away to Comita in Tokyo, where she experiences a big epiphany, which the artist renders in a a two-page spread of Yasumi and Pokota floating above the conventon floor, bathed in sunbeams and emitting sparkles:
Oh my gosh...
You can just...
Draw your own manga!
I get it now!
She is then confused that, when she gets to the front of the line for Hoshino Rei's table and is finally able to buy her own copy of the new manga, she sees her teacher Teshima sitting across the table.
"One moment, please," her teacher calmy says, then dons a mask over the lower half of her face, takes off her glasses, replaces them with opaque sunglasses, and now disguised, tells her student, "Sorry, you've got the wrong person."
But no, it turns out that Yasumi's favorite manga-ka Hoshino Rei and her manga-hating teacher Teshima are actually—and secretly—one and the same!
In short order, Yasumi and two friends at school, including the talented artist whose painting Yasumi had rescued in the earliest pages, form a manga club and, after proving their dedication, Teshima agrees to be their faculty advisor...seemingly in part because one of Yasumi's friends implies that they will blackmail her if they don't, now that they know her secret dual identity.
Teshima has a few odd conditions she makes the girls promise to, though:
One. Your academics must always be your first priority.
Two. You will not aspire to be professional creators.
Three. You will only ever make manga as a hobby...
And never, ever let it consume you to the point that you draw yourselves to death.
And so, the club begins meeting in the backroom of the rent-a-book shop (it turns out the owner and Teshima are actually close friends), and the girls soon fall into a division of labor: Yasumi writes the manga (she's working on a fantasy story about a pair of anthropomorphic cats on an adventures), the girl from the art club handles drawing it, and the third friend mostly just lays around reading the shop's manga, but offers her unvarnished opinion of the others' efforts, acting as something of a disengaged editor and surrogate audience member.
Teshima-sensei regularly checks in with criticism and suggestions. (It is she, of course, who was in the "You fools!!" page, fantasizing about what she would like to have screamed at the girls, when they stumbled upon Osama Tezuka's "inductive" approach to storytelling —that is, starting with the ending first and working towards it—and Yasumi celebrates, "Dang, I guess we're all set now, then! We've found the secret to making good manga!")
By this point, of course, the manga has moved from talking about manga in a vague sense to more specifics, and it's fun to see the girls' youthful enthusiasm and their running into creative walls, and Teshima's bifurcated approach to them, acting at once as a mentor while warning them against the perils of making comics. In this, she keeps her stern face, and is limited in her praise and encouragement, while her inner thoughts, which we get to see, often differ greatly from what she says out loud.
So, um, what's with that title...? Is it a reference to Teshima's warning that the girls never draw themselves to death...?
Not...quite.
After the main story and the four-page afterword, Toyoda presents a 32-page story entitled "Lost World." This stars the young Teshima, and is essentially her "secret origin," explaining how she broke into manga. It...was not easy.
Like Yasumi, Teshima was highly imaginative, and seemed to live her life partly in fantasy, although her fantasies ran toward the violent. For example, after her editor kindly declines her first manga, Teshima imagines detonating the building she has just walked out of in a cool, cinematic scene in which she walks toward the reader, heedless of the explosion behind her (At other points, she will imagine shooting the editor and putting a grenade in her mouth!). She will also frequently compare herself to characters in manga she has read, not entirely unlike Yasumi does.
Throughout this story, Teshima likens the creative process to something she read in Stephen King's autobiography On Writing: A Memoir of Craft, how "stories are 'found things,' like fossils buried deep within the ground." Toyoda illustrates Teshima's search for fossils with little cartoon Teshimas in miner's helmets using pick axes to dig white tunnels underground, not unlike those dug in Dig Dug, dinosaur bones often just outside of the tunnels.
As she struggles to make the right manga, one that an editor will accept and can then see publication, she tries genre after genre. She seems to hit rock bottom when she overhears her parents, who have always been encouraging of her ambitions, talking about how they don't think she will ever make it.
And then, during her first Comita, for which she printed 1,000 copies of her latest manga but only sold one, she meets her own personal manga-ka heroine. She agrees to look at her manga, and responds quite unexpectedly:
Oh, I see what the problem is...♥
You're just not psycho enough.♥
Is making manga—and comics in general—the provenance of psychos...?
Toyoda doesn't seem to suggest that it's not.
Deciding that she would rather just die than make manga, Teshima tells herself, "Well, if I'm gonna die anyway, I might as well try one more time... draw one last manga with all the spite and malice I can muster..."
While that sounds like it might lead to a rather dark or cynical work, that's not how she sees it, and she comes up with this statement of purpose, which, you'll notice, ends with the words, "Draw This, Then Die!!!"
So how did Teshima go from her success with that manga to becoming a teacher who seems to be actively crusading against manga? That's one of the mysterious of Draw This, Then Die!, what exactly happens between the events of "Lost World" and the start of the manga.
After the back-up, I became far more fascinated with her character than Yasumi, although I suppose as things progress, Teshima will eventually have to share more with her pupils, and perhaps tell them the secret of making good manga (That is, going psycho) or continue to try to shield them from achieving a dream with such an apparently high personal cost...?
I don't know, but I had a blast reading the book, and found myself laughing out loud repeatedly during "Lost World."
I can't wait for the second volume, which is due November 3.
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