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Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

star wars

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

January 5, 2020 by Katherine Dacey

As The Rise of Skywalker brings the Star Wars saga to its official close, now seems like the right time to revisit the very first chapter in the series, The Phantom Menace. Episode I debuted in 1999, making the leap from screen to print the following year with Kia Asamiya providing the illustrations. Readers familiar with Asamiya’s Silent Möbius will immediately understand why he was tapped for this project: he has a penchant for drawing detailed space ships and cityscapes, two important qualifications for translating George Lucas’ vision into a compelling comic.

Alas, Asamiya was also saddled with Lucas’ original script, leaving him little room to make the story more interesting on the page than it was on the screen. Asamiya faithfully preserves the film’s most frustrating elements—the tin-eared dialogue, the unfortunate minstrelsy of JarJar Binks—as well as its surfeit of plot points, secondary characters, and clumsy discussions of Federation trade policy. To his credit, Asamiya’s version is brisk and streamlined in contrast with Lucas’, marching from one scene to the next with a sense of urgency that’s often lacking from the film. Some of the film’s most tedious scenes—the blockade of Naboo, the first interactions between Padme and Anakin, the Imperial Senate’s deliberations—have been telescoped, giving Asamiya room for more detailed treatments of chases, light saber fights, and space battles.

The artwork, on the other hand, is a hit-or-miss affair. Asamiya’s skill at drawing aliens, robots, space craft, and futuristic cities is unquestionable; his evocation of Otoh Gunga and Coruscant do justice to the complexity and specificity of Lucas’ original designs, while Asamiya’s establishing shots of Naboo convincingly evoke the planet’s lush jungles and Greco-Roman palaces without the added benefit of color. His ability to compress lengthy action sequences is likewise impressive; in just a few artfully constructed pages, for example, he captures the excitement and danger of Anakin Skywalker’s pod race, using panels-within-panels to juxtapose the racers’ progress with the crowd’s ecstatic reaction to the event:

Asamiya’s human characters, by contrast, are as expressionless as their big-screen counterparts—a key failing, as the characters register as pawns, not people, dutifully shuttled from one scenario to the next with almost no sense of how the violence and chaos they’ve encountered has affected them. Only the two principle non-human characters—JarJar Binks and C3PO—are drawn in an animated fashion, providing the series’ few moments of genuine emotion and surprise.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Asamiya’s take on The Phantom Menace is so frustrating: it improves on certain aspects of the source material while emphasizing its fatal flaws, making for an efficient but affectless gloss on Lucas’ original story that reads a lot like Cliff Notes. Not recommended.

STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE, VOLS. 1-2 • ART BY KIA ASAMIYA • MARVEL COMICS • NO RATING (SUITABLE FOR READERS 10 AND UP)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Kia Asamiya, Marvel Comics, Sci-Fi, star wars

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1

May 22, 2018 by Katherine Dacey

Remember the good ol’ days when a new Star Wars movie took three years to make, and no one was certain that George Lucas was going to get around to Episodes I, II, and III? I miss those days; new installments felt like a cause for celebration and not a dutiful obligation, and the films were an irresistible mixture of bad acting, thrilling space battles, and earnest conversations about the Force. When I’ve felt a twinge of nostalgia for my childhood Star Wars experience, I’ve found the manga adaptations of the original trilogy much more satisfying than the current batch of Disneyfied films. So I was curious to see what an original Star Wars manga might look like: would it explore new territory, or simply recycle the same plot points, a la The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi?

Turns out that Lost Stars is to Star Wars what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet, a retelling of an iconic story from the perspective of two peripheral characters. Many of the most famous moments from George Lucas’ original trilogy appear in Lost Stars — the capture of Princess Leia, the annihilation of Alderaan, the ice battle on Hoth — though the framing of these events is new, seen through the eyes of two young Imperial pilots: Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree, both of whom enrolled in the Imperial Academy hoping for adventure and a better way of life.

The inclusion of these famous scenes is a double-edged sword; they provide a handy point of reference for the Star Wars greenhorn while simultaneously pandering to the hardcore fan by faithfully recreating iconic images, characters, and dialogue from A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. There’s a dot-the-i quality to them that suggests that Yusaku Komiyuma was more concerned with nailing down the original details than imagining how Thane or Ciena would perceive — or participate — in these events. The other problem with these scenes is that they’re more dramatically interesting than Komiyuma’s brisk but flavorless adaptation of Claudia Gray’s novel. The most thoughtful elements of Gray’s work — particularly the class politics on Thane and Ciena’s home planet Jelucan — are presented in a bald fashion that reads more like CliffNotes than honest-to-goodness fiction, while important scenes of character development are too compressed to give us a sense of who these star-crossed lovers really are. The net result is a comic that successfully bridges the aesthetic worlds of Shonen Jump and Star Wars without achieving its own distinct identity as a manga or a Star Wars story. Your mileage may vary.

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1
Original Story by Claudia Gray
Art and Adaptation by Yusaku Komiyuma
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for teens

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Claudia Gray, Lost Stars, Sci-Fi, star wars, yen press

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Star Wars

December 29, 2017 by Katherine Dacey

I was five years old when Star Wars: A New Hope blasted its way into movie theaters. Like most members of Generation X, the film cast a long shadow over my childhood, dictating my Halloween costumes, afterschool play, Happy Meal purchases, toy collections, and clothing; I had Princess Leia action figures, Star Wars drinking glasses, Star Wars t-shirts, and a Star Wars beach towel. One of the few tie-in products I didn’t own, however, was a comic book adaptation of the movie. I’d purchased The Star Wars Storybook at a Scholastic book fair in 1978, but never knew that Marvel Comics or manga publishers were peddling something similar.

That’s a pity, because Star Wars has a long and fascinating history in print. Marvel’s six-issue adaptation of A New Hope, for example, was cooked up by a Lucasfilm executive to drum up business for the film — in essence, it was a trailer for comic geeks, arriving on newsstands a month before the movie opened. Though Marvel executives had been reluctant to license Star Wars — according to former editor Jim Shooter the “Prevailing Wisdom” at Marvel was that “science fiction doesn’t sell”  — it proved one of the company’s best business decisions of the 1970s. “The first two issues of our six issue adaptation came out in advance of the movie,” Shooter observed:

Driven by the advance marketing for the movie, sales were very good. Then about the time the third issue shipped, the movie was released. Sales made the jump to hyperspace. Star Wars the movie stayed in theaters forever, it seemed. Not since the Beatles had I seen a cultural phenomenon of such power. The comics sold and sold and sold. We reprinted the adaptation in every possible format. They all sold and sold and sold.

By contemporary standards, Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin’s version is skillful but a little stodgy, relying on voice-overs to introduce key characters and explain plot points, rather than allowing the art to shoulder the responsibility of telling the story. Nonetheless, as Star Wars fever crossed the Pacific, Weekly Shonen Magazine republished Thomas and Chaykin’s comic, touching off a Star Wars manga blitz in Japan.

Japan caught Star Wars fever again in 1997, when the Special Edition trilogy hit theaters across the globe. Kadokowa’s MediaWorks division churned out a new set of Star Wars manga, hiring Hisao Tamaki (A New Hope), Toshiki Kudo (The Empire Strikes Back), and Shin-Ichi Hiromoto (Return of the Jedi) to handle the adaptations. And while all three are good, faithfully reproducing the main beats from each film, Tamaki’s version of A New Hope is that rarest of tie-in products: it captures the look and feel of the movie without slavishly copying it, offering both a fresh perspective on a canonical text and a point of entry for someone wholly unfamiliar with Star Wars. 

Part of what makes Tamaki’s version so fascinating is how he compensates for the absence of a soundtrack — no mean feat, given how noisy the Star Wars universe is. While Tamaki uses plenty of hand-lettered sound effects, he never uses them as a crutch, instead finding nifty ways to help us imagine the sound of a landspeeder skimming the desert floor or a Stormtrooper firing his blaster. Tamaki’s most effective tactic is careful attention to the velocity and direction of moving objects; through deft placement of speedlines and artful manipulation of the panels’ shape and size, he conveys the same information that a well engineered roar, squeak, thud, or electronic rumble might.

Then there’s the film’s lush, Wagnerian score, the kind of movie music that had been fashionable in the era of Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia but was considered unhip in the gritty, naturalistic world of early 70s cinema. The opening fanfare and dense web of leitmotifs are unquestionably part of A New Hope‘s appeal, goosing fight scenes and capturing the melancholy of a young Luke Skywalker as he gazes at a Tatooine sunset. Absent those musical prompts, however, Tamaki is forced to think about how to elicit the same emotions in words and pictures. One of the most dramatically successful attempts to bridge sound and silence occurs in volume one of Tamaki’s adaptation, right after R2D2 and C3PO land on Tatooine:

In the film, John Williams accompanies C3PO’s trek with music cribbed from The Rite of Spring — a decent choice, as Stravinsky’s dour ostinati and octatonic harmonies imbue the harsh landscape with an otherworldly quality. Tamaki, however, distills this two-minute scene to an evocative two-page spread in which a wide-angle view of the Tatooine desert unfolds beneath the individual panels, reminding us just how small and vulnerable both droids are. These images track closely with Lucas’ own vision, but the implied silence of the first and final panels in this sequence more powerfully conveys C3PO’s isolation than any musical gesture could:

The absence of sound has another unexpected benefit: minus the actors’ desperate attempts to make George Lucas’ dialogue sound… well, like conversation, the script has more room to breathe. Tamaki plays the earnest stuff straight and ramps up the comedy whenever someone is surprised or indignant. Luke, in particular, benefits from such an approach, given his age and naivete; in Tamaki’s hands, he’s Monkey D. Luffy with a lightsaber, freaking out over chores, the Millennium Falcon’s shabby appearance, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death, a kiss from Princess Leia… you get the idea. Tamaki’s elastic deformations of Luke’s face transform him from blandly handsome farm boy to Shonen Jump hero, equal parts brave and ridiculous:

One of the manga’s other great virtues is its ability to expand and contract time in ways that a purely temporal medium like film can’t. The ability to speed up and slow down the unfolding the plot isn’t unique to comics, of course; filmmakers can use slow motion imagery or cross-cutting to manipulate the viewer’s perception of time, but a good manga artist takes advantage of the fact the reader can, in fact, stop time by poring over an image or a scene for minutes, savoring small but telling details that would otherwise get lost in the cinematic flow. Writing for Animerica in 2004, Patrick Macias offered a thoughtful explanation of how this kind of creative expansion of time adds new layers of meaning to Tamaki’s story:

It is in Tamaki’s take on destruction of the planet Alderaan that he really shows off his stuff. A scene that took mere moments to depict on-screen is drawn out to fill half a dozen pages. He inserts images of the Alderaan populace looking up to the heavens, and you can almost hear those “millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror” with more dramatic impact in the manga than in the film.

Of course, none of this would matter if Tamaki lacked the precision to bring Lucas’ vision to life on page. Again and again, Tamaki delivers amazingly detailed drawings of space ships, aliens, and weapons that pulse with the same life as Katsuhiro Otomo’s AKIRA and Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell; if you’d never seen or heard of Star Wars, you might reasonably infer that Tamaki dreamt up this world on his own. Tamaki proves equally adept at staging deep space dogfights, too, conveying both the dizzying speed with which the ships are moving and the maze-like surface of the Death Star:


For readers coming to the manga from the films, the biggest stumbling block will be the character designs: did Tamaki get them right? The short answer is yes, if you can tolerate a little artistic license with hairdos and body types. Not surprisingly, R2D2 and C3PO look most like their big-screen counterparts — no pesky noses or mouths to draw — but the rest of the cast bear a passing-to-strong resemblance to the actors who portrayed them, though Obi-Wan Kenobi looks and moves more like Chuck Norris than Sir Alec Guiness. Tamaki does an even better job of bringing Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers to life on the page, adding an extra touch of menace in the way he draws their helmets; you can almost see the soldiers grimacing under their plastic armor from the way he draws their browlines.

If I’ve sold you on manga Star Wars, you’ll be happy to know it’s a relatively inexpensive way to relive the original trilogy. The digital versions — currently available through Amazon and ComiXology — retail for $1.99 per volume. There’s also a Phantom Menace manga for the morbidly curious; Kia Asamiya is the author, and he’s been given the truly thankless task of condensing that stinker into two volumes. At least it won’t be as interminable as the movie.

WORKS CONSULTED

Macias, Patrick. “Star Wars, The Manga.” Animerica, VIZ LLC, 7 Apr. 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20040407180902/http://www.animerica-mag.com/features/starwars.html. Accessed 27 Dec. 2017.

Rickard, Ron. “Retro Foreign: Japanese Weekly Shōnen Magazine #18 – 23 (1978).” Star Wars Comic Collector, 20 May 2016, http://swcomiccollector.blogspot.com/2016/05/retro-foreign-japanese-weekly-shonen.html. Accessed 27 Dec. 2017.

Shooter, Jim. “Roy Thomas Saved Marvel.” Jim Shooter, 5 July 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20150912134444/http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/07/roy-thomas-saved-marvel.html. Accessed on 28 Dec. 2017.

Spellman, Ron. “A Long Time Ago: The Strange History of Marvel’s Original Star Wars Universe.” Comics Alliance, Townsquare Media, 28 Jan. 2016, http://comicsalliance.com/original-marvel-star-wars-comics-history/. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Tamaki, Hisao. Star Wars: A New Hope, adapted from an original script by George Lucas, Marvel Comics, 1998. 4 vols.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, Recommended Reading, REVIEWS Tagged With: Dark Horse, Hisao Tamaki, Kadokawa, Marvel Comics, star wars

Random, happy, confusing, exciting

August 18, 2008 by MJ 1 Comment

First of all, many thanks to those who have been leaving BL recommendations for me here! I’ve started looking a bit at some of the recs, and will report back in more detail soon. So far, the series I’ve looked at are Shout out Loud!, Let Dai, and Totally Captivated, and I’ve liked at least *something* about each of them, though I still have some reservations.

Random: This made me laugh for an entire day. Seriously.

Happy: I have at last acquired a scanner, which means that my next installment of the Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long will include scanned pages from the Viz editions, rather than scanlations which I’d resorted to originally. I’ve also updated the previous entries (vol. 1 & 2 | vol. 3 & 4) with the proper pages. I’m also thinking of posting some version of my massive xxxHolic post in this blog (previously posted in fannish places), now that I have proper scanned pages, as I have a pretty much constant urge to try to draw people into that series.

A bit of navel-gazing to follow: …

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: fullmetal alchemist, manga, navel-gazing, star wars, writing, xxxholic

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