David Welsh

It’s time again to look at a title from the top 10 list of the 2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list assembled by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association. The exercise is providing a nice variety of reading experiences, from a gracefully rendered adventure on the high seas to a slice of adolescent life in Guadeloupe. This month’s entry is Chew: Taster’s Choice (Image), the first collection a novel and occasionally nauseating detective series written and lettered by John Layman and drawn and colored by Rob Guillory.

This volume introduces us to Tony Chu, a police detective who also happens to be “cibopathic,” which means he experiences the full history of everything he eats. You may worry about food miles, but at least you don’t have to travel every one of them with your salad. As a result, Chu isn’t a very enthusiastic eater. The gift-curse does have its uses in the course of investigations, and Chu ends up drawing the interest of a strangely sinister Food and Drug Administration. The agency hires him to help solve food-related crimes.

Chu is assigned to work with fellow cibopath Mason Savoy, who is as stout and hearty as Chu is scrawny and drawn. They investigate the death of a food inspector, and Chu becomes smitten with a writer whose unique ability is to write about food so expressively that her readers react viscerally to her prose. Before Chu can pursue this fetching raconteur, he starts to sense that there may be more to the FDA and Savoy than he suspected, and the volume ends with Chu’s life changing drastically yet again.

Layman has a great sense of pacing. The chapters generally charge along at a nice clip, but there’s plenty of space for quirky details and funny set pieces. Guillory seems ideally suited for the material, straddling the line between amusingly absurd and full-on gross. Together, they’ve assembled an interesting cast, conducted some smart world building, and established an underlying plot that seems like it could sustain the series for some time. (Why did the FDA drive the poultry industry underground?) They also create enough of a level of internal logic to make the weirder elements fit quite nicely.

The only thing they haven’t seemed to do by the end of this volume is to figure out ways for Chu to solve crimes without eating human flesh. Given the volume of evidence available at the average crime scene, it seems like cannibalism would be a last resort for someone of Chu’s abilities. There are lots of marginally edible things lying around that are bound to be at least somewhat usefully resonant before starting in on the (not chicken) fingers. Aside from being revolting, the device feels limiting. Much as I enjoyed this volume, I want to see the hero vary his diet.

There are several very welcome text pieces in Drawn & Quarterly’s handsome production of Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths – a foreword by Frederik L. Schodt, extensive translation notes, and an afterword by the creator. My favorite extra has to be an interview with Mizuki in which the legendary mangaka is simply not having it.

He’s not being difficult or unpleasant, but he’s not really game for the standard questions that legendary cartoonists generally get asked. His answers tend to be much shorter than the inquiries that triggered them. He won’t play into the “trailblazing artiste” narrative, nor will he won’t deprecate himself. He won’t list his influences, trash commercial comics, or paint the creation of Onward… as an artistic or personal struggle.

Of course, my favorite bit of the interview is when Mizuki is asked which of his works he’s most proud of and would like to see made available in English:

SM: I would have to say GeGeGe no Kitaro.

I would have to agree with him. Grateful as I am to have any of his work licensed and in translation, it feels kind of odd to start with one of his darker works. It would be like if Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako had been licensed before anyone had a chance to read Astro Boy. Of course, GeGeGe no Kitaro is a Kodansha property, some of which was published ages ago in the publisher’s bilingual comics initiative, so that complicates things. It’s also beloved and probably very expensive, so one can’t precisely fault other publishers for not waiting. Of course, Onward… was a Kodansha property as well, originally serialized in Gekiga Gendai, so it’s nice to see the publisher continue to work with other houses rather than keep everything for themselves.

And Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths has numerous merits in its own right beyond being part of Mizuki’s body of work. It’s based on Mizuki’s experiences as a soldier serving in Papua New Guinea during World War II and portrays the hardships and ill use average soldiers endured at the hands of their superiors. These abuses range from routine, almost desultory physical punishment – “New recruits are like tatami mats: the more you beat them, the better they are.” – to the overall military culture that paints surrender as the worst kind of shame and promotes dying in battle, no matter how senseless and futile the effort, as every soldier’s highest calling (aside from victory, obviously).

Mizuki doesn’t need to do much beyond merely portraying this mindset in order to condemn it. His cast of everyman grunts doesn’t pontificate about its fate. They gripe about the shortage of food, the isolation, the grueling routine, the danger and disease. The overarching injustices they face and the ways that these will doom them always loom, and the soldiers are keenly aware of them, but they’re rarely addressed directly in the text. This is welcome, because it keeps subtler, more effective condemnation from becoming an obvious screed, and it’s also natural in a way. It makes sense to me that these powerless people are reluctant to address the fact that their day-to-day suffering is almost certainly for nothing, and that the people responsible for their fate know that and don’t care. As a result, it’s a very straightforward, chronological narrative. The soldiers arrive, conditions deteriorate, they face unthinkable danger and impossible choices, and things end badly. The approach serves Mizuki’s aims well.

The visual style can be jarring at times. Mizuki paints lushly realistic backdrops and peoples them with cartoonish figures. That isn’t problematic by itself, as I’m more than happy to embrace the combination of cartoonish and gruesome in works like Tezuka’s MW and Ode to Kirihito. There are moments when Mizuki’s particular stylization is not just dissonant with his subject matter but directly at odds with it. This is particularly evident in more violent scenes when body parts are flying, and Mizuki’s strict adherence to his character aesthetic sometimes results in panels that look more ridiculous than horrific. He’s also dealing with a large cast, and individuality tends to get lost in terms of design and simple space to develop characters thoroughly. Ironically, it’s the higher-ups who make the strongest impression. Again, that fits, since they’re the ones with the most agency, and it reinforces the brutal expendable status of the rank and file.

It’s an effective piece on the whole, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read it. The overall level of restrained sincerity is welcome and makes the piece stand out in the field of autobiographic comics. I’m also pleased that Drawn & Quarterly chose to mark the occasion of Mizuki’s proper English-language debut with proper introductory pieces providing an overview of his career and impact. If it doesn’t seem like the ideal piece to use for Mizuki’s reintroduction, it certainly does him credit.

Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of “David Gushes over Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game!” Listen, I know I’ve crossed over from any kind of clear-eyed critical examination into full-on, sweaty, tent-in-a-parking-lot evangelism with this title, but I also know that I’m beyond caring. This series delivers joy on a regular basis.

The third omnibus, which collects the sixth and seventh volumes of the series, can be reduced to the simplest of sports manga narratives. The team of plucky upstarts prepares for a big game, then plays the big game, then reacts to the outcome of the big game. It doesn’t get much purer than that, and the arc here is certainly exciting in terms of that basic outline.

But it’s so much more than that. Ultimately, the events portrayed here are about justice, about heart and determination winning out against elitism and presumption. Of course, that’s also one of the least novel conflicts ever to grace the pages of manga as a category, but still…

The thing is, while Adachi is working with one of the oldest road maps in the form, he doesn’t take a straight line anywhere. Our scruffy heroes don’t gaze off into the middle distance and make vows about their future. They’re too realistic for that. They don’t lapse into paragraphs of internal monologue about what’s happening, because Adachi draws too well and frames sequences too clearly for that to be necessary. Characters can behave entirely believably and still surprise you, because Adachi doesn’t feel the need to underline their every thought or feeling. He trusts your ability to comprehend subtext, to remember past moments, and to connect what you already know or suspect with what you see unfolding on the page in front of you.

As goofy as Adachi’s sense of humor can sometimes be, he can also tug at your heartstrings or thrill you with moments big and small. You can be both elated and tickled when justice is visited upon the smug. You can snicker at and feel sympathy for the team dork during his mishaps, and you can feel touched but not manipulated as characters inch towards a better understanding of each other.

It’s just an awesome comic, you guys. It does everything you expect a comic of this sort to do, but it does them with such distinctive style and heartfelt sincerity that you’ll never notice you’ve visited this territory before. Awesome.