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Archives for December 2010

Let’s Get Visual: Duds

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MICHELLE: After a few months of this column, I feel like I’m better able to think critically about the artistic aspect of manga. I expected to be able to better appreciate good art when I see it, but hadn’t anticipated that I’d also more readily notice flaws. This month, MJ (of Manga Bookshelf) and I turn our attention to problematic pages or, as I like to call them, “duds.” (Click on images to enlarge.)

Fairy Tail, Volume 10, Page 84 (Del Rey)

MJ: Wow. I’m… a little bit stymied by that image.

MICHELLE: It is a doozy, isn’t it? Actually, that page was the inspiration for this whole column. There I was, innocently reading volume ten of Fairy Tail, then I turned the page and was brutally accosted by that monstrosity!

So, as is probably pretty obvious, the speaker is unhinged. Mangaka Hiro Mashima has opted to depict this by freezing the guy in the act of making a weird face and forcing readers to read two huge bubbles full of ranting speech before we can proceed to the final (and uninteresting) panel on the bottom of the page. Now, maybe this is a tactic to make us feel as trapped as the girl does, having to sit there and listen to this lunatic ramble on, but it doesn’t do a good job at conveying his insanity. The page feels flat and lifeless; a better choice would have been to inject more movement into the scene, break up the speech, and maybe allow the guy the opportunity to change expressions throughout his tirade.

MJ: I honestly feel accosted by the page. Its primary image is loud, but not particularly expressive in any other way than that, and the text feels overwhelming to the point where I can’t really even bring myself to try to read it all. Not only that, the page is so top-heavy, I find it difficult to even look at. That bottom image is completely wasted there, not that it’s much of a waste.

MICHELLE: Yeah, it’s weird how an amount of text that would be perfectly reasonable to read in a prose novel suddenly looks so daunting in a speech bubble, but it really does. And you’re absolutely right that it’s loud without being expressive. Everything about this page is just so glaringly bad that I knew we had to build a column around lousy art so that I’d have an excuse to talk about it with someone!

MJ: Well, feel free to talk as much as you like, because I’ve rarely seen something so pointlessly hideous. And though I hate to think that I’m reacting purely out of aesthetics, I can’t deny that it offends me greatly on that level.

MICHELLE: I think that’s pretty much the only basis on which you can be expected to react, since you haven’t read the manga in question. For me, it completely yanked me out of the story, which I find inexcusable.

And though I appreciate the offer to further vent my spleen, perhaps we should proceed on to your dud of choice.

Baseball Heaven, pages 133-134 (approx.) (BLU Manga)

MJ: Okay, then. My “dud” comes from Ellie Mamahara’s Baseball Heaven, a BL manga I expressed no great love for in our BL Bookrack column a couple of months ago. I assume I don’t need to describe what’s happening in the scene, and chances are I don’t need to tell anyone what’s wrong with it, either, but of course that’s why we’re here.

I look at this scene, and there’s simply no passion in it. None at all. Here we have a guy, supposedly in an altered state of mind, making the moves on his teammate who has rebuffed him in the past, and not only do we not get any real sense of how either of them are feeling (we wouldn’t even know the one was drunk if it wasn’t for indications in the word balloons and flushed cheeks), but there’s absolutely no sexual tension between them conveyed through the artwork. And while I can appreciate that perhaps we’re meant to believe that athletes might be stiff and awkward with each other, surely the drunk guy, at least, would have a little heat in his body language here.

The artist goes through the motions, placing them physically near each other and indicating that the one is, perhaps, touching the other’s behind, but there is just no real feeling between them at all. Even when their faces are so close together, Mamahara is unable to provide any magnetic reaction between them. I should feel that they *want* to touch each other. It should feel painful for them not to. Instead, it leaves me completely cold.

MICHELLE: I definitely see what you mean! Personally, I keep staring at that first panel on the second page. They look so stiff and awkward. It’s not that I expect the position of a character’s legs to help drive the emotional content of a scene, but when they’re as oddly placed as the blond guy’s are, it feels unnatural and, by extension, makes everything else going on in the scene feel the same way.

MJ: I think I’d go so far as to say that in a scene like *this* one, I kind of *do* expect the position of a character’s legs to help drive the emotional content of the scene. It’s just as I was saying before, there should be a sense that the characters want desperately to touch each other (this includes legs) even if they might be scared to do so. I should see that in the legs and every other part of the body, at least in the drunk guy who is initiating the contact in the first place. It’s a seduction scene with no actual seduction going on.

Also, I feel like the panels are getting in the way of us viewing the scene, which is a weird and uncomfortable feeling. And unlike in last month’s selection where this was done to elicit response from the reader, here it just feels like clumsiness on the part of the artist. She provides these little glimpses of their faces and legs in the smaller panels, but since there is no tension in those panels, they don’t add anything to the scene. They just steal space from the main action, such as it is.

Wow, I’m really ranting now, aren’t I? Please stop me.

MICHELLE: You’re quite right, but I shall stop you as requested by introducing my second dud!

Moon Boy, Volume 9, Page 3 (Yen Press)

MICHELLE: Initially, it was the affronted rooster in the lower left that caught my eye and made me pause to really take in the complete and utter randomness of this page.

You’ve got a young person of indeterminate gender, swaddled in coat and boots, flushed and exhaling a gust of wintry air, possibly due to the exertion of just having decapitated a nearby snowman. This person is surrounded by such seasonal items as a piece of pie, a cookie, a beehive (with fake bees), an inverted dog bowl, and a pair of barnyard pals.

This was enough to have me snickering, but closer inspection reveals several problems in proportion and perspective. For one, take a look at that snowman’s nose. I’m pretty sure that is supposed to be the traditional carrot, but the artist was unable to draw it from a head-on perspective so instead it looks like a giant almond. Secondly, check out the boots. The right foot is clearly much larger than the left, and I don’t think it’s just an issue of angle—the detail on the top of each foot is different! Finally, actually wearing the mitten dangling by the person’s right hand on said hand would cause the heart pattern to appear on the palm side rather the back of the hand, where such designs typically go.

This is just sloppy and, above all, weird. What do these items have to do with each other? I also found it odd that one of the designs in the border is actually a musical symbol called a mordent. The mordent belongs to a class of musical embellishments called “ornaments,” which could carry a Christmassy connotation, except that I don’t credit this artist with that much cleverness.

MJ: I’ll admit I’m not too picky about things like perspective and such, but I am somehow disturbed by the way his fingers are digging into the poor snowman’s head. What did that poor (decapitated) snowman ever do to anyone? It’s as though he’s digging right into its scalp. Which looks oddly fleshy. And now I’m feeling shuddery.

MICHELLE: I don’t think I would have noticed the perspective problems if not for the chicken, to be honest, but spotting it here did spur me to notice other problems in the rest of the volume, notably a few deformed thumbs and some confusing action scenes that I wrote about in my review of the volume. I wasn’t sure what to make of the hands, honestly. If it’s that cold, why aren’t you wearing your mittens, kid?

MJ: If he put on his mittens, he wouldn’t be able to grab that piece of pie when it comes down. ;)

MICHELLE: Well, pie is important…

And that’s it for us this month. Do you have some duds of your own you’d like to share? We’d love to hear about them!

New Let’s Get Visual: Duds

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We’ve arrived again at the third Saturday of the month, which means of course it’s time for a brand new Let’s Get Visual with Michelle Smith at her blog, Soliloquy in Blue. For those new to the feature, each month, Michelle and I turn our rusty brains towards analyzing manga (or manhwa) artwork, in an attempt to improve our understanding of visual storytelling.

Up until now, we’ve always focused on artwork we think works especially well at telling the intended story. For this month, we decided to go the opposite direction and try our hand at discussing artwork that fails. Uh. Way to get into the holiday spirit?

For my “dud” selection, I chose two pages from Ellie Mamahara’s Baseball Heaven (sorry, BLU), a standard BL seduction scene, but one that unfortunately lacks heat.

“… there’s simply no passion in it … absolutely no sexual tension between them conveyed through the artwork … Even when their faces are so close together, Mamahara is unable to provide any magnetic reaction between them. I should feel that they *want* to touch each other. It should feel painful for them not to. Instead, it leaves me completely cold.”

Read the entire discussion here, or check out all our entries in the series so far!

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

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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+)

I Wish I Wrote That!

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It’s been an interesting month in the manga blogosphere, some of which is due, no doubt, to Noah Berlatsky’s recent, scathing criticism of the manga blogging community’s treatment of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. Now, my intent is not to bring more attention to that article, which has already gotten too much (from me and many others). It is far from Noah’s finest hour, and certainly not something that would inspire me to say, “I wish I wrote that!”

That said, though the main subject of my writer’s envy this month was not conceived as a direct response to Noah’s article, I’d bet that his article influenced its timing, and perhaps even some of its tone. That would be, of course, Erica Friedman’s wonderful guest review of Hagio’s collection, posted at the beginning of the month at David Welsh’s The Manga Curmudgeon.

A quote:

I think there’s a real risk, though, in over-analyzing this volume. Moto Hagio’s stories are, as I said at the beginning, masterful largely because she did not set out to be so. She wrote from the heart, stories that girls could understand, enjoy, identify with. She was the Stephanie Meyer of her time and only now, when we look back on a body of literature that spans decades, we see that it’s a little silly to dismiss it (or glorify it) because it’s shoujo manga. What A Drunken Dream offers is as much or as little as we want to see. If we stare too hard past the cute girl looking back at us in the mirror, we might in fact see the deathly crone behind her…but why would we want to do that? Can’t we just take the cute girl at face value? Isn’t she “important” enough on her own?

Thank you, Erica, for putting the work into real perspective, and for speaking eloquently without talking down to the stories’ intended audience. I wish I wrote that!

Other writings I’ve loved this month include Kate Dacey’s reworking of her early take on Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack, proving that it’s entirely possible to admire and respect an important artist’s work while still addressing ways in which it may be problematic. Also, Vom Marlowe’s article, The cycle of criticism, filled me with quite a bit of joy and gratitude.

We’ll be taking next Friday off here at Manga Bookshelf, but keep an eye out the week after for our regular features and some exciting news to share! In the meantime, what do you wish you’d written this month?

Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George: B+

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From the back cover:
Deborah and Simon St. James have taken a holiday in the winter landscape of Lancashire, hoping to heal the growing rift in their marriage. But in the barren countryside awaits bleak news: the vicar of Winslough, the man they had come to see, is dead—a victim of accidental poisoning. Unsatisfied with the inquest ruling and unsettled by the close association between the investigating constable and the woman who served the deadly meal, Simon calls in his old friend Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Together they uncover dark, complex relationships in this rural village, relationships that bring men and women together with a passion, with grief, or with the intention to kill.

Peeling away layer after layer of personal history to reveal the torment of a fugitive spirit, Missing Joseph is award-winning author Elizabeth George’s greatest achievement.

Review:
Somehow, I had formed the impression that Missing Joseph was all about Deborah St. James—whom I frequently find irksome—and her baby angst. Because of that, I put off reading it for quite a while until I was so strongly in the mood for an Elizabeth George mystery that no amount of histrionics would be able to dissuade me. As it turns out, it’s hardly about that at all and though Deborah learns an Important Lesson by the book’s end, she doesn’t play a very large role.

Deborah and Simon St. James have been going through a rough period in their marriage, because she is fixated on having a biological child, although doctors have cautioned against this, while Simon would be fine adopting one. They agree to put this fundamental disagreement aside and go on holiday to Lancashire. On their first evening in the village of Winslough, Simon hears a troubling story about the local constable and his ladyfriend, who has recently been investigated for the death of the vicar. The death was ruled an accident—she fed him hemlock at dinner, which apparently bears some resemblance to wild parsnip—but the fact that she and the constable are romantically involved is suspicious, so Simon calls Lynley to investigate the case.

I love mysteries where the story is sometimes told from the point of view of possible culprits, and Missing Joseph delivers admirably on this score. It’s very different from something like Naked Heat, which features celebrity caricatures for suspects instead of fully fleshed-out regular people. The primary cast, aside from the regulars, is the constable, the ladyfriend, her rebellious tween daughter, and the vicar’s housekeeper. Relationships are intertwined and secrets are closely kept, and it was quite fascinating watching Lynley slowly unravel the facts of the case. The manner of the vicar’s death was never in doubt, and yet I could not predict the outcome.

With all this praise, why a mere B+? I’ll answer in the form of some advice for the author.

Dear Ms. George:

When writing an overweight character whom you intend to describe as a “whale,” whose gait is lumbering, whose “bulk” is “enormous,” whose flesh feels like “a quadruple batch of lumpy bread dough,” it is probably best not to stipulate their exact weight. You see, some Americans are quite capable of converting stone into pounds and might realize, in so doing, that this character does not weigh so much more than they themselves do.

If you must write about an overweight character in these terms, which I strongly discourage, it would be better to leave some of the details to the reader’s imagination.

Grumpily yours,
Michelle

There are a few minor problems, as well. Deborah and Simon have evidently been having this argument about biological versus adopted children for a while now, but it’s not until they go on holiday that he actually asks her why she’s so intent on having biological kids. Simon may be a highly logical man, but he’s not an insensitive one; I found it far-fetched that he would not have posed this question right away. Also, Deborah is irritatingly dense in the moments before she learns her Important Lesson, which makes it even more cheesy. Still, it might bode well for a lessening of future angst. We shall see.

All in all, I enjoyed Missing Joseph quite a lot and it has rekindled my desire to get caught up on the Lynley mysteries. Expect to see more in the near future!

3 Things Thursday: Ladies to look up to

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In checking my pingbacks this morning, I found I’d received one from Daniella Orihuela-Gruber’s wrap-up of this year’s Great Manga Gift Guide. In it, she describe my 2010 gift guide as being, “full of great choices for the manga-loving ladies on your list.”

While I do think of my blog’s primary audience as being adult women, this comment surprised me. “I’m an omnivorous reader,” I thought. “Surely my gift guide is more diverse!” I then rushed right over to take a look, certain my heterogeneous tastes would be plain for all to see. And though I wasn’t exactly wrong, I was indeed surprised by what I found.

Though my suggestions were spread over several major demographic categories (seinen, josei, shoujo) and numerous genres within those categories, the one thing that really stood out when I took in the collection as a whole is that a full 16 out of the 18 suggested gift ideas were written by female mangaka. They’re a pretty diverse group of artists, writing for a range of different audiences, so it would be inaccurate to describe my guide as a list of books for women, but I can’t deny that it’s strongly dominated by female creators. And It’s probably worth noting that the remaining two series feature female leads.

Now, I enjoy work by many male artists (several of whom are certain to appear on my “Best Of” lists for this year), and certainly I don’t consider the gender of the writer when I’m looking for something to read. Still, the guide is pretty revealing, and I suspect the facts speak for themselves.

So, with this discovery fresh in my mind, I thought I’d use this week’s 3 Things to talk about three of my favorite female mangaka.

3 Female manga artists to admire and adore

1. Fumi Yoshinaga – As the only mangaka (to date) to have received a week-long celebration of her very own here at Manga Bookshelf, did anyone doubt she’d make this list? With an impressive body of work that I’m pleased to say actually is mainly written for women, and some of the warmest, most charming dialogue ever to grace the printed page, Yoshinaga is the ultimate kindred spirit for female readers like me, who crossed over from our youthful obsession with prose and somehow never looked back.

It’s difficult to choose a favorite of her works, though they are favorites of mine in several genres. I think it’s possible that Ichigenme is my favorite yaoi manga of all time, while Antique Bakery and Flower of Life fill me with pure, pure shoujo joy. And though she tends to draw a lot of men, she also shines in All My Darling Daughters. Yoshinaga is a gem. It’s that simple.

2. Natsume Ono – I’ve had a rockier road with Natsume Ono, beginning with Not Simple, which was not a tremendous favorite, but she’s won me over completely with books like Ristorante Paradiso, Gente, and (most of all) my beloved House of Five Leaves, another of my favorite series of the year.

There’s a deep melancholy running through Natsume Ono’s work, but not one that begs for unwarranted attention. Instead, it simply offers a muted, gray background that allows her richer colors to display their true beauty, like vibrant autumn leaves against an overcast sky. That sounds terribly trite, I know, but I hardly know how else to describe it, except to say that there’s a surprising beauty to Ono’s work, peeking out between the sketchy lines of her unique, unmistakable art style. Now, if only someone would license her BL titles, my adoration could become complete!

3. CLAMP – This may seem like an obvious (and perhaps overdone) choice, but I simply can’t deny my love for CLAMP, whose work was perhaps the strongest influence in shaping my tastes as a beginning reader of manga. Series like xxxHolic and Tokyo Babylon contain imagery so deeply embedded into my emotional core as a reader that I can call them up in my memory at any given moment, as clearly and as viscerally as if they were sitting in front of me on the page. There’s a visual clarity to CLAMP’s work–their solid lines, the heavy use of black–that conveys an absolute certainty about the story they are telling. It’s mezmerising, truly.

Though some of their series have been aimed squarely at female readers, most of their current catalogue is serialized in magazines for boys and men, which is something I find quite interesting, given their enormous female fan base here in the US, and the strong homoerotic subtext in much of their work. Of course, my only wish is that they’d stop teasing, and finally write some official BL. :D

It pains me deeply not to be able to include Ai Yazawa and Hiromu Arakawa on this list as well. Though I am, of course, cheating simply by mentioning them at all. *sigh*

So, readers, who are three of your favorite female mangaka?

Kurozakuro Volume 1

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Kurozakuro Volume 1 by Yoshinori Natsume

This manga about a bullied schoolboy who makes a pact with evil forces to gain strength wasn’t really to my taste, but Kurozakuro offers a glimpse of something a little different as it incorporates the horror genre into an otherwise conventional shonen tale. Kurozakuro starts out by introducing an overly familiar shonen hero. Mikito is mild and meek, and thus the target of bullies at school. His humiliation is doubled when the girl he has a crush on attempts to come to his rescue. A strange creature comes to Mikito in a dream. Mikito crawls across a desolate landscape towards a barren tree where an impish child with sharp teeth commands him to name his desire. Mikito says that he wants to be stronger so “no one will push me around anymore.” The child says he’ll give Mikito power and in return he has to make the tree bloom. Mikito wakes up the next day with heightened senses, a quick temper, and super strength.

Mikito starts finding joy in violence, and his crush Saki is disgusted by him. He starts dealing with odd compulsions, and finds out that there are demon hunters out to get him. Mikito is slowly turning into an ogre and starts craving human flesh. To make matters worse, a teen demon hunter girl has just transferred into his class. Trying to hide from demon hunters, eating raw meat, and struggling with the compulsion to kill people can make it tough to function effectively in high school. Other than his new habit of thinking of people as meat, there isn’t much to distinguish Mikito from every other bullied shonen manga hero who wants to get stronger. Natsume’s art is a little stiff. The lack of fluidity works fine when he’s referencing the visual language of horror manga, with weird lighting and shading on Mikito’s face as his ogre personality starts to take over, but isn’t as effective during the action scenes when the ogre hunters start to take out their prey.

I enjoyed a couple things about Kurozakuro. The shonen/horror mash-up was interesting and the dark tone set it apart from the more typical fighting manga I tend to expect. But none of the characters were particularly compelling, and I didn’t put the manga down feeling all that invested in the story. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this title to someone who enjoys horror manga. For me, the stock plot elements and lackluster art overwhelmed the more interesting way Natsume was playing with genre. If the art had been a bit more surreal or the characters more unique I’d probably like this title a lot more.

Off the Shelf: Four for the girls

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Welcome to another edition of Off the Shelf with MJ & Michelle! I’m joined, as always, by Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

This week, we take a look at an upcoming debut from Tokyopop, as well as some continuing series from Yen Press and Viz Media.

MICHELLE: Once upon a time I worked for a circus and I lived in Omaha.

MJ: I’ve been to Omaha, if that counts for anything.

MICHELLE: That’s actually a lyric from the stage play version of The Wizard of Oz, which I was in in the sixth grade. For some reason, it gets stuck in my head all the time.

MJ: It serves as an interesting conversation-starter!

MICHELLE: I should try it at a party sometime. Anyway, I expect you’ve been doing some reading!

MJ: Indeed I have! I’ve had a pretty shoujo-tastic week, I have to say. Pretty snark-tastic, too, if I think about it, since both of the books I plan to discuss tonight feature wry humor in place of the usual wide-eyed shoujo optimism.

First on the docket, I’ve got the debut volume of The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko by mangaka Ririko Tsujita, due out in a couple of weeks from TOKYOPOP. The series’ title refers to Kanoko, a third year junior high school student who prides herself on perfect objectivity. To maintain this emotional purity, she spurns any kind of social interaction with her classmates, preferring to simply observe (and, of course, take copious notes). When her interest is piqued by a classroom love triangle, Kanoko is shocked to find herself somehow drawn into the fray by each of the parties involved, and even more so to find herself accidentally befriending them.

My experience with this manga was a bit of a roller-coaster ride. I was immediately drawn in by Kanoko and the gloriously idiosyncratic friendships she develops against her will. Then, amidst a deep sigh of contentment, I was jerked right out of my shoujo-induced bliss by the volume’s second chapter, which begins with Kanoko having transferred to a new school, leaving everything I’d just learned to care about abruptly behind. My dissatisfaction continued through at least two more chapters before I finally realized that this is actually the premise of the series. That’s also when I realized that it’s brilliant.

Using Kanoko’s impossibly frequent school transfers as a structural conceit, Tsujita sets herself free from the bothersome constraints of reality, while also weaving in some of the most wonderfully real characterization I’ve seen in a manga comedy. It’s as though some sleep-deprived manga editor spliced together pages of Kimi ni Todoke with Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, absent-mindedly inventing a new and delicious flavor of shoujo satire that manages to consistently maintain the gag while telling an unexpectedly heartwarming story at the same time. And in a fantasy space like this, of course, Kanoko’s original, accidental friends are able to pop up as needed, to help our heroine learn and grow, even as she snarks her way through another anonymous middle school.

The real secret to the story’s success, however, is Kanoko herself. She’s smart, hilarious, and even kind of heroic, like a super-hero version of Harriet the Spy. She wards off bullies by genuinely not caring what they think of her, and blows off “friendly” saboteurs with little more than a sneer. I seriously wanted to applaud several times during the first chapter alone. She’s also deeply damaged and a complete mess, but even that’s not overplayed. It’s astonishingly well done.

MICHELLE: That truly sounds awesome. I, too, was unaware of the series’ structure, but had managed to pick up somewhere or other that Kanoko is a unique heroine, which is why I’ve been looking forward to this volume’s release. I note from the exterior of the book that TOKYOPOP has a new logo and it looks quite snazzy. Were any differences apparent on the inside of the book?

MJ: I didn’t notice anything new inside, other than this very pleasant sight on the book’s page of credits, “Editor – Asako Suzuki.” :)

You know, the thought I had as I was writing this, Michelle, was that this ability to mix satire with an actual, forward-moving story is what I’ve fruitlessly hoped for from Otomen all this time.

MICHELLE: Oh, that is a welcome sight indeed! And yeah, I’m beginning to see more disappointment with Otomen‘s lack of forward movement popping up online. I usually buy new volumes as they come out, but after the disappointment I mentioned when I discussed volumes six and seven here back in September, I just couldn’t bring myself to buy volume eight.

MJ: So now that I’ve blathered on, what have you got for us tonight?

MICHELLE: Back in the waning days of Manga Recon there was this review copy for Angel Diary volume ten that no one had claimed, so I ended up reviewing it. And, actually, it was pretty interesting. It was primarily a fight between siblings, and though it didn’t make me want to read the series from the beginning, it at least made me want to see what happened next. Well, I’ve now read volumes eleven through thirteen (the final volume) and, unfortunately, what happens next is really not too much.

Briefly, the premise of the story is that Dong-Young, the Princess of Heaven, has fled an arranged marriage with the King of Hell and come to Earth disguised as a boy. Of course, one of her classmates is Bi-Wal, the King of Hell, and they end up falling in love. In volume eleven, there’s some brief resolution to the battle between Bi-Wal and his brother, Ryung, and then Dong-Young decides to get serious about becoming the Queen of Heaven which means going home and devoting herself to studying.

At first I thought, “Oh, this is the Boys Over Flowers school of story conclusions, with one member of a couple going away for an extended period of time.” With two volumes left at this point, I expected there would be several chapters, at least, of Dong-Young hard at work and maybe even the pair waiting quite a while to finally get married. Alas, much of this period is skimmed over and the series ends shortly into volume twelve. The rest of this volume and the whole of the thirteenth are bonus chapters about supporting characters, frequently as big-eyed bratty kids.

I didn’t like or follow this series enough to feel disappointed by this ending, but it certainly lacks substance. I’m glad I wasn’t more invested otherwise I might have been annoyed. I will say, though, that I associate this series with Moon Boy a lot, since they both began with Ice Kunion around the same time and are now wrapping up in the same month, and between the two series, this one is superior. Everything makes sense and Kara’s art is frequently nice to look upon. In fact, I must confess that I felt some squee for Bi-Wal’s chief aide, Hee-Young, mostly because he has really cool hair.

MJ: Is “superior to Moon Boy” really much of a recommendation? :D

MICHELLE: I guess not. If one were in the mood for some utter fluff with pretty boys in it, though, Angel Diary would probably be a decent choice.

MJ: I’m a fan of Kara’s artwork in another Yen Press series, Legend, so though I may snark, I can well imagine the appeal of her very pretty men and their undeniably cool hair.

MICHELLE: I actually scored the first few volumes of Legend recently, and look forward to checking it out.

So, what’s your other wry shoujo read for this week?

MJ: My second shoujo-snark-tastic selection for the evening is the third volume of Kaneyoshi Izumi’s Seiho Boys’ High School, from Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint. Now, you’ll recall that the series’ second volume is what originally won me over, but I’d say that it’s the third that earned it a place in my recent holiday gift guide. And though, in part, this is because it simply maintained the second volume’s quality, it also has some particular merit of its own.

The volume starts a bit slowly, with townie Miyaji coerced into dressing up as a boy-dressing-up-as-a-girl to help Dorm 1 spice up their entry for the school’s play competition. Things move up quickly from there, however, with the introduction of a new love interest for our hero, Maki, and an unexpected development in Nogami’s flirtation with the school nurse.

As in the series’ previous volumes, what really makes this manga shine is Izumi’s honest treatment of her teenaged male characters, even within the context of a fairly light comedy. Though perhaps the more impressive achievement is her demonstrated ability to make a bunch of (mostly) heterosexual horndogs actually appealing to female readers. That Nogami, for instance, the most hideously crass of the bunch, is even remotely sympathetic as a character is an accomplishment indeed. She’s not above poking fun at her readership either, as she proves in the volume’s final chapter with the revelation that Maki’s new love interest is a dedicated fujoshi.

And though Maki is definitely the most average guy of the bunch, he’s also the one who consistently tugs at my heartstrings, whether he’s struggling with overcoming his continued attachment to his lost girlfriend or discovering that there’s more to a popular classmate than he’d previously thought. He’s a fragile sort of everyman, but it really works for this series.

MICHELLE: I’ve seen the girl-dressed-as-boy-dressed-as-girl plot before, as well as the school nurse (there’s one in the second book I plan to discuss tonight, actually) but it sounds like Izumi is able to make some tried-and-true shoujo ideas feel original.

MJ: Yes, she really does, and it’s by doing little more than playing them honestly. Though her terrific sense of humor certainly doesn’t hurt.

So, school nurses, eh? Bring ’em on!

MICHELLE: If your theme this week has been wry shoujo, then mine is “final volumes of light shoujo (or sunjeong).” I wasn’t too impressed with the first two volumes of Cactus’s Secret, in which prickly Miku expects the easygoing object of her affections, Fujioka, to pick up on her feelings despite the fact that she gets angry and yells at him all the time. The series has gradually improved, though, and the scene in the third volume where Fujioka finally admits/realizes that he likes Miku too is truly sweet. Shortly into the fourth and final volume, alas, a buxom new school nurse is introduced and I began to fear that a lame plot centering on Miku’s jealousy would soon unfold. And, in fact, that’s sort of what happens, but in a much better way than I’d anticipated.

Rather than be outraged because Fujioka is spending time with a physically beautiful lady, Miku is actually made insecure by the fact that Fujioka, whom she has pressured into considering his future, has apparently been able to discuss something with the nurse that he couldn’t share with her. It’s a classic case of opposites getting together and realizing, “Hey, we really are majorly different here!” Miku is very focused on her future, so the fact that Fujioka isn’t bothers her. Because she does care so much, he feels unable to reveal to her how clueless he is, lest he lose estimation in her eyes.

Finding the nurse a good confidante herself, Miku eventually realizes what Fujioka’s been feeling and the two end up working things out. Just like Angel Diary, this series ends pretty abruptly and is followed by a couple of bonus stories featuring supporting characters. Even so, I found the conflict in this volume to be engaging and honest, evolving organically from who these characters are. Cactus’s Secret doesn’t rank as one of my favorite shoujo series ever, but it just might deserve a Most Improved award based on the difference between its first and last volumes!

MJ: I wasn’t impressed by the first volume of this series, which kept me from continuing on, and now I’m torn by a desire to watch it improve and a desire to avoid being disappointed by an abrupt ending!

MICHELLE: I think it’s worth it, personally. The creator is also really young, so it’ll be interesting to see her develop, assuming her future endeavors are licensed here.

MJ: You make a compelling argument! I do tend to get attached to flawed works that show promise for their creators.

MICHELLE: Like Heaven’s Will?

MJ: That’s exactly the manga that sprang to mind! You know me too well, my friend.

MICHELLE: As my husband always says, “That’s my gig!”

MJ: So true.

Tune in next week for December’s BL Bookrack, and then again on December 29th for this year’s final Off the Shelf!

Black Jack, Vols. 1-2

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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

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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.

New NANA Project! Vols. 15-16

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After a short hiatus, the NANA Project is back! This time around, we look at volumes 15 and 16, focusing especially on (in Danielle’s words), “Yazawa’s view of popular art, Nana and Ren’s disintegrating relationship, and loving Nana in the past, present and future.”

For my part, I go on quite a bit over the virtues of “blind love:”

“MJ: I think this is absolutely true, and maybe makes it clear that *understanding* is not necessarily the key to… well, anything. I’m reminded of one of the stories from Kino no Tabi, “Land of Visible Pain.” In the story, Kino encounters a country of technologically-advanced people who had, at some point, come to the conclusion that if only they could truly understand each other’s pain, they’d be able to live together in perfect harmony. With this in mind, their scientists develop a way for them to all be able to hear each other’s thoughts. What happens ultimately, of course, is that they soon discover that understanding each other’s pain actually makes it *harder* for them to live together, and they eventually all end up isolated in their own homes, unable to stand being even within sight of one another.

I think to a great extent, Ren’s understanding of Nana’s deepest desires may actually make it more difficult for them to stay together. If anything, it may just make it easier for them to hurt each other, as I think he hurts Nana with his stunningly accurate assessment of her ugliest thoughts and feelings. I’m not suggesting that love is best maintained through rose-colored glasses, but I’m not sure that this level of brutal understanding is always a good thing. We all need someone in our lives who is biased in our favor, and this is most often the role of a romantic partner. I think it’s okay, and even *desirable*, for love to be just a little bit blind.”

Disagree? Tell me so in comments! :D

What a pleasure it is to be back, discussing this series with such wonderful women. Speaking for myself, I’d have to say that I probably enjoy The NANA Project more than nearly anything else I do as a manga blogger. It’s a bit heartbreaking to think about how near we are to the end of the series’ available volumes.

On a lighter note, Danielle asks at the end of the roundtable for suggestions from readers on what title the three of us should tackle next! Visit this month’s roundtable to weigh in!

For those just arriving, you can find the entire NANA Project archive at CBR’s Comics Should Be Good!

Pick of the Week: Not Love But Delicious Foods

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There’s quite a wealth of new manga and manhwa releases this week, according to Midtown Comics, but despite my love for things like Yotsuba&!, Goong, and Seiho Boys High School!, my vote must absolutely go to Fumi Yoshinaga’s Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!, released in English by Yen Press.

From my recent discussion at Off the Shelf:

The book is essentially a tour of several of the author’s favorite Tokyo restaurants, highlighting each establishment’s specialties, and including details ranging all the way from atmosphere to parking recommendations. What makes it especially rewarding for Yoshinaga fans, however, is that Yoshinaga herself stars as the main character, surrounded by her circle of friends. How much of this is fictionalized, of course we can’t know, but it feels so authentic, the overwhelming sense for readers is that we’re getting a peek into Yoshinaga’s private world, with a delightful view of her real-life quirks, hopes, desires, and of course, her obsessive love of food.

Yoshinaga portrays herself as an aging, neurotic slacker who eats like a horse, routinely spills food on her clothing, and has a thing for cute, chubby men, all of which makes her even more appealing to an older female reader like me. She strikes exactly the right balance between self-deprecation and self-love, warding off any danger of approaching either desperation or narcissism. She’s neurotic, sure, but also keenly self-aware, and her affection for her friends (be they real or fictional) is palpable …

And then there’s the food. Oh, the food, Michelle. It took about five pages of this book to get my mouth watering, and it didn’t stop until the end. Even things like “liver sashimi” and “stewed beef tendon” manage to sound appetizing in this context.

You can also find it featured in my 2010 Gift Guide.

This single-volume manga could not possibly be more charming. Go pick one up for yourself!

From the stack: Genkaku Picasso vol. 1

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Between my fondness for Usumaru Furuya’s “Palepoli” strips in Viz’s Secret Comics Japan and my abiding love of episodic “psychic helper” manga, Genkaku Picasso (also from Viz) seemed likely to be a slam dunk. It’s not.

It’s about a high-school student who suffers a near-death experience and resumes life with the ability to see traumatic auras around his classmates, then capture their distress on his sketch pad. If he wants to continue to fend off premature death, he has to help these shrouded people with their issues. He’s the self-isolating type, so this isn’t a natural set of responsibilities for him, but at least he’s got the nagging, tiny ghost of a dead friend to prod him into doing the right thing.

There aren’t many surprises in the various adolescent traumas that our hero must confront, so the book’s interest is reliant on Furuya’s ability to layer compelling weirdness onto things like eating disorders, over-identification with pop idols, and daddy issues. There are some intermittent flourishes, some dollops of lurking nastiness, but the kids are on the dull side, and their woes need more verve than Furuya seems inclined to provide.

In fact, I sometimes found myself wondering if Furuya hadn’t determined on creating a satire without having any particularly novel observations on his subject other than “these are things that routinely happen in these stores.” The chapters sort of ramble through a set number of pages, not in an idiosyncratic, arrhythmic way, but in a “I have 20 pages of story to fill 50 pages of magazine” manner. I invariably lost interest before each tale’s conclusion, and I ended up concluding that, with Furuya, less may be more. He seems at his strongest when he’s being concise.

Part of the book’s problem might be that the protagonist, Hikari “Picasso” Hamura, isn’t especially pleasant company. He’s crabby when engaged, which can be a fun quality in a fictional character, and I wanted to like the fact that he doesn’t yearn for his classmates’ approval like so many of his shônen peers. But Hamura needs to be dragged into things too much, and he carps too much about how difficult his lot is. Beyond being annoying, it doesn’t read as organic. It feels more like a vamp, and a routine one at that.

The apparent time-killing gives me occasion to actively look for things that annoy me, even though I find Genkaku Picasso to be drawn very well. By volume’s end, I was improbably put out with Hamura’s pouty, blush-bruised lips. I know that the lips should barely have registered, that I had been given time to fixate on something minor and off-putting while so little was actually happening, and that it was less about the lips themselves than the fact that I’d had so little else to fill in the gaps of a rather lazy satire of a familiar formula.

I’m still looking forward to Furuya’s Lychee Light Club, due out from Vertical in April. It promises a much higher degree of adolescent perversion without any filter necessitated by placement in a shônen magazine while still being able to twist shonen conventions into knots. Maybe it was overly optimistic to expect that from Genkaku Picasso?

Papillon Volume 5/6

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Papillon Volume 5/6 by Miwa Ueda

I was happy to see signs of life in Kodansha’s North American arm with the recent summer lineup, but I was a little disappointed that the only ongoing Kodansha title that I actively purchase was left off the list. I’ve slacked off on getting Tsubasa and xxxHolic just because they seem to have gotten so weighed down by continuity. Wallflower is so episodic that I don’t feel like I’m missing much if I skip volumes, and while I enjoyed the first few volumes of Nodame Cantible, I haven’t gotten back into collecting that series. Papillon is pure trashy fun.

As I was reading this omnibus volume I was struck with how addicting Ueda makes this series despite the fact that none of her characters are sympathetic. Nice girl Ageha may be the heroine, but she’s essentially spineless and prone to collapsing under the weight of her own drama. Ageha’s twin Hana has a myriad of psychological issues that lead her to dress up as her sister to see if her boyfriends will fall for her twin, and she’s now trying to steal Ageha’s boyfriend away. Ageha’s boyfriend Ichijiku is a guidance counselor in training who somehow finds it appropriate to date a high schooler even though he might be trying to help build up her self-confidence. If the ending of Papillon involved the main characters dying in a fiery bus crash, I would not be all that disappointed. Yet Ueda’s soap opera makes me want to keep reading.

Ageha starts a part-time summer job at a restaurant where Hana’s ex-boyfriend Shinobu Shindo happens to be working. Shinobu used to have a crush on Ageha too, but when he told her about his feelings she thought he was teasing her. Hana confesses her feelings to Ichijiku and he rejects her. Then Ageha talks to Ichikiku in guidance counselor mode, telling him all about Shinobu without realizing that her new co-worker might inspire feelings of jealousy in her boyfriend. Angst and misunderstandings abound, and Hana start to act even more reprehensible than before when she disguises herself as Ageha and attempts to seduce Ichijiku. Meanwhile, a woman from Ichijiku’s past makes a sudden return, bringing yet another set of psychological problems for him and Ageha to deal with.

Ageha begins to show vague signs of self-awareness as she begins to analyze her own behavior. She actually helps Ichijiku with some of his problems, instead of being her usual flailing and helpless self. Hana keeps acting out so much, I am really hoping that she gets hit by a meteorite and dies. I hope that Kodansha decides to wrap up this series because even though I doubt my hopes of fiery death will be satisfied, I do want to see what happens next.