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The Manga Review, 10/28/22

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Over the last year, The Comics Journal has been translating essays by prolific manga critic Natsume Fusanosuke. The topics have run the gamut from Taiyo Matsumoto’s distinctive visual style to the enduring appeal of Sazae-san and Rumiko Takahashi’s role in bringing romance to shonen manga. The latest installment focuses on Miyaya Kazuhiko, a key figure in the gekiga movement who’s not particularly well known to Western readers. In their helpful introduction, translators John Holt and Teppei Fukuda compare Natsume’s essay to Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s A Drifting Life, arguing that both Yoshihiro and Natsume write their “autobiograph[ies] as a history of gekiga. For Natsume, Miyaya’s gekiga form the pivotal ‘chapters’ in his own life as a ‘manga youth’ (manga seinen), coming of age in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.” That’s a helpful way of understanding the essay’s mixture of self-reflection and analysis; Natsume uses his personal experiences to show the reader what Miyaya’s work meant to Japanese readers during a period of immense social, cultural, and technological change.

NEWS AND VIEWS

Seven Seas announced that it will be publishing LUPIN III (Lupin the Third): Thick as Thieves – Classic Manga Collection, “a curated collection of some of Monkey Punch’s best stories and chapters of Lupin III from throughout the classic manga’s history.” The book will be available in digital and hardcover editions next summer. [Seven Seas]

If you missed the first issue of Glaeolia, fear not: Glacier Bay Books is currently raising money for a reprint. (N.B. The crowdfundr page is not yet accepting pledges; the site should go live this weekend.) [Glacier Bay Books]

Jocelyne Allen sings the praises of Japanese SF Comics, a collection of sci-fi stories by Keiko Takamiya, Osamu Tezuka, and Junko Sasaki. Someone license this, please! [Brain vs. Book]

Found on Twitter: Kiuchi Niboro’s manga memoir about his time in a Soviet POW camp. It’s a fascinating look at a forgotten chapter of World War II history. [tara_chara]

What does Space Brothers have in common with M*A*S*H? The Mangasplainers are big fans of both, and divide their latest episode between a discussion of Chuya Koyama’s sci-fi drama and a discussion of the beloved seventies sitcom. [Mangasplaining… er, M*A*S*Hsplaining]

Tom and Joe, a.k.a. the Anime Sickos, sit down with one of Twitter’s most popular manga influencers, Minovsky Article. [Anime Sickos]

The Manga Machinations crew dedicate their latest podcast to Franken Fran, Wonderland, and Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation. [Manga Machinations]

Scholar Kathryn Hemmann explores the relationship between dojinshi and Western zine culture, drawing on their own experiences “both as an indie zine maker and as someone who has participated in big anthology fanzines.” [WWAC]

REVIEWS

In keeping with the spirit of Halloween, this week’s featured review analyzes Junji Ito’s Black Paradox, just out from VIZ. Christoper Farris argues that the book isn’t “especially ‘scary’ in a traditional sense, noting that “[t]here aren’t a lot of page-turn jump-scares included, and even the idea of gnawing, anxious dread is tied more to a character’s interior development rather than tangibly imparted to the reader. Black Paradox instead mostly thrives on general conceptual weirdness, letting Ito cut loose with body horror in time with the broadening of the plot.”

Also worth a look is Megan D.’s review of Happiness, a vampire manga by Shuzo Oshimi (Blood on the Tracks, Flowers of Evil). “Happiness is at its best when it tries to visualize the terror and confusion of a vampiric transformation against one’s will,” she observes, “but it’s hard to shake the feeling that from this point onward Oshimi was starting to rely on a story formula that was starting to get a little repetitious and questionable in its gender politics.”

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Mail

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Have spirit gun, will travel — that’s the basic plot of Mail, a three-volume collection of ghost stories penned by Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service illustrator Housui Yamazaki.

Like Kurosagi, Mail follows a spook-of-the-week formula, pausing occasionally to fill us in on the personal life of its chief exorcist, Detective Reiji Akiba. Akiba initially presents as a Columbo-esque figure, disarming clients with his rumpled coat and penchant for napping on the job, but his true nature is soon revealed in the first story: he’s handy with Kagutsuchi, his trusty pistol, and unflappable in the presence of the undead.

As we learn over the course of the series, Akiba was blind as a child. Medicine restored his sight, but with a side effect: he saw dead people. After years of living in fear of ghosts, Akiba learned to perform exorcisms with Kagutsuchi, a skill he parlayed into a career as a modern-day onmyoji.

If Akiba’s strategies for assisting his clients are decidedly hi-tech — websites, cellphones, GPS devices, bullets — the stories have a pleasantly old-fashioned quality to them. Some are morality plays; in “The Doll,” for example, a toy becomes the vessel for a hit-and-run victim to bring her killer to justice. Others read more like good campfire tales; in “Suppressed,” for example, a young woman begins receiving mysterious calls from a “friend” who’s en route to her home, the last of which appear to be originating from inside her apartment. Still others draw on urban legend for inspiration; “Ka-tsu-mi,” the fifth chapter in the series, focuses on a girl who dies after accidentally photographing a ghost.

I’d be the first to admit that Yamazaki is not a master of suspense. Though Mail is filled with suitably gruesome imagery and creative variations on oft-told ghost stories, the reader is never in doubt about Akiba’s ability to save his clients. The endings have a sameness that becomes more apparent when reading them back-to-back, as Akiba’s only method for banishing the undead is to fire Kagutsuchi. And while Akiba demonstrates remarkable sangfroid when confronting murdered babies, vengeful lovers, and drowning victims, his undeniable coolness doesn’t quite compensate for the predictability of the denounements.

What Mail lacks in suspense it makes up in atmosphere. Yamazaki shows considerable flair for turning ordinary urban environments into unbearably scary places, whether he’s depicting an empty public bathroom or a high-rise building. In one of Mail‘s best stories, for example, a woman receives a letter urging her to move out of her apartment right away. Shortly after reading the letter, she catches glimpse of something moving along the ceiling of the adjacent room:

Though we’re outside the picture plane, viewing the action from a different angle than the hapless apartment dweller, we don’t have any more information about what’s lurking in the other room than she does; Yamazaki is relying on the reader to guess what might be crawling along the ceiling by planting one suggestive detail.

The other thing that makes this image so unsettling is the very mundaneness of the setting. With its square rooms and bland furnishings, this scene could be unfolding in almost any Tokyo neighborhood, in almost any modern apartment complex. (Add a parquet floor, and it could just as easily be taking place in any postwar building in Manhattan.) More unsettling still is that this scene is taking place in broad daylight, not at night; whatever is haunting the apartment isn’t relying on the camouflage of darkness, but is sallying forth at a time of day when spirits are supposed to be hidden and, more importantly, impotent.

Not all of the stories take place in Tokyo; several unfold in the countryside. Mail is at its best in urban settings, however, as the very nature of city living gives Yamazaki ample material to work with, whether he’s spinning a cautionary tale about the anonymity of modern life or simply reflecting on the myriad layers of history buried underneath new roadways and buildings. As a life-long city-dweller, I found stories such as “The Drive” — which takes place on an urban freeway — “The Elevator” — which takes place in a stalled elevator car — and “Hide-and-Seek” — which takes place in a haunted apartment — among the spookiest in the collection, as they tapped into a deep well of fear that all urban folk share: that cities harbor something even bigger and scarier than crime, high property taxes, or gridlock.

MAIL, VOLS. 1-3 • BY HOUSUI YAMAZAKI • DARK HORSE • RATING: OLDER TEEN/MATURE

7 Essential VIZ Signature Manga

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Are you an adult reader new to manga? Or a librarian who’s looking to add more graphic novels to your adult collection? Then this list is for you! The VIZ Signature imprint is one of the best resources for adults who read — or are curious about — manga. All of the Signature titles originally appeared in Japanese magazines that cater to grown-up tastes. As a result, the Signature line has broader appeal than many of VIZ’s other imprints, offering something for manga lovers who have “aged out” of Naruto as well as general interest readers who are more likely to discover a graphic novel through The New York Times than The Comics Journal.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of seven titles that best represent the VIZ Signature catalog. In choosing manga for this list, I was less concerned about identifying the “best” titles and more concerned with steering readers towards stories that resonate with their taste in movies, television, and comics. I’ve also focused on more recent series, as some of the line’s older titles — Monster, Sexy Voice and Robo, Phoenix — are out of print. Manga fans are strongly encouraged to add their recommendations in the comments section!

ALL MY DARLING DAUGHTERS

FUMI YOSHINAGA • 1 VOLUME

The five vignettes in All My Darling Daughters depict women negotiating difficult personal relationships: a daughter confronts her mother about mom’s new, much younger husband; a college student seduces her professor, only to dump him when he tries to court her properly; a beautiful young woman contemplates an arranged marriage. Like all of Yoshinaga’s work, the characters in All My Darling Daughters love to talk. That chattiness isn’t always an asset to Yoshinaga’s storytelling, but here the dialogue is perfectly calibrated to reveal just how complex and ambivalent these relationships really are. Yoshinaga’s artwork is understated but effective, as she uses small details — how a character stands or carries her shoulders — to offer a more complete and nuanced portrait of each woman. (One of my picks for Best New Manga of 2010.)

Recommended for: Readers who liked Drinking at the Movies, Dykes to Watch Out For, Make Me a Woman, and other graphic novels exploring the everyday lives of women; readers who are reluctant to commit to a multi-volume series.

BIOMEGA

TSUTOMU NIHEI • 6 VOLUMES

In this sci-fi/horror hybrid, an outbreak of a mysterious virus turns all but one resident of an island colony into zombies. Zoichi Kanoe, a corporate bounty hunter, is sent to retrieve that survivor, only to discover that she’s being guarded by a talking, gun-toting bear. Tsutomu Nihei has the artistic chops to pull off some outlandish stuff, including a rooftop chase scene that borrows a few pages from Bullitt and a spooky Martian prologue that would do John Carpenter proud. Nihei also has the good sense to exercise restraint — if one can describe an apocalyptic zombie scenario with pistol-packing grizzlies as “restrained” — revealing key bits of information only as the characters learn them. The result is a lean, fast-paced shoot-em-up that has just enough thought behind it to make it plausible but not so much that it seems ham-fistedly allegorical. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 2/14/10.)

Recommended for: Readers who like science fiction with elements of horror (e.g. Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing); readers who like zombie fiction, comics, and movies.

DETROIT METAL CITY

KIMINORI WAKASUHI • 10 VOLUMES

Satirizing death metal is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel: how hard can it be to parody a style associated with bands named Cannibal Corpse or Necrophagia? Poking fun at death metal while respecting the sincerity of its followers, however, is a much more difficult trick to pull off, yet Kiminori Wakasugi does just that in Detroit Metal City, ridiculing the music — the violent lyrics, the crudely sexual theatrics — while recognizing the depth of DMC fans’ commitment to the metal lifestyle. Though the musical parodies are hilarious, the series’ funniest moments arise from classic fish-out-of-water situations: Negishi driving a tractor on his parent’s farm while dressed as alter ego Lord Krauser (complete with makeup, fright wig, and platform boots), Negishi bringing a fruit basket to a hospitalized DMC fan while dressed as Krauser… you get the idea. The series begins to run out of gas around volume six, but has the decency not to overstay its welcome. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/28/09.)

Recommended for: Readers who love musical parodies (e.g. This Is Spinal Tap, South Park, Flight of the Conchords); readers who have fond memories of attending KISS or GWAR concerts back in the day.

HOUSE OF FIVE LEAVES

NATSUME ONO • 7 VOLUMES, ONGOING (8 TOTAL)

Timid ronin Akitsu Masanosuke can’t hold a steady job, despite his formidable swordsmanship. When a businessman approaches him with work, Masanosuke readily accepts, not realizing that his new employer, Yaichi, runs a crime syndicate that specializes in kidnapping. Masanosuke’s unwitting participation in a blackmailing scheme prevents him from severing his ties to Yaichi; Masanosuke must then decide if he will join the House of Five Leaves or bide his time until he can escape. Though Toshiro Mifune and Hiroyuki Sanada have made entire careers out of playing characters like Masanosuke, Natsume Ono makes a persuasive case that you don’t need a flesh-and-blood actor to tell this kind of story with heartbreaking intensity; she can do the slow-burn on the printed page with the same skill as Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Samurai Rebellion) and Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai) did on the big screen. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/20/10.)

Recommended for: Kurosawa junkies; readers who like costume dramas; readers with an interest in Japanese history.

OISHINBO A LA CARTE

STORY BY TETSY KARIYA, ART BY HANASAKI AKIRA • 7 VOLUMES

Equal parts Iron Wok Jan, Mostly Martha, and The Manga Cookbook, this educational, entertaining series explores Japanese cuisine at its most refined — sake, seabream sashimi — and its most basic — rice, pub food. The stories fall into two categories: stories celebrating the important role of food in creating community, and stories celebrating the culinary expertise of its principal characters, newspaperman Yamaoka Shiro and his curmudgeonly father Kaibara Yuzan. (Fun fact: Yuzan is such a food snob that he drove Yamaoka’s mother to an early grave, causing an irreparable break between father and son.) Though the competition between Yamaoka and Yuzan yields some elegant, mouth-watering dishes, Oishinbo is at its best when it focuses on everyday food in everyday settings, shedding light on how the Japanese prepare everything from bean sprouts to ramen. Warning: never read on an empty stomach! (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09.)

Recommended for: Foodies, gourmets, and other people who like to watch the Food Network (or have daydreamed about becoming a restaurant critic); readers who enjoy The Drops of God.

REAL

TAKEHIKO INOUE • 10 VOLUMES, ONGOING

In lesser hands, REAL might have been an Afterschool Special in manga form, an earnest, uplifting story about disabled teens who find a new sense of purpose on the basketball court. Takehiko Inoue, however, steers clear of easy sentiment; his characters are tough, competitive, and profane, occasionally self-pitying, and fiercely determined to create a space for themselves that’s theirs—and theirs alone. Though the court scenes are brief (at least by shonen sports manga standards, where matches can take several volumes to unfold), Inoue captures the speed and energy of his athletes with consummate skill. A funny, honest, and sometimes rueful series that works equally well for teens and adults. (My choice for Best New Manga of 2008 at PopCultureShock; reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/3/09.)

Recommended for: Basketball enthusiasts; readers who enjoy sports stories with a human interest angle.

20TH CENTURY BOYS

NAOKI URASAWA • 20 VOLUMES, ONGOING (24 TOTAL)

Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys tells a twisty, layered story about ordinary people saving the world from annihilation. Other auteurs have explore similar turf — Tim Kring’s Heroes comes to mind — but Urasawa manages to sustain the reader’s interest without succumbing to cliche or unduly testing our patience. The key to Urasawa’s success is strong script with vivid characters and a clear sense of purpose, reassuring the reader that all the plot strands are just that: strands, not loose threads. Crisp, detailed artwork helps sell the more ludicrous aspects of the story, and distinguish the sprawling cast from one another. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 1/9/10.)

Recommended for: Conspiracy theory buffs; readers who enjoy television programs that blend elements of science fiction, suspense, and paranoia (e.g. Alcatraz, Heroes, Lost).

5 Reasons to Read InuYasha

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InuYasha was the first comic that I actively collected, the manga that introduced me to the Wednesday comic-buying ritual and the very notion of self-identifying as a fan. Though I followed it religiously for years, trading in my older editions for new ones, watching the anime, and speculating about the finale, my interest in the series gradually waned as I was exposed to new artists and new genres. Still, InuYasha held a special place in my heart; reading it was one of my seminal experiences as a comic fan, making me reluctant to re-visit InuYasha for fear of sullying those precious first-manga memories. VIZ’s recent decision to re-issue InuYasha in an omnibus edition, however, inspired me to pick it up again. I made a shocking discovery in the process of re-reading the first chapters: InuYasha is good. Really good, in fact, and deserving of more respect than it gets from many critics.

What makes InuYasha work? I can think of five reasons:

1. The story arcs are long enough to be complex and engaging, but not so long as to test the patience.

There’s a Zen quality to Rumiko Takahashi’s storytelling that might not be obvious at first glance; after all, she loves a pratfall or a sword fight as much as the next shonen manga-ka. Don’t let that surface activity fool you, however: Takahashi has a terrific sense of balance, staging a romantic interlude between a demon-of-the-week episode and a longer storyline involving Naraku’s minions, thus preventing the series from devolving into a punishing string of battle arcs. The other great advantage of this approach is that Takashi carves out more space for her characters to interact as people, not just combatants; as a result, InuYasha is one of the few shonen manga in which the characters’ relationships evolve over time.

2. Takahashi knows how to stage a fight scene that’s dramatic, tense, and mercifully short.

‘Nuff said.

3. InuYasha‘s villains are powerful and strange, not strawmen.

Though we know our heroes will prevail — it’s shonen, for Pete’s sake — Takahashi throws creative obstacles in their way that makes their eventual triumph more satisfying. Consider Naraku. In many respects, he’s a standard-issue bad guy: he’s omnipotent, charismatic, and manipulative, capable of finding the darkness and vulnerability in the purest soul. (He also has fabulous hair, another reliable indication of his villainy.) Yet the way in which Naraku wields power is genuinely unsettling, as he fashions warriors from pieces of himself, then reabsorbs them into his body when they outlive their usefulness. Naraku’s manifestations are peculiar, too. Some are female, some are children, some have monstrous bodies, and some have the power to create their own demonic offspring, but few look like the sort of golem I’d create if I wanted to wreak havoc. And therein lies Naraku’s true power: his opponents never know what form he’ll take next, or whether he’s already among them.

Sesshomaru, too, is another villain who proves more interesting than he first appears. In the very earliest chapters of the manga, he’s a bored sociopath who has no qualms about using InuYasha’s mama trauma to trick his younger brother into revealing the Tetsusaiga’s location. As the story progresses, however, Sesshomaru begins tolerating the company of a cheerful eight-year-old girl who, in a neat inversion of the usual human-canine relationship, is dependent on her dog-demon master for protection, food, and companionship. Takahashi resists the urge to fully “humanize” Sesshomaru, however; he remains InuYasha’s scornful adversary for most of the series, largely unchanged by his peculiar fixation with Rin.

And did I mention that Sesshomaru has awesome hair? Oh, to be a villain in a Takahashi manga!

4. InuYasha‘s female characters kick ass.

Back in 2008, Shaenon Garrity wrote a devastatingly funny article about the seven types of female characters in shonen manga, from The Tomboy to The Little Girl to The Experienced Older Woman. I’m pleased to report that none of these types appear in InuYasha; in fact, InuYasha boasts one of the smartest, toughest, and most appealing set of female characters in shonen manga. And by “tough,” I don’t mean that Kagome, Kikyo, and Sango brandish weapons while wearing provocative outfits; I mean they persist in the face of adversity, even if their own lives are at stake. They’re strong enough to hold their own against demons, ghosts, and heavily armed bandits, and wise enough to know when words are more effective than weapons. They’re not adverse to the idea of romance, but recovering the Shikon Jewel takes precedence over dating. And they’re woman enough to cry if something awful happens, though they’d rather shed their tears in private than show their pain to others.

5. The horror! The horror!

Takahashi may have the coolest resume of anyone working in manga today; not only did she study script writing with Kazuo Koike, she also worked as an assistant to Kazuo Umezu — an apprenticeship that’s evident in the early chapters of InuYasha. In between Kagome and InuYasha’s first encounters with Naraku are a handful of short but spooky stories in which seemingly benign objects — a noh mask, a peach tree — are transformed by Shikon Jewel shards into instruments of torture and killing. Takahashi’s horror stories are less florid than Umezu’s, with fewer detours into WTF? territory, but like Umezu, Takahashi has a vivid imagination that yields some decidedly scary images. Here, for example, is the demonic peach tree from chapter 79, “The Fruits of Evil”:

Takahashi doesn’t just use these images to shock; she uses them to illustrate the consequences of ugly emotions, impulsive actions, and violent behavior, to show us how these choices slowly corrode the soul and transform us into the most monstrous version of ourselves. (Also to show us the consequences of substituting human bones and blood for Miracle Gro. Kids, don’t try this at home.)

What Takahashi does better than almost anyone is walk the fine line between terror and horror. Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), was one of the first writers to argue that terror and horror were different states of arousal. “Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them,” she wrote in an 1826 essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Critiquing Radcliffe’s work in 1966, Devendra P. Varma explained that difference more concretely: “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.” And that’s exactly where Takahashi operates: she gives us tantalizing, suggestive glimpses of scary things, then keeps them obscured until the denouement of the story, allowing our imaginations to supply most of the grisly details. We read her work in a heightened state of awareness, which only intensifies our pleasure — and revulsion — when the true nature of Kagome and InuYasha’s foes are revealed.

* * * * *

If you haven’t looked at InuYasha in a while, or missed it during the height of its popularity, now is a great time to give it a try. Each volume of the VIZBIG edition collects three issues, allowing readers to more fully immerse themselves in the story. And if you’re a purist about packaging, you’ll be happy to know that VIZ is finally issuing InuYasha in an unflipped format — a first in the series’ US history.

The Red Snake

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The Red Snake isn’t the most disturbing manga I’ve read — that honor belongs to Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, a book so intent on celebrating taboo behavior that I was certain I’d be arrested for having a copy in my house. But The Red Snake earns a special place on my manga-reading list for being one weirdest horror stories I’ve read, a grim fable about a family obsessed with bugs, boils, chickens, and snakes.

The book opens with the narrator wandering the halls of a sprawling house. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to get away from this house,” he explains. “Something evil lurks within these walls.” As lugubrious as the corridors and empty rooms may be, the inhabitants are even scarier: the grandfather is a tyrant who lavishes more attention on his poultry than on his family; the grandmother believes she’s a chicken and sits on a gigantic nest, attacking anyone who threatens her “territory”; the sister has an almost erotic fascination with insects; and the mother is a virtual slave, forced each day to massage and drain the pus from an enormous boil on the grandfather’s face. (Perhaps they’re the kind of people Tolstoy had in mind when he famously opined that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)

What follows the prologue is hard to classify as a story; it’s more a string of loosely connected vignettes, all increasingly horrific, in which:

  • Snakes violate the sister in almost every way imaginable;
  • The sister kills chickens and drinks their blood — straight from their dripping necks;
  • The grandmother transforms into a chicken with a human head;
  • The mother gives birth to a monstrous creature that looks like a Garbage Pail Kid; and
  • The narrator goes mano-a-mano with a flotilla of zombie infants.

After nearly one hundred pages of blood-soaked insanity, we find ourselves right back where we started: the narrator begins his soliloquy about the house again, using the same words and wandering the same corridors as he did in the book’s opening pages.

Hino’s artwork resembles a scratchboard drawing or a woodblock print, characterized by large patches of black ink pierced by thin, white lines. In the opening pages, for example, there’s no visible light source anywhere in the house or the surrounding woods — no sky, no candles or lamps — creating an atmosphere of almost unbearable claustrophobia; the shadows are palpable, pressing in on the narrator just as surely as the demons he unwittingly frees later in the story.

Character-wise, Hino’s designs belong to the same genotype as Kazuo Umezu and Kanako Inuki’s. Hino draws young girls and mothers as beautiful, glassy-eyed dolls and old women, fathers, and boys as grotesques. The narrator, for example, wears his worry like a shirt; he has enormous eyes rimmed in circles and is almost bald, even though his behavior and height peg him as a child of about ten or twelve. The grandparents, by contrast, resemble animals: the grandfather looks like a toad, with a bumpy hide, wide-set eyes, and a broad, leering mouth filled with rotting teeth, while the grandmother increasingly resembles the object of her delusion:

I feel like chicken tonight?

For all Hino’s ability to provoke and amuse, I’m not sure how I feel about The Red Snake. The story unfolds with the feverish logic of a dream, yielding some suitably creepy and bizarre images; I’ve never pictured the Sanzu River as alive with flesh-eating zombie babies, but it’s an arresting idea. The ending, too, is surprisingly effective. It’s not clear if the narrator realizes that he’s trapped in a cycle of unending horror, or is simply puzzled that all of the house’s nameless inhabitants have reverted to their “normal” state; either way, it’s a nasty punchline that subverts our desire — and the narrator’s — for closure.

At the same time, however, Hino has a juvenile fixation with blood, pus, and bugs, relishing every opportunity to draw a close-up of the grandfather’s boil or fill the page with a squirm of insects. Though some of these images merit an appreciative eewww, they’re too broadly cartoonish to really spook us; the grandfather’s ailments reminded me of an old George Carlin routine about the perverse delight humans take in studying their hangnails and pimples, rather than the disturbing metamorphoses found in Junji Ito and David Croenberg’s work. Maybe that’s Hino’s point: that we’re weirdly — almost comically — obsessed with our own bodily existence, but The Red Snake is so packed with ideas and sight gags and detours into the ludicrous that it’s hard to know what, exactly, Hino is trying to do besides mess with our heads.

THE RED SNAKE • BY HIDESHI HINO • DH PUBLISHING • 200 pp. • NO RATING (APPROPRIATE FOR OLDER TEENS AND MATURE AUDIENCES; SEXUAL CONTENT AND DISTURBING IMAGERY)

7 Short Series Worth Adding to Your Manga Bookshelf

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I like getting lost in a long, twisty story as much as the next person, but I often lose interest in a manga around the five- or ten-volume mark. As a service to other people afflicted with Manga ADHD, therefore, I’ve compiled a list of seven shorter series that enjoy pride of place on my shelves.

There were a few ground rules that guided my list-making. First, the series needed to be complete in five volumes or fewer. Second, every volume of the series needed to be readily available through a major retailer like Amazon. Third, the list needed to be diverse, covering a range of genres and demographics. Had I expanded the list to include out-of-print favorites — Antique Bakery, Apocalypse Meow, Club 9, Domu: A Child’s Dream, The Name of the Flower, Planetes — it would have been an unwieldy beast, and one sure to disappoint: why recommend a book that’s selling for $100 on eBay?

So without further ado… here are seven short series worth adding to your manga bookshelf.

A DISTANT NEIGHBORHOOD

JIRO TANIGUCHI • FANFARE/PONENT MON • 2 VOLUMES

A Distant Neighborhood is a wry, wistful take on a tried-and-true premise: a salaryman is transported back in time to his high school days, and must decide whether to act on his knowledge of the past or let events unfold as they did before. We’ve seen this story many times at the multiplex — Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married — but Taniguchi doesn’t play the set-up for laughs; rather, he uses Hiroshi’s predicament to underscore the challenges of family life and the awkwardness of adolescence. (Hiroshi is the same chronological age as his parents, giving him special insight into the vicissitudes of marriage, as well as the confidence to cope with teenage tribulations.) Easily one of the most emotional, most intimate stories Taniguchi’s ever told. (A Distant Neighborhood was one of my picks for Best Manga of 2009; click here for the full list.)

ICHIGENME… THE FIRST CLASS IS CIVIL LAW

FUMI YOSHINAGA • DMP • 2 VOLUMES

One of the things that distinguishes Fumi Yoshinaga’s work from that of other yaoi artists is her love of dialogue. In works like Antique Bakery and Solfege, she reminds us that conversation can be an aphrodisiac, especially when two people are analyzing a favorite book or confessing a mutually-shared passion for art, cooking, or manga. True to form, the sexiest scenes in Ichigenme: The First Class Is Civil Law are conversations between law professors and their students. We feel the erotic charge of more experienced scholars engaging their proteges in intense debates over legal procedure and philosophy, even when the topics themselves are rather dry. Not that Yoshinaga skimps on the smut: there’s plenty of bedroom action as the carefree Tohdou helps his uptight, closeted classmate Tamiya explore his sexuality, but the series’ best moments are fully clothed. An entertaining manga that gets better with each reading. (Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 3/14/08.)

ODE TO KIRIHITO

OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 2 VOLUMES

While investigating an outbreak of a mysterious disease, an earnest young doctor contracts it himself, becoming a hideous dog-man who craves raw meat. Kirihito’s search for the cause — and the cure — is the backbone of this globe-trotting adventure, but Kirihito’s quest to reclaim his humanity is its heart and soul; his travels bring him into contact with hustlers, racists, and superstitious villagers, each of whom greets him with a mixture of suspicion and fear. As its dog-man premise suggests, Ode to Kirihito is Tezuka at his bat-shit craziest: in one storyline, for example, Kirihito befriends a nymphomaniac circus performer who transforms herself into human tempura. But for all its over-the-top characters and plot developments (see “nympho human tempura,” above), Ode to Kirihito is one of Tezuka’s most moving stories, a thoughtful meditation on the the fluid boundaries between man and animal, sanity and insanity, good and evil. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 4/7/10.)

THE SECRET NOTES OF LADY KANOKO

RIRIKO TSUJITA • TOKYOPOP • 3 VOLUMES

Kanoko, the sardonic heroine of The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, is a student of human behavior, gleefully filling her notebooks with detailed observations about her classmates. Though Kanoko would like nothing more than to remain on the sidelines, she frequently becomes embroiled in her peers’ problems; they value her independent perspective, as Kanoko isn’t the least bit interested in dating, running for student council, or currying favor with the alpha clique. Kanoko’s sharp tongue and cool demeanor might make her the mean-girl villain in another shojo manga, but Ririko Tsujita embraces her heroine’s prickly, opinionated nature and makes it fundamental to Kanoko’s appeal. The perfect antidote to shojo stories about timid good girls and boy-crazy spazzes. UPDATE 4/16/11: TOKYOPOP announced that it would be shutting down its US publishing operations on May 31, 2011. Unfortunately, that means that Lady Kanoko will likely remain incomplete at two volumes. The stories are largely self-contained, so it is still possible to enjoy Lady Kanoko without reading the last volume.

7 BILLION NEEDLES

NOBUAKI TADANO • VERTICAL, INC. • 4 VOLUMES

Nobuaki Tadano gives Hal Clement’s Needle a manga makeover, moving the action from a remote island in the South Seas to Japan, and replacing Clement’s wholesome, Hardy Boy protagonist with a sullen teenage girl who’s none too pleased to discover that an alien bounty hunter has taken control of her body. The decision to make Hikaru a troubled loner with a difficult past is a stroke of genius; her social isolation proves almost as formidable an obstacle for her to overcome as the monster that she and Horizon (as the bounty hunter is known) are pursuing. Her personal struggles also add a level of raw, emotional authenticity to the story — something that was largely absent from the fascinating, though clinically detached, original. Oh, and the monster? It’s a doozy. (7 Billion Needles was one of my picks for Best Teen-Friendly Comic of 2010; see Good Comics for Kids for the full list. Volumes one and two were reviewed at The Manga Critic on 11/21/10; volume three was reviewed on 2/17/11. The fourth and final volume will arrive in stores on April 26, 2011.)

TO TERRA

KEIKO TAKEMIYA • VERTICAL, INC. • 3 VOLUMES

If Richard Wagner wrote space operas, he might have composed something like Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra, an inter-generational drama about a race of telepathic mutants who’ve been exiled from their home world. Under the leadership of the charismatic Jomy Marcus Shin, the Mu embark on a grueling voyage back to Terra to be reunited with their human creators. Their principle foe: an evil supercomputer named Mother. Takemiya’s richly detailed artwork makes To Terra an almost cinematic experience, suggestive of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. But don’t be fooled by those blinking computers and blazing starships: To Terra is an unabashedly Romantic saga about two ubermensch locked in a struggle of cosmic proportions. No doubt Richard would approve. (To Terra was one of my picks for Best Manga of 2007; read the full list at PopCultureShock. For more information on To Terra‘s history, click here.)

TOTO! THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURE

YUKO OSADA • DEL REY • 5 VOLUMES

Shonen series often run to 10, 20, or 40 volumes, but Toto! The Wonderful Adventure proves that good stories come in shorter packages, too. Yuko Osada brazenly steals ideas from dozens of other sources — Castle in the Sky, One Piece, Last Exile, The Wizard of Oz — to produce a boisterous, fast-paced story about a tyro explorer who crosses paths with sky pirates, military warlords, and a high-kicking senjutsu expert named Dorothy. Though the jokes are hit-or-miss, Toto! boasts crisp artwork, strong female characters, and an infectious sense of bonhomie among the series’ protagonists; Kakashi and his traveling companions are impossible to dislike. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 9/16/10.)

HONORABLE MENTIONS

CAT-EYED BOY (Kazuo Umezu • VIZ • 2 volumes): Readers looking for an introduction to Kazuo Umezu’s work could do a lot worse than this two-volume collection of stories about a strange little boy who’s half-human, half-demon. Umezu gives free reign to his imagination, conjuring some of the most bizarre monsters in the J-horror canon. The results aren’t always as shocking as they might be, but Cat-Eyed Boy is by turns funny, scary, and sad. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/3/10.)

LADY SNOWBLOOD (Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kimimura • Dark Horse • 4 volumes): Now that everyone’s forgotten Kill Bill, the epic mess “inspired” by Kazuo Koike’s Lady Snowblood, it’s possible to read this series for what it is: a deliciously trashy story about a beautiful assassin who manipulates, cajoles, seduces, and stabs her way through Meiji-era Japan. Expect copious nudity, buckets of blood, and fight scenes so outrageous they have to be seen to be believed.

ONE POUND GOSPEL (Rumiko Takahashi • VIZ • 4 volumes): In this charming sports comedy, a struggling boxer is torn between his love for food and his love for a pretty young nun who wants him to lay down his fork, lose some weight, and win a few matches. The series is a little episodic (Takahashi published new chapters sporadically), but the dialogue and slapstick humor have a characteristically Takahashian zing.

For additional suggestions, see:

  • 5 Underrated Shojo Manga, which includes Setona Mizushiro’s X-Day;
  • My 10 Favorite CMX Titles, which includes such short series as Astral Project, Chikyu Misaki, Kiichi and the Magic Books, The Name of the Flower, and Presents. Note that many of these series are out of print and may be hard to find through retailers like Amazon;
  • My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga, which includes such short series as Dororo, Gyo, Mail, and School Zone.