Monthly(-ish) Manga Reviews

Cowa!
Viz

I mentioned this briefly the week I bought it, but I figured I might as well review it while I’m taking the time to mention the last few manga digests I read. It’s the work of Akira Toriyama, best known for a little creation of his called Dragon Ball, and it’s an easily digestible one-volume adventure about a half-vampire/half-werekoala kid named Paifu.

After a few shorter stories introducing us to Paifu and the other colorful characters who live in his little village of monsters—including his shape-changing best friend Jose Rodriguez, rival Arpon and a disgraced human sumo wrestler—the book shifts focus into a road-trip adventure. Much of the town has come down with a deadly monster flu, and its up to this quartet to journey far away, through the big city and a haunted woods and up a tall mountain to get the cure.

Whether because this was earlier in his career or because this was intended for a younger audience, Toiryama’s art is a lot more simplified than his later Dragon Ball output or even his Dr. Slump, although it’s clearly the work of the same man. The story reminded me quite a bit of the original, pre-tournament Dragon Ball stories, when Goku was still just a little kid and the book was more of a comedy adventure then it was a fight comic. Toriyama touches like anthropomorphic animals living among humans, weird-shaped houses, cute vehicle designs and well-choreographed, over-the-top action scenes abound; there’s even some character design resonance between some of Cowa’s stars and Dragon Ball characters.

I’d recommend checking out Matthew J. Brady’s review of it; he’s the one who alerted me to this book’s existence, and he has some scans of the art over there.

No, I don’t have any idea why this is called what it’s called.



Dororo Vols. 1-2
Vertical

In synopsis, this one sounds weird, even compared to that last book, which starred a half-vampire/half-werekoala. In feudal Japan, a wicked lord promises 48 pieces of his unborn son to a host of demons if they’ll grant him power. They comply, and his son is born as what looks a little like a large, fat worm with a skull on one end (that’s him as a baby in yellow on the cover to the right). He’s sent floating down the river in a basket, where a kindly old doctor finds him and cares for him, building him a mostly artificial body (with hidden swords for arms). Thanks to psychic senses and telepathy, the boy, who grows up to be Hyakkimaru, can function normally, despite a lack of body parts.

He goes on a quest to wander Japan, slaying demons, and each one he kills restores one of this body parts to him.

This is just part of the story. The title character is a sneaky, ill-tempered little orphan kid that befriends Hyakkimaru and joins him on his journey, which, by volume two, becomes more about Dororo’s heritage and a lost treasure than it has to do with Hyakkimaru’s search for his body parts.

This is the work of Osamu Tezuka, and while it’s not his best work, it’s still the work of Osamu Tezuka, which means it’s better than about 90% of the other stuff you’ll find in your local comic shop. The peculiarities of the particular premise aside, I found myself reminded of Rumiko Takeshi’s early Inu-Yasha volumes, in which the colorful heroes wandered feudal Japan getting into episodic battles with a variety of demons.

Tezuka’s demon designs are top-notch, and regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of the narrative, awesome monster abound.

This series is being packaged and published by Vertical, who have done a pretty stellar job with all of the Tezuaka work they’ve been putting out the past few years, and this is no exception. I love the collage-like covers and spines of these book s, which are nice enough to probably be well worth a purchase just to spruce up your book shelf, whether you read them or not. But you should read them. Because they’re about a guy with a prosthehic body and swords for arms wandering feudal Japan and fighting alien moth women and armies of ghost foxes to earn his body parts, and it’s by Tezuka.



Yotsuba&! Vol. 5
ADV Manga

I held off as long as I could. It was my understanding that this was going to be the last volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s darling and hilarious slice-of-life stories about a precocious little girl, her good-humored single father, and the neighbors they pester for the foreseeable future.

Having heard this repeatedly online, I held off on buying this volume, so that I would know that I still had at least one more volume of Youstuba to look forward to. My plan was to wait until a sixth volume was at least announced, but then I read Christopher Butcher’s recent-ish post about the manga market in 2009, and I finally caved. According to Buther, more Yotsuba is somewhat inevitable, but there’s no indication on when it might get here.

If you’ve read any of the first four volumes of this series, one of the most delightful comics I’ve ever read, then you know exactly what to expect from this particular volume. It’s just as good as the previous ones, and in the exact same ways. In fact, this might be a little bit better than the last few, in large part because the longer the amount of time you spend with Yotsuba, the better you get to know her, and thus the more endearing her antics become.

In this volume, she meets Cardbo the cardboard robot who isn’t really a robot but Shh! Don’t tell Yotsuba or you’ll break her heart, she meets a young friend of her father’s who becomes her mortal enemy, she goes star-gazing, runs errands and goes to the beach. Er, none of which might not sound like the plot of a particularly hilarious comic book, but Azuma’s characters are so sharply realized and their behavior so sharply communicated that day-to-day activities become thrilling comic adventures.

Review: Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan

This appears to be a collection of licensed Batman and Robin comics that famed manga-ka Chip Kidd and his studiomates Geoff Spear and Saul Ferris created in the mid-sixties to meet their fellow Japanese fans' demand for the Dynamic Duo at the height of Bat-Mania.

Er, wait. Actually it turns out that Kidd’s an American author, designer and comics fan, and these other two guys are…I have no idea, actually. All three have bios on the back cover flap, though. Let’s see, it looks like Spear is a photographer, who apparently took some of the pictures that are in this book. And Ferris is a Batman fan and collector, who must have done…something. Huh.

Now, you’ll recall there was some pretty heated exchanges from a lot of smart, thoughtful people on the Internet recently about this book. (Here’s Leigh Walton’s final post on the subject, which sums up everything pretty nicely, if you’d like to reacquaint yourself with the cover credit controversy). While mouthing off about subjects I know very little about is something of a hobby of mine, I managed to avoid the temptation to do so regarding this, as I had yet to actually see a copy of the book, and was eagerly awaiting doing so.

Now that I have, I have to admit, there’s really no way to make sense out of why the book is presented the way it is or why the credits are assigned the way they are. Not without having to theorize about its origins, and the hows and whys of its assemblage, which is, frankly, a great disservice to the work within.

All in all, this is a thunderously disappointing book, in large part because Kidd and company seemed to really be on to something here, and ended up poorly presenting it in a confused and ill-conceived collection, ultimately suggesting rather than delivering a great book.

Whatever Kidd, Spear and Ferris’ various contributions, they aren’t all that apparent, and seem to pale next to those of Jiro Kuwata, the manga-ka who produced the work that actually fills the book. Kuwata doesn’t get a cover credit, nor is his biography on the back flap with the three “authors.” It’s not like Kidd is trying to hide the fact that Kuwata created the comics, or is trying to take credit for them. Once you read the book, it’s quite clear that it’s Kuwata doing the work, but it does make the credits seem all the weirder, and here’s where we get into theorizing.

Is “Chip Kidd” a bigger sales draw then “Jiro Kuwata,” thus explaining the former getting top billing? Perhaps, but it seems unlikely Kidd is as big a draw as either “Batman” or “manga;” there can’t be more people thinking, “Sweet! A new Chip Kidd joint!” then thinking “Batman? Sixties Batman? From Japan? I’ve gotta check this out!” (And are Spear and Ferris draws? I can’t imagine that they are; they don’t even sound Japanese, which may make the book appear to be more of a book about manga than a collection of manga).

However it came about, and however much work Kidd did in the book, much of it would be behind the scenes sort of stuff. Book designers and cover artists get little credits on the title page (if that), while the author’s get their names on the covers; here, the situation is reversed. Did Kidd track Kuwata down and scan the images? Maybe, I guess. But who gives a shit?

It’s a weird sort of auteurism…the sort I’ve never encountered in publishing, in books or comics. (I mean, old Marvel books in, say, the late ‘90s, at least said “Stan Lee Presents,” rather than putting “Lee” on the cover credits above the actual creators, you know?)

What Kidd does provide is about 500 words of production notes and an introduction that’s probably somewhere between 500 and 800 words. His emailed response to Chris Mautner and Christopher Butcher defending himself for not having Kuwata’s name on the cover was also about 500 words.

Kidd also provides 11 questions for an interview with Kuwata, which takes up a whole one page of the book’s 384, and it’s a Q-and-A interview of the school newspaper sort, which takes about a half-hour to write—What comics did you enjoy reading as a child? What made you want to become a cartoonist? Who influenced you? Who would win in a fight: 8-Man or Batman?

Then there are the pictures of Batman merchandise from Japan. Presumably this is where Kidd and the other cover boys come in. There’s a lot of these pictures, and it’s certainly a kick seeing them—I’ve always been fascinated with the way different cultures misread eachother’s pop-culture (or at least highlight different elements of it) and the off-kilter familiar but not knock-off versions of popular things (Batman with blue tights and a red cape and cowl, for example, just mesmerizes me). But Jesus, there aren’t that many of them, and they are all provided devoid of context.

(Above: Some cool off-model Batmen...check out the Mickey Mouse ears on the bat-symbol to the far right. I'm not sure what these are from...such images fill the inside covers)

Counting them up, because I am obsessive compulsive and have lots of free time, it looks like there are only about 60 pages of these photos, which would account for a little over one-sixth of the book, or about 17-percent of the contents. There’s no information about the items pictured, even identifying what they are, where they’re from, who made them or what year they were created in.

Frankly, I’m not quite sure where the book gets off calling itself “The Secret History of Batman in Japan,” as there is no actual history of Batman in Japan, beyond “Hey, did you know there was a Batman manga in the ‘60s? Here are some examples of it. Oh, and some toys and ads for toys too.” I would be quite interested in a book that actually detailed Batman’s history in Japan (or any country really); even if it weren’t a wonderfully written, observant cultural study of an American urban icon being transplanted into Japan, but a simple chronicle of Batman comics were available in Japan like this, the show started airing this year, it was popular because of that reason and so on.

Well, this ain’t that kind of book.

So what is it? Well, it’s essentially a collection of Kuwata’s Batman comics, translated into English by Anne Ishii and Kidd. I was somewhat surprised to see that it was even published to read right-to-left, and thus I assume the art wasn’t at all “flipped;” meaning it was printed the way a modern publisher sensitive to the preferences of modern manga fans would publish a manga collection. A book that wasn’t a manga collection, well, there’d be no reason to repint it right-to-left like that, beyond maybe simple novelty.

The thing is, it’s a pretty terrible way to collect the manga. Only a few of the stories are complete, meaning there are a few that just sort of trail off. In the introduction, Kidd mentions that they actually have a lot more pages, and, if this sells well enough, they might put out a Bat-Manga 2, which begs the question of why they wasted all those pages on photos of toys.

It’s particularly unsatisfying given how publishers major and minor are focusing on complete versions of comics these days…not just old manga but cartoons of all kinds. This seems like a throwback to a pre-Golden Age of reprint collections. Just, “Hey, here’s a bunch of comics,” instead of a thoughtful collection along the lines of any of Fantagraphics or even Checker’s strip collections or, perhaps more saliently, Drawn and Quarterly’s Yoshihiro Tatumi books or Vertical’s Tezuka books.

The book presents three exciting possibilities—a collection of Batman manga, a “secret history of Batman in Japan,” and a photo collection of old Japanese Batman toys and material—and offers none of them, except in perhaps the most half-assed way imaginable. And that’s why the book is so disappointing; its existence means we probably won’t get any other, better attempts to actually provide the works this book seems to promise.

(Batman and Robin vs. Clayface, who's disguised as a Batman-like sculpture. Remember, read right to left)

As for the manga itself, it’s a lot of fun, and well worth tracking the book down for (At least from a library; at $30, Bat-Manga probably isn’t worth it, given the random nature of the presentation).

Kuwata’s Batman looks like the one you’d see in Showcase Presents Batman, World’s Finest and Justice League of America, with the articulated eyebrows and everything. He looks vaguely Dick Sprang-y, but with a slimmer, more doll-like physique, and ears that jut somewhat awkwardly away from his cowl, giving it a somewhat homemade feel.

There’s no sign of Alfred, and Bruce and Dick seem to live alone in a mansion, always dressed up and waiting to hear of some crime in the news—or get word of one from no-glasses-wearing Inspector Gordon—at which point that get into costume and then into the Batmobile from the TV show.

They face only one villain familiar to us from our homegrown Batman comics, Clayface, who finds a pool of magic water (and maybe steals some formula from a scientist in another story) that allows him to change shape.

The other villains are all pretty exciting though, especially for a jaded Batman reader like me who gets tired of writers cycling through the same 15 or so Batman villains in endless succession.

There’s Lord Death Man, who wears a skeleton suit and a skull mask that can’t be removed, and who is able to die and come back to life whenever he wishes (Thanks to a fakir trick). There’s Go-Go the Magician, who has a weather-controlling magic wand gadget, who looks and fights a lot like Flash villain the Weather Wizard. There’s Faceless, a criminal with, um, a deformed face. And then there’s my favorite, Karmak, who is a gorilla who has absorbed the intelligence of a scientist, which isn’t really tha unique, but also disguises himself in a full body suit, mask, cape and gloves, which is unique (He appears as a huge-shouldered, no-necked bilious cape shape with a dome atop it, two perfectly spherical, emotionless eye-holes his only facial feature).

Batman and Robin battle these and other menaces using their fists, ropes and the occasional batarang, plus a weird “boomerang dart” that looks like a toy shuriken. The heroes are mostly personality-free, only really showing a hint of characterization in one fun exchange where Dick Grayson mouths off to a lady at a diamond auction, and there adventures are quite straightforward. It’s the same sort of storytelling you’d find in the Showcase collections, although they are often much less wordy and much more visually dynamic.

Kuwata gets off some great scenes of Batman in action, and some really remarkable visuals here and there, like when Go-Go first appears flying alongside the racing Batmobile, or some of Clayface’s transformations (there’s a neat one towards the beginning where Clayface emerges from a pool of, um, himself as a man-sized praying mantis that’s great).

(Batman versus Clayface, now in the form of a praying mantis)

There’s really much less insanity than I expected in the book; your average American Batman comic from the ‘50s or ‘60s was actually a lot weirder than this, despite Kuwata’s comics coming from the land of weird comics. Except maybe for that scene where Batman falls in the Clayface pool and TURNS HIMSELF INTO A GIANT BATRANG to attack Clayface, of course, or the final story in the collection, which deals with evolution and mutation and has such murky ethics involved all around that I’d need a whole post to discuss it.

It’s really just as much a what the fuck?! kind of collection as I was expecting, given that it was the Japanese version of the sixties Batman, but, it was Kidd’s bizarre, confused presentation that ended up providing all the what the fuck?!-edness, instead of the comics themselves.

Monthly(-ish) Manga Reviews

Bird Kiss Vols. 1-6
Tokyopop

I’m probably much too old to get too wrapped up in the goings-on of this fairy tale-inspired manhwa rom-com and relate to the personal dilemmas of the teenaged characters, all of whom are still on the level of “like” rather than “love” or “lust” when it comes to describing romantic emotions. But I'm not too old to appreciate the sharp characters and their highly tangled web of relationships.

The fairy tale in question is apparently the frog prince, what with the repulsive but helpful frog who is wronged by the beautiful but mean princess, but ultimately hooks up with her when she discovers he's really a handsome prince. Not sure why this isn't called Frog Kiss then, but maybe that's explained in future volumes.

Eun Ah Park illustrates an abbreviated version of the frog prince story, and then jumps to the action at K-through-college school called Nachsung Academy.

There we meet junior high student Miyoul, a violent (and powerful) tomboy whose girliest feature is her crush on Guelin, the pride of their school and the president of The Slipper Club, a mysterious group to which only the tallest, handsomest boys seem to belong (And Park’s design makes everyone look really tall and elongated). Though Miyoul is in a sense our heroine, or at least the character we spend the most time with, she can be a real jerk and buffoon. She’s known as “The Devil Woman of Nachsung,” but dreams of ruling it maniacally as “The First Lady of Nachsung.”

Just as hard as Miyoul crushes on Guelin, short, bespectacled, bowl cut-encumbered Heerack crushes on her. As her life-long neighbor, Miyoul regards him as something between a brother and a slave, viciously mistreating him and taking advantage of his obvious—to everyone but her—affection for him.

Meanwhile, the most beautiful and popular girl in class, the Veronica-like queen bee mean girl Che Rosa, falls for Heerack when she discovers his glasses hide beautiful eyes (He gets a makeover and growth spurt at the end of volume one, and suddenly everyone wants Heerack, even Guelin; with the exception of Miyoul, who’s slow to realize he’s become a prince).

And then there's also a mysterious, intense boy who always seems to be asleep, who stares intently at Rosa and awakens conflicting feeling with her.

So basically, there's a handful of characters, all of whom have unrequited feelings for other characters, but none of them quite matching up correctly, giving park plenty of material to keep this love triangle…er, penta--…well, let’s just go with love polygon going for six volumes.

Things seem rather hastily resolved in the last volume, but Park leaves no loose ends, and provides character arcs for each and everyone of the characters. Each of them grows to be different, better people throughout the story.


Cat-Eyed Boy Vol. 2
Viz

This is the second and concluding volume of the Kazuo Umezu series about a demon who's just human-looking enough to be shunned by his fellow monsters, and just monstrous looking enough to be shunned by normal humans. As I mentioned in my review of the first volume at the top of last month, these are very finely designed and packaged bricks of manga that look great just sitting there on the end table or side by side on the bookshelf.

When we left our half-horror host, half-protagonist character, he was halfway through a pitched battle against the Band of 100 Monsters, a group of crazy-looking creatures whose diminutive, three-eyed leader Kodomo claims are all humans that are so deformed they seem to be monsters, but aren’t really (Which is a rather odd claim, given that many of them seem to have supernatural powers to go along with their looks).

The Band’s goal is to transform evil humans so that their appearances are as ugly as their hearts, and Cat-Eyed Boy finds himself defending a whole family of greedy jerks who probably deserve such torment, for the sake of the single kind-hearted boy in their clan.

The story gets weirder and weirder until it seems like Umezu is just completely improvising, but the Band certainly gives him a chance to flex his design skills.

That's followed by another big epic story involving the improbably-named Meatball Monster (Did they have meatballs in Japan? What about back in the Kansei Era?), a bizarre monster that haunts a particular family from generation to generation.*

Cat-Eyed Boy gets drawn into their curse when he's given a blood transfusion from blood one of them donated, including him in their apparently hereditary, blood-borne curse. Then he cures cancer with the help of the repulsive but more-or-less helpless monster that his magical bindle stick turns into.

The volume is rounded out with some shorter (and more clever) stories. In one he encounters a religious wooden idol with a thousand arms that comes to life to drink the blood of the faithful (one of Umezu's many super-creepy designs, it scurries about as a cloud of arms); in another he tries to protect a little boy form a snake-man; and in still another he tries to comfort a little boy who has lost his mother, to terrible results.

Among the most remarkable pieces are one that apparently takes place within the imagination of a sick little boy which I'm not entirely sure made complete sense (or at least I didn't understand the framing sequences), and one in which still another troubled little boy is gradually haunted by increasingly detailed, horrific visions of hell (which looks like a mash-up of the cartoon Catholic hell and Japanese afterlife; devils, pitchforks, fire, lava and ogres with clubs), and his having to haul his mother out of it. It's a brilliantly plotted little story, in which several moving peices all fall into place just so.


Red Colored Elegy
Drawn + Quarterly

Everyone knows you're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but it's perfectly acceptable to judge book covers on their own merits, and this one is just gorgeous. Author Seiichi Hayashi's simplified art is pulled from its context and transformed into bold, punchy graphics, colored in bright reds, light blue and light green, with silver text. The front and back covers, the inside front and inside back covers, are rock posters, album covers and concert t shirt designs as much as they are panels from the book. It's a hard graphic novel to ignore, and pass by unflipped-through when you see it on a shelf somewhere.

As with their other major manga offerings of late— collections of Yoshihiro Tatsumi output—D+Q aren't simply offering nicely packaged manga for grown-ups, but they're giving us some enormously challenging work. This is probably the most challenging comic I've read this year (excepting perhaps Lynda Barry's What It Is) and was, in fact, so challenging that I didn't even care for it for much of the time I was reading it.

But by the time I finished it, I did; and immediately reread it with the stronger sense of who was who, what was what and where the story was going. I have a feeling that Red Colored Elegy is one of those books that is frustrating precisely because it's so rewarding, and offers something new each time its reread.

Here's some background on the book from D+Q's site, which will likely be helpful going in, as much of the context isn't apparent from the story, which has a strange naturalistic approach interrupted by weird bits of silent close-ups of various people and objects and settings. To make a comparison to film, there's an element of cinema verite, an element of French New Wave, and an element of film school experimental short to it, which, obviously, isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea.

Ichiro and Sachiko are two young people dreaming of different lives than the ones they're living; lives that more than likely don't involve the other, but neither wants to really be apart from the other either. Most of their relationship seems to play out in and around their bed (well, futon) at the beginnings and endings of their respective days. It's pretty heart-breaking stuff, delivered in a pretty unusual style.

It’s probably also a good book to smack someone across the face with when they say they don’t like manga because it’s all the same.



*According to Every Day Is Like Wednesday’s Japanese language and culture consultant (i.e. The Only Japanese Person I know), Japan does indeed have a meatball called “Niku-dango,” so perhaps in the original The Meatball Monster was The Niku-Dango Monster.

Monthly manga reviews

Cat-Eyed Boy Vol. 1
Viz

Horror manga maestro and horizontal stripe aficionado Kazuo Umezu is becoming an increasingly familiar name on American bookshelves. In 2006 Viz started reprinting his batshit insane Drifting Classroom series, and the following year IDW published a handful of his snake lady stories as Reptilia. Now comes Cat-Eyed Boy, a two-volume collection of his 1967 series Nekome Kozou.

The package is a striking one. Weighing in at 500 pages, and with substantially larger pages than your average-sized Viz digest, the book has the heft of a small family bible.

Ronnie Casson is credited with the cover design, which features a totem pole of visual information; the titular character’s silhouette above a luridly colored logo above a vintage looking color image from the manga. It’s some nice eye candy, and if my eyes had mouths they would totally devour this cover.

The inside front and back covers are one-color drawings of the inside of a Japanese, multi-story house, full of the various monsters that appear in the story, providing a sort of key or legend to the weird-ass characters within.

As for the stories, they are five in number, and they are only loosely connected. Cat-Eyed Boy is a character within the stories, but he’s not always the main one, and he tends to function somewhere between a Crypt Keeper/Cain horror host type of character and an active participant.

Visually, he’s an inspired creation. In addition to the feature he’s named after, he has claws where his nails should be, pointy elf-like ears, and sharp teeth, and he often bounds about on all fours like a cat. Dressed in shorts, he resembles nothing so much as a demonic school boy, and he wanders about with a bindle over his shoulder (making him a hobo demonic school boy), attracted to terror hotspots.

Sometimes he merely lurks in the attic, peering down at the scary story unfolding in the house below (as in the volume’s opening story, “The Immortal Man”) or he finds himself a victim of the main characters (As in “The Ugly Demon”).

After these first few stories, Cat-Eyed Boy begins to play a larger and larger role, starting with his “origin story,” “The Tsunami Summoners,” in which all of the goblins in the world gather to see the once-every-300-year birth of a cat demon…one which is tragically human-like in appearance.

He plays a fairly pivotal role in “The One-Legged Demon of Oudai,” about a cursed nail and a cruel little boy who enjoys killing insects, and the first half of “The Band of 100 Monsters,” which ends on a cliffhanger to be continued in Volume 2.

The loosely-connected anthology format suits Umezu’s skills quite well, and several of the stories cater to his abilities at horror design, as both “Band of 100 Monsters” and “Tsunami Summoners” involve hordes of inventively weird looking creatures, often something of a mix between traditional folk tale monsters and more modern contemporary horror creatures.

I’d highly recommend this book for fans of manga, horror, or manga horror.

(Above: A horribly scanned image of one of my favorite pages from Cat-Eyed Boy, in which a man flees the moutaintop meeting of a band of goblins, and is chased down by a, um, well I guess it's just a head)



Good-bye
Drawn + Quarterly

The third volume collecting Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s often dark and depressing literary short stories from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (following The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo), has fewer shocking stories—at least, fewer that featured the sorts of fucked-up moments that apparently appeared like grisly traffic accidents in the previous ones (the sex with the dog, the rat who might have been impregnated with the man’s wasted semen, the dead babies in the sewer, the sex slave under the blankets).

Not that the Tatsumi’s tales are any less powerful, however. He’s still exploring humanity faced with extreme, existential crises, whether they seem tame and personal (like a salaryman facing the irrelevance of retirement, the unbearable loneliness of a bachelor, or the revulsion of a boy who finds one of his peers experimenting with transvestism), or the fallout of global acts (like what became of some after the end of World War II, or how the atom bomb changed the world—and failed to change some basic, base behavior).

This was probably my favorite of the three volumes, although I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with the (relative) lack of shock, and thus slightly more relatable circumstances, or the balance between the types of stories—some are operatic in their melodrama, but wonderfully, transparently constructed, while others unfold in a more organic pace, with unpredictable results.

I know it’s only July, but I’m pretty sure this is a book that will be appearing on my best of 2008 list in another six months or so.

Monthly manga reviews

Apollo's Song
Vertical

Here's another 500-plus-page brick of Osamu Tezuka comics from Vertical, who have previously published the rather similarly formatted Ode To Kirihito and MW. It's one of Tezuka's lesser works, if one can put the words "Tezuka" and "lesser works" in the same sentence, given his lesser is greater than so many others' greatest.

The scope and scale of this story, like so many of Tezuka's, is so sweeping it seems as if literally anything can happen when you turn the pages. It begins with the act of human conception, with the sperm represented as millions of identical men in a frantic marathon to reach the single woman at the end, and then ends with a goddess (or perhaps the protagonist's mind's projection of a goddess) speaking to him of eternity, the repetition of a cycle we've seen several hundred pages of.

That protagonist is Shogo, a young man who was born to a whore, mistreated by her, and suffering from a deeply ingrained hatred of love; whenever he sees animals loving one another, he's overcome by an urge to destroy them, an urge he often gives in to. As a punishment, a goddess appears to him and tells him he is doomed to fall in love over and over again, and just when that love blossoms, the woman will be taken from him violently.

Although maybe he's not really seeing a real goddess, maybe that's all the manipulation of a doctor treating him, trying to cure him of his violent hatred of love before he's too far gone. Whichever is the case, we see Shogo's tale unfold in the real world, with several diversions into more standalone tragic love stories, which may only be occurring in his head. In one, he's a Nazi soldier guarding a train full of Jewish people on their way to the camps; one of whom he falls in love with. In another, he's a pilot for a female photographer, and they find themselves marooned on an island populated by wild animals that behave quite strangely. In another, he's a human terrorist in a future world where synthetic humans rule. In the real world, meanwhile, he escapes from his asylum and then starts training to be a marathon runner under the tutelage of a kind, beautiful woman.

Each of the other lives works as a pretty powerful story all on their own, although in most cases they are so over-the-top as to be cartoony. Of course, considering how cartoony Tezuka's art is, and his Disney-influenced aesthetic, that isn't really to be unexpected. The futurescape in which Shogo must teach the synthetic woman to love has a lot of the goofiness of the futures seen in Astro Boy or Phoenix, but the emotions are real and raw.

Perhaps ironically, the most unrealistic passage is the one that is supposed to be the most real; it's likely a product of Tezuka's culture at the time more than anything else, but the depiction of mental health problems and their treatments ring false, surprisingly so given Tezuka's skill at writing medical thrillers (Japan isn't as open and accepting of mental health issues as American culture is today; I imagine things were even worse on that front back in the day).

It's still essential reading, however, and Vertical and created another nicely designed package that is an appealing art object in and of itself. I'd recommend reading outside on a sunny day where birds are signing, as the subject matter makes it quite a downer.

There's a ten-page preview featuring the futuristic section here.



Gun Blaze West Vol. 1
Viz

Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki follows his popular samurai epic with another period piece, this one set on our own continent, during the late 19th century. It's always interesting to see European and (especially) Asian takes on the western genre, since its such a thoroughly American genre that watching others interpret our own national creation myths is often just as compelling and informative as watching our own modern deconstructions of it.

And for some reason the phrase "cowboy manga" just makes me smile.

Set in 1875 in Winston Town, Illinois, Gun Blaze West Vol. 1 introduces us to precocious little gunslinger wannabe Viu Bannes (a good, strong, American name, Viu Bannes). Viu's only nine-years-old and lives alone with his school marm sis Cissy, after their sheriff parents were killed. He's a pretty standard boy's manga hero—more heart than head, huge appetite, etc.—and gets his first real taste of his fantasy life when he meets Marcus the Underdog, a lazy-eyed Wild West washout Viu apprehends.

The pair become fast friends, and begin training together to reach the mythic land of Gun Blaze West, a place that's west of the west, where only the greatest gunslingers can go. Before they get there, they'll need to survive an attack on their town by the vicious Kenbrown Gang.

The story is so much fun that I was quite disappointed when it flashed forward five years, when the now young man Viu sets out to find Gun Blaze West, guided only by a mysterious map. He gets as far as St. Louis in this issue. What he finds there is pretty cool, including a hotheaded, gunfighter with the ridiculous name of "Target: Kevin" and a steely, stoic lariat master, but as cool as the action is, I preferred Viu's earlier iteration as Goku-as-Huck-Finn than the more familiar young-man-on-a-quest angle, which it will presumably remain in future volumes.

Little Viu is totally hardcore. There's one scene where he flying kicks a guy and catches a charging horse's hoof to the dome, and doesn't even lose consciousness, and there's a great two-page training montage showing Marcus and Viu’s long-distance running training, which includes running on their hands, eating doughnuts and coffee while running (and then throwing them up) and not stopping for anything—not even to pee or poop (shown in silhouette, thankfully).

For a more thorough review, I’d highly recommend Matt Brady, which includes a scan of that awesome hoof-to-face scene.



Mär Vol. 1
Viz

The morning after reading the first volume of Mär, I came to a realization: It seems to me that I find a lot more manga series that are pretty decent (as opposed to mediocre or just plain awfu) than Western comics. It’s not that I’ve never read a bad manga; there are certain series I’ve tried the first volume of and found them to be pretty bad comics (as opposed to ones that just aren’t for me because I’m not, say, and eight-year-old or whatever), but the overwhelming majority of the manga I try tends to be extremely decent. Like, maybe it’s not a great comic, maybe it’s not something I’d buy every new volume of as it comes out, but certainly I would be able to continue reading it indefinitely and find myself perfectly entertained.

I’m not sure why this is. I don’t know if that, in general, the manga studio system tends to produce better art and clearly storytelling than a lot of American comics (and I don’t mean the best American comics vs. manga in general; I mean mediocre American comics vs. mediocre manga, or awful American comics vs. the worst manga). (And I should probably point out that by “manga” here I mean comics produced in Japan and republished here; not OEL “manga,” because the more-of-this-stuff-seems-to-be-decent-than-I’d-expect-from-Western-comics phenomenon doesn’t carry through to a lot of that stuff).

Or is it that it is produced for a bigger mass audience than a lot of American comics, and is thus more likely to appeal to me, because it was designed to appeal to as many people as possible?

Or is simply a byproduct of the vetting process that naturally occurs when publishers like Viz import series previously published and popular in Japan? Because one has to assume they’re picking up only the most popular and successful properties to try selling to U.S. customers; in a sense, most of the manga we’re seeing in the U.S. today has already been as thoroughly focus-grouped as possible.

This is a long (probably too long), roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed the first volume of Mär, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing special about it, in terms of characters, character designs, conceit or execution. It’s just a run-of-the-mill manga series that is a lot of fun and I wouldn’t mind reading future volumes of one bit, though it’s not the sort of series I’d buy the newest installment of on a Wednesday at the shop or try pushing on other readers.

I honestly have no idea what the title means, or if that’s even the title; Viz’ website sometimes refers to it as MAR and I’ve seen it spelled M.A.R. elsewhere. It apparently stands for “Märchen Awakens Romance,” with “märchen” being German for “fairy tale.” However, there are these magical weapon things referred to as ärms that figure rather prominently in the story, so I wonder if this all makes more sense in Japanese…?

Our protagonist is Ginta Toramizu, a weak little 14-year-old with terrible eyesight, no athletic ability and the bad habit of falling asleep in class, only to act out and/or announce his dreams, all of which revolve around the same fantasy world.

Only his super-cute friend Koyuki seems at all interested in Ginta and his dreams, and she defends him from bullies, although these bullies all seem more like they’re just kidding around at Ginta’s expense than being terribly mean-spirited.

When Ginta finally gets sucked into the world he was dreaming of, he finds he suddenly has great strength, endurance and eyesight, and he’s so excited to be there that he’s like a kid in a candy store, rushing around screaming about how cool everything is.

In this world, there are these little magic rings and objects called ärms that can transform into either monsters which do battle for their owners or weapons of some kind.

A cute witch named Dorothy enlists the now super-strong Ginta to help her find a very rare ärm named “Babbo” that is a living arm, the weighted ball on the end of a chain connected to a warhammer. Only Ginta’s strong enough to use it, so she lets him keep it. Also, the weapon’s kind of annoying, as it has a very strong personality.

I really liked the design of Babbo, who has a long nose and expressive thick black metal facial hair surrounding big eyes and a long thin nose. Babbo prides himself on being a heroic gentleman, and looks and acts something like a foolish Three Musketeers parody. Only he’s a metal ball chained to a magic hammer.

Babbo and Ginta kind of quest aimlessly throughout this first volume, with their first major conflict involving saving a vegetable patch from a pair of vegetarian werewolves. (There’s a great line where one of them says, “Guess there’s nothing we can do except…settle it werewolf-style!!” I would assume everything werewolves do is done werewolf-style).

By volume’s end, they pick up a traveling companion, and a magician by the name of Peta (who works with vegetarian werewolves; is that a coincidence?) rallies bandits from all over to hunt down our heroes.

I’m coming to this series very, very, very late, as this volume was published in 2005, and from what I can tell, it ended last year with the fifteenth volume. Based on this first volume, I’m definitely interested in reading the second, even if it’s not on the top half of my to-read list.



Speed Racer: Mach Go Go Go Vol. 1
Digital Manga Publishing

I was honestly shocked with how much I enjoyed this, the first half of DMP’s beautifully designed and packaged reprinting of Speed creator Tatsuo Yoshida’s original manga.

I enjoyed the original cartoons when they were showing them on late night MTV in the ‘90s, and I enjoyed the summer live action movie about 1000% more than most other film critics, but my relationship with the franchise has been more or less arms-length. I couldn’t possibly defend that original Speed Racer cartoon as being any good at all, and there’s not much to the characters to recommend them as unique or inspired either; it was just like playing with toy cars as a little kid, only instead of making up the voices of the drivers in your own little kid-head, stiff, fast-talking voice over actors handled that. And occasionally a child with a piercing voice and a chimpanzee that I thought might have just been that kid’s hallucination would be involved. Hallucinatory chimpanzees dressed like toddlers was never a part of my childhood car-playing-with.

So Yoshida’s original comics? Great stuff. Many of the plots were ones I was familiar with from the cartoons (I guess even back in the 1960s anime adaptations of manga tended to follow them pretty exactly?), but the pacing of the manga was infinitely more engaging than that of the anime (something not necessarily unique to this property of course; those interminable episodes of Dragon Ball Z that seem to be 80% powering up and reacting to others powering up, for example, are actually really fun to read in comics form).

The art is somewhat scratchy and more roughly delineated and, for lack of a better word, more primitive than most of manga you see on the shelves these days. The visual language and shortcuts and cues that are secondhand in modern manga are largely absent here, making this read a bit more like a Western comic than, say, one of Tezuka’s works. There are also a lot more panels per page, which likely contributes to the more Western aesthetic.

Another surprise, however, was how similar this feels to a lot of today’s competition manga. Whether its fighting, card game-playing, magic, cooking, hair-styling, or bread-baking, the character types and story structures are often the same, and this definitely seems to be in that ball park.

There are four stories in this volume, adding up to almost 300 pages of racecar driving and fistfights. There’s the story of Pops’ secret engine design and some evil businessmen’s attempts to steal them, using bikers; there’s the story of the Alpine Race in which Speed teams up with Racer X and we meet The Car Acrobatic Team (I love that phrase) and their mad, cape-wearing, speech-making evil leader; there’s a story involving a killer remote control car; and then there’s the most insane story of the volume, which involves a race through the base of a volcano, a demonic hero racer that protects a lost civilization from exploitation, and some kind of giant prehistoric walrus monster.

Although I borrowed this from the library, it’s a book that’s so well designed I’d kinda like to get one for my bookshelf at some point; it just an all-around great looking package. It’s about nine inches-by-six inches, and about two-inches thick, making for a big, fat square. The spine and covers are all bright primary colors, with a black and white close-up of an anxious looking Speed running off the cover, and red-and-yellow racing checkers on the flaps.

After watching the new film, I found myself wanting to experience more Speed Racer and, naturally, turned to the comics. The first series I tried was frankly awful bordering on incompetent (Speed Racer: Chronicles of The Racer), but this sure hit the spot. I’ve still got the second volume, and the Speed Racer and Racer X: The Origins trade by Tommy Yune and Jo Chen to get to.

Monthly manga review

Fairy Tail Vol. 1
Del Rey Manga

The art and designs in new series Fairy Tail struck me as super-familiar as I was reading through the first volume, seeming quite similar to those of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. It wasn’t until I flipped back to the “about the creator” page in the back that I realized that the author Hiro Mashima as the person responsible for Rave Master, the extremely popular series that I couldn’t really get into, despite trying the first few volumes (and I liked the art and character designs a lot too).

I suppose the fact that this is the work of the creator of Rave Master would eventually have become obvious by the point in which a Rave Master character is introduced. That shivering, snowman-headed dog that says nonsense words that begin with the letter P (or at least a creature that looks exactly like it) joins the cast near the end of this first volume.

I imagine fans of Rave Master will love this. As I said, I was pretty apathetic to Mashima’s previous manga, but didn’t mind this one at all, and probably wouldn’t mind reading future volumes, although it’s not a series I’d go out of my way to get a hold of or anything, as it’s a somewhat straightforward fantasy role-playing inspired type of book, featuring more or less stock character types.

Our heroes are Natsu, a spiky-haired, thick-headed, deep-stomached, magic-using dragonslayer whose only weakness seems to be motion sickness; Happy, a talking bipedal, big-headed cat with a somewhat blank, pleasant expression on his face at all times (and the ability to grow wings when needed); and Lucy, a buxom magic user who can call monsters based on the zodiac to her aid and whose dream is joining the renowned wizard guild known as Fairy Tail.

I have no idea why they’re called that.

It turns out, Natsu and Happy belong to the Fairy Tail guild, and are able to introduce her to the colorful characters—each with a specialty and weird character trait—after their initial adventure battling a sort of pop star wizard who is actually in the slave business.

The world Mashima creates is an odd amalgam of Dungeon & Dragons-style fantasy, with video game-like RPGs and our own modern society. There’s enough action to keep it from ever devolving into a full-on slapstick comedy, but enough comedy to keep it from being a boring genre exercise.

Monthly manga reviews

Minima! Vol. 1
Del Rey Manga

Here’s the high-concept pitch for Minima!, a darling high school comedy from manga-ka Machiko Sakurai: Shy, quiet Ame and her classmates take a field trip to an amusement park, and there she acquires a cute little stuffed animal that almost immediately begins talking to her. Its name is Nicori, and it turns out that all dolls can talk to humans, there’s simply a rule forbidding it.

I was pleasantly surprised that Sakurai didn’t go the expected route with the concept, and have Nicori’s animated, Japanese-speaking status be a secret shared only with Ame. Rather, Nicori is out and proud, immediately chatting up his new owner’s friends and enemies, granting media interviews, entertaining sponsorship deals, and making his feelings known to the mean girls who talk about Ame behind her back, and the chicken stuffed animal character whose popularity far exceeds Nicori’s own.

There’s a tangle of relationships introduced at the beginning that took me embarrassingly long to straighten out—I blame the fact that the Japanese kids call each other alternately by their first and last names, depending on how close they are, in effect being introduced twice a piece—but Ame seems to be neighbors with a boy named Midori, who is friends with Sasaki, the cute boy in school all the girls adore (including Ame), who is friends with Kei, a pleasant, tomboy-ish girl.

Once Nicori enters the picture, everything gets solidified nicely, and Sakurai has great fun playing with the animal characters burgeoning prima donna attitude—he laps up the attention being a talking stuffed animal affords, he’s jealous of Sasaki’s popularity with his public, he’s insanely jealous of that chicken character, he’s insulted when people can’t figure out what kind of animal he’s supposed to be, and so on.

His stuffed-animal perspective on human relationships gives a somewhat fresh angle to the more rote crush romance story elements to the book, and there seems to be a great deal of potential to his trying to figure them out, which apparently causes plenty of problems.

(Oh, and I don’t understand the title. I asked the only two people I know who speak Japanese—one of whom is a native speaker—and neither had a guess. “Mini-Mama” was the best they could come up with).



Short Sunzen! Vol. 1
Tokyopop

Aya Sendou hates to see his classmate Satsuki Kurokawa fight, because he is secretly in love with her, and he’s both unwilling and unable to confess it, since he's a teenager just coming to grips with his feelings for the opposite sex.

Plus, there seems to be a really good chance she would either laugh at him or think he's a sissy, since Satusuki loves to fight. "Tomboy" doesn't really seem to cover her; she's a brawler who can out-arm-wrestle everyone in school and is quick to come to the aid of the bullied, seemingly as much because she enjoys punching people in the face as because of some sort of noble, protect the weak impulse.

It's a pretty cool conflict to drive a high school romantic comedy, ensuring the requisite melodrama and mushy stuff will also occasionally involve scenes of, say, Satsuki jumping out of a second story window to land knees-first on the head of an evil upper classmen.

Manga-ka Susugi Sakurai introduces the leads in an opening chapter that plays a bit like the Prince and The Pauper. Satsuki and Aya go to Tama High, the toughest school in the Kansai region, a school so widely-known for it's violent and ill-mannered student body that its uniform alone is enough to strike fear in the hearts of other local teens. So after Satsuki rescues a rich girly-girl from Narujo High from attackers, the two girls secretly change uniforms for the afternoon.

Establishing a pattern, Satsuki offers to walk around with Aya and pretend to be his girlfriend, so he'll look cool with a rich girl from a respectable school on his arm, unaware that he would be happier with her as his girlfriend.

The next chapter jumps back to show how they met, and there are a few more adventures involving he two in this volume. In one Satusuki masquerades as a boy to join the school’s male cheerleading squad, and in the other Satsuki takes Aya to an all girls school to check out the chicks, but he only has eyes for her.

That brings us to what I guess you'd call a back-up feature (in old school Western super-comic parlance), which switches to another cast, but tells a similar story of young almost love.

In “Girl Boy,” Abe and Komugi are the two tallest kids in their school and have always been friends, on account of their shared height (every time they look across a crowded room, they can't help but see each other). But once they begin spending more time together outside of school, that friendship looks like it could be becoming something more.

Neither relationship is completely resolved this volume, and good thing. The Satsuki/Aya story at least has the potential to go on for a few more volumes before it gets too frustrating. (“Girl Boy” might have simply have had an open-ending ending; I guess we’ll see next volume).

Finally, the book includes a few fun little stories about the author’s deadline troubles. One multi-part story tells of her trip to Tokyo to hand in her assignment, which includes working on it on the bullet train there. And the volume ends with a short piece called “Lights out Sunzen!”, in which Satsuki and Aya stop by Sakurai’s house to help her work on her manga starring them. It’s pretty cute stuff, and a head and shoulders above the more typical stories by manga creators, in which they portray themselves as weird little animals or whatever.

As for the art, Sakurai's figure work is pretty quirky. Her characters all have long, elongated bodies with gigantic hands the size of their heads and sometimes way too-small faces. The anatomy isn't always perfect (that is, of course, within the confines of the style), but the panel layouts are all easy to read and Satsuki at least is a nice character design, which Sakurai has fun designing outfits for (there are even paper dolls). The early chapters look pretty rough, but by volume’s end Satsuki seems to have found her footing.

(As for the title of this one, “sunzen” is apparently Japanese for “on the verge” or “just in front of,” and “short” is English, so…? My friend guesses “To Be Close To Short Out.”)



Yozakura Quartet Vol. 1
Del Rey Manga

Hime is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl superhero, using her super-strength, superior fighting and a lacrosse racket to defend her city. And I do mean her city; see, Hime is also the town’s mayor. She works with Ao, a cat-eared girl who can read minds, and Kotoha, a busty, bespectacled girl with the power to create things by saying magic words.

Together they’re some sort of heroes-for-hire organization operating out of the Hizumi Life Counseling Office under the leadership of Akina, an 18-year-old guy who’s pretty much just a guy; he’s the Charlie to their Angles, but he doesn’t seem to bring anything to the table besides his courage and friendship.

They’re often accompanied by food delivery girl Rin and Hime’s brother, who, like her, has two-toned hair and fearsome powers. Although his are kept in check by magic shackles. Because he’s a demon, I think. And maybe Ao’s older brother is too; he has ears and powers, at any rate, and seems to be pretty evil.

Suzuhito Yasuda’s manga boasts some very well designed and interesting characters. I know they all sound pretty stereotypical as explained above, but Yasuda sure makes them all look pretty great, particular Hime, with her always-angry eyebrows, who is often pictured standing atop a street light, watching over her city.

Only Hime and Ao get much exploration in this volume, and while the latter’s conflicts simply revolve around doubts about her powers and missing her older brother, Hime’s are somewhat complex, as she places so much import on the greatness of her town and the safety of its people (Civic pride’s just not a motivation you see much in comics anymore).

The rather casual, gradual introduction to the characters, their relationships and their situation made getting into the book a lot harder than I would have liked (I thought Hime and her brother were the same person for a while, and I had to keep counting characters because while the title promised a foursome, there were usually five or six people seemingly on the team and in each scene).

The cases they take on run the gamut between super-serious and small potatoes, but I liked the insular, small-town feel of their endeavors. In one story they face a guy shooting the place up, in another they try to figure out why a little schoolboy is so sad. Later they try to find the parents or owners of an orphaned corgi puppy, only to end up fighting it when it becomes possessed by a demon.

By the volume’s end, after I’d spent a few hundred pages hanging out with the characters, I started to like being around them, but, like I said, it takes the book a while to get going. The two stories that really stand out are the one with the puppy—who is incredibly adorable—and one in which the characters spar using their super-powers, thanks to the novel uses of “magic words” Yasuda comes up with (Basically, the characters are throwing block-lettered words at each other and sifting through discarded spells and sound effects for particular words to hold up and communicate with).

Oddly enough, the story I think I liked the most was the space-wasting one in the end, in which Yasuda, in the form of a funny-looking animal, tells us of how the feature came to be and interacts with the cast.

(Oh, "yozakura" is "cherry blossoms at night," so this one's pretty self-explanatory).



Death Note Vols. 7-12
Viz

I’m not normally one to give spoiler warnings here, since I figure if you’re reading about a comic, then you’re already actively seeking information about it, but this is one of those cases where I feel the need to do so, as when you take out the surprises of Death Note, you pretty much ruin the series. So, if you haven’t read Death Note yet, and I highly recommend that you do, you can stop reading now, okay?

So despite my freakout about the unforeseen, game-changing event that happens about 3/4ths of the way through Vol. 7, I got sucked right back into the series, and was satisfied by the ending, if disappointed that it did, in fact, actually end.

While the Light vs. L conflict is what was making Vols. 3-7 so addictive, and the goofy-ass jump into the future in which Kira was suddenly a popular enough force that whole countries were surrendering to him (which conveniently ignored things like, oh, how Light finished college), L’s heirs slowly grew on me to the point where I was actively rooting for Near at the end, just as I was actively rooting for L earlier.

L is still a superior character I think, particularly in terms of design (I just like looking at and reading his posture and expressions, as much as anything else), but Near’s toy habit was pretty endearing. The bit with the Kurbricks near the end, especially.

Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata recovered the loss of momentum with the change in the conflict pretty well, I thought—if The Event in the second half of Vol. 7 came at the very end of that particular volume, I could have easily seen myself losing interest in the series (particularly if I were reading it as it was originally released, rather than now that all 12 volumes were available to be read one after the other), but the kidnapping cliffhanger ensured I’d be picking up Vol. 8, and they continued to wring real suspense out of the various set-ups that followed.

Also, Sidoh? I love that guy, particularly when he was passing out fliers in the Shingami realm, and this panel, in which he finally recovers his lost Death Note:

Monthly-ish Manga Reviews, or, Damn you Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, you evil, evil jerks I hate you so much I could just ghaahh!!!!!1!!

A while back I decided once a month I’d post a round-up of reviews of all the manga I read during that past month, either links to books I reviewed elsewhere, or brief, rambling reviews original to EDILW. And then, after making that decision, I promptly proceeded to read less and less manga (Even at the wonderfully affordable popular $9.99 price point, those digests are expensive, and review copies seem to few and far between for stingy readers/reviewers like me).

So, it’s the first of a new month, and a good time to post reviews of all the manga from the previous month. Except I didn’t really read any manga in February, save one particular series.

Death Note has been pretty much consuming a lot of my manga reading time the past few weeks—in fact, it’s been consuming a lot of my reading time in general (I think a spider has actually decided to start spinning a we off the pile of neglected prose books sitting on my end table).

As I mentioned in the early February post about super-popular comics I took my sweet time finally getting around to reading, I was kind of luke warm on Death Note up until the very end of the first volume, at which point I was rather curious about what happened next.

And then I checked out the second volume, and that mild curiosity turned into something more urgent. Holy crap, was this story exciting all of a sudden! Once “L” fully enters the series, and the crazy intense high-stakes game of cat and mouse between he and Light develops in earnest, the story got about as thrilling as any comic I’d ever read, and Ohba and Obata just kept upping the stakes, getting L and Light closer and closer, until they are literally spending all of their time in one another’s faces.

Things seemed to stumble a bit once the first two Kiras lost their memories, which seemed like a bit of a cheat (both on the part of the creators and on the part of Light) since the potential memory-loss wasn’t laid out to the same degree as the other “rules” of the Death Notes in the earlier volumes. I was even a little disappointed in the introduction of the third Kira at first too, since it distracted from the Light vs. L fight, but the longer that plot progressed, the more clear it became that it was actually central to their duel, and the conclusion of volume 6 was seriously intense. I kept catching myself sitting up and getting more and more anxious as the protagonists closed in on the third Kira.

And then, about half way through volume 7, The Event happened, and I could not actually believe it actually happened. Years of reading superhero comics have made me somewhat suspicious of such events, but the weird shift in time did make The Event seem pretty final.

And, man, it just sucked all the adrenaline out of the story. I can’t remember the last time I was so bummed about the fate of a fictional character, and I caught myself being a bit angry at Ohba and Obata for doing that to me—which is a good thing, for creators to get a reader that invested in a story that you can be that pissed off at them doing what they did. Damn them.

On the downside, at the close of Volume 7, I’m kinda back where I was at the end of Volume 1. I’m curious about where the story ends up, but the urgency of the narrative seems to have drained out of it, and it’ shard to believe there are five more whole volumes to go, despite the fact that what has so long been the central conflict has been so altered.

So goddam you Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Damn you for creating such an awesome fucking series and making me like it as much as you did, and then doing what you’ve done. I hate you both. And look forward to reading the rest of the series. And your other work. Jerks.

I read some manga.

King of Thorn Vol. 1 (Tokyopop) A few days after mentioning the YALSA list of “Top Graphic Novels for Teens” in a post, I was able to track down one of the manga that made the list, King of Thorn.

It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

It’s a fine action-adventure manga, with nice, easily readable art, cool character designs and a serviceable melodrama about a shy young girl finding the courage to live her life at its heart, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s simply a baseline manga series and, unlike The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, Laika and some of the other books on their top ten, I’m really not sure what it’s doing on this list at all.

This page has a longer YALSA list, going under the name of “Great Graphic Novels For Teens,” with a sentence or two of commentary and a bit on the criteria. As far as I can tell, it seems to be the list is composed of books that are popular and encompass the full range of teen graphic novels (a lot of manga, some superhero books, some fantasy, some Minx, some pleasant surprises like Robot Dreams, Houdini: The Handcuff King and Notes for a War Story).

I wouldn’t put too much stock in the list, as it does credit the Sam Kieth-created Batman series Secrets to “Sam Kieth, Bob Kane and others.”

At any rate, it got me to read the first volume of King of Thorn, which was an inoffensively told genre story that I didn’t mind killing an hour or so reading, and, by the time I reached the last page, I was intrigued enough by the central mystery to want to check out future volumes (From a library, if not from a bookstore at $9.99 a pop…or my local comic shop for $9.99 minus my pull-list discount).

In the near future, a horrible, deadly, incurable disease nicknamed Medusa is ravaging the world’s population. It gets its name from the manner in which it kills people, practically petrifying them until they crumble like an old statue.

An eccentric aristocrat has financed the building of a huge research center inside an old castle, outfitting it with cryogenics chambers for infectees chosen by lottery.

They’re to be frozen and eventually awoken once the cure is found. When they are awoken, it's seemingly by accident, and it’s certainly not by doctors ready to give them a cure. Instead, they find the castle in ruins, completely covered in thorns (an allusion to the old Sleeping Beauty story), and patrolled by monsters.

How long have they been asleep? Long enough for nature to evolve bird-sized dragons, horned velociraptor-looking dinosaurs, and a huge, eye-less beast that can eat a dozen people in a single gulp, apparently.

Our protagonist is Kasumi, a shy, bespectacled twin who was separated from her sister, and seems to long to join her in death, but images of her sister keep her going. The other survivors are so thoroughly generic they seem pilfered from a Hollywood screenwriter’s notebook. There’s a mysterious stranger covered with tattoos; a fat, old, rich, contrarian senator; a big black dude for fisticuffs; a smart, little white guy with glasses; a motherly young woman whose not long for this world; and a little boy to cry in fear or say something encouraging, depending on the situation.

Together this ragtag group of survivors have to find their way out of the thorn-filled castle, avoid all the monsters and figure out what the hell happened while they were out. Adding tension is the fact that they’re all still dying of the disease they were dying from when they went to sleep, and they’re wearing wristbands that indicate exactly how close to death they all are.

Despite the generic nature of the characters—seemingly more generic in that they are Hollywood stereotypes more than manga stereotypes, making them less exotic to cynical Western readers like me—Yuji Iwahara’s narrative is definitely full of suspense, and rather deftly raises mysteries within mysteries, so that new questions arise while one reads.

While I don’t think this belongs on anyone’s top ten list, if YALSA was just going by popularity among teen readers, then I can see why this made it there. As a jaded 30-year-old, I found it engaging enough; I imagine I would have loved it when I was a teen. I mean, the horned raptor monsters are really, really cool-looking.

A second volume has already been published, and it looks like a third is due any day now.



Kitchen Princess Vol. 1 (Del Rey) The credits for this book confuse me. They read “Manga by Natsumi Ando” and “Story by Miyuki Kobayashi.” I don’t know what that means; is the former the artist and the latter the writer? Ando does the little biographic pieces in the borders of each chapter, like Yû Watase and others do in their manga, and an afterword from Kobayashi mentions that Kobayashi writes for a series of Japanese YA books, so I think that’s the right division, but the who does what on this book kinda confuses me, and I hate that.

I’m pretty far behind on this series, an impulse borrow from the library, as I see it apparently began last spring and is already up to four volumes. There were a lot of elements to the story that seemed pretty derivative of other manga I’ve read, so I doubt it’s a series I’ll make a point of following, but it’s pleasant enough, and I found myself pretty disappointed when I got to the end of the book and realized I had reached it already.

Our heroine is the orphan Najika, who has just been accepted to Seika Academy, an exclusive boarding school that she was only able to get into due to her wizardry in the kitchen. She’s in a special class, in which everyone has an exceptional talent in a different field—hers is cooking.

She became such a good cook, in part, due to a mysterious childhood memory. Crying over the loss of her pastry chef parents, she’s rescued from drowning by an older boy, who gives her a dessert he’s carrying to cheer her up. Her only clue as to the boy’s identity is the silver spoon that was in the dessert, which came from…Seika Academy!

Well, that and her memory of the taste of the flan. Najika never forgets a taste.

Already we’ve got a bit of a Cinderella story going on, and the search for her destined love she only cloudily remembers, as in Love Hina (and probably other manga, but that’s my favorite to use that particular conceit).

At the academy, she meets moody Daichi and his popular older brother Sora, the two prime suspects for princehood. They befriend her, but the rest of the student body isn’t so kind, particularly the Mean Girls-style Queen Bee model Akane. I really liked this last character, because while she’s thoroughly evil, she’s deviously so, and her evil isn’t telegraphed in the way bad guy characters usually are presented—we’re as shocked as Najika at Akane’s cruelty. (Well, I was; you won’t be if you read it now, because I’ve spoiled it. Sorry).

This first volume chronicles Najika’s first semester at the school, her difficulties with the other girls, and the gentle flirtations with the two brothers, and the mysteries of the series, like who her prince is and why Sora and Daichi are no longer as close as one would expect brothers to be.

Also included are recipes of all the foods Najika whips up in the book, which is kinda neat. Unfortunately, my being mostly vegan will prevent me from trying to make any of these except possibly the Christmas cookie recipe, which actually doesn’t sound all that great anyway, but, had I read this, like, a decade ago, I would have been all over this section.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much your standard manga high school dramedy, with some cooking thrown in, and a few surprisingly touching words of wisdom (translated by Satsuki Yamashita and adapted by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christinia Weir).

At one point, Najika is crying about the latest act of cruelty, and wishing she could move back to her hometown of Hokkaido, where the night sky is so much clearer.

Sora tells her, “You know, small stars, large stars…they shine equally bright in the night sky. I don’t think you need to be the same as [the other girls]. You have… …your own way of shining.”

Awwwww!

Also, early on, the mysterious Flan Prince tells Najika that “When you eat something good, you smile,” and we learn that informs her philosophy of cooking—the greatest pleasure in cooking is seeing the smile on the face of the person who eats and enjoys your cooking.

Awwwwww!

It’s not quite as elegant as the bit in Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing” wherein the baker explains the importance of food to the mourning parents—which is the story I always think of when it comes to food philosophy—but it’s not bad from such a frivolous little story.

Come to think of it, a two “Awww!”-inducing book with nice enough art, entertaining enough storylines and recipes in the back might be something worth following into future volumes after all…

Monthly-ish Manga Reviews

Empowered Vol. 1
Dark Horse Comics

Yes, I realize that Adam Warren is not a Japanese person, and that this book was not produced in Japan, and is thus not a Japanese comic, and thus is not really manga. But I’m including it here because Warren draws as well as writes this, and his is a heavily influenced manga style. Additionally, Dark Horse is publishing this closer to manga-size and format, and I’m assuming it’s going to be shelved with manga in most comic shops and book stores, so for the purposes of this post, we’re just going to go ahead and call this manga, cool?

Anyway, Empowered is an ironically named superheroine who comes across as a more shapely version of Ally McBeal. She’s a got a superhero physique, but tragically low self-esteem, almost pathological neurosis and trouble being taken seriously by her peers in the Superhomeys (Probably the second best superhero team name of all time, right behind James Kochalka’s Superfuckers). Like Ms. McBeal, she’s pretty pathetic most of the time, but it’s played for laughs of the laughing-along-with rather than laughing-at variety.

Her powers come from her costume, a body stocking that gives her super strength and the ability to shoot lasers from her hands, but also tears very, very easily, and the smaller her costume gets, the weaker her powers get.
So 75-percent of her adventures end with her barely clad in a badly Swiss-cheesed costume, bound and gagged by the bad guys, awaiting rescue from some other superhero.

It should come as no real surprise that she got her start in a series of fetish sketches by Warren, who, in addition to being one of the first U.S. artists to fully embrace Japanese animation and comics storytelling styles and techniques, is also one of the sharper writers when it comes to integrating sci-fi technology and fourth-wall-abusing metatextual meaning into comics.
Over the course of 240 pages, Empowered quickly grows from three-page parody stories to a much more complex narrative involving Emp, her semi-reformed villain/boyfriend Thug Boy, her villainess-turned-best friend Ninjette and an interdimensional Lovecraftian monster god that they’ve trapped in a set of “Cosmichains” and made their prisoner/slacker roommate.

A sort of R-rated sitcom exploring geek culture from the inside out, Empowered has its cake and eats it too—it’s full of exploitative, titillating imagery, but it also features the healthiest and most realistic romantic relationship ever featured in any comic book also featuring capes and masks.




Gothic Sports Vol. 1
Tokyopop

Sixteen-year-old Anya has just transferred to Lucrece High Scooh, for one simple reason—they have the best sports teams in the city, and she dreams of playing for one of them. Unfortunately, she has more heart than experience, as she’s never actually played on a sports team. Of any kind.

After washing out at basketball try-outs and learning the school’s soccer team won’t let girls play, she rallies the school’s other misfits and outcasts to form her own soccer team. But to gain official recognition, they must first defeat the school’s real soccer team in a match.

German writer/artist Anike Hage’s geeks vs. jocks high school comedy isn’t terribly gothic in its storytelling or aesthetic, and gets its name instead from the team’s uniforms, stylish black and red creations designed by the team’s Gothic Lolita (and fashion fan) Filiz.

It’s a charming enough series, even if this first volume of the story fails to live up to the promise of the intriguingly mismatched words that make up the title. And let’s face it, that is an incredible title. Unfortunately, it plants in my head a comic story that is much, much cooler than the one Hage gives us here (Is it possible that a title can be too good?).

It also ends on something of a cliffhanger, just before the real soccer team and the goth one are set to square off against one another, which leaves me balancing on a fence; I do want to see how it turns out, but I’m not so enamored of the book that I’m sure I want to pick up volume two.



Avril Lavigne’s Make 5 Wishes Vol. 1
Del Rey Manga

I honestly have a hard time imagining how this particular graphic novel even came to be. Artist Camilla D’Errico’s concept sketches included in the back of the volume seem to indicate that she was working on a story called “Iku and Oni” at some point, using these character designs and basic concepts.

The story she tells along with scripter Joshua Dysart seems like it could have been told perfectly well without Lavigne’s involvement.

And what exactly is Lavigne’s involvement? Well, the credits bill her as “starring” in the book, and she writes the introduction and ... that seems to be about it. (When Tokyopop published Courtney Love-related manga Princess Ai, Love at least got credit for co-creating the character).

So the cynical reading is that they just kinda slapped Lavigne’s name on the thing to boost sales, a move that worked, as Del Rey issued a press release saying the first printing sold out within four days, forcing them to go back to press for a second printing.

But it’s hard to stay cynical about a book this charming for too long. Forget what the credits say, Lavigne actually only co-stars. The real star is troubled high-schooler Hana, a friendless, lonely and unnoticed girl who amuses herself by pretending to be different people online and striking up friendships with people she knows in real life but never speaks to, listening to Lavigne’s music in her headphones to drown out the sound of her parents fighting and talking to Lavigne, a sort of imaginary friend who also acts like her conscience (I’m not up on what high school kids are listening to any more, but one would think Hana would be attracted to a musician with a darker and more melancholy sound than Lavigne; if this were set back when I was in high school, I would imagine Hana listening to Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson, or, if she had a cooler older sibling or cousing to introduce her to their music, maybe The Smiths or The Cure).

When Hana stumbles upon the website make5wishes.com (go check it out; it’s there), she places an order and receives an adorable but scary little red demon, one which looks like something of a combination between Disney’s Stitch and a Chinese lion—in a box, and it promises to grant her five wishes. It does so, but monkey’s paw-style.

While the titular pop star’s presence will likely scare away some regular comics readers (though far fewer readers than it will attract), if you take Lavigne out of the equation completely, it’s still a beautifully constructed book, with D’Errico’s rough, manga-inspired pencils colored without any ink laid on top of them. There’s also a pretty interesting story about the redemptive power of pop music in here as well, if you’re willing to look for it. Even pop music that comes courtesy of the singer who gave us “Sk8er Boi.”

The book’s color art and somewhat higher-than-usual production values (nice cover and paper stock, etc.) makes it’ a bit pricey for those of us used to the $9.99 price point for manga, but it’s definitely worth a read while loitering in a big box bookstore, or a check out form the library.



To Terra… Vol. 1
Vertical

I was really looking forward to this nice-looking, 350-page volume from Vertical, having immensely enjoyed the last release from the company I had read. The book design is perfect; it’s the sort of book that serves as a sort of little rectangular paper sculpture all by itself, the kind of book I might buy just because I like the way it looks sitting on a shelf or strewn on a coffee table (Okay, I’m not rich enough to actually buy books based on how well designed the spines and covers are, but sometimes it is a factor, and if I were rich enough to do that, I would have done it with To Terra…)

The interiors are just as beautiful. Keiko Takemiya’s art is pretty dated—a glance says late-‘70s Japan—but that’s hardly a bad thing in my book. The ‘70s-ishness of the design might have made it look cutting edge upon original publication, and out-of-date in the ‘80s or ‘90s, but now it’s old enough that it looks unusual again. As a member of a generation who considered the first two Star Wars flicks, G-Force/Battle of the Planets and Voltron the pinnacle of science fiction entertainment, this look seems perfectly space opera to me personally.

Designs aside, Takemiya’s pages are all wonderfully constructed; packed with panels and visual information, but easy to read.

While the age of the book contributed to its otherworldly, sci-fi feel, I think it may also have hurt the specifics of the story, as what might have seemed forward-looking in the late seventies now seems rather played out. In fact, several elements of the book seemed to echo ones I’d just read a few months ago in Phoenix, a superior manga.

It’s sometime in the far future—“the year XXXX”—and mankind’s unchecked over-development lead Terra to the edge of a man-made apocalypse, the environment buckling under the weight of humanity and its abuses.

Luckily, our descendants have developed space travel and had begun colonizing space before they’d killed themselves off, and so they took off. But there’s a deep connection between a species and their home planet, and the goal was always to return. To help them get there, humanity developed the sinister sounding era of Superior Domination, also known by the less sinister sounding acronym of S.D., in which children are born of a god-like computer, which places them in foster homes until they’re 14, and rigorously programs all aspects of their life.

Only the best and brightest are allowed to return to Terra.

This dystopian utopia future is not without strife; a result of the weird computer-lead breeding is the rise of Mu, a mutant race who have psychic abilities. Their powers are activated around the time they hit puberty, and they’ve been persecuted historically; by the time the story opens, they are eliminated from human society (Marvel readers have seen this all before…ad nauseum).

This first volume does quite a bit of world-building. Though the broad strokes are overly familiar, I’m pretty intrigued by where things are going. We open with Soldier Blue and Physis, members of a Mu revolutionary group hiding out from the humans and plotting their people’s destiny. Then we spend a lot of time with Jomy Marcus Shin, an unusual child who has the powers of the Mu but the rugged constitution of a human, who is reluctantly forced into the role of the leader of the Mu.

Then we flash forward some years to meet Keith Anywan, a young human on a track to become one of the Elite and return to Terra, who has a strange origin he’s not quite aware of, and a rebellious streak that worries some of his compatriots.

The scope of the book is pretty incredibly. These 350 pages all read like set-up, making for a first act in a navel-gazing space opera that is actually quite operatic. At only $13.95, it’s a hell of a page-per-dollar value, even if it’s not quite as mindblowing as Phoenix.



Yakitate!! Japan Vol. 3
Tokyopop

I know I’ve sung praises for Yakitate!! Japan before, and, for the most part, this third volume offers more of the same. That’s a good thing, in that Takashi Hashiguichi’s art is incredible, the characters are well designed, well-defined and well-realized, and that the concept is a lot of fun.

It’s also a bad thing in that in this volume, it becomes clear that the book is hitting the wall that all competition manga does, in which the stories become repetitive. At this point in the narrative, it’s clear that Kazuma is going to repeatedly find himself in baking battles of different varieties, seem to be up against impossible odds, and somehow cook his way out of them.

It’s the details, the little tweaks to these competitions, that can save the book, and Hashiguichi throws enough new characters into the mix here that the book still works for me, but I find myself less excited than I was when I first discovered it.