Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Katherine Dacey

Toriko, Vol. 1

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Imagine, if you can, an extreme sports edition of Iron Chef, one in which the contestants have to catch and cook the show’s theme ingredient. That’s essentially what Toriko is: an over-the-top food manga in which a hunter and a chef find — and eat — the world’s rarest delicacies.

Toriko, the titular character, is a peculiar mix of id and super-ego. On the one hand, he’s pure instinct: he hunts with his nose, uses brute strength to overwhelm his opponents, and gobbles every meal with animalistic gusto. On the other, he’s a hunter-philosopher who disdains slaughter for sport; Toriko may wrestle six-armed gorillas into submission, but he only kills creatures for food.

His sidekick, Komatsu, is a small, nervous chef who plays Chester to Toriko’s Spike, twitching and talking up a storm whenever they embark on a new mission or face danger. Komatsu is initially assigned to supervise Toriko; Komatsu’s boss, head of the International Gourmet Organization (IGO), wants to make sure that Toriko successfully fulfills an order for garara gator, an eight-legged, bus-sized monster prized for its delicate meat. Though Komatsu spends most of their expedition screaming, cowering, and clinging to Toriko, Komatsu is moved by Toriko’s passion. “When I saw you on the hunt close up,” Komatsu tells Toriko, “I decided it’s worth risking my life to follow you.” He elaborates:

I want to understand where those ingredients come from and what they look like in their natural habitat. By the time the high-level prey are shipped to us, they’re already slaughtered and just pieces of meat.

I never thought I’d see a Shonen Jump character extol the value of slow foods, but that’s a big part of Toriko‘s appeal: the concept screams Ted Nugent, but the underlying philosophy says Michael Pollan. Toriko still barks like a shonen manga, of course, with lengthy fight scenes, colorful opponents, and jokes a-plenty. But there’s a more thoughtful dimension to the story than is warranted by the material; many of the characters’ soliloquies wouldn’t be out of place in Oishinbo or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as Toriko and Komatsu wax poetic about the flavor and succulence of freshly-caught meat.

Toriko‘s other strength is the artwork; look past that god-awful cover, and what you’ll find is some excellent cartooning. The monsters are fierce and slightly repulsive but plausibly edible, while the humans run the gamut from ridiculously virile — Toriko looks like a youthful Sylvester Stallone — to thoroughly decadent — the IGO’s Bureau Chief wears a leisure suit, aviator shades, and an ill-advised shag. Artist Mitsutoshi Shimabukaro renders each setting with enough detail to make it feel like a distinctive habitat; his mangrove swamp, where the garara gator lives, looks just pre-historic enough to harbor a pterodactyl or two. Not all of the visual gambits work: Toriko lives in a candy house, for example, a choice that seems out of character for a manly meat-eater, while a rainbow fruit tree falls flat in grayscale. Shimabukaro never belabors a sight gag, however, nimbly moving to the next set-piece before the failures even register.

I’d be the first to admit that Toriko won’t be every locavore’s idea of fun. I nearly lost my appetite watching Toriko lay waste to an entire banquet’s worth of food, and found some of the hunting scenes too protracted. If you’ve got a hearty constitution and a deep, abiding love of cooking competitions, however, this macho food-fest might just tickle your taste buds.

TORIKO, VOL. 1 • BY MITSUTOSHI SHIMABUKARO • VIZ MEDIA • 207 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

PotW: Shounen Manga FTW!

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Though MJkicks off this week’s Picks with a new shoujo favorite, the theme of the week is resoundingly shounen, according to David, Kate, and special guest Michelle Smith!

From MJ: There’s quite a bit of new shoujo on Midtown Comics’ list this week, including favorites like Kimi ni Todoke and Seiho Boys’ High School! But the one I most consider an absolute must-read is volume two of previous Pick The Story of Saiunkoku, art by Kairi Yura, adapted from the novels by Sai Yukino. The series’ first volume charmed me completely with its smart, capable heroine and compelling palace intrigue, even earning itself a place on my list of Best Manga of 2010. Don’t believe me? Check out David’s recent review, fully as delightful a read as the book itself. A strong opening volume can be a tough act to follow, so I look forward to discovering what Yura and Yukino have in store.

From David: I’m going to take this opportunity to remind people of my abiding love for Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece and pick the 56th volume of this sprawling, hilarious pirate saga. It would probably not be wise to recommend that someone who has never picked up a volume of this series start with the 56th volume, unless that person is a fan of great action cartooning. Our hero, Luffy D. Monkey, is staging a massive jailbreak, battling sinister jailers and gathering an ever-larger gang of allies along the way. The chief joy in these giant set pieces is to see how Oda manages to combine wildly improbable action, comedy, and heart in a mad jumble that always seems on the verge of spinning out of control, but never does.

From Kate: My choice is Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, a new shonen series that VIZ has been promoting up a storm. The story focuses on a young teen whose grandfather leads a demon clan. Gramps wants Rikuo to follow in his footsteps, but there’s a catch: Rikuo is only one-quarter demon, and can’t control when or for how long he turns into a yokai. Not surprisingly, Rikuo’s iffy powers don’t inspire much confidence among the full-blooded yokai, and various factions try to prevent Rikuo from succeeding his grandfather. The story hasn’t quite found its groove: the comic relief scenes aren’t particularly funny, and the characters haven’t come into their own yet. But the pacing is smart and the yokai designs nifty (think Gegege no Kitaro meets the Hokusai Manga), so I think it’s worth pursuing, especially for readers who liked Kekkaishi and Natsume’s Book of Friends.

From Michelle: It’s another wallet-busting week for manga! I’m definitely excited about new volumes of some Shojo Beat favorites, as well as volume three of Bakuman, which I realize isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but honestly, the one release on this list that has me going, “Eee!” more than any other is volume fourteen of Slam Dunk. Why? Because I’m allowed to read this one! You see, this is a series that benefits from being read in multiple-volume chunks, which occasionally requires me to bide my time and sit on some books until I have amassed enough to read them. I’ve been doing that with volume thirteen. Honestly, two volumes really aren’t enough to satisfy one’s appetite, but it’s better than nothing! And yes, I know, I know. I really should read Inoue’s REAL, which is, I’m sure, the better manga, but that doesn’t keep me from loving Slam Dunk whole-heartedly.

Amazon.com Widgets

So, readers, what is your must-buy manga this week?

Salvatore

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It doesn’t take a village to write a review, but darned if it isn’t more fun when you tackle a challenging book with a neighbor. That’s exactly what David Welsh and I did this month: we both read Nicolas de Crécy’s latest work, Salvatore, then spent a couple of weeks comparing notes on the book. The results are less a formal critique than an animated and open-ended conversation. We hope you’ll keep the discussion going with your own thoughts about this odd, fascinating story.

David: To start, I thought I’d describe my admittedly limited background with Nicolas de Crécy’s work. The first time I encountered him was in Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s anthology, Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators. He contributed a piece called “The New Gods” which is about commercial design and the prevalence of cartoon mascots in Japanese culture, and it’s a neat, uneasy little piece. The only other work of his that I’ve read is Glacial Period, created in conjunction with the Louvre to celebrate that great museum and published in English by NBM, also the publishers of Salvatore. Glacial Period is about a group of archeologists who use these hybrid dog-pigs to sniff out history. It’s whimsical and smart and a little on the creepy side. Salvatore has a number of narrative threads working through it, including a dog who’s an auto mechanic and is trying to reunite with his childhood love, a myopic sow who’s lost one of her enormous litter of piglets, and a goth cat who can’t seem to offend her liberal parents.

I think my strongest impression of Salvatore is that it makes me a little anxious, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most of Joann Sfar’s work – Klezmer, The Rabbi’s Cat, Vampire Loves – and Taiyo Matsumoto’s comics – TekkonKinkreet and Gogo Monster – also have that effect. I suspect the anxiety partly comes from how visually dense de Crécy’s comics tend to be, sort of dragging your eye in a bunch of different directions at once, and how morally vague his characters and their situations are. What’s your initial, ink-blot response to Salvatore and to de Crécy in general?

Kate: I’m glad you used the word “anxious” to describe your reaction to de Crécy’s work, as I also find his stories unsettling. Some of it I attribute to his animal protagonists; they’re not the least bit disarming, but endowed with the kind of flaws, eccentricities, and inconsistencies that we associate with literary realism. Usually authors endow their animal characters with human traits in an effort to close the species gap, to suggest parallels between human and animal behavior, but in de Crécy’s work, the effect is very different: his animals seem less like walking metaphors and more like individuals. The animals’ physical appearance, too, is unsettling; no one will ever accuse de Crécy of pandering to the Daily Squee crowd. I found the sow in Salvatore, for example, a vaguely grotesque figure, with her squinty eyes and parasitic brood of piglets, while Salvatore himself looks more like a pig or a hamster than a dog.

I also find de Crécy’s artwork a little unsettling. Like you, David, I admire the clarity of his vision, and his incredible attention to detail, yet I find de Crécy’s linework pulses with a strange energy; it’s as if a nervous little dog were drawing the images. Almost every adjective I could come up with to describe the lines sounds very unflattering (e.g. “spidery,” “shaky”), but I actually find de Crécy’s work quite beautiful in its idiosyncracies.

David: His style is very organic in exactly the way you describe which, for me, is an unusual use of the word. In this case, it’s more that the illustrations have a slightly arhythmic, unsettling pulse, which means that things can feel both very stylized and very “real” at the same time. I’m thinking in particular of the sow, as you mentioned, with her unnerving squint and rolls of flesh. Another example might be the cow who crops up later in the narrative, who is both menacing and unpleasant in the ways an entirely human character might be but also in ways that are sort of bovine-specific. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism that’s both restrained in terms of the rules the artist sets for himself, but it’s also demonstrative of a very creepy, unhampered imagination.

de Crécy seems very, very aware of the imposition of bits of human culture that he’s superimposed on what might be called animal culture. A sow can take her car to get repaired, but a pig can still wind up in the butcher’s window, you know? Those contradictions don’t seem entirely offhanded to me, but I’m darned if I can pinpoint exactly what de Crécy’s formula is. That might be another source of anxiety for me as a reader.

Kate: That’s a good point: I’m not sure if de Crécy is aiming for magical realism or something else. There’s plenty of whimsy and imagination in Salvatore, but it’s tempered with a very frank sensibility. Tonally, it sits somewhere between the kind of fantasy where talking animals signify the supernatural and the kind of satire in which animals are used to make human behavior look absurd or cruel.

In light of our conversation, I’m wondering what you thought of Salvatore himself: could he have been a cat or a raccoon? Or is his dog-ness somehow fundamental to the story?

David: That’s a question that goes to one of the sources of interesting tension in the book for me. I have a dog, and I love dogs, and Salvatore doesn’t have many of the core qualities that I would ascribe to that species, which would be loyalty and a desire for companionship, a pack. But the animal characters generally don’t line up entirely with traditional perceptions of their species, except maybe for the cat, who’s kind of capricious and contrary. (At the same time, she’s also the animal character who looks most human to me, a girl in a cat suit rather than an animal that just behaves in human ways.)

On one hand, I think that Salvatore could have been any creature with the same essential nature — secretive, determined, somewhat amoral. But I do wonder if the creator wasn’t trying to create a tension between what we expect of dogs and the kind of character he wanted to write. Salvatore is a dog because he doesn’t act like one. If anything, his poor little human companion is more like a dog to me than Salvatore. It’s like the Grinch and Max switched bodies.

Kate: Exactly! I thought the scene in which Salvatore debated whether to leave his human companion behind was surprisingly effective, touching on all the emotions that dog owners experience when they’re worried about subjecting a pet to physical or emotional discomfort. In switching the dog-human roles, though, de Crécy lays bare the essence of that dog-human compact; there are no pleading eyes or whimpers to prompt us into feeling sorry for Salvatore’s pet, just Salvatore’s deep concern for his welfare.

What did you think of the supporting characters (e.g. the raging bull couple, the cat girl)? Did you find them as persuasive as Salvatore? And what about the numerous subplots introduced in the second half of the book: do they feel essential to moving the story along, or do they register more as tangents?

David: I found them persuasive as characters, but I felt that their animal identities were much less of a factor in their persuasiveness or their interest than they were with Salvatore. It seemed as though de de Crécy may have spent all of his energy creating that anti-dog dissonance and had that be the fulcrum of what we think of as animals acting against what we think of as their natures.

Basically, that leaves me to evaluate the rest of the characters just as characters, so my reactions are mixed. I liked the cows because they’re so awful and shallow. They were refreshing, because I didn’t really experience any ambivalence when reading about them. The cat was less successful, because she feels so cliché to me. Brief as those scenes were, they dragged for me.

On the whole, I appreciate the attempt to expand the narrative. It’s a tricky thing to attempt, creating these antic, concurrent threads that still all have a sadness to them, and trying to make them all hold together into a single, dark farce. I don’t know if the attempt is entirely successful yet. What did you think of those sequences?

Kate: For me, the most successful subplot involved the sow bonding with her piglets. She’s an awful mom at first: distracted, foolish, and disconnected from her babies. But then she begins to see her husband’s face in her litter, and the tenor of their relationship changes. She’s more affectionate and more solicitous of her piglets’ needs, even though she misses her partner and feels overwhelmed by the sheer size of her new family. I thought that was a lovely and subtle development in a storyline that initially repelled me.

As for the other subplots, I have to agree that the business with the cat-girl was the least dramatically persuasive, in large part because it seemed so random. But not in a “hey, life can be arbitrary” sort of way, but in a contrived, French arthouse movie sort of way; those scenes felt like something from an early draft of the Amelie screenplay. The cows were a more successful addition to the story; they were believably cosmopolitan and crass, the kind of folks you might find in sitting in a cafe in Paris or New York, conducting their personal business in public.

David: Yes, the pig’s story is definitely the most resonant of the subplots, to the point that I’d almost call it a co-plot. I like the way you describe her evolution, and it just about makes me change my mind on my earlier position regarding the amount of conceptualization the author did with various animal archetypes. She starts out very barnyard, very domesticated in assuming that her needs will be met without much thought or effort, but as her arc progresses, she becomes more conscious of survival. She’s not quite feral, but she’s certainly more active in achieving her desired ends.

In fact, I’d say it’s for her story as much as Salvatore’s that I’ll stick with this fascinating but slightly vexing series. What about you? In for the haul?

Kate: I’m on the fence about Salvatore, in part because I find it a little over-scripted; de Crécy has a very strong urge to narrate, even though he’s a terrific visual storyteller. The scene in which the sow catapults down the snowy mountain, lands on top of a plane, then sails back down to Earth is just the sort of wordless (or largely wordless) sequence that I wish de Crécy did more of; it’s a gorgeous bit of visual choreography that nicely underscores what a space cadet Amandine really is.

I also feel ambivalent about Salvatore’s predicament; it’s so ridiculously French that I hear accordions every time he looks sorrowfully at Julie’s picture. But the pig’s story has grown on me, and the cows amuse me, so I’ll give Salvatore one more volume before I throw in the towel.

David: So we both come down to a ruling of “ambivalent but still engaged.” Shall we resume this conversation when the second volume arrives to alternately charm, confound and distress us?

Kate: It’s a date!

SALVATORE, VOL. 1: TRANSPORTS OF LOVE • BY NICOLAS DE CRÉCY • NBM/COMICSLIT • 104 pp.

Salvatore

by

It doesn’t take a village to write a review, but darned if it isn’t more fun when you tackle a challenging book with a neighbor. That’s exactly what David Welsh and I did this month: we both read Nicolas de Crécy’s latest work, Salvatore, then spent a couple of weeks comparing notes on the book. The results are less a formal critique than an animated and open-ended conversation. We hope you’ll keep the discussion going with your own thoughts about this odd, fascinating story.

David: To start, I thought I’d describe my admittedly limited background with Nicolas de Crécy’s work. The first time I encountered him was in Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s anthology, Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators. He contributed a piece called “The New Gods” which is about commercial design and the prevalence of cartoon mascots in Japanese culture, and it’s a neat, uneasy little piece. The only other work of his that I’ve read is Glacial Period, created in conjunction with the Louvre to celebrate that great museum and published in English by NBM, also the publishers of Salvatore. Glacial Period is about a group of archeologists who use these hybrid dog-pigs to sniff out history. It’s whimsical and smart and a little on the creepy side. Salvatore has a number of narrative threads working through it, including a dog who’s an auto mechanic and is trying to reunite with his childhood love, a myopic sow who’s lost one of her enormous litter of piglets, and a goth cat who can’t seem to offend her liberal parents.

I think my strongest impression of Salvatore is that it makes me a little anxious, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most of Joann Sfar’s work – Klezmer, The Rabbi’s Cat, Vampire Loves – and Taiyo Matsumoto’s comics – TekkonKinkreet and Gogo Monster – also have that effect. I suspect the anxiety partly comes from how visually dense de Crécy’s comics tend to be, sort of dragging your eye in a bunch of different directions at once, and how morally vague his characters and their situations are. What’s your initial, ink-blot response to Salvatore and to de Crécy in general?

Kate: I’m glad you used the word “anxious” to describe your reaction to de Crécy’s work, as I also find his stories unsettling. Some of it I attribute to his animal protagonists; they’re not the least bit disarming, but endowed with the kind of flaws, eccentricities, and inconsistencies that we associate with literary realism. Usually authors endow their animal characters with human traits in an effort to close the species gap, to suggest parallels between human and animal behavior, but in de Crécy’s work, the effect is very different: his animals seem less like walking metaphors and more like individuals. The animals’ physical appearance, too, is unsettling; no one will ever accuse de Crécy of pandering to the Daily Squee crowd. I found the sow in Salvatore, for example, a vaguely grotesque figure, with her squinty eyes and parasitic brood of piglets, while Salvatore himself looks more like a pig or a hamster than a dog.

I also find de Crécy’s artwork a little unsettling. Like you, David, I admire the clarity of his vision, and his incredible attention to detail, yet I find de Crécy’s linework pulses with a strange energy; it’s as if a nervous little dog were drawing the images. Almost every adjective I could come up with to describe the lines sounds very unflattering (e.g. “spidery,” “shaky”), but I actually find de Crécy’s work quite beautiful in its idiosyncracies.

David: His style is very organic in exactly the way you describe which, for me, is an unusual use of the word. In this case, it’s more that the illustrations have a slightly arhythmic, unsettling pulse, which means that things can feel both very stylized and very “real” at the same time. I’m thinking in particular of the sow, as you mentioned, with her unnerving squint and rolls of flesh. Another example might be the cow who crops up later in the narrative, who is both menacing and unpleasant in the ways an entirely human character might be but also in ways that are sort of bovine-specific. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism that’s both restrained in terms of the rules the artist sets for himself, but it’s also demonstrative of a very creepy, unhampered imagination.

de Crécy seems very, very aware of the imposition of bits of human culture that he’s superimposed on what might be called animal culture. A sow can take her car to get repaired, but a pig can still wind up in the butcher’s window, you know? Those contradictions don’t seem entirely offhanded to me, but I’m darned if I can pinpoint exactly what de Crécy’s formula is. That might be another source of anxiety for me as a reader.

Kate: That’s a good point: I’m not sure if de Crécy is aiming for magical realism or something else. There’s plenty of whimsy and imagination in Salvatore, but it’s tempered with a very frank sensibility. Tonally, it sits somewhere between the kind of fantasy where talking animals signify the supernatural and the kind of satire in which animals are used to make human behavior look absurd or cruel.

In light of our conversation, I’m wondering what you thought of Salvatore himself: could he have been a cat or a raccoon? Or is his dog-ness somehow fundamental to the story?

David: That’s a question that goes to one of the sources of interesting tension in the book for me. I have a dog, and I love dogs, and Salvatore doesn’t have many of the core qualities that I would ascribe to that species, which would be loyalty and a desire for companionship, a pack. But the animal characters generally don’t line up entirely with traditional perceptions of their species, except maybe for the cat, who’s kind of capricious and contrary. (At the same time, she’s also the animal character who looks most human to me, a girl in a cat suit rather than an animal that just behaves in human ways.)

On one hand, I think that Salvatore could have been any creature with the same essential nature — secretive, determined, somewhat amoral. But I do wonder if the creator wasn’t trying to create a tension between what we expect of dogs and the kind of character he wanted to write. Salvatore is a dog because he doesn’t act like one. If anything, his poor little human companion is more like a dog to me than Salvatore. It’s like the Grinch and Max switched bodies.

Kate: Exactly! I thought the scene in which Salvatore debated whether to leave his human companion behind was surprisingly effective, touching on all the emotions that dog owners experience when they’re worried about subjecting a pet to physical or emotional discomfort. In switching the dog-human roles, though, de Crécy lays bare the essence of that dog-human compact; there are no pleading eyes or whimpers to prompt us into feeling sorry for Salvatore’s pet, just Salvatore’s deep concern for his welfare.

What did you think of the supporting characters (e.g. the raging bull couple, the cat girl)? Did you find them as persuasive as Salvatore? And what about the numerous subplots introduced in the second half of the book: do they feel essential to moving the story along, or do they register more as tangents?

David: I found them persuasive as characters, but I felt that their animal identities were much less of a factor in their persuasiveness or their interest than they were with Salvatore. It seemed as though de de Crécy may have spent all of his energy creating that anti-dog dissonance and had that be the fulcrum of what we think of as animals acting against what we think of as their natures.

Basically, that leaves me to evaluate the rest of the characters just as characters, so my reactions are mixed. I liked the cows because they’re so awful and shallow. They were refreshing, because I didn’t really experience any ambivalence when reading about them. The cat was less successful, because she feels so cliché to me. Brief as those scenes were, they dragged for me.

On the whole, I appreciate the attempt to expand the narrative. It’s a tricky thing to attempt, creating these antic, concurrent threads that still all have a sadness to them, and trying to make them all hold together into a single, dark farce. I don’t know if the attempt is entirely successful yet. What did you think of those sequences?

Kate: For me, the most successful subplot involved the sow bonding with her piglets. She’s an awful mom at first: distracted, foolish, and disconnected from her babies. But then she begins to see her husband’s face in her litter, and the tenor of their relationship changes. She’s more affectionate and more solicitous of her piglets’ needs, even though she misses her partner and feels overwhelmed by the sheer size of her new family. I thought that was a lovely and subtle development in a storyline that initially repelled me.

As for the other subplots, I have to agree that the business with the cat-girl was the least dramatically persuasive, in large part because it seemed so random. But not in a “hey, life can be arbitrary” sort of way, but in a contrived, French arthouse movie sort of way; those scenes felt like something from an early draft of the Amelie screenplay. The cows were a more successful addition to the story; they were believably cosmopolitan and crass, the kind of folks you might find in sitting in a cafe in Paris or New York, conducting their personal business in public.

David: Yes, the pig’s story is definitely the most resonant of the subplots, to the point that I’d almost call it a co-plot. I like the way you describe her evolution, and it just about makes me change my mind on my earlier position regarding the amount of conceptualization the author did with various animal archetypes. She starts out very barnyard, very domesticated in assuming that her needs will be met without much thought or effort, but as her arc progresses, she becomes more conscious of survival. She’s not quite feral, but she’s certainly more active in achieving her desired ends.

In fact, I’d say it’s for her story as much as Salvatore’s that I’ll stick with this fascinating but slightly vexing series. What about you? In for the haul?

Kate: I’m on the fence about Salvatore, in part because I find it a little over-scripted; de Crécy has a very strong urge to narrate, even though he’s a terrific visual storyteller. The scene in which the sow catapults down the snowy mountain, lands on top of a plane, then sails back down to Earth is just the sort of wordless (or largely wordless) sequence that I wish de Crécy did more of; it’s a gorgeous bit of visual choreography that nicely underscores what a space cadet Amandine really is.

I also feel ambivalent about Salvatore’s predicament; it’s so ridiculously French that I hear accordions every time he looks sorrowfully at Julie’s picture. But the pig’s story has grown on me, and the cows amuse me, so I’ll give Salvatore one more volume before I throw in the towel.

David: So we both come down to a ruling of “ambivalent but still engaged.” Shall we resume this conversation when the second volume arrives to alternately charm, confound and distress us?

Kate: It’s a date!

SALVATORE, VOL. 1: TRANSPORTS OF LOVE • BY NICOLAS DE CRÉCY • NBM/COMICSLIT • 104 pp.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro

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Don’t be fooled by the kawaii covers: Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro is a melancholy little manga. The story focuses on an androgynous young woman on a pilgrimage. Kuro’s goal: to find the witch who inflicted a mysterious curse on her. Everywhere she goes, Kuro cuts a dramatic figure, wearing heavy black clothing, a Pilgrim hat, and a custom-sized coffin, which she straps to her back. Though she begins her journey with only a talking bat for a companion, she soon adds two members to her traveling “family”: Nijuku and Sanju, a pair of genetically engineered nekomimi whose creator was brutally murdered.

Kuro’s story is told primarily through four-panel, black-and-white strips, with full-color pages marking the beginning of each chapter. The format imposes a certain rhythm on the material that occasionally makes Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro a little too talky; I found myself wishing that Satoko Kiyuduki had allowed her spiky, expressive artwork to play a more prominent role in the storytelling. But the format also frees her from the constraints of a linear narrative, allowing the story to unfold in a less schematic, more relaxed fashion. The predominant mood is wistful bordering on elegiac; Kuro is always mindful that Nijuku and Sanju are too naive to understand what befell their creator, and worries what will happen to them at the end of their journey. Kuro, too, faces an uncertain future, as her body is slowly consumed by a deadly illness.

The jacket copy promises “all the whimsy of the most memorable fairy tales,” but I think that misses the point — if anything, Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro eschews whimsy in favor of dark complexity; anger and fear inform the behavior of many people Kuro meets in her travels, the threat of violence lurking just below the surface of their interactions. To be sure, the somber mood is lightened by plenty of broad comedy as various characters mistake Kuro for a vampire, a demon, a gravedigger, or — quelle horreur! — a boy. But even these comic moments are tinged with sadness: Kuro often finds herself cast out of towns, branded a witch, a weirdo, or worse, even though the residents are happy to profit from her skills.

Ultimately, it’s this mixture of melancholy and humor that makes Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro such a compelling read. The story never succumbs to mawkishness or easy sentiment, yet at the same time, it dares to tug a little at the heartstrings. Not everyone will find the series’ odd tone to their liking, especially those in search of a breezy riff on Western fairy tales. But for those looking something more thought-provoking — the kind of story that lingers in your mind after you’ve finished reading it — I highly recommend Kuro.

This is a revised version of a review that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/29/08.

SHOULDER-A-COFFIN, KURO, VOLS. 1-2 • BY SATOKO KIYUDUKI • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro

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Don’t be fooled by the kawaii covers: Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro is a melancholy little manga. The story focuses on an androgynous young woman on a pilgrimage. Kuro’s goal: to find the witch who inflicted a mysterious curse on her. Everywhere she goes, Kuro cuts a dramatic figure, wearing heavy black clothing, a Pilgrim hat, and a custom-sized coffin, which she straps to her back. Though she begins her journey with only a talking bat for a companion, she soon adds two members to her traveling “family”: Nijuku and Sanju, a pair of genetically engineered nekomimi whose creator was brutally murdered.

Kuro’s story is told primarily through four-panel, black-and-white strips, with full-color pages marking the beginning of each chapter. The format imposes a certain rhythm on the material that occasionally makes Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro a little too talky; I found myself wishing that Satoko Kiyuduki had allowed her spiky, expressive artwork to play a more prominent role in the storytelling. But the format also frees her from the constraints of a linear narrative, allowing the story to unfold in a less schematic, more relaxed fashion. The predominant mood is wistful bordering on elegiac; Kuro is always mindful that Nijuku and Sanju are too naive to understand what befell their creator, and worries what will happen to them at the end of their journey. Kuro, too, faces an uncertain future, as her body is slowly consumed by a deadly illness.

The jacket copy promises “all the whimsy of the most memorable fairy tales,” but I think that misses the point — if anything, Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro eschews whimsy in favor of dark complexity; anger and fear inform the behavior of many people Kuro meets in her travels, the threat of violence lurking just below the surface of their interactions. To be sure, the somber mood is lightened by plenty of broad comedy as various characters mistake Kuro for a vampire, a demon, a gravedigger, or — quelle horreur! — a boy. But even these comic moments are tinged with sadness: Kuro often finds herself cast out of towns, branded a witch, a weirdo, or worse, even though the residents are happy to profit from her skills.

Ultimately, it’s this mixture of melancholy and humor that makes Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro such a compelling read. The story never succumbs to mawkishness or easy sentiment, yet at the same time, it dares to tug a little at the heartstrings. Not everyone will find the series’ odd tone to their liking, especially those in search of a breezy riff on Western fairy tales. But for those looking something more thought-provoking — the kind of story that lingers in your mind after you’ve finished reading it — I highly recommend Kuro.

This is a revised version of a review that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/29/08.

SHOULDER-A-COFFIN, KURO, VOLS. 1-2 • BY SATOKO KIYUDUKI • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)

PotW: Great reads for a wintery week

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It’s a pretty full week for manga, according to Midtown Comics. So bundle up, pour some cocoa, and take a look at this week’s Picks from the Manga Bookshelf bloggers and special guest Michelle Smith!

From Michelle: Wow, there’s quite a lot coming out this week! I’ll be buying several items on the list—I’ve been waiting for the second volume of Close the Last Door for a long time, and hoarding volumes of Gakuen Alice for probably about as long—but the release that most excites me is the second volume of Yuuki Fujimoto’s The Stellar Six of Gingacho. The first volume was surprisingly charming, and actually made me verklempt in its portrayal of six friends who drifted apart in middle school but reunite to help a neighbor in need. Bonus points for its positive depiction of an overweight character! I’ve been eagerly awaiting this second volume, so its purchase is a no-brainer!

From MJ: I have to agree with Michelle, there’s a lot worth buying this week! Big draws for me include new volumes of Bride of the Water God (Dark Horse), Pandora Hearts (Yen Press), and Michelle’s Pick, The Stellar Six of Gingacho (TOKYOPOP). I think this week, though, my Pick will have to be one that doesn’t appear on Midtown Comics’ list, but whose arrival was announced by the publisher via Twitter, volume thirteen of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack from Vertical, Inc. I got into Black Jack later than most. After receiving a copy of volume ten, I marathoned the series from the beginning to catch up, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Black Jack (like Dororo) is rare among what I’ve read of Tezuka’s work as a series I’d feel comfortable recommending to nearly anyone (teen or older), even as a first comic. It’s immediately compelling, easy to jump into at nearly any point, and though the story and its protagonist can both get quite dark, its episodic structure allows that to be consumed in small doses, to taste.

From David: I’m going to step out of my usual wheelhouse, whatever that is, and pick a yaoi title this week. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of manga in this category that I enjoy; it’s more a case that I tend to have to put titles through a fairly careful vetting process to make sure they eschew some popular plot elements that can sour a yaoi title for me. But based on some Twitter chatter from reliable sources like Kristin Bomba and Danielle Leigh, I’m going to make a point of seeking out Kou Yoneda’s No Touching At All (Digital Manga). According to Danielle, this one can be summarized thusly: “Adults acting like adults fall in love.” And that is pretty much exactly my yaoi wheelhouse. I’m very favorably inclined toward salaryman yaoi.

From Kate: For me, this week’s must-buy title is the eighth volume of Pet Shop of Horrors Tokyo (Tokyopop). The premise is pure comeuppance theater: troubled people seek out the eccentric Count D, who furnishes them with exotic “pets” — usually, a demon or magical creature with shape-shifting abilities — that are always more than the buyer bargained for. What makes these little morality plays work so well is that Matsuri Hino doesn’t just punish her characters for being weak, vain, or foolish; she explores what drove them to seek Count D’s help in the first place. The results are much more nuanced and unpredictable than most stories in the wish-granting-emporium genre, and can be genuinely moving. Best of all, you don’t need any background on Count D to fully appreciate what’s happening; aside from a few perfunctory scenes documenting his run-ins with local authorities, the stories are self-contained.

So readers, what are your picks this week?

LIVES, Vol. 1

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Everything you need to know about LIVES is summed up by the following category tags: “big breasts,” “meteor,” “stranded,” “strategically torn clothing,” and “survival.” (Kudos to the Baka-Updates moderator who felt the need to give “strategically torn clothing” its due as a category. But what, no “hungry predators”?)

Plot-wise, LIVES resembles Battle Royale, Gantz, and King of Thorn in using a catastrophic event — in this case, a meteor shower — to deposit normal people into a hostile environment — here, a dense jungle inhabited by carnivorous monsters. It doesn’t take long for the refugees to discover the particularly nasty secret behind these beasties: they were originally human beings as well, and some can still transform back into their bipedal selves, with no memory of terrorizing their fellow survivors.

Art-wise, Taguchi delivers the goods, with scene after scene of expertly staged carnage. His monsters are perhaps a little too neat, lightbox chimaeras that originated in the pages of National Geographic, but they’re agile and vicious enough to be convincing. His humans also offer balm for tired eyes: the hero, Shingo, has abs that would shame The Situation’s, and the harem of doe-eyed, big-bosomed ladies wear just enough clothing to prevent the story from shading into pornography. (In a hilarious touch, all of the women’s shoes are in immaculate condition, even though their tops and skirts have been reduced to scraps. Paging Imelda Marcos!)

What’s missing is subtext. LIVES is the umpteenth manga to suggest when man lives in a “state of nature” — no rulers, no rules of law — that a “war of all against all” prevails, creating an environment where lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” While other manga-ka have attempted to explore what happens to the human psyche when all social constraints disappear, Masayuki Taguchi focuses exclusively on those consequences that Thomas Hobbes forget to mention in The Leviathan: costume failures, near-rapes, faintly incestuous relationships, and hyper-violent showdowns between monsters and would-be meals. There’s nothing wrong with carnage and cheesecake; I’m all for brainless fun. But when the narrative falls into an all-too-predictable pattern of grope-chase-chomp-regroup in the very first volume, a little subtext goes a lot farther than a cool monster or a torn shirt in making things interesting.

Review copy provided by Tokyopop. Volume one will be released on February 1, 2011.

LIVES, VOL. 1 • BY MASAYUKI TAGUCHI • TOKYOPOP • 196 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

LIVES, Vol. 1

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Everything you need to know about LIVES is summed up by the following category tags: “big breasts,” “meteor,” “stranded,” “strategically torn clothing,” and “survival.” (Kudos to the Baka-Updates moderator who felt the need to give “strategically torn clothing” its due as a category. But what, no “hungry predators”?)

Plot-wise, LIVES resembles Battle Royale, Gantz, and King of Thorn in using a catastrophic event — in this case, a meteor shower — to deposit normal people into a hostile environment — here, a dense jungle inhabited by carnivorous monsters. It doesn’t take long for the refugees to discover the particularly nasty secret behind these beasties: they were originally human beings as well, and some can still transform back into their bipedal selves, with no memory of terrorizing their fellow survivors.

Art-wise, Taguchi delivers the goods, with scene after scene of expertly staged carnage. His monsters are perhaps a little too neat, lightbox chimaeras that originated in the pages of National Geographic, but they’re agile and vicious enough to be convincing. His humans also offer balm for tired eyes: the hero, Shingo, has abs that would shame The Situation’s, and the harem of doe-eyed, big-bosomed ladies wear just enough clothing to prevent the story from shading into pornography. (In a hilarious touch, all of the women’s shoes are in immaculate condition, even though their tops and skirts have been reduced to scraps. Paging Imelda Marcos!)

What’s missing is subtext. LIVES is the umpteenth manga to suggest when man lives in a “state of nature” — no rulers, no rules of law — that a “war of all against all” prevails, creating an environment where lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” While other manga-ka have attempted to explore what happens to the human psyche when all social constraints disappear, Masayuki Taguchi focuses exclusively on those consequences that Thomas Hobbes forget to mention in The Leviathan: costume failures, near-rapes, faintly incestuous relationships, and hyper-violent showdowns between monsters and would-be meals. There’s nothing wrong with carnage and cheesecake; I’m all for brainless fun. But when the narrative falls into an all-too-predictable pattern of grope-chase-chomp-regroup in the very first volume, a little subtext goes a lot farther than a cool monster or a torn shirt in making things interesting.

Review copy provided by Tokyopop. Volume one will be released on February 1, 2011.

LIVES, VOL. 1 • BY MASAYUKI TAGUCHI • TOKYOPOP • 196 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

PotW: Cyborgs, Monsters, & Alchemists (Oh my!)

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It’s pretty scant on the shipping front this week, but the Manga Bookshelf gang has a few Picks to share!

From Kate: Since I don’t love any of this week’s new manga arrivals — and death is not an option — I’m going to cheat and name Mardock Scramble (VIZ) my pick of the week. I’m not a big sci-fi reader, but I’ve enjoyed all the Haikasoru novels I’ve read so far: Dragon Sword and Wind Child, Harmony, The Ouroboros Wave, Rocket Girls, and Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse. The licensing team has done an excellent job of cherry-picking the best speculative fiction coming out of Japan, choosing titles that are both thought-provoking and fun to read. I’m particularly curious about Mardock Scramble because Kodansha will be publishing the manga adaptation later this year. From the summary at the Haikasoru website, Mardock sounds like an entertaining mixture of hard-boiled crime fiction and hard sci-fi, with a strong female protagonist to boot.

From MJ: This week is an easy one for me, since it brings us the newest volume of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist, undeniably my favorite shounen fantasy series and one of my favorite manga series, period. With the series gearing up to climax (this is volume 24 of 27 total), we’re undoubtedly in for some pretty intense drama as Arakawa continues to reveal more of the truth behind her epic tale. One of this series’ greatest strengths has been Arakawa’s long-form storytelling, which, even over the course of 23 volumes, has never let go of its primary thread–our heroes’ quest to recover their original bodies. I, for one, am dying to know where she’s taking them.

You can find links to many of my posts about the series here.

From David: Since it’s a slim week, I’m going to take a chance with my pick and go with the third volume of Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro (Viz). I’ve always thought the art in this series was amazing, but the early going didn’t really grab me the way that other series in the SigIKKI line have. But Sean (A Case Suitable for Treatment) Gaffney has been talking this up on Twitter, and he described it as “the biggest surprise of 2010” and indicated that it gets a lot more layered and interesting as it goes along. So my Pick of the Week is more of a “second chance of the week.”

With so little new manga shipping this week, readers, do you have a Pick?

Manga Artifacts: Hotel Harbour View

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Back in 1990, before anyone had hit on the magic formula for selling manga to American readers, VIZ tried a bold experiment. They released a handful of titles in a prestige format with fancy covers, high-quality paper, and a large trim size, and called them “Viz Spectrum Editions.” Only three manga got the Viz Spectrum treatment: Yu Kinutani’s Shion: Blade of the Minstrel, Yukinobu Hoshino’s Saber Tiger, and Natsuo Sekikawa and Jiro Taniguchi’s Hotel Harbour View. While neither the imprint nor the format survived, these three titles helped pave the way for VIZ’s later efforts to establish its Signature line.

Hotel Harbour View, by far the strongest of the three, is a stylish foray into hard-boiled crime fiction. In the title story, a man patronizes a once-elegant bar in Hong Kong, telling the bartender that he’s waiting for the person who’s supposed to kill him, while in the second story, “A Brief Encounter,” an assassin returns to Paris, where his former associates — including his protege — lie in wait for him.

As editor Fred Burke observes in his afterword, both stories are as much about style and genre as they are about exploring what motivates people to kill. The characters in both stories are deeply concerned with scripting their own lives, of behaving the way hit men and high-class call girls do in the movies. None of them wear simple street clothes; all of them are in costume, wearing gloves and suits and garter belts. (In one scene, for example, an assassin asks a bystander to hand him his hat, even though he lies dying in a pool of blood. “Just don’t feel right without it,” he explains.) Their words, too, are carefully chosen; every conversation has the kind of pointed quality of a Dashiell Hammett script, with characters trading quips and telling well-rehearsed stories about their past. A brief surveillance operation, for example, yields this tersely wonderful exchange between two female assassins:

“She’s French, isn’t she? Parisienne.”
“How can you tell?”
“She looks arrogant and stubborn. The sort who ruins men.”
“He loves her. That’s why he came back to Paris.”
“And how can you tell?”
“I’m a Parisienne, too.”

[As an aside, I should note that Gerard Jones and Matt Thorn’s excellent translation brings Sekikawa’s script to life in English; each character has a distinctive voice, and the dialogue is thoroughly idiomatic.]

The violence has a cinematic flavor as well; Taniguchi’s balletic gunfights call to mind the kind of technically dazzling shoot-outs that became a staple of John Woo’s filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Taniguchi uses many of the same tricks. He follows a bullet’s trajectory from the gun barrel to its point of impact, showing us the victim’s terrified face as the bullet closes in on its target; stages elaborate duels in which passing trains demand split-second timing from the well-armed participants; and shows us a hit gone bad from dozens of different angles. In one the book’s most stylish sequences, we see a gunman’s reflection in a shattered mirror; as the “camera” pulls back from that initial image, we realize that we’re seeing things from the killer’s point of view, not the gunman’s. A dramatic cascade of glass destroys his reflection as he slumps to the floor — a perfect movie ending for a character obsessed with orchestrating his own death.

Like Taniguchi’s other work, there’s a slightly stiff quality to the artwork. His characters are drawn with meticulous attention to detail, yet their faces remain impassive even when bullets fly and old lovers betray them. That detachment can be frustrating in other contexts, but in Hotel Harbour View it registers as sang-froid; the characters’ composure is as essential to their performances as their costumes and studied banter, as each self-consciously fulfills their role in the drama.

Though Hotel Harbour View is out of print, copies are still widely available through online retailers; I ordered mine directly from Amazon. You’ll also find a robust market for second-hand copies; expect to pay between $4.00 and $20.00 for a copy in good to excellent condition.

Manga Artifacts is a monthly feature exploring older, out-of-print manga published in the 1980s and 1990s. For a fuller description of the series’ purpose, see the inaugural column.

HOTEL HARBOUR VIEW • SCRIPT BY NATSUO SEKIKAWA, ART BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • VIZ MEDIA • 94 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Manga Artifacts: Hotel Harbour View

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Back in 1990, before anyone had hit on the magic formula for selling manga to American readers, VIZ tried a bold experiment. They released a handful of titles in a prestige format with fancy covers, high-quality paper, and a large trim size, and called them “Viz Spectrum Editions.” Only three manga got the Viz Spectrum treatment: Yu Kinutani’s Shion: Blade of the Minstrel, Yukinobu Hoshino’s Saber Tiger, and Natsuo Sekikawa and Jiro Taniguchi’s Hotel Harbour View. While neither the imprint nor the format survived, these three titles helped pave the way for VIZ’s later efforts to establish its Signature line.

Hotel Harbour View, by far the strongest of the three, is a stylish foray into hard-boiled crime fiction. In the title story, a man patronizes a once-elegant bar in Hong Kong, telling the bartender that he’s waiting for the person who’s supposed to kill him, while in the second story, “A Brief Encounter,” an assassin returns to Paris, where his former associates — including his protege — lie in wait for him.

As editor Fred Burke observes in his afterword, both stories are as much about style and genre as they are about exploring what motivates people to kill. The characters in both stories are deeply concerned with scripting their own lives, of behaving the way hit men and high-class call girls do in the movies. None of them wear simple street clothes; all of them are in costume, wearing gloves and suits and garter belts. (In one scene, for example, an assassin asks a bystander to hand him his hat, even though he lies dying in a pool of blood. “Just don’t feel right without it,” he explains.) Their words, too, are carefully chosen; every conversation has the kind of pointed quality of a Dashiell Hammett script, with characters trading quips and telling well-rehearsed stories about their past. A brief surveillance operation, for example, yields this tersely wonderful exchange between two female assassins:

“She’s French, isn’t she? Parisienne.”
“How can you tell?”
“She looks arrogant and stubborn. The sort who ruins men.”
“He loves her. That’s why he came back to Paris.”
“And how can you tell?”
“I’m a Parisienne, too.”

[As an aside, I should note that Gerard Jones and Matt Thorn’s excellent translation brings Sekikawa’s script to life in English; each character has a distinctive voice, and the dialogue is thoroughly idiomatic.]

The violence has a cinematic flavor as well; Taniguchi’s balletic gunfights call to mind the kind of technically dazzling shoot-outs that became a staple of John Woo’s filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Taniguchi uses many of the same tricks. He follows a bullet’s trajectory from the gun barrel to its point of impact, showing us the victim’s terrified face as the bullet closes in on its target; stages elaborate duels in which passing trains demand split-second timing from the well-armed participants; and shows us a hit gone bad from dozens of different angles. In one the book’s most stylish sequences, we see a gunman’s reflection in a shattered mirror; as the “camera” pulls back from that initial image, we realize that we’re seeing things from the killer’s point of view, not the gunman’s. A dramatic cascade of glass destroys his reflection as he slumps to the floor — a perfect movie ending for a character obsessed with orchestrating his own death.

Like Taniguchi’s other work, there’s a slightly stiff quality to the artwork. His characters are drawn with meticulous attention to detail, yet their faces remain impassive even when bullets fly and old lovers betray them. That detachment can be frustrating in other contexts, but in Hotel Harbour View it registers as sang-froid; the characters’ composure is as essential to their performances as their costumes and studied banter, as each self-consciously fulfills their role in the drama.

Though Hotel Harbour View is out of print, copies are still widely available through online retailers; I ordered mine directly from Amazon. You’ll also find a robust market for second-hand copies; expect to pay between $4.00 and $20.00 for a copy in good to excellent condition.

Manga Artifacts is a monthly feature exploring older, out-of-print manga published in the 1980s and 1990s. For a fuller description of the series’ purpose, see the inaugural column.

HOTEL HARBOUR VIEW • SCRIPT BY NATSUO SEKIKAWA, ART BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • VIZ MEDIA • 94 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

PotW Showdown: Cross Game vs. InuYasha

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David leads us off this week, in our second group Pick of the Week with the Manga Bookshelf gang & special guest Michelle Smith! This week comes down to a showdown between a new series and a long-running favorite. Who will come out on top?

From David: I’m very happy to go first this week, because I’m fairly sure I won’t be the only person to choose the second volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz), and I don’t want to seem like a copycat. I was so pleasantly surprised by the first multi-volume collection, with its slice-of-life blend of comedy and drama. If the prospect of a story about sports (baseball, in this case) triggers your fight-or-flight instinct, and I would be very much in sympathy if it does, I urge you to try and suppress the response. Adachi is the real deal as a manga-ka: a versatile original who earns laughs and tears with equal facility and surprising subtlety. Come to think of it, I don’t care if I seem like a copycat. The more people who sing this book’s praises, the merrier. Looking at Cross Game‘s inclusion in Deb Aoki’s round-up of the Critics’ Choice: Best Manga of 2010, it seems like the merriment is off to a great start.

From MJ: I expect you’re right, David, though it won’t be me (only because I haven’t read the first volume!), and in fact, it’s a bit of a difficult week for me, with nothing from ComicList piquing my interest, though I did find an exciting item elsewhere. I took a peek at Comicopia’s list where they claim to be expecting the second volume of Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi’s Summit of the Gods from Fanfare-Ponent Mon. The series’ first volume was stunningly beautiful, and despite the fact that it sometimes feels like an illustrated novel rather than a comic (I’ll point to Kate’s review for a thoughtful discussion of the series’ strengths and flaws), it’s definitely a must-read. This volume has been due out for quite a while, so I was surprised to see it on the list. I’ll definitely be looking to pick one up!

From Kate: Cross Game and Summit of the Gods are both on my must-read list, but I’m going with a sentimental favorite this week: InuYasha. The final volume — that’s number 56, for folks who are still keeping track after all these years — arrives in stores on Wednesday. After so many story arcs, villains, and recovered jewel shards, it will be interesting to see how Rumiko Takahashi brings the whole thing to a close. I suspect that many readers have expectations for how and with whom the characters ride off into the sunset, making it a sure bet that someone will be disappointed in the conclusion. (Look for a surge in InuYasha fan-fic in the coming weeks…) I’m confident, however, that Takahashi will deliver a satisfying finale. InuYasha gets kicked around a lot by manga cognescenti– “It’s not as good as Lum or Ranma or Maison Ikkoku,” they insist — but InuYasha represents Takahashi at the top of her game, not least for its terrific cast of characters. There are manga I like more than InuYasha, but there are few fictional characters — in comics, anyway — that have as strong a claim on my loyalty as InuYasha and Sango.

From Michelle: For me it’s a toss-up between Cross Game—the bittersweet first volume of which I truly loved—and the final volume of InuYasha, a series I’ve been following for years. Mitsuru Adachi versus Rumiko Takahashi… who will reign supreme? While I love both equally, I think in the end I’m also going to have to come down on the side of InuYasha. Like Kate, it’s the characters that have earned my loyalty here rather than ingenious plotting—indeed, the series is rather notoriously repetitive—but I am looking forward to the storyline actually coming to a point where the nefarious villain is finally unable to escape. Perhaps the best testament I can make in favor of this series is that, even though it’s 56 volumes long, I can still easily imagine the day when I will undertake a marathon reread and enjoy luxuriating in its comfy goodness.

Readers, what’s your Pick of the Week?

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts–sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts—sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)