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Amnesia Labyrinth, Vol. 1

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In public, Souji Kushiki leads a charmed life: he’s wealthy and handsome, popular with girls, smarter than his classmates, and faster than anyone on the track team. In private, Souji lives under a dark cloud: his older brother disappeared, a possible victim of foul play, while his sisters paw and flirt with him like Aphrodite and Hera competing for Paris’ affections. Souji’s private and public lives collide when a family emergency requires him to return home from boarding school. Souji’s new school turns out to be Murder High: the school’s top student, best athlete, and council president have all been brutally killed, and the evidence suggests that someone in the Kushiki household is responsible.

For a manga that features incest, murder, and at least one character with a split personality, Amnesia Labyrinth is awfully dull, plodding from scene to scene with little sense of urgency. Part of the problem lies with the source material; as writer Nagaru Tanigawa explains in the afterword to volume one, Amnesia Labyrinth was “based on a story that, while it didn’t have enough to become a full-fledged novel, had been kicking around in my head for years.” He admitted that he had to “dismantle” his original idea and “reinvent the characters”; small wonder that the published version was, by his own admission, filled with “lazy, phantom passages,” vestiges of an earlier story idea.

Those “phantom passages” crop up repeatedly throughout the manga, especially when Souji interacts with his sisters. In one excruciatingly pointless scene, Souji watches younger sis Harumi eat a popsicle, a wordless moment that serves no dramatic purpose other than to reinforce the idea that Harumi is more demure than sibling rivals Youko and Saki. Other scenes go on too long; in chapter one, for example, Tanigawa makes one of his female characters recite Souji’s entire CV in comic detail. (“Your grades… they’re among the top in the nation,” Sasai declares. “You put everyone to shame on Sports Day. You weren’t even on the track team, but you still cleaned up in the races.”)

That expository soliloquy points to one of Amnesia Labyrinth‘s other problems: Souji. Though we learn a lot about him from other characters, we never see Souji do anything that warrants their high esteem; it’s hard to imagine why his three sisters are so keen to bed him, as he seems like a rather ordinary teen, passive in attitude and behavior. The only moments in which we get a glimpse of his true personality are when he interacts with Sasai, a pushy classmate from his new school. She teases and flatters Souji, trying to provoke a response, and when that strategy fails, engages him in a semi-philosophical conversation about death. Their conversation might be trivial from an adult point of view, but from a teenage perspective, it feels right, two young people trying to make a terrible abstraction seem less scary.

Souji’s sisters are equally problematic. They’re a harem of types, rather than three distinctive characters: Youko, Souji’s full sister, is crazy and wears a kimono; Harumi, Souji’s stepsister, is the embodiment of moe, blushing and stammering around Souji; and Saki, Souji’s half sister, is a fetish object, cheerfully trading a maid’s outfit for a school uniform. The girls’ sexual aggression isn’t beyond the realm of possibility; one might plausibly infer that their gamesmanship and flirtation are an attempt to establish a pecking order. But the scenes lack emotion or context, registering more as cheap titillation — hey, Souji’s such a stud that even his sisters want him! — than an essential element of the plot.

The one bright spot in this otherwise lackluster affair is the art. Using clean, precise linework, Natsumi Kohane renders each setting in careful detail, drawing a sharp distinction between the Kushiki’s isolated rural home and the school’s bustling urban neighborhood. There’s a lovely — if unnecessary — sequence of panels showing us what kind of flowers grow in the Kushiki’s garden, thus establishing the time of year and suggesting the home’s claustrophobic, hothouse atmosphere. (It’s a bit like finding a tribute to Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematography embedded in a Vin Diesel flick.) Even the fanservice is handled tastefully; the female characters have plausible, pleasing body shapes that demonstrate a firm grasp of basic anatomy. There’s some brief nudity, but we’re spared the panty shots and boob collisions typical of harem manga.

I’m hesitant to pan Amnesia Labyrinth, as I know I’m not its target audience. Souji is clearly intended to be a surrogate for teenage boys who fantasize about being brilliant, athletic, and irresistible to girls without the slightest effort. For readers outside this demographic, however, the series’ main draw — the mystery — is too underdeveloped to be interesting, and the characterizations too thin to inspire sympathy for or identification with any of the cast.

Review copy provided by Seven Seas. Volume one will be released on February 28, 2011.

AMNESIA LABYRINTH, VOL. 1 • STORY BY NAGARU TANIGAWA, ART BY NATSUMI KOHANE, CHARACTER DESIGNS BY HINATA TAKEDA • SEVEN SEAS • 194 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

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+)

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+)

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

by

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+)

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

by

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+)

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

by

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+)

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

by

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: Gun Blaze West

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Let me begin this review with a disclaimer: Ken Burns would not approve of the historical liberties taken by Gun Blaze West creator Nobuhiro Watsuki. The dialogue, for example: the characters speak in a distinctly modern patois, filled with phrases never uttered by Sitting Bull or General Custer. The scenery, for another: verdant Eastern forests abut rugged desert canyons, even though the story begins in Illinois. (I particularly liked Watsuki’s rendering of Saint Louis as a kind of Budapest on the Mississippi, complete with majestic buildings.) Even the saloon names feel a little off-kilter, as one group of outlaws patronize a joint called Bella Donna. Such incongruities may offend Mr. Burns, but they’re just part of this boisterous series’ charm. (Did I mention the knife-throwing samurai girl? Oh, Mr. Burns, the horror!)

Gun Blaze West focuses on Viu Bannes, a ten-year-old boy who dreams of visiting Gun Blaze West, a mythical city populated by the world’s greatest gunslingers. (On the map, it appears to be located in Seattle, making me wonder if Gun Blaze West is, in fact, populated by the West’s most caffeinated gunslingers.) When a down-on-his-luck cowboy wanders into town, Viu pesters him for shooting lessons. Marcus reluctantly agrees to show Viu the gunslinging ropes, but before Viu can complete his training, the notorious Kenbrown gang arrives in Winston Town, terrorizing the citizens and threatening Viu’s older sister. Viu and Marcus’s standoff with the Kenbrown gang ends with an unexpected turn of events — one that sets the stage for Viu’s subsequent cross-country odyssey.

As in many shonen adventure series, the hero is the least interesting member of the cast. Viu seems to have been ordered straight from the SJ catalog: he’s fast, strong, and so single-minded in pursuit of his dreams that he often comes across as stupid. He also spends a lot of time declaring that he’ll “do his best” and extolling the value of friendship — two other perennial Shonen Jump themes.

In spite of the numerous capitulations to formula, however, Gun Blaze West is one of the most enjoyable shonen titles that VIZ has published. The Western setting proves a welcome change of pace from feudal Japan, modern-day Tokyo, and fantasy realms where teens go mano-a-mano with demons and undead souls. Though the characters possess exaggerated skill and strength, there’s nothing supernatural about Viu and his friends; they come by their talents honestly, through practice, hard work, and mistakes. The story, too, proves surprisingly adult at times, exploring the consequences of violence and rash behavior more realistically than many titles in the Shonen Jump canon.

What really makes Gun Blaze West tick, however, is its playful intermingling of shonen and Western tropes. Gun Blaze West actually feels like a Western, minus some of the obvious anachronisms and geographical gaffes. Marcus is a classic oater type, the gunslinger who’s developed a strong distaste for violence; he’s reluctant to participate in a shoot-out of any kind, adopting a foolish persona to camouflage his skill. When the bullets start flying — and there several lengthy gun battles sprinkled throughout the series — the tone shifts dramatically to underscore Marcus’ abhorrence of fighting. The supporting cast, too, is filled with familiar Wild West archetypes: salty saloon keepers, feisty young women, straight-arrow lawmen, sadistic villains, and traveling circus performers. Even the plots stick closely to the John Ford playbook, whether a small town is under siege from criminals or a local business owner is being harassed by a rival’s private army of thugs.

If you’re a fan of Buso Renkin or Rurouni Kenshin, you know what to expect from Watsuki’s art: dynamic fight scenes, villains with memorable mugs, and nonstop sight gags. The art’s relentless, antic quality wears a little thin towards the end of the series; I found myself wishing that Watsuki would pause to savor the landscape or linger at the sight of a lonely gunslinger’s tombstone instead of uncorking another fart joke or chase scene. Yet for all the artwork’s implied dynamism, the images themselves are never too busy; like Eiichiro Oda and Akira Toriyama, Watsuki relies primarily on lines and evocative shapes to convey the physicality of the people and objects in his stories, rather than heavy patches of screentone. Watsuki isn’t quite Oda or Toriyama’s peer when it comes to backgrounds and peripheral characters — his repertory of towns and bit players is more limited — but his pages exude the same boisterous energy as theirs do.

Best of all, Gun Blaze West is short, clocking in at just three volumes. Given how many shonen titles overstay their welcome with repetitive, drawn-out story arcs, that kind of brevity is admirable; that Gun Blaze West finishes on a high note makes its brevity seem like a stroke of creative genius.

This is an expanded version of a review that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 3/31/08.

GUN BLAZE WEST, VOLS. 1-3 • BY NOBUHIRO WATSUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1

by

A poor man’s Dawn of the Dead — that’s how I’d describe Highschool of the Dead, a slick, violent zombie story that borrows shamelessly from the George Romero canon. Whether that’s a good thing depends a lot on your relationship with Romero. If you thought Dawn of the Dead was a sly poke at American society — its consumerism, class divisions, and latent racism — Daisuke Sato and Shouji Sato’s manga will seem awfully thin, as the authors are more concerned with dishing out panty shots than revealing how threadbare the social fabric really is. If you found Romero’s film unnecessarily burdened with subtext, however, you might just cotton to the Satos’ ultra-violent update.

As the title implies, the story begins at an ordinary high school in Tokyo. When the staff contract a mysterious disease that transforms them into zombies, they wreak havoc, infecting hundreds of other people as they chomp, rend, and tear their way through campus. A small band of students take refuge on the roof, hoping for a helicopter rescue. What they discover, however, is that the entire city has descended into chaos, leaving them little choice than to find a safer place to wait out the crisis.

From a narrative point of view, Highschool of the Dead follows the zombie playbook to the letter. The zombies are slow and shambling; the the story takes place in a closed environment where the zombies’ sheer numbers give them a decided advantage; and the characters can barely stand each other, setting aside their mutual contempt only for the zombie-fighting cause. But while Romero made the most of his film’s shopping mall setting, the Satos treat their high school’s corridors and classrooms as just another indoor space filled with convenient weapons. (Call me crazy, but I don’t remember nail guns lying around the Newton North science labs.) The fight scenes are choppy and poorly staged, giving little indication of how the characters are moving through the space or where, exactly, they are in relation to the school’s main entrance. Even the violence-porn flourishes lack imagination: zombies die by baseball bat, power drill, broom handle, sword, and fire hose, but none of the characters improvises an interesting weapon out of something unique to the school.

The script is as predictable and clumsy as the fight scenes; the characters speak in exposition-heavy soundbites that bear little resemble to real conversation. (Sample: “Rumor has it that your childhood girlfriend ended up in your class when she stayed back and is going out with Igou now, right?”) Daisuke Sato assigns each character a few defining personality traits, raising the possibility that the characters’ economic and social disparities might inform the way they interact. The characterizations are so meager and inconsistent, however, that it’s tough to remember who’s who; I learned more from reading the Wikipedia article on Highschool of the Dead than from the manga itself, never a good sign when the characters, in fact, do have important backstories that shape their opinions of one another.

The biggest problem with Highschool of the Dead is its relentless commitment to cheesecake. The Satos work fanservice into as many scenes as possible, taking full advantage of every stairwell, fight, fall, and female death to flash derrieres and panties; only an episode of Strike Witches has more up-skirt imagery. Adding insult to injury is Shouji Sato’s willful disregard for basic female anatomy. Several of the female characters’ bust lines are so monstrously distended that it would be impossible for the characters to actually stand up and walk in real life, let alone fight zombies. (Hint to aspiring manga artists: large breasts do not look like grossly misshapen lemons or balloon animals.) I realize that costume failures and nubile girls are a staple of horror movies, but when the cheesecake is so poorly done, it’s hard to imagine who would find it arousing; the Satos could take a few tips from Robert Rodriguez on how to incorporate plausible, sexy women into a monster flick.

And when the scariest thing about a zombie story is the way the female characters’ breasts are drawn, well… I’d say the creators have fallen down on the job. The bottom line: unless you’re a die-hard zombie fan or panty-shot connoisseur, you’re better off seeking undead thrills elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volume one of Highschool of the Dead will go on sale January 25, 2011.

HIGHSCHOOL OF THE DEAD, VOL. 1 • STORY BY DAISUKE SATO, ART BY SHOUJI SATO • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)