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Manga Critic

Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1

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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+)

The 2010 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

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While there’s no shortage of boring or cliche manga available in English — even with fewer titles being released this year — grade-A turkeys are going the way of the dodo. I had so much difficulty compiling this year’s Manga Hall of Shame Nominees, in fact, that I turned to Twitter for help. Some folks named The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan for being dull and incomprehensible; others fingered Saving Life for unsexy fanservice and dopey characters; one person chastised You Higuri for foisting Nighthead Genesis on the world; and one brave soul bucked conventional wisdom by naming AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga as her Worst of 2010. (You can see more reader nominations at #badmanga2010.) The conversation made me laugh, but it also helped me clarify my own thinking about the subject. Common to all five titles on this year’s list is a flagrant disregard for the reader; no matter how interesting the initial premise, these stories derailed quickly, thanks to lousy artwork, disjointed storytelling, and/or a juvenile fixation on body parts and bodily functions.

5. CHE GUEVARA: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY (Penguin)

In the opening pages of Che Guevara: A Manga Biography, the creators promise to reveal the flesh-and-blood person behind the iconic images on t-shirts and posters. The authors never deliver on that promise, however, instead relying heavily on Guevara’s own self-promoting essays for most of their information. That commitment to primary sources might be laudable if the authors made any effort to reveal the inconsistencies in Guevara’s beliefs, but Guevara’s heroism is never in doubt; he’s always portrayed as brave, strong, and capable, even when abandoning his first family or serving in Fidel Castro’s administration. (The authors also gloss over Guevara’s enthusiasm for the Stalinist regime, perhaps because it’s hard to put a positive spin on anyone or anything associated with that period in Soviet history.) More frustrating still is how choppy and uneven the manga is; the authors compress major battles and periods of Guevara’s life into one or two pages, leaving no room for them to explore these events with any nuance. Clumsy character designs and endless talking-head scenes complete the not-so-pretty picture.

4. SCARLET (BLU Manga)

Hiro Madarame may draw achingly pretty manga, but her stories are surprisingly ugly and unpleasant, filled with Tragically Gay Characters and manipulative, shrewish women who drive men to homosexuality. The nadir of this slim anthology is the titular story, which includes a brutal rape scene that’s disturbing both for its sadism (it wouldn’t be out of place in David Fincher’s ultra-gory Seven) and for the speed with which the victim and the attacker reconcile. It’s true that many domestic abuse victims go through cycles of leaving and reuniting with their tormentors, but Madarame presents this act of violence as testament to her characters’ deep attachment to one another, rather than evidence of their pathologically unhealthy relationship. Call me a curmudgeonly old feminist if you must, but romanticizing rape and possessive behavior — no matter what the gender or sexual orientation of the parties involved — just isn’t very sexy. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/31/10

3. PINK INNOCENT (Del Rey)

The title screams soft-core porn, but Pink Innocent is, in fact, G-rated shojo comedy. The story revolves around Kotona, a ditzy rich girl who stalks and smothers Reiji, a befuddled nerd who finds Kotona almost as annoying as readers will. The jokes are profoundly unfunny: Kotona destroys Reiji’s computers, burns down his apartment, and stars in her class production of Romeo and Juliet so that she can woo him. (One shudders to think what she’ll do in future volumes: carpet bomb his home by accident? Run over his brother with a car?) Adding insult to injury is the artwork: it’s sub-par Arina Tanemura, with sparkles on top of sparkles, and a heroine so saucer-eyed she resembles a chibi squid. Unless Orange Planet was a bigger hit than I remembered, it’s hard to fathom what inspired Del Rey to license Pink Innocent; shojo fans deserve better than this dumb, repetitive stinker.

2. “BLACK SUSHI PARTY PIECE” AND “ARIZONA SIZZLER,” FROM AX: AN ALTERNATIVE COLLECTION OF MANGA (Top Shelf)

David Welsh said it best when he declared, “While AX is one of the books I’m happiest to have bought this year, it does contain some seriously bad manga.” Many of the stories in AX push the boundaries of good taste, aesthetic and otherwise, but the best of them — “Puppy Love,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Push-Pin Woman” — are genuinely thought-provoking. Two, however, earn demerits for their sheer pointlessness. The first, “Black Sushi Party Piece,” is a festival of excrement, anuses, and Butt Head-ugly character designs, with no real ambition other than to turn the stomach. The second, “Arizona Sizzler,” features a desert showdown between an irritated young woman and an enormous set of genitals. I have no doubt that in the hands of someone like Terry Gilliam this kind of cock-and-balls story might be funny, but the crudeness of the execution robs “Sizzler” of any potential playfulness; instead, it seems like a dumb joke dragged out to epically unfunny lengths, the manga equivalent of a Benny Hill sketch. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 5/21/10

1. THE QWASER OF STIGMATA (Tokyopop)

The creators of Qwaser of Stigmata have erected a sturdy framework on which to hang boobs and bishonen: their story takes place at a parochial boarding school filled with nubile teens, allowing them to indulge every manner of fetish, from schoolgirls in short skirts to hotties of the cloth. Alas, Hiroyuki Yoshino and Kenetsu Sato’s only novel idea was to substitute Russian Orthodoxy for Catholicism, the go-to religion of manga-ka in search of cool outfits and arcane rituals. The rest of the story is a fever-dream of incoherent fight scenes, topless girls, and… breast feeding. (That’s the source of the characters’ super-strength: breast milk. I’m not making this up. Really.) The central plot, which revolves around a Russian icon, makes even less sense than the fight scenes; I’m not an expert on any form of Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that an observant person would find it offensive. (Or silly.) The saddest part is that an imaginative artist could write a boffo manga about the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a long and rich history, filled with mystics, heretics, and believers so hard core they’d set fire to themselves before accepting small changes to the liturgy. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/11/10

So… I turn the floor over to you: what titles do you think belong in this year’s Manga Hall of Shame?

The 2010 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

by

While there’s no shortage of boring or cliche manga available in English — even with fewer titles being released this year — grade-A turkeys are going the way of the dodo. I had so much difficulty compiling this year’s Manga Hall of Shame Nominees, in fact, that I turned to Twitter for help. Some folks named The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan for being dull and incomprehensible; others fingered Saving Life for unsexy fanservice and dopey characters; one person chastised You Higuri for foisting Nighthead Genesis on the world; and one brave soul bucked conventional wisdom by naming AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga as her Worst of 2010. (You can see more reader nominations at #badmanga2010.) The conversation made me laugh, but it also helped me clarify my own thinking about the subject. Common to all five titles on this year’s list is a flagrant disregard for the reader; no matter how interesting the initial premise, these stories derailed quickly, thanks to lousy artwork, disjointed storytelling, and/or a juvenile fixation on body parts and bodily functions.

5. Che Guevara: A Manga Biography
By Kiyoshi Konno and Chie Shimano • Penguin Books
In the opening pages of Che Guevara: A Manga Biography, the creators promise to reveal the flesh-and-blood person behind the iconic images on t-shirts and posters. The authors never deliver on that promise, however, instead relying heavily on Guevara’s own self-promoting essays for most of their information. That commitment to primary sources might be laudable if the authors made any effort to reveal the inconsistencies in Guevara’s beliefs, but Guevara’s heroism is never in doubt; he’s always portrayed as brave, strong, and capable, even when abandoning his first family or serving in Fidel Castro’s administration. (The authors also gloss over Guevara’s enthusiasm for the Stalinist regime, perhaps because it’s hard to put a positive spin on anyone or anything associated with that period in Soviet history.) More frustrating still is how choppy and uneven the manga is; the authors compress major battles and periods of Guevara’s life into one or two pages, leaving no room for them to explore these events with any nuance. Clumsy character designs and endless talking-head scenes complete the not-so-pretty picture.

4. Scarlet
By Hiro Madarame • BLU Manga
Hiro Madarame may draw achingly pretty manga, but her stories are surprisingly ugly and unpleasant, filled with Tragically Gay Characters and manipulative, shrewish women who drive men to homosexuality. The nadir of this slim anthology is the titular story, which includes a brutal rape scene that’s disturbing both for its sadism (it wouldn’t be out of place in David Fincher’s ultra-gory Seven) and for the speed with which the victim and the attacker reconcile. It’s true that many domestic abuse victims go through cycles of leaving and reuniting with their tormentors, but Madarame presents this act of violence as testament to her characters’ deep attachment to one another, rather than evidence of their pathologically unhealthy relationship. Call me a curmudgeonly old feminist if you must, but romanticizing rape and possessive behavior — no matter what the gender or sexual orientation of the parties involved — just isn’t very sexy. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/31/10

3. Pink Innocent
By Kotori Momoyuki • Del Rey
The title screams soft-core porn, but Pink Innocent is, in fact, G-rated shojo comedy. The story revolves around Kotona, a ditzy rich girl who stalks and smothers Reiji, a befuddled nerd who finds Kotona almost as annoying as readers will. The jokes are profoundly unfunny: Kotona destroys Reiji’s computers, burns down his apartment, and stars in her class production of Romeo and Juliet so that she can woo him. (One shudders to think what she’ll do in future volumes: carpet bomb his home by accident? Run over his brother with a car?) Adding insult to injury is the artwork: it’s sub-par Arina Tanemura, with sparkles on top of sparkles, and a heroine so saucer-eyed she resembles a chibi squid. Unless Orange Planet was a bigger hit than I remembered, it’s hard to fathom what inspired Del Rey to license Pink Innocent; shojo fans deserve better than this dumb, repetitive stinker.

2. “Black Sushi Party Piece” and “Arizona Sizzlet,” AX: An Alternative Collection of Manga
Edited by Sean Michael Wilson • Top Shelf
David Welsh said it best when he declared, “While AX is one of the books I’m happiest to have bought this year, it does contain some seriously bad manga.” Many of the stories in AX push the boundaries of good taste, aesthetic and otherwise, but the best of them — “Puppy Love,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Push-Pin Woman” — are genuinely thought-provoking. Two, however, earn demerits for their sheer pointlessness. The first, “Black Sushi Party Piece,” is a festival of excrement, anuses, and Butt Head-ugly character designs, with no real ambition other than to turn the stomach. The second, “Arizona Sizzler,” features a desert showdown between an irritated young woman and an enormous set of genitals. I have no doubt that in the hands of someone like Terry Gilliam this kind of cock-and-balls story might be funny, but the crudeness of the execution robs “Sizzler” of any potential playfulness; instead, it seems like a dumb joke dragged out to epically unfunny lengths, the manga equivalent of a Benny Hill sketch. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 5/21/10

1. The Qwaser of Stigmata
Story by Hiroyuki Yoshino • Art by Kenetsu Satō • Tokyopop
The creators of Qwaser of Stigmata have erected a sturdy framework on which to hang boobs and bishonen: their story takes place at a parochial boarding school filled with nubile teens, allowing them to indulge every manner of fetish, from schoolgirls in short skirts to hotties of the cloth. Alas, Hiroyuki Yoshino and Kenetsu Sato’s only novel idea was to substitute Russian Orthodoxy for Catholicism, the go-to religion of manga-ka in search of cool outfits and arcane rituals. The rest of the story is a fever-dream of incoherent fight scenes, topless girls, and… breast feeding. (That’s the source of the characters’ super-strength: breast milk. I’m not making this up. Really.) The central plot, which revolves around a Russian icon, makes even less sense than the fight scenes; I’m not an expert on any form of Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that an observant person would find it offensive. (Or silly.) The saddest part is that an imaginative artist could write a boffo manga about the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a long and rich history, filled with mystics, heretics, and believers so hard core they’d set fire to themselves before accepting small changes to the liturgy. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/11/10

So… I turn the floor over to you: what titles do you think belong in this year’s Manga Hall of Shame?

Osamu Tezuka: A Bibliography for English Speakers

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For the English-language reader interested in learning more about Osamu Tezuka, there’s a growing body of scholarship exploring his life and work. Frederik L. Schodt, who was a personal friend of Tezuka’s, has done more than just about anyone to introduce Tezuka’s manga to Western audiences, writing in an accessible style that eschews academic formality but is nonetheless rigorous and well-researched. Schodt reproduced a chapter from Tezuka’s Phoenix in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), paid tribute to Tezuka’s work with an essay in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and devoted an entire book to one of Tezuka’s best-known characters in The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution (2007). Readers who find Schodt’s approach congenial should also investigate Helen McCarthy’s recent book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009); like Schodt, McCarthy is interested in bringing Tezuka’s work to a wider audience of comics fans and moviegoers, rather than subjecting Tezuka’s work to close readings.

Academics, too, have been exploring Tezuka’s work from a variety of perspectives, as numerous articles in The International Journal of Comic Art, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Mechademia attest. Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World-War II Manga (2009) is among the most user-friendly of these recent scholarly tomes; she writes in a clear, unfussy style that provides readers insight into the historical, social, and economic conditions in which Tezuka lived and worked. Readers may also find Philip Brophy’s Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (2007) a helpful bridge between mainstream and academic discourse about Tezuka. Though Marvel of Manga is as much a museum catalog as a scholarly work, Brophy’s contextual essays do a fine job of introducing the different stages of Tezuka’s career, as well as some of the themes that were central to Tezuka’s work.

A word about this bibliography: it isn’t comprehensive, nor is it intended to be. What I’ve done is compile a list of resources that a journalist, college student, or serious comic fan would find helpful in learning more about Tezuka’s life and work. The list is divided into three sections: the first focuses on articles and books about Tezuka, the second on websites, and the third on Tezuka’s manga in translation. Please feel free to suggest resources I have overlooked; this list is meant to be a living document, updated on a regular basis.

ARTICLES AND BOOKS ABOUT TEZUKA

Arnold, Andrew D. “Born Again.” Rev. of Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka. Time 17 July 2004. Web. 21 December 2010.

Bird, Lawrence. “States of Emergency: Urban Space and the Robotic Body in the Metropolis Tales.” Mechademia 3 (2008): 127-48. Print.

Brophy, Philip, ed. Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga. Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007. Print.

Covert, Brian. “Manga, Racism & Tezuka.” Japan Times Weekly 18 April 1992: 1-4. Print.

Eiji, Otsuka. “Disarming Atom: Osamu Tezuka’s Manga at War and Peace.” Trans. Thomas LaMarre. Mechademia 3 (2008): 111-25. Print.

Gravett, Paul. “The Father Storyteller: The Life and Role of Osamu Tezuka, Originator of Story Manga.” Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 34-47. Print.

Inuhiko,  Yomata. “Stigmata in Tezuka Osamu’s Works.” Trans. Hajime Nakatani. Mechademia 3 (2008): 97-109. Print.

Kuwahara, Yasue. “Japanese Culture and Popular Consciousness: Disney’s The Lion King vs. Tezuka’s Jungle Emperor.” Journal of Popular Culture 31.1 (1997): 37-48. Print.

LaMarre, Thomas. “Speciesism, Part II: Tezuka Osamu and the Multispecies Ideal.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 51-85. Print.

Kinsella, Sharon. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Print.

Ma, Sheng-mei. “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia.” Mechademia 4 (2009): 183-96. Print.

MacWilliams, Mark Wheeler. “Japanese Comics and Religion: Osamu Tezuka’s Story of the Buddha.” Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture. Ed. Timothy J. Craig. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. 109-37. Print.

McCarthy, Helen. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. Foreword by Katsuhiro Otomo. New York: Abrams, 2009. Print.

O’Luanaigh, Cian. “Osamu Tezuka: Father of Manga and Scourge of the Medical Establishment.” The Guardian 21 July 2010. Web. 21 December 2010.

Onoda, Natsu. “Drag Prince in Spotlight: Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Osamu Tezuka’s Early Shojo Manga.” International Journal of Comic Art 4.2 (2002): 124-38. Print.

——— . “Tezuka Osamu and the Star System.” International Journal of Comic Art 5.1 (2003): 161-94. Print.

Palmer, Ada. “‘You, God of Manga, Are Cruel!’: Karma and Suffering in the Universe of Osamu Tezuka.” Manga and Philosophy. Ed. Adam Barkman and Joseph Steiff. Chicago: Open Court, 2010. Print.

Patten, Fred. Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews. Foreword by Carl Macek. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2004. Print.

Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Print.

Randall, Bill. “Achieving Godhood in Pen and Ink.” Rev. of Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka. The Comics Journal 246 (2002): 109-13. Print.

——— . “Behold Japan’s God of Manga: An Introduction to the Work of Osamu Tezuka.” The Comics Journal 5 (2005): 46-57. Print.

Schilling, Mark. “Tezuka, Osamu.” The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. Trumbull, CT: Weatherhill, 1997. 263-68. Print.

Schodt, Frederik L. The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007. Print.

——— . “A Tribute to the God of Comics.” Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996. 233-74. Print.

Thorn, Matt. “Tezuka’s Modernism.” Introduction. Adolf: The Half-Aryan. By Osamu Tezuka. Trans. Oniki Yoji. San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1997. 7-11. Print.

WEB RESOURCES

Anthropology of Anime and Manga: Site includes a useful overview of Tezuka’s Phoenix saga, with links to English and Japanese resources.

Osamu Tezuka, Father of Manga: Site provides a biography, timeline, and a brief discussion of Tezuka’s influences.

Tezuka in English: Site maintained by American scholar Ada Palmer; provides a comprehensive list of Tezuka’s work in translation, as well as overview of Tezuka’s star system.

TezukaOsamu.net: Official website of Tezuka Productions, Inc. (Link is to English-language content.) Includes summaries of major works, as well as Japanese-language previews of manga such as The Three-Eyed One, Unico, IL, and New Treasure Island.

Wikipedia entry on Osamu Tezuka. See also the Wikipedia entries on Tezuka’s anime and manga, as well as the Wikipedia entry on Tezuka’s star system. The quality of the entries varies considerably; use in conjunction with other sources.

TEZUKA IN TRANSLATION

Adolf. San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1995-97. 5 volumes.
Apollo’s Song. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Astro Boy. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2002-04. 23 volumes.
Ayako. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010.
Black Jack. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2008-10. 12 volumes, ongoing.
The Book of Human Insects. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2011. [N.B. Announced at New York Comic-Con 2010. Also known as Human Metamorphosis.]
Buddha. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2006-07. 8 volumes.
Crime and Punishment. Tokyo: The Japan Times, Inc., 1990.
Dororo. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2008. 3 volumes.
Lost World. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003.
Metropolis. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003.
MW. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Nextworld. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003. 2 volumes.
Ode to Kirihito. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Phoenix. San Francisco: VIZ Media, LLC, 2004-08. 12 volumes.
Princess Knight. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001. 6 volumes.
Swallowing the Earth. Gardena, CA: Digital Manga Publishing, 2009.

Tezuka: A Bibliography for English Speakers

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For the English-language reader interested in learning more about Osamu Tezuka, there’s a growing body of scholarship exploring his life and work. Frederik L. Schodt, who was a personal friend of Tezuka’s, has done more than just about anyone to introduce Tezuka’s manga to Western audiences, writing in an accessible style that eschews academic formality but is nonetheless rigorous and well-researched. Schodt reproduced a chapter from Tezuka’s Phoenix in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), paid tribute to Tezuka’s work with an essay in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and devoted an entire book to one of Tezuka’s best-known characters in The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution (2007). Readers who find Schodt’s approach congenial should also investigate Helen McCarthy’s recent book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009); like Schodt, McCarthy is interested in bringing Tezuka’s work to a wider audience of comics fans and moviegoers, rather than subjecting Tezuka’s work to close readings.

Academics, too, have been exploring Tezuka’s work from a variety of perspectives, as numerous articles in The International Journal of Comic Art, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Mechademia attest. Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World-War II Manga (2009) is among the most user-friendly of these recent scholarly tomes; she writes in a clear, unfussy style that provides readers insight into the historical, social, and economic conditions in which Tezuka lived and worked. Readers may also find Philip Brophy’s Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (2007) a helpful bridge between mainstream and academic discourse about Tezuka. Though Marvel of Manga is as much a museum catalog as a scholarly work, Brophy’s contextual essays do a fine job of introducing the different stages of Tezuka’s career, as well as some of the themes that were central to Tezuka’s work.

…

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Manga Artifacts: Princess Knight

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What Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946) was to shonen, his Princess Knight (1953-56) was to shojo. Both were long-form adventure stories that employed the kind of camera angles, reaction shots, and action sequences that suggested a movie, rather than an illustrated novel or a comic strip. Neither could be said to be the “first” shonen or shojo manga, but both had a profound influence on the artists who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, offering a new storytelling model for them to emulate.

Princess Knight debuted in Shojo Club magazine in 1953, serialized in three-to-four page installments over a three-year period. The story proved so popular it inspired a radio play, a ballet, and a sequel, Twin Knight (1958-59), which followed the adventures of Princess Sapphire’s children. Ever the tinkerer, Tezuka revisited the story twice in the 1960s: first for Nakayoshi magazine, from 1963-66, and then for Shojo Friend, from 1967-68. Both the Nakayoshi and Shojo Friend versions re-told the original story with new artwork and subtle changes to the cast of characters. While the Nakayoshi version was a certifiable hit, and came to be regarded as the definitive edition of Princess Knight, Tezuka’s fourth go-round with the series was, by the author’s own admission, a commercial flop, an ill-conceived tie-in with an anime version that was airing on Fuji TV at the same time.

The basic outline of the 1953 and 1963 stories is the same: a mischievous angel named Tink gives the unborn Princess Sapphire an extra heart — and a boy’s heart, no less. Before Tink can recover the spare, however, Sapphire is born into the royal family of Goldland, a country in which only men can inherit the throne. Eager to avoid a crisis of succession, Sapphire’s parents raise her as a boy — a fraud that their enemy, Duke Duralmin, reveals just before Sapphire is crowned the new king. Sapphire escapes, then adopts a new, masked persona, using the skills she acquired as a king-in-training — horseback riding, swordsmanship — and the physical strength granted by her male heart to rescue her subjects from Duralmin’s tyranny.

Reading Princess Knight in 2010, it’s impossible to ignore Tezuka’s myriad borrowings. The story is an affectionate pastiche of Christianity, Greek mythology, and European fairy tales, at once utterly derivative and completely fresh in the way it appropriates plot points from “Cinderella,” Hamlet, Dracula, and “Eros and Psyche.” A Disney-esque sensibility smooths over the rough edges of this collage; resourceful mice and talking horses provide both aid to the heroine and comic relief, while the deities bear a strong resemblance to the prancing satyrs and nymphs of Fantasia‘s “Pastoral” interlude. Characters even burst into song, prompting Tezuka to draw several elaborate, full-page spreads that resemble Busby Berkeley routines.

What makes this pastiche especially interesting is the way in which Tezuka’s childhood fascination with the Takarazuka Revue informs his female characters. As Natsu Onoda Power observes in God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga, Tezuka never fully camouflages Sapphire’s female identity; Sapphire adopts male speech patterns and dress, yet retains feminine attributes — a shapely waist, thin eyebrows — when in drag. Neither the reader nor the other characters doubt she is a woman; only Friebe, a beautiful female knight who falls in love with Sapphire, is convinced of Sapphire’s maleness. Like the otoko yaku (male role specialists) of Takarazuka, Sapphire doesn’t impersonate a man so much as embody a feminine ideal of masculinity. Kobayashi Ichizo, founder of the Takarazuka Revue, intuitively understood that female audiences favored such idealized portrayals over verisimilitude. “When a woman performs as a man,” he explained, “she is able to craft an image of a man that is better than a real man, from a woman’s perspective.” (Power, 118)

For young readers, however, the real draw is the story’s mixture of swashbuckling adventure and conventional romance. Sapphire scales walls, dons disguises, duels with her rivals, and escapes from prison several times, yet is still beautiful enough to win the heart of a pirate king and a Prince Charming (no, really — her primary love interest is named Franz Charming), even when she’s posing as a man. It’s an irresistible fantasy: a girl can be brave, strong, and resourceful, and still inspire the kind of devotion normally accorded more passive, conventionally feminine characters. Small wonder Princess Knight beguiled several generations of Japanese girls.

American readers interested in reading Princess Knight have two options. The first is a bilingual edition published by Kodansha in 2001, which reproduces the Nakayoshi version from 1963-66. The small trim size and occasionally colorful translation don’t do the material any favors (“Get away from me, you shitty little cherub!” an evil witch screeches), but the artwork is reproduced very cleanly, making it easy to appreciate Tezuka’s draftsmanship. A number of Japanese booksellers have been offering used copies on eBay; expect to pay anywhere from $7.00 to $30.00 per volume. (I purchased all six volumes through mkbooks2003.) The second is a brief excerpt from the Shojo Club version, which was reproduced in the July 2007 issue of Shojo Beat. For readers who don’t want to commit to buying the bilingual editon, the chapters reproduced in Shojo Beat offer a nice, representative sample of the work, and are accompanied by a helpful contextual essay. Expect to pay $6.00 to $18.00 for a back issue in good condition.

UPDATE, 1/28/11: Vertical, Inc. has just announced that it has licensed the Nakayoshi edition of Princess Knight for the North American market. The series will be published in two installments: volume one will be released on October 4, 2011 and volume two on December 6, 2011. Both volumes will retail for $13.95. Anime News Network has more details. Hat tip to CJ for breaking the news to me!

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.

Manga Artifacts: Princess Knight

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What Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946) was to shonen, his Princess Knight (1953-56) was to shojo. Both were long-form adventure stories that employed the kind of camera angles, reaction shots, and action sequences that suggested a movie, rather than an illustrated novel or a comic strip. Neither could be said to be the “first” shonen or shojo manga, but both had a profound influence on the artists who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, offering a new storytelling model for them to emulate.

Princess Knight debuted in Shojo Club magazine in 1953, serialized in three-to-four page installments over a three-year period. The story proved so popular it inspired a radio play, a ballet, and a sequel, Twin Knight (1958-59), which followed the adventures of Princess Sapphire’s children. Ever the tinkerer, Tezuka revisited the story twice in the 1960s: first for Nakayoshi magazine, from 1963-66, and then for Shojo Friend, from 1967-68. Both the Nakayoshi and Shojo Friend versions re-told the original story with new artwork and subtle changes to the cast of characters. While the Nakayoshi version was a certifiable hit, and came to be regarded as the definitive edition of Princess Knight, Tezuka’s fourth go-round with the series was, by the author’s own admission, a commercial flop, an ill-conceived tie-in with an anime version that was airing on Fuji TV at the same time.

The basic outline of the 1953 and 1963 stories is the same: a mischievous angel named Tink gives the unborn Princess Sapphire an extra heart — and a boy’s heart, no less. Before Tink can recover the spare, however, Sapphire is born into the royal family of Goldland, a country in which only men can inherit the throne. Eager to avoid a crisis of succession, Sapphire’s parents raise her as a boy — a fraud that their enemy, Duke Duralmin, reveals just before Sapphire is crowned the new king. Sapphire escapes, then adopts a new, masked persona, using the skills she acquired as a king-in-training — horseback riding, swordsmanship — and the physical strength granted by her male heart to rescue her subjects from Duralmin’s tyranny.

Reading Princess Knight in 2010, it’s impossible to ignore Tezuka’s myriad borrowings. The story is an affectionate pastiche of Christianity, Greek mythology, and European fairy tales, at once utterly derivative and completely fresh in the way it appropriates plot points from “Cinderella,” Hamlet, Dracula, and “Eros and Psyche.” A Disney-esque sensibility smooths over the rough edges of this collage; resourceful mice and talking horses provide both aid to the heroine and comic relief, while the deities bear a strong resemblance to the prancing satyrs and nymphs of Fantasia‘s “Pastoral” interlude. Characters even burst into song, prompting Tezuka to draw several elaborate, full-page spreads that resemble Busby Berkeley routines.

What makes this pastiche especially interesting is the way in which Tezuka’s childhood fascination with the Takarazuka Revue informs his female characters. As Natsu Onoda Power observes in God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga, Tezuka never fully camouflages Sapphire’s female identity; Sapphire adopts male speech patterns and dress, yet retains feminine attributes — a shapely waist, thin eyebrows — when in drag. Neither the reader nor the other characters doubt she is a woman; only Friebe, a beautiful female knight who falls in love with Sapphire, is convinced of Sapphire’s maleness. Like the otoko yaku (male role specialists) of Takarazuka, Sapphire doesn’t impersonate a man so much as embody a feminine ideal of masculinity. Kobayashi Ichizo, founder of the Takarazuka Revue, intuitively understood that female audiences favored such idealized portrayals over verisimilitude. “When a woman performs as a man,” he explained, “she is able to craft an image of a man that is better than a real man, from a woman’s perspective.” (Power, 118)

For young readers, however, the real draw is the story’s mixture of swashbuckling adventure and conventional romance. Sapphire scales walls, dons disguises, duels with her rivals, and escapes from prison several times, yet is still beautiful enough to win the heart of a pirate king and a Prince Charming (no, really — her primary love interest is named Franz Charming), even when she’s posing as a man. It’s an irresistible fantasy: a girl can be brave, strong, and resourceful, and still inspire the kind of devotion normally accorded more passive, conventionally feminine characters. Small wonder Princess Knight beguiled several generations of Japanese girls.

American readers interested in reading Princess Knight have two options. The first is a bilingual edition published by Kodansha in 2001, which reproduces the Nakayoshi version from 1963-66. The small trim size and occasionally colorful translation don’t do the material any favors (“Get away from me, you shitty little cherub!” an evil witch screeches), but the artwork is reproduced very cleanly, making it easy to appreciate Tezuka’s draftsmanship. A number of Japanese booksellers have been offering used copies on eBay; expect to pay anywhere from $7.00 to $30.00 per volume. (I purchased all six volumes through mkbooks2003.) The second is a brief excerpt from the Shojo Club version, which was reproduced in the July 2007 issue of Shojo Beat. For readers who don’t want to commit to buying the bilingual editon, the chapters reproduced in Shojo Beat offer a nice, representative sample of the work, and are accompanied by a helpful contextual essay. Expect to pay $6.00 to $18.00 for a back issue in good condition.

UPDATE, 1/28/11: Vertical, Inc. has just announced that it has licensed the Nakayoshi edition of Princess Knight for the North American market. The series will be published in two installments: volume one will be released on October 4, 2011 and volume two on December 6, 2011. Both volumes will retail for $13.95. Anime News Network has more details. Hat tip to CJ for breaking the news to me!

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.

Ayako

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Ayako is an odd beast. Structurally, it resembles a Russian realist novel, using a once-powerful family of landowners to embody the political and economic upheaval caused by America’s seven-year occupation of Japan (1945-52). Temperamentally, however, Ayako feels more like a John Frankenheimer movie, with subplots involving a Communist organizer, an assassin who stashes orders in his empty eye socket, and a witness whose family condemns her to lifelong imprisonment in an underground cell. Though Tezuka makes a game effort to reconcile his literary and cinematic influences, the results are uneven: Ayako is powerful, disturbing, and, at times, flat-out ludicrous, yet it lacks the winking self-awareness of MW or the profound humanism of Ode to Kirihito, instead offering an engrossing but not entirely persuasive portrait of a family torn apart by the emergence of a new social order in post-war Japan.

Ayako revolves around the Tenge clan. The patriarch, Sakuemon, is a glutton and a bully, indulging his voracious appetites for food and sex while aggressively policing his family’s behavior. His sons aren’t much better: Ichiro, the eldest, is a manipulative coward who barters his wife for Sakuemon’s loyalty; Jiro, the middle son, is a disgraced war veteran who’s been coerced into spying for the US military; and Shiro, the youngest, is a fierce truth-teller who is slowly corrupted by his family’s secrets.

Two events threaten the Tenge’s equilibrium. The first — a murder — condemns the youngest family member to a dungeon, lest Ayako reveal a key piece of evidence linking a clan member to a murdered political dissident. Though the Tenge women are appalled by the plan, they’re powerless to help; the rest of the family views Ayako as a threat, as she’s both Sakuemon’s daughter and Ichiro, Jiro, and Shiro’s half-sister. The second — a decree from the government — forces the Tenge clan to redistribute their land among tenant farmers. Despite Ichiro’s vigorous protests, the government arrives on the property, intent on razing the structure that has kept Ayako out of public view for more than a decade.

Though the characters’ behavior is more extreme than anything found in Tolstoy or Sholokhov — unless I missed the incest in The Don Flows Home to the Sea — the spirit of Russian realism informs Ayako. Tezuka had already been to the Russian realist well before, loosely adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in 1953. He wasn’t alone in taking inspiration from Russian literature; other Japanese artists — most notably Akira Kurosawa — adapted Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky’s work, too, transplanting the settings from Russia to Japan. (Kurosawa’s Red Beard, borrows liberally from Dosteoveksy’s 1861 novel Humiliated and Insulted; The Idiot and The Lower Depths follow the original source material more faithfully.) It’s not hard to imagine what made these Russian authors so attractive to Japanese artists of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the realists’ work was both grand and intimate, using sympathetic characters to dramatize the toll — physical, economic, and psychological — of social unrest and change.

Of course, the realist approach has a potential pitfall: characters can feel contrived, lacking an identity outside the cause they represent. Ichiro and Jiro, the eldest brothers in Ayako, both have obvious symbolic intent: Ichiro represents the last vestiges of feudal Japan, a landlord in danger of losing his fields, his farmers, and his source of power, while Jiro embodies the complicated relationship between the Japanese and their American overlords, caught between the Japanese desire to restore normalcy and the American desire to refashion Japanese society in its own image. For all their symbolic baggage, Ichiro and Jiro still register as fundamentally human: they’re flawed, inconsistent, and corrupted by what little power they have, yet both are strongly driven to pursue what they believe to be in their best interests.

Ayako, however, is more a receptacle for other characters’ anger and lust than a true individual. She’s an innocent victim who endures over a decade of isolation, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse at Shiro’s hands, emerging from her ordeal with no real beliefs or desires of her own. Her lack of individuality makes her the most transparently symbolic member of the Tenge clan; it’s not much of a stretch to interpret her character as a representation of occupied Japan. That symbolism is underscored by one of the book’s most arresting sequences. In it, we see Ayako writhe and shed her skin like a molting insect, casting aside her girl’s body for a woman’s. The images are stark: Ayako is rendered in white lines on a jet-black background, and her ecstatic expression suggests an erotic awakening — a metaphorical re-enactment of lost innocence during a period of confinement and darkness.

The symbolic intent of Tezuka’s characters is more apparent in Ayako than in some of Tezuka’s other mature works, I think, because Ayako is more  self-consciously literary than MW or Ode to Kirihito. The absence of humor or cartoonishly evil characters — two staples of MW and Kirihito — cuts both ways. On the one hand, Ayako is sobering and adult; we can appreciate the gravity of the characters’ actions because Tezuka doesn’t punctuate serious moments with low comedy; there’s no reprieve from our discomfort with the characters’ behavior, no mustache-twirling villains on whom to pin our disgust. On the other hand, Tezuka has a natural instinct for blending high and low, using pulp genres as vehicles for exploring big questions about human nature. The heightened reality of the stories is fundamental to their success; Tezuka uses his character’s extreme behavior and dramatic physical transformations to tear away masks, to lay bare real hypocrisy, selfishness, and cowardice. That pulpy spirit asserts itself from time to time in Ayako (see “spy who stashes orders in his eye socket,” above), but there isn’t quite enough of it; the thriller elements feel tacked on, rather than fundamental to elucidating Tezuka’s central themes.

Yet Ayako is compelling, in spite of its flaws. It’s a fierce, angry work, at once intensely critical of American efforts to re-engineer Japanese society, and intensely critical of the old Japanese social order, portraying the Tenges as feudal overlords out of step with the modern world. It isn’t Tezuka’s best work, but it’s one of his most ambitious, a sincere and emotionally wrenching attempt to show the lingering effects of World War II on the Japanese psyche. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Vertical, Inc.

AYAKO • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 704 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Ayako

by

Ayako is an odd beast. Structurally, it resembles a Russian realist novel, using a once-powerful family of landowners to embody the political and economic upheaval caused by America’s seven-year occupation of Japan (1945-52). Temperamentally, however, Ayako feels more like a John Frankenheimer movie, with subplots involving a Communist organizer, an assassin who stashes orders in his empty eye socket, and a witness whose family condemns her to lifelong imprisonment in an underground cell. Though Tezuka makes a game effort to reconcile his literary and cinematic influences, the results are uneven: Ayako is powerful, disturbing, and, at times, flat-out ludicrous, yet it lacks the winking self-awareness of MW or the profound humanism of Ode to Kirihito, instead offering an engrossing but not entirely persuasive portrait of a family torn apart by the emergence of a new social order in post-war Japan.

Ayako revolves around the Tenge clan. The patriarch, Sakuemon, is a glutton and a bully, indulging his voracious appetites for food and sex while aggressively policing his family’s behavior. His sons aren’t much better: Ichiro, the eldest, is a manipulative coward who barters his wife for Sakuemon’s loyalty; Jiro, the middle son, is a disgraced war veteran who’s been coerced into spying for the US military; and Shiro, the youngest, is a fierce truth-teller who is slowly corrupted by his family’s secrets.

Two events threaten the Tenge’s equilibrium. The first — a murder — condemns the youngest family member to a dungeon, lest Ayako reveal a key piece of evidence linking a clan member to a murdered political dissident. Though the Tenge women are appalled by the plan, they’re powerless to help; the rest of the family views Ayako as a threat, as she’s both Sakuemon’s daughter and Ichiro, Jiro, and Shiro’s half-sister. The second — a decree from the government — forces the Tenge clan to redistribute their land among tenant farmers. Despite Ichiro’s vigorous protests, the government arrives on the property, intent on razing the structure that has kept Ayako out of public view for more than a decade.

Though the characters’ behavior is more extreme than anything found in Tolstoy or Sholokhov — unless I missed the incest in The Don Flows Home to the Sea — the spirit of Russian realism informs Ayako. Tezuka had already been to the Russian realist well before, loosely adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in 1953. He wasn’t alone in taking inspiration from Russian literature; other Japanese artists — most notably Akira Kurosawa — adapted Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky’s work, too, transplanting the settings from Russia to Japan. (Kurosawa’s Red Beard, borrows liberally from Dosteoveksy’s 1861 novel Humiliated and Insulted; The Idiot and The Lower Depths follow the original source material more faithfully.) It’s not hard to imagine what made these Russian authors so attractive to Japanese artists of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the realists’ work was both grand and intimate, using sympathetic characters to dramatize the toll — physical, economic, and psychological — of social unrest and change.

Of course, the realist approach has a potential pitfall: characters can feel contrived, lacking an identity outside the cause they represent. Ichiro and Jiro, the eldest brothers in Ayako, both have obvious symbolic intent: Ichiro represents the last vestiges of feudal Japan, a landlord in danger of losing his fields, his farmers, and his source of power, while Jiro embodies the complicated relationship between the Japanese and their American overlords, caught between the Japanese desire to restore normalcy and the American desire to refashion Japanese society in its own image. For all their symbolic baggage, Ichiro and Jiro still register as fundamentally human: they’re flawed, inconsistent, and corrupted by what little power they have, yet both are strongly driven to pursue what they believe to be in their best interests.

Ayako, however, is more a receptacle for other characters’ anger and lust than a true individual. She’s an innocent victim who endures over a decade of isolation, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse at Shiro’s hands, emerging from her ordeal with no real beliefs or desires of her own. Her lack of individuality makes her the most transparently symbolic member of the Tenge clan; it’s not much of a stretch to interpret her character as a representation of occupied Japan. That symbolism is underscored by one of the book’s most arresting sequences. In it, we see Ayako writhe and shed her skin like a molting insect, casting aside her girl’s body for a woman’s. The images are stark: Ayako is rendered in white lines on a jet-black background, and her ecstatic expression suggests an erotic awakening — a metaphorical re-enactment of lost innocence during a period of confinement and darkness.

The symbolic intent of Tezuka’s characters is more apparent in Ayako than in some of Tezuka’s other mature works, I think, because Ayako is more  self-consciously literary than MW or Ode to Kirihito. The absence of humor or cartoonishly evil characters — two staples of MW and Kirihito — cuts both ways. On the one hand, Ayako is sobering and adult; we can appreciate the gravity of the characters’ actions because Tezuka doesn’t punctuate serious moments with low comedy; there’s no reprieve from our discomfort with the characters’ behavior, no mustache-twirling villains on whom to pin our disgust. On the other hand, Tezuka has a natural instinct for blending high and low, using pulp genres as vehicles for exploring big questions about human nature. The heightened reality of the stories is fundamental to their success; Tezuka uses his character’s extreme behavior and dramatic physical transformations to tear away masks, to lay bare real hypocrisy, selfishness, and cowardice. That pulpy spirit asserts itself from time to time in Ayako (see “spy who stashes orders in his eye socket,” above), but there isn’t quite enough of it; the thriller elements feel tacked on, rather than fundamental to elucidating Tezuka’s central themes.

Yet Ayako is compelling, in spite of its flaws. It’s a fierce, angry work, at once intensely critical of American efforts to re-engineer Japanese society, and intensely critical of the old Japanese social order, portraying the Tenges as feudal overlords out of step with the modern world. It isn’t Tezuka’s best work, but it’s one of his most ambitious, a sincere and emotionally wrenching attempt to show the lingering effects of World War II on the Japanese psyche. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Vertical, Inc.

AYAKO • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 704 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Black Jack, Vols. 1-2

by

Black Jack practices a different kind of medicine than the earnest physicians on Grey’s Anatomy or ER, taking cases that push the boundary between science and science fiction. In the first two volumes of Black Jack alone, the good doctor tests his surgical mettle by:

  • Performing a brain transplant
  • Separating conjoined twins
  • Operating on a killer whale
  • Operating blind
  • Operating on a man who’s been hit by a bullet train
  • Operating on twelve patients at once… without being sued for medical malpractice.

Osamu Tezuka’s own medical training is evident in the detailed drawings of muscle tissue, livers, hearts, and brains. Yet these images are beautifully integrated into his broad, cartoonish vocabulary, making the surgical scenes pulse with life. These procedures get an additional jolt of energy from the way Tezuka stages them; he brings the same theatricality to the operating room that John Woo does to shoot-outs and hostage crises, with crazy camera angles and unexpected complications that demand split-second decision-making from the hero.

At the same time, however, a more adult sensibility tempers the bravado displays of surgical acumen. Black Jack’s medical interventions cure his patients but seldom yield happy endings. In “The Face Sore,” for example, a man seeks treatment for a condition that contorts his face into a grotesque mask of boils. Jack eventually restores the man’s appearance, only to realize that the organism causing the deformation had a symbiotic relationship with its host; once removed, the host proves even more hideous than his initial appearance suggested. “The Painting Is Dead!” offers a similarly bitter twist, as Jack prolongs a dying artist’s life by transplanting his brain into a healthy man’s body. The artist longs to paint one final work — hence the request for a transplant — but finds himself incapable of realizing his vision until radiation sickness begins corrupting his new body just as it did his old one. Jack may profess to be indifferent to both patients’ suffering, insisting he’s only in it for the money, but that bluster conceals a painful truth: Jack knows all too well that he can’t heal the heart or mind.

The only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for Black Jack was the outdated sexual politics. In “Confluence,” for example, a beautiful young medical student is diagnosed with uterine cancer. Tezuka diagrams her reproductive tract, explaining each organ’s function and describing what will happen to this luckless gal if they’re removed:

As you know, the uterus and ovaries secrete crucial hormones that define a woman’s sex. To have them removed is to quit being a woman. You won’t be able to bear children, of course, and you’ll become unfeminine.

Too bad Tezuka never practiced gynecology; he might have gotten an earful (and a black eye or two) from some of his “unfeminine” patients.

I also found the dynamic between Jack and his sidekick Pinoko, a short, slightly deformed child-woman, similarly troubling. Though Pinoko has the will and libido of an adult, she behaves like a toddler, pouting, wetting herself, running away, and lisping in a babyish voice. She’s mean-spirited and possessive, behaving like a jealous lover whenever Jack mentions other women, even those who are clearly seeking his medical services. These scenes are played for laughs, but have a creepy undercurrent; it’s hard to know if Pinoko is supposed to be a caricature of a housewife or just a vaguely incestuous flourish in an already over-the-top story. Thankfully, these Pygmalion-and-Galatea moments are few and far between, making it easy to bypass them altogether. Don’t skip the story in which Jack first creates Pinoko from a teratoid cystoma, however; it’s actually quite moving, and at odds with the grotesque domestic comedy that follows.

If you’ve never read anything by Tezuka, Black Jack is a great place to begin exploring his work. Tezuka is at his most efficient in this series, distilling novel-length dramas into gripping twenty-page stories. Though Tezuka is often criticized for being too “cartoonish,” his flare for caricature is essential to Black Jack; Tezuka conveys volumes about a character’s past or temperament in a few broad strokes: a low-slung jaw, a furrowed brow, a big belly. That visual economy helps him achieve the right balance between medical shop-talk and kitchen-sink drama without getting bogged down in expository dialogue. The result is a taut, entertaining collection of stories that offer the same mixture of pathos and medical mystery as a typical episode of House, minus the snark and commercials. Highly recommended.

This is a synthesis of two reviews that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 10/26/2008 and 11/4/08. I’ve also reviewed volumes five and eleven here at The Manga Critic.

BLACK JACK, VOLS. 1-2 • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC.

Black Jack, Vols. 1-2

by 9 Comments

Black Jack practices a different kind of medicine than the earnest physicians on Grey’s Anatomy or ER, taking cases that push the boundary between science and science fiction. In the first two volumes of Black Jack alone, the good doctor tests his surgical mettle by:

  • Performing a brain transplant
  • Separating conjoined twins
  • Operating on a killer whale
  • Operating blind
  • Operating on a man who’s been hit by a bullet train
  • Operating on twelve patients at once… without being sued for medical malpractice.

Osamu Tezuka’s own medical training is evident in the detailed drawings of muscle tissue, livers, hearts, and brains. Yet these images are beautifully integrated into his broad, cartoonish vocabulary, making the surgical scenes pulse with life. These procedures get an additional jolt of energy from the way Tezuka stages them; he brings the same theatricality to the operating room that John Woo does to shoot-outs and hostage crises, with crazy camera angles and unexpected complications that demand split-second decision-making from the hero.

At the same time, however, a more adult sensibility tempers the bravado displays of surgical acumen. Black Jack’s medical interventions cure his patients but seldom yield happy endings. In “The Face Sore,” for example, a man seeks treatment for a condition that contorts his face into a grotesque mask of boils. Jack eventually restores the man’s appearance, only to realize that the organism causing the deformation had a symbiotic relationship with its host; once removed, the host proves even more hideous than his initial appearance suggested. “The Painting Is Dead!” offers a similarly bitter twist, as Jack prolongs a dying artist’s life by transplanting his brain into a healthy man’s body. The artist longs to paint one final work — hence the request for a transplant — but finds himself incapable of realizing his vision until radiation sickness begins corrupting his new body just as it did his old one. Jack may profess to be indifferent to both patients’ suffering, insisting he’s only in it for the money, but that bluster conceals a painful truth: Jack knows all too well that he can’t heal the heart or mind.

The only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for Black Jack was the outdated sexual politics. In “Confluence,” for example, a beautiful young medical student is diagnosed with uterine cancer. Tezuka diagrams her reproductive tract, explaining each organ’s function and describing what will happen to this luckless gal if they’re removed:

As you know, the uterus and ovaries secrete crucial hormones that define a woman’s sex. To have them removed is to quit being a woman. You won’t be able to bear children, of course, and you’ll become unfeminine.

Too bad Tezuka never practiced gynecology; he might have gotten an earful (and a black eye or two) from some of his “unfeminine” patients.

I also found the dynamic between Jack and his sidekick Pinoko, a short, slightly deformed child-woman, similarly troubling. Though Pinoko has the will and libido of an adult, she behaves like a toddler, pouting, wetting herself, running away, and lisping in a babyish voice. She’s mean-spirited and possessive, behaving like a jealous lover whenever Jack mentions other women, even those who are clearly seeking his medical services. These scenes are played for laughs, but have a creepy undercurrent; it’s hard to know if Pinoko is supposed to be a caricature of a housewife or just a vaguely incestuous flourish in an already over-the-top story. Thankfully, these Pygmalion-and-Galatea moments are few and far between, making it easy to bypass them altogether. Don’t skip the story in which Jack first creates Pinoko from a teratoid cystoma, however; it’s actually quite moving, and at odds with the grotesque domestic comedy that follows.

If you’ve never read anything by Tezuka, Black Jack is a great place to begin exploring his work. Tezuka is at his most efficient in this series, distilling novel-length dramas into gripping twenty-page stories. Though Tezuka is often criticized for being too “cartoonish,” his flare for caricature is essential to Black Jack; Tezuka conveys volumes about a character’s past or temperament in a few broad strokes: a low-slung jaw, a furrowed brow, a big belly. That visual economy helps him achieve the right balance between medical shop-talk and kitchen-sink drama without getting bogged down in expository dialogue. The result is a taut, entertaining collection of stories that offer the same mixture of pathos and medical mystery as a typical episode of House, minus the snark and commercials. Highly recommended.

This is a synthesis of two reviews that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 10/26/2008 and 11/4/08. I’ve also reviewed volumes five and eleven here at The Manga Critic.

BLACK JACK, VOLS. 1-2 • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC.

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!

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My Dinner With Fumi: that’s what I would have called the English-language edition of Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! The fifteen stories contained within this slim volume celebrate good food and good conversation, documenting Yoshinaga’s interactions with friends, assistants, and fellow artists at real restaurants around Tokyo. No culinary stone goes unturned, as Yoshinaga — or, as her fictional alter ego is called, Y-naga — visits a Korean restaurant, a French bistro, an Italian trattoria, a sushi joint, an all-you-can-eat dim sum buffet, and a bakery famous for its bagels. (Bagels in Tokyo? Call me a recovering New Yorker, but that sounds horribly wrong, especially since Y-naga views the absence of a hole in a the middle as a sign of quality.)

I can think of few mediums less suited to showcasing food than manga, but Yoshinaga’s drawings of steaming dumplings, seafood stews, and sashimi are convincing, despite the absence of color. She renders the food’s textures and shapes in meticulous detail, in the process suggesting the care with which each item was prepared. Her characters’ obvious enjoyment of the meals also helps sell the conceit; watching them rhapsodize over rare ingredients or extol the virtues of dessert makes the reader feel like another member of the party.

Much as I enjoyed the foodie shop-talk, what really sold me on Not Love But Delicious Foods was Yoshinaga’s willingness to poke fun at herself. Y-naga is a sartorial disaster, wearing a frumpy headband, thick glasses, and a scowl as she toils over her comics; only the prospect of a restaurant meal can persuade her to trade her sweatpants for a dress and to comb her hair. Once transformed, however, Y-naga is just as uncouth as her work attire would suggest, spilling copious amounts of food and wine on herself, talking with her mouth full, and flirting aggressively with a handsome dinner companion after drinking too much wine. Yet Y-naga’s dinner conversations reveal that she isn’t a buffoon; she’s surprisingly self-aware, rejecting one potential boyfriend because he’s indifferent to food (he doesn’t like to talk about it the way she does), farming out an incompetent assistant to other artists so that he can improve his skills, and apologizing profusely to a gay friend for “paying my rent by drawing manga with gay themes,” even though her books contain “no real gay themes.”

And that, I think, is the real strength of Not Love But Delicious Foods: the people remain central to the story, even though the Tokyo restaurant scene is the ostensible subject of the manga. As the characters chatter enthusiastically about what they’re eating, we realize that Yoshinaga’s real objective is showing us the important role that food plays in bringing people together, drawing them out, and cementing friendships. It’s a sentiment that’s expressed throughout the manga, as characters find common ground in their mutual enthusiasm for creme brulee and osso bucco. One contentious conversation even prompts the omniscient narrator to praise good food for its diplomatic value; in Yoshinaga’s world, detente is just a dish away. “But through the power of skirt steak, their hearts resumed beating as one,” the narrator observes. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! will be released on December 21, 2010.

NOT LOVE BUT DELICIOUS FOODS MAKE ME SO HAPPY! • BY FUMI YOSHINAGA • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!

by

My Dinner With Fumi: that’s what I would have called the English-language edition of Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! The fifteen stories contained within this slim volume celebrate good food and good conversation, documenting Yoshinaga’s interactions with friends, assistants, and fellow artists at real restaurants around Tokyo. No culinary stone goes unturned, as Yoshinaga — or, as her fictional alter ego is called, Y-naga — visits a Korean restaurant, a French bistro, an Italian trattoria, a sushi joint, an all-you-can-eat dim sum buffet, and a bakery famous for its bagels. (Bagels in Tokyo? Call me a recovering New Yorker, but that sounds horribly wrong, especially since Y-naga views the absence of a hole in a the middle as a sign of quality.)

I can think of few mediums less suited to showcasing food than manga, but Yoshinaga’s drawings of steaming dumplings, seafood stews, and sashimi are convincing, despite the absence of color. She renders the food’s textures and shapes in meticulous detail, in the process suggesting the care with which each item was prepared. Her characters’ obvious enjoyment of the meals also helps sell the conceit; watching them rhapsodize over rare ingredients or extol the virtues of dessert makes the reader feel like another member of the party.

Much as I enjoyed the foodie shop-talk, what really sold me on Not Love But Delicious Foods was Yoshinaga’s willingness to poke fun at herself. Y-naga is a sartorial disaster, wearing a frumpy headband, thick glasses, and a scowl as she toils over her comics; only the prospect of a restaurant meal can persuade her to trade her sweatpants for a dress and to comb her hair. Once transformed, however, Y-naga is just as uncouth as her work attire would suggest, spilling copious amounts of food and wine on herself, talking with her mouth full, and flirting aggressively with a handsome dinner companion after drinking too much wine. Yet Y-naga’s dinner conversations reveal that she isn’t a buffoon; she’s surprisingly self-aware, rejecting one potential boyfriend because he’s indifferent to food (he doesn’t like to talk about it the way she does), farming out an incompetent assistant to other artists so that he can improve his skills, and apologizing profusely to a gay friend for “paying my rent by drawing manga with gay themes,” even though her books contain “no real gay themes.”

And that, I think, is the real strength of Not Love But Delicious Foods: the people remain central to the story, even though the Tokyo restaurant scene is the ostensible subject of the manga. As the characters chatter enthusiastically about what they’re eating, we realize that Yoshinaga’s real objective is showing us the important role that food plays in bringing people together, drawing them out, and cementing friendships. It’s a sentiment that’s expressed throughout the manga, as characters find common ground in their mutual enthusiasm for creme brulee and osso bucco. One contentious conversation even prompts the omniscient narrator to praise good food for its diplomatic value; in Yoshinaga’s world, detente is just a dish away. “But through the power of skirt steak, their hearts resumed beating as one,” the narrator observes. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! will be released on December 21, 2010.

NOT LOVE BUT DELICIOUS FOODS MAKE ME SO HAPPY! • BY FUMI YOSHINAGA • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Bunny Drop, Vols. 1-2

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Fictional bachelor dads come in two flavors. The first is easily flummoxed by diapers, sippy cups, tantrums, and stomach aches, reacting in abject horror to bodily functions and extreme emotions (see Three Men and a Baby), while the second behaves more like a stand-up comedian than an engaged parent, commenting wryly on his charges’ behavior without doing much to guide or correct them (see Yotsuba&!). Daikichi, the singleton hero of Bunny Drop, is a pleasant corrective to these familiar stereotypes: he’s a sensitive, well-meaning thirty-year-old who steps up to the plate when his grandfather dies, leaving behind an illegitimate six-year-old daughter.

What begins as an impulsive decision — Daikichi is offended by his family’s reluctance to accept responsibility for gramps’ kid — quickly evolves into a serious commitment. Daikichi is humble enough to realize his limitations as a father, enlisting help from co-workers, friends, and family members in his efforts to find day care for Rin and impose some structure on her life, even though he isn’t entirely certain what kind of boundaries and routines are appropriate for a six-year-old. Yumi Unita wrings some humor out of Daikichi’s attempt to understand Rin’s unique point of view, but steers clear of easy laughs and easy victories. The early moments of rapport between Daikichi and Rin feel earned, not contrived, while Rin’s quirks reflect the bizarre circumstances of her early upbringing, as well as her deep fear of being abandoned.

Though Unita’s character designs are highly stylized and her panels free of busy detail, the spare, unfussy quality of her artwork is deceptive; her seemingly simple faces and bodies actually speak volumes about each character’s personality and history. The few lines on Daikichi’s face, for example, not only establish his age and his homeliness, they also give readers a window into his relationship with Rin. We see his growing attachment to the girl through the softening of his brow and jawline, and note the tension in his face when trying to negotiate new office hours for himself. (His co-workers are puzzled and angered by Daikichi’s decision to take care of Rin. “Just because it’s a relative’s child,” one underling complains, “why must you be the sacrifice, Kawachi-San?”)

With Rin, Unita focuses as much on the character’s body language as on her facial expressions. In the first volume, Rin appears closed off from everyone: rounded shoulders, downcast eyes, pursed lips, and folded arms. As Rin begins to trust Daikichi, however, her face and posture change: her limbs unfurl and her eyes brighten, and her repertory of faces soon includes pouty defiance and bravado. That same attention to detail extends to supporting cast members as well. Rin’s mother, whom Daikichi meets in volume two, comes across as impossibly young, swimming in an outfit too big for her slight frame, and fidgeting throughout her conversation with Daikichi, twisting her hair and avoiding eye contact in the manner of a sullen teenager.

The introduction of Rin’s mother suggests that future installments of Bunny Drop will continue to focus complex issues — what constitutes a family? who has the right to call himself a parent? what’s in the best interest of a damaged child? — in lieu of sitcom ones. (See sippy cups, bad dreams, and the stomach flu, above.) That Unita can take such potentially overwrought material and fashion a thoughtful, funny, and honest look at child-rearing is testament to her skill as a storyteller and — one suspects — as a parent. Easily one of 2010’s best new titles.

BUNNY DROP, VOLS. 1-2 • BY YUMI UNITA • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Bunny Drop, Vols. 1-2

by

Fictional bachelor dads come in two flavors. The first is easily flummoxed by diapers, sippy cups, tantrums, and stomach aches, reacting in abject horror to bodily functions and extreme emotions (see Three Men and a Baby), while the second behaves more like a stand-up comedian than an engaged parent, commenting wryly on his charges’ behavior without doing much to guide or correct them (see Yotsuba&!). Daikichi, the singleton hero of Bunny Drop, is a pleasant corrective to these familiar stereotypes: he’s a sensitive, well-meaning thirty-year-old who steps up to the plate when his grandfather dies, leaving behind an illegitimate six-year-old daughter.

What begins as an impulsive decision — Daikichi is offended by his family’s reluctance to accept responsibility for gramps’ kid — quickly evolves into a serious commitment. Daikichi is humble enough to realize his limitations as a father, enlisting help from co-workers, friends, and family members in his efforts to find day care for Rin and impose some structure on her life, even though he isn’t entirely certain what kind of boundaries and routines are appropriate for a six-year-old. Yumi Unita wrings some humor out of Daikichi’s attempt to understand Rin’s unique point of view, but steers clear of easy laughs and easy victories. The early moments of rapport between Daikichi and Rin feel earned, not contrived, while Rin’s quirks reflect the bizarre circumstances of her early upbringing, as well as her deep fear of being abandoned.

Though Unita’s character designs are highly stylized and her panels free of busy detail, the spare, unfussy quality of her artwork is deceptive; her seemingly simple faces and bodies actually speak volumes about each character’s personality and history. The few lines on Daikichi’s face, for example, not only establish his age and his homeliness, they also give readers a window into his relationship with Rin. We see his growing attachment to the girl through the softening of his brow and jawline, and note the tension in his face when trying to negotiate new office hours for himself. (His co-workers are puzzled and angered by Daikichi’s decision to take care of Rin. “Just because it’s a relative’s child,” one underling complains, “why must you be the sacrifice, Kawachi-San?”)

With Rin, Unita focuses as much on the character’s body language as on her facial expressions. In the first volume, Rin appears closed off from everyone: rounded shoulders, downcast eyes, pursed lips, and folded arms. As Rin begins to trust Daikichi, however, her face and posture change: her limbs unfurl and her eyes brighten, and her repertory of faces soon includes pouty defiance and bravado. That same attention to detail extends to supporting cast members as well. Rin’s mother, whom Daikichi meets in volume two, comes across as impossibly young, swimming in an outfit too big for her slight frame, and fidgeting throughout her conversation with Daikichi, twisting her hair and avoiding eye contact in the manner of a sullen teenager.

The introduction of Rin’s mother suggests that future installments of Bunny Drop will continue to focus complex issues — what constitutes a family? who has the right to call himself a parent? what’s in the best interest of a damaged child? — in lieu of sitcom ones. (See sippy cups, bad dreams, and the stomach flu, above.) That Unita can take such potentially overwrought material and fashion a thoughtful, funny, and honest look at child-rearing is testament to her skill as a storyteller and — one suspects — as a parent. Easily one of 2010’s best new titles.

BUNNY DROP, VOLS. 1-2 • BY YUMI UNITA • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)