Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Katherine Dacey

7 Billion Needles, Vols. 1-2

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First published in 1950, Hal Clement’s Needle was a unique mixture of hard science fiction and police procedural. The story focused on an alien detective who crash-lands on Earth while chasing an intergalactic criminal. With his ship destroyed and his symbiant companion dead, The Hunter takes up residence inside a teenager’s body, eventually persuading his host to help him find the fugitive — no mean feat, as the fugitive can also hide, undetected, inside a human host.

The story was notable, in part, for Clement’s meticulous, detailed study of the alien’s physiology. Drawing on mid-century research on microorganisms, Clement imagined a highly intelligent, adaptable creature capable of manipulating its body to squeeze through tiny spaces and make use of its host’s sensory organs to learn more about its surroundings. Needle was also notable for the way in which Clement folded these speculative passages into an old-fashioned detective story; once The Hunter begins communicating directly with Bob, his host, the two retrace the fugitive’s steps, investigating everyone who might have come into contact with it and systematically ruling out suspects through careful observation of their behavior.

Nobuaki Tadano’s 7 Billion Needles (2008-10) draws inspiration from Clement’s novel, preserving the basic concept while tweaking the storyline to work in a graphic format. Gone are the long passages explaining how Horizon (as the alien detective is called in 7 Billion Needles) insinuates himself into his human host; in their place are more direct, dramatic scenes showing us how Horizon’s host, a sullen teenage girl named Hikaru, wrestles with the emotional and physical burden of helping him pursue Maelstrom, a shape-shifting creature so powerful he’s left a trail of dead planets in his wake.

As a result, 7 Billion Needles reads more like horror than hard science fiction, placing more emphasis on monster-hunting and raw adolescent emotion than the mechanics of Horizon and Hikaru’s symbiotic relationship. Tadano’s choices make good sense from the standpoint of pacing and visual drama; so much of the original novel took place inside Bob, it’s hard to imagine how an artist would have brought those passages to life in comic-book form. (That summary makes Needle sound impossibly dirty, but rest assured, it isn’t.) Tadano’s monster, too, is much better defined than Clement’s; Clement’s fugitive only appears in the final chapters of the book, the nature of his crime never fully explained, whereas Maelstrom, Tadano’s creation, is something out of a good B-movie, causing his host du jour to undergo grotesque transformations before going all-out alien.

The real genius of 7 Billion Needles, however, is the way Tadano uses teen angst as a key plot element. In the very first pages of volume one, we learn that Hikaru is an orphan, living with an aunt and uncle not much older than she is. As the story unfolds, Tadano seeds the conversation with nuggets of information about Hikaru’s past; in volume two, for example, we learn that Hikaru and her father had lived on a small island, where they became social pariahs, enduring threats, taunts, and vandalism from their neighbors. Not surprisingly, Hikaru is withdrawn at the beginning of 7 Billion Needles, openly defying teachers by wearing headphones in class and avoiding even the most basic interaction with her peers. Once she agrees to help Horizon, however, she must begin talking to other people — the only way Horizon can detect Malestrom’s presence is for Hikaru to interact with Maelstrom’s host. Her awkward attempts to connect with other students, and her fumbling efforts at friendship, add a raw emotional energy to 7 Billion Needles that is largely absent from Clement’s original story.

The series’ artwork is its only shortcoming. As Deb Aoki noted in her review of volume one, all the female characters have the same bland, plastic face, making them difficult to distinguish from one another. (Tadano’s rather weak efforts at creating a memorable supporting cast also contribute to the impression of sameness.) Some of the monster designs, too, lack inspiration — a key shortcoming in a genre known for its nightmarish, otherworldly imagery. When we first see Maelstrom in his true form, he looks like a tyrannosaurus rex; not until the second volume are we treated to a more terrifying and unsettling image of Malestrom as a grotesque composite of all the human beings he’s ingested. Perhaps most disappointing is Tadano’s over-reliance on the flash-boom, using big bursts of light and sound effects to indicate Horizon’s powers without really showing us what’s happening.

On the whole, however, 7 Billion Needles is an intelligent update on Needle, substituting the heat of adolescent angst and monster-slaying for the cool detachment of hard science and old-fashioned gumshoeing. Recommended.

Review copies provided by Vertical, Inc. Volume two will be released on November 23, 2010.

7 BILLION NEEDLES, VOLS. 1-2 • BY NOBUAKI TADANO • VERTICAL, INC. • RATING: 16+

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali

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I was six in 1978, the year DC Comics first published Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, so I can’t claim to have fond memories of reading it or seeing it on the newsstand. But as a product of the 1970s, the idea of putting a superhero and a celeb in an “event” comic makes intuitive sense to me. In 1978, it seemed like every TV show featured a special guest star or assembled a large group of Hollywood luminaries for some kind of friendly competition: remember The New Scooby-Doo Movies, in which Sandy Duncan and Cher helped the gang solve preposterous mysteries? Or Battle of the Network Stars, a forerunner of modern reality TV?

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali combines these two trends into a shamelessly entertaining package in which the world’s most famous superhero teams up with the world’s greatest boxer to defeat an alien race called… The Scrubb. (If you had any doubt that ten-year-old boys were the target audience for the original comic, look no further than the names; The Scrubb’s ruler is named Rat’lar.) Better still, Superman and Muhammad Ali duke it out in front of a distinguished audience of fictional DC characters, Hollywood actors, DC Comics personnel, and the POTUS himself, a veritable who’s-who of 1978. (At least on the cover; in the actual book, the fight takes place in front of a large, boisterous crowd of aliens that does not include Raquel Welch, Joe Namath, Kurt Vonnegut, or The Jackson Five.)

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Superman vs. Muhammad Ali

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I was six in 1978, the year DC Comics first published Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, so I can’t claim to have fond memories of reading it or seeing it on the newsstand. But as a product of the 1970s, the idea of putting a superhero and a celeb in an “event” comic makes intuitive sense to me. In 1978, it seemed like every TV show featured a special guest star or assembled a large group of Hollywood luminaries for some kind of friendly competition: remember The New Scooby-Doo Movies, in which Sandy Duncan and Cher helped the gang solve preposterous mysteries? Or Battle of the Network Stars, a forerunner of modern reality TV?

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali combines these two trends into a shamelessly entertaining package in which the world’s most famous superhero teams up with the world’s greatest boxer to defeat an alien race called… The Scrubb. (If you had any doubt that ten-year-old boys were the target audience for the original comic, look no further than the names; The Scrubb’s ruler is named Rat’lar.) Better still, Superman and Muhammad Ali duke it out in front of a distinguished audience of fictional DC characters, Hollywood actors, DC Comics personnel, and the POTUS himself, a veritable who’s-who of 1978. (At least on the cover; in the actual book, the fight takes place in front of a large, boisterous crowd of aliens that does not include Raquel Welch, Joe Namath, Kurt Vonnegut, or The Jackson Five.)

The concept was the brainchild of legendary boxing promoter Don King, who first pitched the idea to DC Comics in 1976 after seeing the media frenzy that accompanied the release of another event comic, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man: The Battle of the Century. Working with editor Julie Schwartz, Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams developed King’s Superman-versus-Ali concept into a storyline in which Superman and Muhammad Ali are ordered by alien invaders to fight each other to determine who is Earth’s greatest warrior. The winner, in turn, must go mano-a-mano with The Scrubb’s best fighter; if Earth’s representative loses, the planet will be annexed by The Scrubb as a slave labor colony.

On many levels, the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali is cheesier than a plate of Velveeta: who but a ten-year-old boy would dream up a scenario in which the fate of the world rested on the outcome of a boxing match between a fictional superhero and a larger-than-life athlete? Yet the well-crafted script keeps the idea in the realm of the… well, I won’t say plausible, but… logical, at least within the established parameters of the DC universe. Dennis O’Neil anticipates the reader’s many objections to the premise — doesn’t Superman have an unfair advantage over Ali? how could Ali possibly defeat a giant green alien who’s bigger and meaner than George Foreman? — by addressing them head-on: the big fight, for example, takes place under the glare of a red sun, thus draining Superman of his powers, while Ali proves the intergalactic versatility of the rope-a-dope when fighting The Scrubb’s best boxer.

The other secret to Superman vs. Muhammad Ali‘s success is that O’Neil captures Ali’s charisma and swagger without imitating his famous verbal mannerisms — a wise decision, I think, as it would be awfully hard to write Ali-esque dialogue without shading into parody. What O’Neil does instead is pure genius: he inserts a brief speech in which Ali explains the grammar and syntax of boxing to Superman, comparing various punches to declarative and interrogative statements. It’s hokey as hell but it works, showcasing the boxer’s quick wit and flair for metaphor while walking the reader through the basics of the sport. O’Neil’s characterization of Ali is nicely supported by Neal Adams’ artwork; not only does comic-book Ali look a lot like the real man, but he moves with the agility and speed that were hallmarks of Ali’s boxing.

If I had any criticism of Superman, it’s that DC published two different versions of the book: the cheaper, smaller “Deluxe” version includes some nice bonus material — an essay by DC publisher Jenette Kahn, preliminary sketches — but not the glorious, wraparound cover, while the “Facsimile” version reproduces the comic at its original trim size, with the full cover gracing the outside of the book. (The Deluxe version’s slipjacket only reproduces part of the original cover; the full image appears inside the book, to decidedly lesser effect.) At $39.99, the Facsimile version is nearly twice as expensive as the Deluxe version, further limiting its appeal to all but the most dedicated Superman fans.

Still, that’s a minor complaint about an eminently worthwhile project. I’d love to see DC and Marvel re-issue Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man in a similar, hardbound format. And if DC would really like to make me happy, they could commission a special 35th anniversary tribute to Superman vs. Muhammad Ali in which Supergirl and Laila Ali picked up where Clark Kent and Cassius Clay left off in 1978. Now that would be awesome.

SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI • BY NEAL ADAMS AND DENNY O’NEIL • DC COMICS • 96 pp. • NO RATING

Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso

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Short Cuts has the unique distinction of being one of the first manga I ever loathed. In fairness to Usamaru Furuya, I read it early in my relationship with manga, when the only titles I knew were Lone Wolf and Cub, Tokyo Babylon, InuYasha, Mermaid Saga, and X/1999. I found Short Cuts bewildering, frankly, as I knew very little about ko-gals — one of Furuya’s favorite subjects — and even less about the other cultural trends and manga tropes that Furuya gleefully mocked. Then, too, Furuya’s fascination with teenage girls, panties, casual prostitution, and incest grew tiresome: how many times can you play the am-I-shocking-you card before the shtick gets old? With the release of Genkaku Picasso, however, I thought it was a good time to revisit Short Cuts and see if I’d unfairly dismissed a great artist or correctly judged him as an unrepentant perv.

What I found was a decidedly mixed bag, a smorgasbord of jokes about girl cliques, lecherous salarymen, Valentine’s Day gift-giving, travel guides for foreigners, and, yes, sex. Some of the best strips tackle obvious targets in unexpected ways. Mr. Pick-on-Me, a recurring character, is one such example: he’s a robot whose sole job is to endure harassment from school kids, providing them a more attractive target for bullying than each other. He proves so effective, however, that the school administrators begin bullying him, too, necessitating the purchase of more robots. Another recurring character, Mitsu Cutie, is an assassin who assembles lethal weapons from bento boxes and Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Though Furuya is hardly the first person to wring laughs from a sweet-faced character’s degenerate behavior, the gag is surprisingly funny, not least for the way in which it carefully filters spy thriller conventions through the lens of shojo manga; it’s as if Takao Saito and Arina Tanemura teamed up to produce a story about a twelve-year-old hit girl.

Furuya is also a first-class mimic, capable of channeling just about any other artist’s style in service of a good joke. In one gag, for example, he twists a TV-addled teen’s face into a perfect imitation of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s parasite aliens, while in another, he shows a woman with ridiculously long eyelashes performing her daily grooming routine, revealing her true identity only in the final panel: she’s Maetel, the heroine of Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999. Even Tezuka take his lumps: in Furuya’s version of Astro Boy, the iconic robot looks like the rotund, bespectacled Dr. Ochanomizu, while his maker resembles Astro, though in Furuya’s telling, the mad scientist likes baggy knee socks, a hallmark of ko-gal fashion.

The Astro Boy strip is one of many poking fun at ko-gals, Japan’s own answer to the Valley Girl. Like their Orange County counterparts, kogals are an easy target: their speech and attire are distinctive and easily parodied, as are their devotion to shopping, brand names, and hanging out in the Shibuya district. That’s not to say that Furuya’s jokes are bad; to the contrary, there are some genuinely inspired panels. In one strip, for example, we see a shrine featuring monumental sculptures of ko-gals attended by elderly male priests in short skirts and baggy socks, while in another, a balding, middle-aged man apprentices himself to become a ko-gal, applying himself with the steely resolve of a samurai or geisha-in-training.

A lot of the ko-gal humor is rather mean-spirited, however, portraying girls as hopelessly dim, materialistic, and uninterested in sex unless it comes with a financial reward. Though the male characters are ridiculed for their willingness to pay teenage girls for sexual favors, Furuya allows the reader to have his cake and eat it, too, laughing with recognition at his weakness for panty flashes while being treated to… panty flashes. From very cute girls. Furuya even pokes fun at himself, punishing one of his female characters for her dawning awareness of his “Lolita complex.” (He first attempts to white her out, then resorts to drawing her as a monster.) In the final panel of the “cut,” he’s asserted control over the character again, blackmailing her into silence. The whole sequence is done with a nudge and a wink, as if to make us complicit in Furuya’s predilection for teenage girls; it’s a classic non-apology, the equivalent of saying, “No offense, but sixteen-year-olds are hawt, dude!”

In many ways, Genkaku Picasso seems like one of the two-page “cuts” dragged out to epic lengths. The story focuses on Hikari Hamura, a weird, asexual twit who becomes so involved with his sketch book that he finds a beautiful girl’s attention a nuisance. While sitting on the bank of a river with his classmate Chiaki, a bizarre disaster kills them both. She’s reincarnated as a pocket-sized angel; he’s reborn with a new supernatural gift, the ability to draw other people’s dreams. The central joke of the series is that Hikari is a terrible dream interpreter, reading even darker intent into other students’ nightmares than is implied by the imagery.

The need to show where Hikari’s interpretations go astray proves Genkaku Picasso‘s biggest weakness. Consider “Manba and Kotone,” the third story of volume one, in which one of Hikari’s classmates is plagued by images of a teenage girl being tortured and tied up. As Ng Suat Tong points out in his review of Genkaku, the punchline is squicky: these images aren’t a dark fantasy, but pictures from a magazine shoot in which the girl volunteered to pose for her father, a professional photographer. Handled in two panels, the joke would hit like a nasty rim shot, but as the driving force behind the chapter’s storyline, it becomes… well, seriously creepy, pushing the material into the decidedly unfunny territory of incest and parent-child power dynamics.

I actually liked Genkaku Picasso more than Tong did, partly because I think Furuya is having a ball subverting shonen cliches; it’s the kind of series in which doing your best means staving off body rot, not winning a tournament, and a quiet, philosophical moment between two teens is interrupted by a fiery helicopter crash. I also liked some of the dream sequences, which showcase Furuya’s incredible versatility as an artist. However pedestrian the script may be in explaining the images’ meaning — and yes, there are some borderline Oprah moments in every story — the dreams are nonetheless arresting in their strange specificity.

After reading Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso, I’m convinced of Usamaru Furuya’s ability draw just about anything, and to tell a truly dirty joke. I’m not yet persuaded that he can work in a longer form, but perhaps if he’s adapting someone else’s story — say, Osamu Daizi’s No Longer Human — he might find the right structure for containing and directing his furious artistic energy.

Review copy of Gengaku Picasso provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

SHORT CUTS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • NO RATING (MATERIAL BEST SUITED FOR MATURE READERS)

GENKAKU PICASSO, VOL. 1 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso

by

Short Cuts has the unique distinction of being one of the first manga I ever loathed. In fairness to Usamaru Furuya, I read it early in my relationship with manga, when the only titles I knew were Lone Wolf and Cub, Tokyo Babylon, InuYasha, Mermaid Saga, and X/1999. I found Short Cuts bewildering, frankly, as I knew very little about ko-gals — one of Furuya’s favorite subjects — and even less about the other cultural trends and manga tropes that Furuya gleefully mocked. Then, too, Furuya’s fascination with teenage girls, panties, casual prostitution, and incest grew tiresome: how many times can you play the am-I-shocking-you card before the shtick gets old? With the release of Genkaku Picasso, however, I thought it was a good time to revisit Short Cuts and see if I’d unfairly dismissed a great artist or correctly judged him as an unrepentant perv.

What I found was a decidedly mixed bag, a smorgasbord of jokes about girl cliques, lecherous salarymen, Valentine’s Day gift-giving, travel guides for foreigners, and, yes, sex. Some of the best strips tackle obvious targets in unexpected ways. Mr. Pick-on-Me, a recurring character, is one such example: he’s a robot whose sole job is to endure harassment from school kids, providing them a more attractive target for bullying than each other. He proves so effective, however, that the school administrators begin bullying him, too, necessitating the purchase of more robots. Another recurring character, Mitsu Cutie, is an assassin who assembles lethal weapons from bento boxes and Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Though Furuya is hardly the first person to wring laughs from a sweet-faced character’s degenerate behavior, the gag is surprisingly funny, not least for the way in which it carefully filters spy thriller conventions through the lens of shojo manga; it’s as if Takao Saito and Arina Tanemura teamed up to produce a story about a twelve-year-old hit girl.

Furuya is also a first-class mimic, capable of channeling just about any other artist’s style in service of a good joke. In one gag, for example, he twists a TV-addled teen’s face into a perfect imitation of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s parasite aliens, while in another, he shows a woman with ridiculously long eyelashes performing her daily grooming routine, revealing her true identity only in the final panel: she’s Maetel, the heroine of Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999. Even Tezuka take his lumps: in Furuya’s version of Astro Boy, the iconic robot looks like the rotund, bespectacled Dr. Ochanomizu, while his maker resembles Astro, though in Furuya’s telling, the mad scientist likes baggy knee socks, a hallmark of ko-gal fashion.

The Astro Boy strip is one of many poking fun at ko-gals, Japan’s own answer to the Valley Girl. Like their Orange County counterparts, kogals are an easy target: their speech and attire are distinctive and easily parodied, as are their devotion to shopping, brand names, and hanging out in the Shibuya district. That’s not to say that Furuya’s jokes are bad; to the contrary, there are some genuinely inspired panels. In one strip, for example, we see a shrine featuring monumental sculptures of ko-gals attended by elderly male priests in short skirts and baggy socks, while in another, a balding, middle-aged man apprentices himself to become a ko-gal, applying himself with the steely resolve of a samurai or geisha-in-training.

A lot of the ko-gal humor is rather mean-spirited, however, portraying girls as hopelessly dim, materialistic, and uninterested in sex unless it comes with a financial reward. Though the male characters are ridiculed for their willingness to pay teenage girls for sexual favors, Furuya allows the reader to have his cake and eat it, too, laughing with recognition at his weakness for panty flashes while being treated to… panty flashes. From very cute girls. Furuya even pokes fun at himself, punishing one of his female characters for her dawning awareness of his “Lolita complex.” (He first attempts to white her out, then resorts to drawing her as a monster.) In the final panel of the “cut,” he’s asserted control over the character again, blackmailing her into silence. The whole sequence is done with a nudge and a wink, as if to make us complicit in Furuya’s predilection for teenage girls; it’s a classic non-apology, the equivalent of saying, “No offense, but sixteen-year-olds are hawt, dude!”

In many ways, Genkaku Picasso seems like one of the two-page “cuts” dragged out to epic lengths. The story focuses on Hikari Hamura, a weird, asexual twit who becomes so involved with his sketch book that he finds a beautiful girl’s attention a nuisance. While sitting on the bank of a river with his classmate Chiaki, a bizarre disaster kills them both. She’s reincarnated as a pocket-sized angel; he’s reborn with a new supernatural gift, the ability to draw other people’s dreams. The central joke of the series is that Hikari is a terrible dream interpreter, reading even darker intent into other students’ nightmares than is implied by the imagery.

The need to show where Hikari’s interpretations go astray proves Genkaku Picasso‘s biggest weakness. Consider “Manba and Kotone,” the third story of volume one, in which one of Hikari’s classmates is plagued by images of a teenage girl being tortured and tied up. As Ng Suat Tong points out in his review of Genkaku, the punchline is squicky: these images aren’t a dark fantasy, but pictures from a magazine shoot in which the girl volunteered to pose for her father, a professional photographer. Handled in two panels, the joke would hit like a nasty rim shot, but as the driving force behind the chapter’s storyline, it becomes… well, seriously creepy, pushing the material into the decidedly unfunny territory of incest and parent-child power dynamics.

I actually liked Genkaku Picasso more than Tong did, partly because I think Furuya is having a ball subverting shonen cliches; it’s the kind of series in which doing your best means staving off body rot, not winning a tournament, and a quiet, philosophical moment between two teens is interrupted by a fiery helicopter crash. I also liked some of the dream sequences, which showcase Furuya’s incredible versatility as an artist. However pedestrian the script may be in explaining the images’ meaning — and yes, there are some borderline Oprah moments in every story — the dreams are nonetheless arresting in their strange specificity.

After reading Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso, I’m convinced of Usamaru Furuya’s ability draw just about anything, and to tell a truly dirty joke. I’m not yet persuaded that he can work in a longer form, but perhaps if he’s adapting someone else’s story — say, Osamu Daizi’s No Longer Human — he might find the right structure for containing and directing his furious artistic energy.

Review copy of Gengaku Picasso provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

SHORT CUTS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • NO RATING (MATERIAL BEST SUITED FOR MATURE READERS)

GENKAKU PICASSO, VOL. 1 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Presents

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Back in 2007, John Jakala coined the trademark-worthy phrase “comeuppance theater” to describe horror stories in which a mean, violent, or greedy person gets his just desserts: a vain woman becomes visibly grotesque, a murderer dies at the hands of his victim’s ghost. In order for comeuppance theater to be dramatically persuasive, the author needs to do more than just dream up a suitably ironic punishment for the villain; he needs to convince us that the villain is sufficiently deserving of said punishment, that the villain is, in fact, monstrous in his desires or behavior and not simply an average joe exercising bad judgment. We may not be rooting for the villain’s demise — we may even feel a twinge of sympathy for him or self-identification with his plight — but if the author has done his job, the villain’s punishment seems necessary for restoring the social order.

In Presents (CMX), Kananko Inuki puts an interesting spin on the material, using our love of gifts as the jumping-off point for some funny, nasty, and intelligent episodes of comeuppance theater. The series’ host is Kurumi, a strange little girl who doles out presents to bad people and victims alike. Some gifts prove the recipients’ undoing: in “Present of Love,” for example, a manipulative college student goads her suitor into buying expensive jewelry that he can’t afford, even though she loathes him. His last gift to her — a set of earrings that Kurumi promised would “bring them together” — initiates a chain of events that unite the foolish pair in death. Other gifts provide victims a tool for payback: in “The Scary Present,” Kurumi gives a giant, man-eating box to a girl whose big sister gives horrific, mean-spirited gifts, while in “The Return Present,” Kurumi helps a bullied teen find an appropriate present for her tormentor.

Not all the stories follow this exact template; Kurumi becomes less central to the plots in volumes two or three, sometimes functioning as a passive observer, other times not appearing in the story at all. Volume two, for example, opens with a peculiar — and not entirely successful — trio of stories about Christmas gifts’ potential to corrupt little kids. Other stories read more like fairy tales: in “Dream Present,” a young woman endures a series of painful rituals in order to win a prince’s hand in marriage (in homage to Cinderella’s stepsisters, she even dispenses with a few toes), while in “Konotori” (or “stork”), magical cabbages bestow fertility on deserving couples.

The most potent stories shed light on the indignities of childhood, especially playground politics. Many of Presents‘ female characters are preoccupied with their place in the school’s pecking order, selecting uglier or quieter classmates to serve as foils more than friends. Rinko, the mean-girl villain of “The Return Gift,” is a classic example, calmly admitting that her friendship with the shy, slow Suzuko makes her “relax and feel better about herself,” then quietly fuming when Suzuko begins coming into her own socially and academically. The principal characters in “The Keepsake” and “The Most Wanted Present” are similarly opportunistic, demanding extreme fealty from lonely, passive classmates; when these eager-to-please girls die in an effort to honor their promises, their tormentors suffer retribution from beyond the grave.

Frenemies are a staple of young adult literature, of course, but the bald presentation of the issue in Presents conveys the cruelty of the behavior more effectively than a more restrained, realistic depiction could, capturing the intensity of both the bully and the victim’s feelings in an immediate, visceral fashion. Inuki’s imagery in all three stories is cartoonishly grotesque: Rinko, for example, develops monster zits that look more like the handiwork of an alien virus than P. acnes, while Mamiko, the manipulative frenemy in “The Keepsake,” winds up with a grotesque scar on her chest in the shape of her dead friend’s profile. (Mamiko coveted Sakiko’s cameo brooch.) The pimples and the scars make visible Rinko and Mamiko’s true selves; though both are fully aware of what they’re doing (“I was happy to see the look of distress on Sakiko’s face,” Mamiko narrates), it’s not until they see their deformed likenesses that they grasp how hurtful their behavior really is.

The fact that bullies, mean girls, and big sisters factor so prominently into Presents suggests that Inuki was writing for a younger audience, a supposition borne out by her fondness for goosing the story with fleeting but gross images: a box of cockroaches, pus-covered wounds, rotting corpses. It’s a pity, then, that CMX opted for a Mature rating, as I think the series works well for teens, depicting the emotional horrors of childhood in a vivid, gruesomely funny way. The stories are varied enough to sustain an adult’s interest as well; readers with fond memories of Tales from the Crypt or The Twilight Zone will find a lot to like about Inuki’s work, from the efficiently of her storytelling — many of Presents‘ best chapters are less than twenty pages — to the pointedness of her punishments.

PRESENTS, VOLS. 1-3 • BY KANAKO INUKI • CMX • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading is an occasional feature that highlights titles that aren’t getting the critical attention — or readership — they deserve. Click here for the inaugural column; click here for the series archive.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Presents

by

Back in 2007, John Jakala coined the trademark-worthy phrase “comeuppance theater” to describe horror stories in which a mean, violent, or greedy person gets his just desserts: a vain woman becomes visibly grotesque, a murderer dies at the hands of his victim’s ghost. In order for comeuppance theater to be dramatically persuasive, the author needs to do more than just dream up a suitably ironic punishment for the villain; he needs to convince us that the villain is sufficiently deserving of said punishment, that the villain is, in fact, monstrous in his desires or behavior and not simply an average joe exercising bad judgment. We may not be rooting for the villain’s demise — we may even feel a twinge of sympathy for him or self-identification with his plight — but if the author has done his job, the villain’s punishment seems necessary for restoring the social order.

In Presents (CMX), Kananko Inuki puts an interesting spin on the material, using our love of gifts as the jumping-off point for some funny, nasty, and intelligent episodes of comeuppance theater. The series’ host is Kurumi, a strange little girl who doles out presents to bad people and victims alike. Some gifts prove the recipients’ undoing: in “Present of Love,” for example, a manipulative college student goads her suitor into buying expensive jewelry that he can’t afford, even though she loathes him. His last gift to her — a set of earrings that Kurumi promised would “bring them together” — initiates a chain of events that unite the foolish pair in death. Other gifts provide victims a tool for payback: in “The Scary Present,” Kurumi gives a giant, man-eating box to a girl whose big sister gives horrific, mean-spirited gifts, while in “The Return Present,” Kurumi helps a bullied teen find an appropriate present for her tormentor.

Not all the stories follow this exact template; Kurumi becomes less central to the plots in volumes two or three, sometimes functioning as a passive observer, other times not appearing in the story at all. Volume two, for example, opens with a peculiar — and not entirely successful — trio of stories about Christmas gifts’ potential to corrupt little kids. Other stories read more like fairy tales: in “Dream Present,” a young woman endures a series of painful rituals in order to win a prince’s hand in marriage (in homage to Cinderella’s stepsisters, she even dispenses with a few toes), while in “Konotori” (or “stork”), magical cabbages bestow fertility on deserving couples.

The most potent stories shed light on the indignities of childhood, especially playground politics. Many of Presents‘ female characters are preoccupied with their place in the school’s pecking order, selecting uglier or quieter classmates to serve as foils more than friends. Rinko, the mean-girl villain of “The Return Gift,” is a classic example, calmly admitting that her friendship with the shy, slow Suzuko makes her “relax and feel better about herself,” then quietly fuming when Suzuko begins coming into her own socially and academically. The principal characters in “The Keepsake” and “The Most Wanted Present” are similarly opportunistic, demanding extreme fealty from lonely, passive classmates; when these eager-to-please girls die in an effort to honor their promises, their tormentors suffer retribution from beyond the grave.

Frenemies are a staple of young adult literature, of course, but the bald presentation of the issue in Presents conveys the cruelty of the behavior more effectively than a more restrained, realistic depiction could, capturing the intensity of both the bully and the victim’s feelings in an immediate, visceral fashion. Inuki’s imagery in all three stories is cartoonishly grotesque: Rinko, for example, develops monster zits that look more like the handiwork of an alien virus than P. acnes, while Mamiko, the manipulative frenemy in “The Keepsake,” winds up with a grotesque scar on her chest in the shape of her dead friend’s profile. (Mamiko coveted Sakiko’s cameo brooch.) The pimples and the scars make visible Rinko and Mamiko’s true selves; though both are fully aware of what they’re doing (“I was happy to see the look of distress on Sakiko’s face,” Mamiko narrates), it’s not until they see their deformed likenesses that they grasp how hurtful their behavior really is.

The fact that bullies, mean girls, and big sisters factor so prominently into Presents suggests that Inuki was writing for a younger audience, a supposition borne out by her fondness for goosing the story with fleeting but gross images: a box of cockroaches, pus-covered wounds, rotting corpses. It’s a pity, then, that CMX opted for a Mature rating, as I think the series works well for teens, depicting the emotional horrors of childhood in a vivid, gruesomely funny way. The stories are varied enough to sustain an adult’s interest as well; readers with fond memories of Tales from the Crypt or The Twilight Zone will find a lot to like about Inuki’s work, from the efficiently of her storytelling — many of Presents‘ best chapters are less than twenty pages — to the pointedness of her punishments.

PRESENTS, VOLS. 1-3 • BY KANAKO INUKI • CMX • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading is an occasional feature that highlights titles that aren’t getting the critical attention — or readership — they deserve. Click here for the inaugural column; click here for the series archive.

My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga

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Whether by accident or design, the very first manga I read and liked were horror titles: “The Laughing Target,” Mermaid Saga, Uzumaki. I’m not sure why I find spooky stories so compelling in manga form; I don’t generally read horror novels, and I don’t have the constitution for gory movies. But manga about zombies? Or vampires? Or angry spirits seeking to avenge their own deaths? Well, there’s always room on my bookshelf for another one, even if the stories sometimes feel overly familiar or — in the case of artists like Kanako Inuki and Kazuo Umezu — make no sense at all. Below is a list of my ten favorite scary manga, which run the gamut from psychological horror to straight-up ick.

10. LAMENT OF THE LAMB

KEI TOUME • TOKYOPOP • 7 VOLUMES

Kei Toume puts a novel spin on vampirism, presenting it not as a supernatural phenomenon, but as a symptom of a rare genetic disorder. His brother-and-sister protagonists, Kazuna and Chizuna, begin exhibiting the same tendencies as their deceased mother, losing control at the sight or suggestion of blood, and enduring cravings so intense they induce temporary insanity. Long on atmosphere and short on plot, Lament of the Lamb won’t be every vampire lover’s idea of a rip-snortin’ read; the manga focuses primarily on the intense, unhealthy relationship between Kazuna and Chizuna, and very little on blood-sucking. What makes Lament of the Lamb so deeply unsettling, however, is the strong current of violence and fear that flows just beneath its surface; Kazuna and Chizuna may not be predators, but we see just how much self-control it takes for them to contain their bloodlust.

9. SCHOOL ZONE

KANAKO INUKI • DARK HORSE • 3 VOLUMES

In this odd, hallucinatory, and sometimes very funny series, a group of students summon the ghosts of people who died on school grounds, unleashing the spirits’ wrath on their unsuspecting classmates. School Zone is as much a meditation on childhood fears of being ridiculed or ostracized as it is a traditional ghost story; time and again, the students’ own response to the ghosts is often more horrific than the ghosts’ behavior. Inuki’s artwork isn’t as gory or imaginative as some of her peers’, though she demonstrates a genuine flair for comically gruesome thrills: one girl is dragged into a toilet, for example, while another is attacked by a scaly, long-armed creature that lives in the infirmary. Where Inuki really shines, however, is in her ability to capture the primal terror that a dark, empty building can inspire in the most rational person. Even when the story takes one its many silly detours — and yes, there are many WTF?! moments in School Zone — Inuki makes us feel her characters’ vulnerability as they explore the school grounds after hours. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09

8. MAIL

HOUSUI YAMAKAZI • DARK HORSE • 3 VOLUMES

If you like you horror neat with a twist, Mail might be your kind of manga: a meticulously crafted selection of short, spooky tales in which a handsome exorcist goes toe-to-toe with all sort of ghosts. The stories are a mixture of urban legend and folklore: a GPS system which directs a woman to the scene of a crime, an accident victim who haunts the elevator shaft where he died, a possessed doll. Through precise linework and superb command of light, Hosui Yamakazi transforms everyday situations — returning home from work, logging onto a computer — into extraordinary ones in which shadows and corners harbor very nasty surprises. Best of all, Mail never overstays its welcome; it’s the manga equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, offering a number of short, trenchant variations on a single theme and then wrapping things up neatly.

7. AFTER SCHOOL NIGHTMARE

SETONA MITZUSHIRO • GO! COMI • 10 VOLUMES

Masahiro, a charming, popular high school student, harbors a terrible secret: though he appears to be male, the lower half of his body is female. At a nurse’s urging, he agrees to visit the school infirmary for a series of dream workshops in which he interacts with classmates who are also grappling with serious problems, from child abuse to pathological insecurity. The students’ collective dreams are vivid and strange, unfolding with the peculiar, fervid logic of a nightmare; buildings flood, stairwells lead to dead ends, and characters undergo sudden, dramatic transformations. Making the dream sequences extra creepy is the way Setona Mizushiro renders the students, choosing an avatar for each that represents their true selves: a black knight, a faceless body, a long, disembodied arm that grasps and slithers. Attentive readers will be rewarded for their patient observation with an unexpected but brilliant twist in the very final pages.

6. THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM

KAZUO UMEZU • VIZ • 11 VOLUMES

It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves from their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to their own time. (Their entire elementary school has slipped through a rift in the space-time continuum, depositing everyone in the distant future.) The story is as relentless as an episode of 24: characters are maimed or killed in every chapter, and almost every line of dialogue is shouted. (Sho’s petty arguments with his mother are delivered as emphatically as his later attempts to alert classmates to the dangers of their new surroundings.) Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups. If that isn’t the ultimate ten-year-old’s nightmare, I don’t know what is. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 10/15/06

5. MERMAID SAGA

RUMIKO TAKAHASHI • VIZ • 4 VOLUMES

This four-volume series ran on and off in Shonen Sunday for nearly ten years, chronicling the adventures of Yuta, a fisherman who gained immortality by eating mermaid flesh. Desperate to live an ordinary existence, Yuta spends five hundred years wandering Japan in search of a mermaid who can restore his mortality, crossing paths with criminals, immortals, and “lost souls,” people reduced to a monstrous condition by the poison in mermaid flesh. Though the stories follow a somewhat predictable pattern, Takahashi’s writing is brisk and assured, propelled by snappy dialogue and genuinely creepy scenarios. The imagery is tame by horror standards, but Takahashi doesn’t shy away from the occasional grotesque or gory image, using them to underscore the ugly consequences of seeking immortality. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09.

4. DORORO

OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 3 VOLUMES

The next time you feel inclined to criticize your parents, remember Hyakkimaru’s plight: his father pledged Hyakkimaru’s body parts to forty-eight demons in exchange for political power, leaving his son blind, deaf, and limbless at birth. After being rescued and raised by a kindly doctor, Hyakkimaru embarks on a quest to reclaim his eyes and ears, wandering across a war-torn landscape where demons take advantage of the chaos to prey on humans. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore (e.g. a nine-tailed fox), while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination (e.g. a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath). Though the story ostensibly unfolds during the Warring States period, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear. For my money, one of Tezuka’s best series, peroid. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/27/09

3. PARASYTE

HITOSHI IWAAKI • DEL REY • 8 VOLUMES

Part The Defiant Ones, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Parasyte focuses on the symbiotic relationship between Shin, a high school student, and Migi, the alien parasite that takes up residence in his right hand after failing to take control of Shin’s brain. The two go on the lam after another parasite kills Shin’s mother — and makes Shin and Migi look like the culprits. If the human character designs are a little blank and clumsy, the parasites are not; Hitoshi Iwaaki twists the human body into some of the most sinister-looking shapes since Pablo Picasso painted Dora Maar. The violence is graphic but not sadistic, as most of the action takes place between panels, with only the grisly aftermath represented in pictorial form. The best part of Parasyte, however, is the script; Shin and Migi trade barbs with the antagonistic affection of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, revealing Migi to be smarter and more objective than his human host. Shin and Migi’s banter adds an element of levity to the story, to be sure, but their heated debates about survival are also a sly poke at the idea that human beings’ intellect and emotional attachments place them squarely atop the food chain. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/2/10

2. THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE

EIJI OTSUKI AND HOUSUI YAMAKAZI • DARK HORSE • 13+ VOLUMES

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is comprised of five members: Karatsu, a monk-in-training; Numata, a hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture; Yata, an odd duck who communicates primarily through a puppet that he wears on his left hand; Makino, a chatty embalmer; and Sasaki, a hacker with an entrepreneurial streak. Working as a team, the quintet helps the dead cross over, using their myriad talents to locate bodies, speak with ghosts, and resolve the spirits’ unfinished business. The set-up is pure gold, giving the episodic series some structure, while allowing Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamakazi the flexibility to stage grisly murders and discover corpses in a variety of unexpected places. Think Scooby Doo with less wholesome protagonists and scarier spooks and you have a good idea of what makes this offbeat series tick. And yes, the gang even has their own van. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09

1. GYO

JUNJI ITO • VIZ • 2 VOLUMES

From the standpoint of craft, Uzumaki is a better manga, but it’s hard to top the sheer creepiness factor of Gyo, which taps into one of the most primordial of fears: being eaten! Here’s how I explained its appeal to David Welsh at The Comics Reporter:

Like many other children of the 1970s, Jaws left an indelible impression on me. I wasn’t just terrified of swimming in the ocean, I was reluctant to immerse myself in any standing body of water — swimming pools, bathtubs, ponds — that might conceivably harbor a shark. That irrational fear of encountering a great white somewhere it’s not supposed to be even led me to wonder what it might be like to bump into one on land — could I outrun it?

I’m guessing Junji Ito also suffers from icthyophobia, because Gyo looks like my worst nightmare, a world in which hideously deformed fish crawl out of the sea on mechanical legs and terrorize humans, spreading a disease that quickly jumps species. As horror stories go, many of Gyo‘s details aren’t terribly well explained — how, exactly, the fish acquired legs remains unclear despite talk of military experiments gone awry — but the imaginative artwork appeals on a visceral level. Gyo‘s highpoint comes midway through volume one, when a great white shark chases the hero and his girlfriend through a house, even scaling the stairs (no pun intended) in pursuit of its next meal. The scene is utterly ridiculous, but it works — for a few terrible, thrilling pages I learned the answer to my long-standing question, What would it be like to be chased by a shark on land? In a word: scary.

In other words, this is my worst nightmare:

So those are ten of my favorite spooky manga! What horror manga are on your top-ten list? Inquiring minds want to know!

My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga

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Whether by accident or design, the very first manga I read and liked were horror titles: “The Laughing Target,” Mermaid Saga, Uzumaki. I’m not sure why I find spooky stories so compelling in manga form; I don’t generally read horror novels, and I don’t have the constitution for gory movies. But manga about zombies? Or vampires? Or angry spirits seeking to avenge their own deaths? Well, there’s always room on my bookshelf for another one, even if the stories sometimes feel overly familiar or — in the case of artists like Kanako Inuki and Kazuo Umezu — make no sense at all. Below is a list of my ten favorite scary manga, which run the gamut from psychological horror to straight-up ick.

10. Lament of the Lamb
By Kei Toume • Tokyopop • 7 volumes
Kei Toume puts a novel spin on vampirism, presenting it not as a supernatural phenomenon, but as a symptom of a rare genetic disorder. His brother-and-sister protagonists, Kazuna and Chizuna, begin exhibiting the same tendencies as their deceased mother, losing control at the sight or suggestion of blood, and enduring cravings so intense they induce temporary insanity. Long on atmosphere and short on plot, Lament of the Lamb won’t be every vampire lover’s idea of a rip-snortin’ read; the manga focuses primarily on the intense, unhealthy relationship between Kazuna and Chizuna, and very little on blood-sucking. What makes Lament of the Lamb so deeply unsettling, however, is the strong current of violence and fear that flows just beneath its surface; Kazuna and Chizuna may not be predators, but we see just how much self-control it takes for them to contain their bloodlust.

9. School Zone
By Kanako Inuki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
In this odd, hallucinatory, and sometimes very funny series, a group of students summon the ghosts of people who died on school grounds, unleashing the spirits’ wrath on their unsuspecting classmates. School Zone is as much a meditation on childhood fears of being ridiculed or ostracized as it is a traditional ghost story; time and again, the students’ own response to the ghosts is often more horrific than the ghosts’ behavior. Inuki’s artwork isn’t as gory or imaginative as some of her peers’, though she demonstrates a genuine flair for comically gruesome thrills: one girl is dragged into a toilet, for example, while another is attacked by a scaly, long-armed creature that lives in the infirmary. Where Inuki really shines, however, is in her ability to capture the primal terror that a dark, empty building can inspire in the most rational person. Even when the story takes one its many silly detours — and yes, there are many WTF?! moments in School Zone — Inuki makes us feel her characters’ vulnerability as they explore the school grounds after hours. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09

8. Mail
By Housui Yamazaki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
If you like you horror neat with a twist, Mail might be your kind of manga: a meticulously crafted selection of short, spooky tales in which a handsome exorcist goes toe-to-toe with all sort of ghosts. The stories are a mixture of urban legend and folklore: a GPS system which directs a woman to the scene of a crime, an accident victim who haunts the elevator shaft where he died, a possessed doll. Through precise linework and superb command of light, Hosui Yamakazi transforms everyday situations — returning home from work, logging onto a computer — into extraordinary ones in which shadows and corners harbor very nasty surprises. Best of all, Mail never overstays its welcome; it’s the manga equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, offering a number of short, trenchant variations on a single theme and then wrapping things up neatly.

7. After School Nightmare
By Setona Mizushiro • Go! Comi • 10 volumes
Masahiro, a charming, popular high school student, harbors a terrible secret: though he appears to be male, the lower half of his body is female. At a nurse’s urging, he agrees to visit the school infirmary for a series of dream workshops in which he interacts with classmates who are also grappling with serious problems, from child abuse to pathological insecurity. The students’ collective dreams are vivid and strange, unfolding with the peculiar, fervid logic of a nightmare; buildings flood, stairwells lead to dead ends, and characters undergo sudden, dramatic transformations. Making the dream sequences extra creepy is the way Setona Mizushiro renders the students, choosing an avatar for each that represents their true selves: a black knight, a faceless body, a long, disembodied arm that grasps and slithers. Attentive readers will be rewarded for their patient observation with an unexpected but brilliant twist in the very final pages.

6. The Drifting Classroom
By Kazuo Umezu • VIZ Media • 11 volumes
It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves from their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to their own time. (Their entire elementary school has slipped through a rift in the space-time continuum, depositing everyone in the distant future.) The story is as relentless as an episode of 24: characters are maimed or killed in every chapter, and almost every line of dialogue is shouted. (Sho’s petty arguments with his mother are delivered as emphatically as his later attempts to alert classmates to the dangers of their new surroundings.) Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups. If that isn’t the ultimate ten-year-old’s nightmare, I don’t know what is. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 10/15/06

5. Mermaid Saga
By Rumiko Takahashi • VIZ Media • 4 volumes
This four-volume series ran on and off in Shonen Sunday for nearly ten years, chronicling the adventures of Yuta, a fisherman who gained immortality by eating mermaid flesh. Desperate to live an ordinary existence, Yuta spends five hundred years wandering Japan in search of a mermaid who can restore his mortality, crossing paths with criminals, immortals, and “lost souls,” people reduced to a monstrous condition by the poison in mermaid flesh. Though the stories follow a somewhat predictable pattern, Takahashi’s writing is brisk and assured, propelled by snappy dialogue and genuinely creepy scenarios. The imagery is tame by horror standards, but Takahashi doesn’t shy away from the occasional grotesque or gory image, using them to underscore the ugly consequences of seeking immortality. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09.

4. Dororo
By Osamu Tezuka • Vertical, Inc. • 3 volumes
The next time you feel inclined to criticize your parents, remember Hyakkimaru’s plight: his father pledged Hyakkimaru’s body parts to forty-eight demons in exchange for political power, leaving his son blind, deaf, and limbless at birth. After being rescued and raised by a kindly doctor, Hyakkimaru embarks on a quest to reclaim his eyes and ears, wandering across a war-torn landscape where demons take advantage of the chaos to prey on humans. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore (e.g. a nine-tailed fox), while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination (e.g. a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath). Though the story ostensibly unfolds during the Warring States period, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear. For my money, one of Tezuka’s best series, peroid. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/27/09

3. Parasyte
By Hitoshi Iwaaki • Del Rey • 8 volumes
Part The Defiant Ones, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Parasyte focuses on the symbiotic relationship between Shin, a high school student, and Migi, the alien parasite that takes up residence in his right hand after failing to take control of Shin’s brain. The two go on the lam after another parasite kills Shin’s mother — and makes Shin and Migi look like the culprits. If the human character designs are a little blank and clumsy, the parasites are not; Hitoshi Iwaaki twists the human body into some of the most sinister-looking shapes since Pablo Picasso painted Dora Maar. The violence is graphic but not sadistic, as most of the action takes place between panels, with only the grisly aftermath represented in pictorial form. The best part of Parasyte, however, is the script; Shin and Migi trade barbs with the antagonistic affection of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, revealing Migi to be smarter and more objective than his human host. Shin and Migi’s banter adds an element of levity to the story, to be sure, but their heated debates about survival are also a sly poke at the idea that human beings’ intellect and emotional attachments place them squarely atop the food chain. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/2/10

2. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
By Eiji Otsuki and Housui Yamakazi • Dark Horse • 13+ volumes
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is comprised of five members: Karatsu, a monk-in-training; Numata, a hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture; Yata, an odd duck who communicates primarily through a puppet that he wears on his left hand; Makino, a chatty embalmer; and Sasaki, a hacker with an entrepreneurial streak. Working as a team, the quintet helps the dead cross over, using their myriad talents to locate bodies, speak with ghosts, and resolve the spirits’ unfinished business. The set-up is pure gold, giving the episodic series some structure, while allowing Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamakazi the flexibility to stage grisly murders and discover corpses in a variety of unexpected places. Think Scooby Doo with less wholesome protagonists and scarier spooks and you have a good idea of what makes this offbeat series tick. And yes, the gang even has their own van. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09

1. Gyo
By Junji Ito • VIZ Media • 2 volumes
From the standpoint of craft, Uzumaki is a better manga, but it’s hard to top the sheer creepiness factor of Gyo, which taps into one of the most primordial of fears: being eaten! Here’s how I explained its appeal to David Welsh at The Comics Reporter:

Like many other children of the 1970s, Jaws left an indelible impression on me. I wasn’t just terrified of swimming in the ocean, I was reluctant to immerse myself in any standing body of water — swimming pools, bathtubs, ponds — that might conceivably harbor a shark. That irrational fear of encountering a great white somewhere it’s not supposed to be even led me to wonder what it might be like to bump into one on land — could I outrun it?

I’m guessing Junji Ito also suffers from icthyophobia, because Gyo looks like my worst nightmare, a world in which hideously deformed fish crawl out of the sea on mechanical legs and terrorize humans, spreading a disease that quickly jumps species. As horror stories go, many of Gyo‘s details aren’t terribly well explained — how, exactly, the fish acquired legs remains unclear despite talk of military experiments gone awry — but the imaginative artwork appeals on a visceral level. Gyo‘s highpoint comes midway through volume one, when a great white shark chases the hero and his girlfriend through a house, even scaling the stairs (no pun intended) in pursuit of its next meal. The scene is utterly ridiculous, but it works — for a few terrible, thrilling pages I learned the answer to my long-standing question, What would it be like to be chased by a shark on land? In a word: scary.

In other words, this is my worst nightmare:

So those are ten of my favorite spooky manga! What horror manga are on your top-ten list? Inquiring minds want to know!

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse

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At some point in your travels through high school English, a teacher probably made you read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a short story about a rural community that routinely sacrifices one its members to ensure a good harvest. I remember writing a paper about “The Lottery” my freshman year. Like many of my classmates, I critiqued the story’s dramatic aspects — the shocking twist, the ethics of the townspeople’s ritual — and neglected to say much about Jackson’s prose. Re-reading “The Lottery” as an adult, it’s obvious what I missed the first time around: Jackson’s singular ability to make the banal sinister through the selective presentation and repetition of seemingly inconsequential details.

Consider “The Summer People,” a short story from 1950. Jackson lavishes considerable attention on the title characters’ day-to-day activities such as buying groceries in town; one might reasonably infer it was a slice-of-life story about New Yorkers experiencing mild culture shock in backwoods New England. By the story’s end, however, it becomes clear why Jackson documented the Allisons’ routine in such detail; the townspeople have been observing the Allisons, viewing every gesture or action as a further violation of the unspoken agreement between residents and summer people that the out-of-towners go home by Labor Day. We don’t know what, exactly, happens to the Allisons for breaking the contract — Jackson leaves that to the readers’ imagination — but we’re left feeling deceived and unsettled, as if we ourselves had been the target of the year-rounders’ wrath.

It seems fitting, then, that Japanese horror novelist Otsu-ichi was nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award, as he has a similar flair for transforming ordinary situations into extraordinary ones. In “Yuko,” the second entry in Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse, for example, a young woman takes a job working for a childless couple, one of whom is bedridden. A small but noticeable change in their nightly dinner routine arouses her suspicion that something is amiss between her employers, setting in motion a chain of events that culminate in a scene of comic horror.

The title story, too, pivots on a few carefully chosen details, as two children conspire to hide the corpse of a playmate who fell to her death. Throughout the story, Otsu-ichi describes the children eating ice cream, a simple motif that seems, at first, to be offered as evidence of the children’s struggle to conceal their guilt by engaging in normal activities. In the final pages of the story, however, that seemingly benign habit is cast in an entirely different light, forcing us to reconsider everything we’d believed about one of the story’s secondary characters.

Only the third and final story of the collection, “Black Fairy Tale,” deviates from this pattern, instead offering a mixture of urban legend and B-movie horror in book form. It’s an ambitious story, with several interlaced threads, including a dark fable about a crow who befriends a blind girl, and a teenager who loses her eye and her memory in an accident, only to have them replaced with a murder victim’s. There’s also a subplot involving a serial killer who carries out ghastly experiments on people, transforming them into monsters and holding them captive in his basement. Though Otsu-ichi skillfully maneuvers among the various storylines, maintaining sufficient suspense throughout the story, “Black Fairy Tale” is a less rewarding read than “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse” or “Yuko,” both of which rely more on psychological manipulation than cheap shock tactics to scare the reader; Otsu-ichi’s descriptions of the killer’s surgeries elicit a visceral, immediate response, to be sure, but prove less unsettling or memorable than the behavior of “Summer”‘s true villain.

Good horror operates on a deeper level as well, showing us how greed, hypocrisy, and conformity tear at the very fabric of society. I think that’s one of the reasons we continue to read Jackson’s work; stories like “The Lottery” and “The Summer People” offer a window into the conservative, conformist culture of the 1950s, that brief moment before the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the Pill, and the Vietnam War radically altered the American landscape. Jackson’s characters live in terror of upsetting the status quo; their greatest fear is to be exposed as an outsider or an outlier of any kind.

The pressure to conform to parental and peer expectations — a frequent motif in contemporary Japanese comics, cinema, and literature — plays a similar role in Otsu-ichi’s “Black Fairy Tale.” Nami, its amnesiac heroine, is an obvious example. Before her accident, she was a model student, musician, and daughter, basking in others’ approbation; when a head injury robs her of the the ability to do well in school or play a Chopin ballad, her peers and parents begin to ostracize her, writing her off as a shy, inept loser. Throughout the story, she wrestles with her desire to reconcile her new and old personalities; only by embracing and acting on the memories left behind by her left eye’s previous owner — a loner and a college dropout — does she begin to appreciate the possibility of living the life she chooses, rather than the one her parents had planned for her.

Would Jackson have recognized the parallels between her work and Otsu-ichi’s? Aside from Otsu-ichi’s occasional detour into Clive Barker-esque excess, I’d say yes; Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse is a solidly crafted collection of psychological horror stories, the best of which prove as spooky and thought-provoking as “The Lottery” and “The Summer People,” not least for the way in which Otsu-ichi finds the uncanny in the everyday.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE • BY OTSU-ICHI, TRANSLATED BY NATHAN COLLINS • VIZ (HAIKASORU) • 300 pp.

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse

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At some point in your travels through high school English, a teacher probably made you read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a short story about a rural community that routinely sacrifices one its members to ensure a good harvest. I remember writing a paper about “The Lottery” my freshman year. Like many of my classmates, I critiqued the story’s dramatic aspects — the shocking twist, the ethics of the townspeople’s ritual — and neglected to say much about Jackson’s prose. Re-reading “The Lottery” as an adult, it’s obvious what I missed the first time around: Jackson’s singular ability to make the banal sinister through the selective presentation and repetition of seemingly inconsequential details.

Consider “The Summer People,” a short story from 1950. Jackson lavishes considerable attention on the title characters’ day-to-day activities such as buying groceries in town; one might reasonably infer it was a slice-of-life story about New Yorkers experiencing mild culture shock in backwoods New England. By the story’s end, however, it becomes clear why Jackson documented the Allisons’ routine in such detail; the townspeople have been observing the Allisons, viewing every gesture or action as a further violation of the unspoken agreement between residents and summer people that the out-of-towners go home by Labor Day. We don’t know what, exactly, happens to the Allisons for breaking the contract — Jackson leaves that to the readers’ imagination — but we’re left feeling deceived and unsettled, as if we ourselves had been the target of the year-rounders’ wrath.

It seems fitting, then, that Japanese horror novelist Otsu-ichi was nominated for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award, as he has a similar flair for transforming ordinary situations into extraordinary ones. In “Yuko,” the second entry in Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse, for example, a young woman takes a job working for a childless couple, one of whom is bedridden. A small but noticeable change in their nightly dinner routine arouses her suspicion that something is amiss between her employers, setting in motion a chain of events that culminate in a scene of comic horror.

The title story, too, pivots on a few carefully chosen details, as two children conspire to hide the corpse of a playmate who fell to her death. Throughout the story, Otsu-ichi describes the children eating ice cream, a simple motif that seems, at first, to be offered as evidence of the children’s struggle to conceal their guilt by engaging in normal activities. In the final pages of the story, however, that seemingly benign habit is cast in an entirely different light, forcing us to reconsider everything we’d believed about one of the story’s secondary characters.

Only the third and final story of the collection, “Black Fairy Tale,” deviates from this pattern, instead offering a mixture of urban legend and B-movie horror in book form. It’s an ambitious story, with several interlaced threads, including a dark fable about a crow who befriends a blind girl, and a teenager who loses her eye and her memory in an accident, only to have them replaced with a murder victim’s. There’s also a subplot involving a serial killer who carries out ghastly experiments on people, transforming them into monsters and holding them captive in his basement. Though Otsu-ichi skillfully maneuvers among the various storylines, maintaining sufficient suspense throughout the story, “Black Fairy Tale” is a less rewarding read than “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse” or “Yuko,” both of which rely more on psychological manipulation than cheap shock tactics to scare the reader; Otsu-ichi’s descriptions of the killer’s surgeries elicit a visceral, immediate response, to be sure, but prove less unsettling or memorable than the behavior of “Summer”‘s true villain.

Good horror operates on a deeper level as well, showing us how greed, hypocrisy, and conformity tear at the very fabric of society. I think that’s one of the reasons we continue to read Jackson’s work; stories like “The Lottery” and “The Summer People” offer a window into the conservative, conformist culture of the 1950s, that brief moment before the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the Pill, and the Vietnam War radically altered the American landscape. Jackson’s characters live in terror of upsetting the status quo; their greatest fear is to be exposed as an outsider or an outlier of any kind.

The pressure to conform to parental and peer expectations — a frequent motif in contemporary Japanese comics, cinema, and literature — plays a similar role in Otsu-ichi’s “Black Fairy Tale.” Nami, its amnesiac heroine, is an obvious example. Before her accident, she was a model student, musician, and daughter, basking in others’ approbation; when a head injury robs her of the the ability to do well in school or play a Chopin ballad, her peers and parents begin to ostracize her, writing her off as a shy, inept loser. Throughout the story, she wrestles with her desire to reconcile her new and old personalities; only by embracing and acting on the memories left behind by her left eye’s previous owner — a loner and a college dropout — does she begin to appreciate the possibility of living the life she chooses, rather than the one her parents had planned for her.

Would Jackson have recognized the parallels between her work and Otsu-ichi’s? Aside from Otsu-ichi’s occasional detour into Clive Barker-esque excess, I’d say yes; Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse is a solidly crafted collection of psychological horror stories, the best of which prove as spooky and thought-provoking as “The Lottery” and “The Summer People,” not least for the way in which Otsu-ichi finds the uncanny in the everyday.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE • BY OTSU-ICHI, TRANSLATED BY NATHAN COLLINS • VIZ (HAIKASORU) • 300 pp.

The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography

by

Reading The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography, I was irresistibly reminded of a quip attributed to Thomas Carlyle: “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” Though the Dalai Lama has lead one of the most exemplary lives in recent memory, demonstrating uncommon wisdom, patience, and pragmatism in his efforts to publicize Tibet’s plight, Tetsu Saiwai’s paint-by-numbers biography reduces the Dalai Lama from a worldly religious leader to a saintly cipher.

Saiwai’s work takes its inspiration from Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama’s 1991 autobiography, and Kundun, its subsequent adaptation by Martin Scorsese. Like Kundun, The 14th Dalai Lama focuses on the first twenty-odd years of Tenzin Gyatso’s life, from 1937, when he was pronounced the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, to 1959, when he fled to Dharamsala, India, to escape escalating violence between Tibetan nationals and Chinese military forces. Many of the scenes in Saiwai’s book have analogues in Scorsese’s film: we see Tenzin Gyatso correctly identify objects that belonged to his predecessor, thus revealing himself to be the next Dalai Lama; we watch him spend time with Austrian mountaineer (and former SS officer) Heinrich Harrer, a relationship explored in the film Seven Years in Tibet; and we follow him to Beijing, where Chairman Mao exploits the Tibetan leader’s sincerity and youthful naivete for propaganda. Saiwai also offers numerous — if brief — scenes dramatizing the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, showing us both the internal disagreement within the Dalai Lama’s advisory circle and the growing unrest in the streets of Lhasa.

Readers familiar with Scorsese’s film will experience deja vu reading Saiwai’s work, as the manga feels like a shot-by-shot remake. It isn’t, of course, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Saiwai relied too heavily on Scorsese’s movie for guidance on what events to include in the narrative.

The comparison between the film and the manga reveals another drawback to The 14th Dalai Lama: it lacks the visual drama of Kundun. One of the movie’s most arresting aspects was its cinematography; though Scorsese’s crew wasn’t allowed to film in Tibet (most of the movie was shot in Morocco), the art director collaborated with Tibetan cast members to meticulously recreate the costumes, religious ceremonies, and interiors of the Potala Palace. Almost every frame of the movie was saturated in rich color — azure skies, crimson robes, golden objects — an almost painterly affectation that suggested the radiance of a Titian canvas. Saiwai’s unadorned, grayscale artwork, by contrast, seems impoverished; there’s very little detail, even in his depictions of religious rituals, and his efforts to represent Tibet’s rugged terrain barely suggest how dry and unforgiving the landscape can be.

What Kundun and The 14th Dalai Lama share, however, is an uncritical, even devotional, attitude to their subject. In his 1997 review of the film, Roger Ebert contrasted Scorsese’s saintly portrayal of the Dalai Lama in Kundun with his all-too-human depiction of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ:

Kundun is like one of the popularized lives of the saints that Scorsese must have studied as a boy in Catholic grade school. I studied the same lives, which reduced the saints to a series of anecdotes. At the end of a typical episode, the saint says something wise, pointing out the lesson, and his listeners fall back in amazement and gratitude. The saint seems to stand above time, already knowing the answers and the outcome, consciously shaping his life as a series of parables.

In Kundun, there is rarely the sense that a living, breathing and (dare I say?) fallible human inhabits the body of the Dalai Lama. Unlike Scorsese’s portrait of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, this is not a man striving for perfection, but perfection in the shape of a man.

The same could be said for Saiwai’s work: in almost every scene, the Dalai Lama displays preternatural wisdom, sagely counseling those around him. We never see the Dalai Lama in exile, when he faced new challenges to his regime’s authority — moments that might reveal him to be a more human, more canny individual than is suggested by the carefully selected episodes from his early life. I say this not to criticize the Dalai Lama, but to recognize him as a spiritual leader with uncommon insight into the modern condition, as someone who regularly engages members of the scientific community, who intelligently uses mass media to disseminate Buddhist teaching, and who views his faith not as a set of practices to be unquestionably preserved and transmitted to future generations, but as a religion capable of evolving; can you imagine the Pope speculating that his successor might be a woman?

Like his portrayal of the Dalai Lama, Saiwai’s characterization of Chinese-Tibetan relations is devoid of nuance. Saiwai characters’ explain in simple, stark terms what Chinese “modernization” efforts meant for Tibet: devastation of natural resources, and systematic efforts to erradicate the indigenous language, agricultural practices, and religion. (In the introduction to Essential Tibetan Buddhism, Robert Thurman notes that fewer than twenty of the country’s 6,267 monasteries remain open.) Yet nowhere does Saiwai address the long and fraught relationship between China and Tibet — a serious omission, as this history helps explain why China viewed Tibet as part of its territory, and why other nations were reluctant to acknowledge Tibetan sovereignty. These historical facts in no way justify Chinese occupation of Tibet, or diminish the horror of what the Tibetan people have endured; as Thurman observes, nearly 1.3 million have perished under Chinese rule, some while performing hard labor, others for opposing the regime. A story as sad and complex as Tibet’s, however, deserves a more thoughtful treatment than it’s given in Saiwai’s book.

Given the limitations of the text, the best audience for The 14th Dalai Lama are young readers. The book’s directness and sincerity make it an engaging read, while its note of moral outrage over Chinese atrocities may prompt teens to learn more about the 1950 invasion. Readers already familiar with the conflict won’t find much here to enrich their understanding of the man or the region, though they may come away from the manga with a renewed sense of the Dalai Lama’s resilience and courage.

Review copy provided by Penguin Books.

THE 14TH DALAI LAMA: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY • BY TETSU SAIWAI • PENGUIN BOOKS • 208 pp.

The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography

by

 

Reading The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography, I was irresistibly reminded of a quip attributed to Thomas Carlyle: “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” Though the Dalai Lama has lead one of the most exemplary lives in recent memory, demonstrating uncommon wisdom, patience, and pragmatism in his efforts to publicize Tibet’s plight, Tetsu Saiwai’s paint-by-numbers biography reduces the Dalai Lama from a worldly religious leader to a saintly cipher.

Saiwai’s work takes its inspiration from Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama’s 1991 autobiography, and Kundun, its subsequent adaptation by Martin Scorsese. Like Kundun, The 14th Dalai Lama focuses on the first twenty-odd years of Tenzin Gyatso’s life, from 1937, when he was pronounced the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, to 1959, when he fled to Dharamsala, India, to escape escalating violence between Tibetan nationals and Chinese military forces. Many of the scenes in Saiwai’s book have analogues in Scorsese’s film: we see Tenzin Gyatso correctly identify objects that belonged to his predecessor, thus revealing himself to be the next Dalai Lama; we watch him spend time with Austrian mountaineer (and former SS officer) Heinrich Harrer, a relationship explored in the film Seven Years in Tibet; and we follow him to Beijing, where Chairman Mao exploits the Tibetan leader’s sincerity and youthful naivete for propaganda. Saiwai also offers numerous — if brief — scenes dramatizing the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, showing us both the internal disagreement within the Dalai Lama’s advisory circle and the growing unrest in the streets of Lhasa.

Readers familiar with Scorsese’s film will experience deja vu reading Saiwai’s work, as the manga feels like a shot-by-shot remake. It isn’t, of course, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Saiwai relied too heavily on Scorsese’s movie for guidance on what events to include in the narrative.

The comparison between the film and the manga reveals another drawback to The 14th Dalai Lama: it lacks the visual drama of Kundun. One of the movie’s most arresting aspects was its cinematography; though Scorsese’s crew wasn’t allowed to film in Tibet (most of the movie was shot in Morocco), the art director collaborated with Tibetan cast members to meticulously recreate the costumes, religious ceremonies, and interiors of the Potala Palace. Almost every frame of the movie was saturated in rich color — azure skies, crimson robes, golden objects — an almost painterly affectation that suggested the radiance of a Titian canvas. Saiwai’s unadorned, grayscale artwork, by contrast, seems impoverished; there’s very little detail, even in his depictions of religious rituals, and his efforts to represent Tibet’s rugged terrain barely suggest how dry and unforgiving the landscape can be.

What Kundun and The 14th Dalai Lama share, however, is an uncritical, even devotional, attitude to their subject. In his 1997 review of the film, Roger Ebert contrasted Scorsese’s saintly portrayal of the Dalai Lama in Kundun with his all-too-human depiction of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ:

Kundun is like one of the popularized lives of the saints that Scorsese must have studied as a boy in Catholic grade school. I studied the same lives, which reduced the saints to a series of anecdotes. At the end of a typical episode, the saint says something wise, pointing out the lesson, and his listeners fall back in amazement and gratitude. The saint seems to stand above time, already knowing the answers and the outcome, consciously shaping his life as a series of parables.

In Kundun, there is rarely the sense that a living, breathing and (dare I say?) fallible human inhabits the body of the Dalai Lama. Unlike Scorsese’s portrait of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, this is not a man striving for perfection, but perfection in the shape of a man.

The same could be said for Saiwai’s work: in almost every scene, the Dalai Lama displays preternatural wisdom, sagely counseling those around him. We never see the Dalai Lama in exile, when he faced new challenges to his regime’s authority — moments that might reveal him to be a more human, more canny individual than is suggested by the carefully selected episodes from his early life. I say this not to criticize the Dalai Lama, but to recognize him as a spiritual leader with uncommon insight into the modern condition, as someone who regularly engages members of the scientific community, who intelligently uses mass media to disseminate Buddhist teaching, and who views his faith not as a set of practices to be unquestionably preserved and transmitted to future generations, but as a religion capable of evolving; can you imagine the Pope speculating that his successor might be a woman?

Like his portrayal of the Dalai Lama, Saiwai’s characterization of Chinese-Tibetan relations is devoid of nuance. Saiwai characters’ explain in simple, stark terms what Chinese “modernization” efforts meant for Tibet: devastation of natural resources, and systematic efforts to erradicate the indigenous language, agricultural practices, and religion. (In the introduction to Essential Tibetan Buddhism, Robert Thurman notes that fewer than twenty of the country’s 6,267 monasteries remain open.) Yet nowhere does Saiwai address the long and fraught relationship between China and Tibet — a serious omission, as this history helps explain why China viewed Tibet as part of its territory, and why other nations were reluctant to acknowledge Tibetan sovereignty. These historical facts in no way justify Chinese occupation of Tibet, or diminish the horror of what the Tibetan people have endured; as Thurman observes, nearly 1.3 million have perished under Chinese rule, some while performing hard labor, others for opposing the regime. A story as sad and complex as Tibet’s, however, deserves a more thoughtful treatment than it’s given in Saiwai’s book.

Given the limitations of the text, the best audience for The 14th Dalai Lama are young readers. The book’s directness and sincerity make it an engaging read, while its note of moral outrage over Chinese atrocities may prompt teens to learn more about the 1950 invasion. Readers already familiar with the conflict won’t find much here to enrich their understanding of the man or the region, though they may come away from the manga with a renewed sense of the Dalai Lama’s resilience and courage.

Review copy provided by Penguin Books.

THE 14TH DALAI LAMA: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY • BY TETSU SAIWAI • PENGUIN BOOKS • 208 pp.

Cat-Eyed Boy, Vols. 1-2

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Kazuo Umezu’s writing defies easy categorization. His horror stories unfold in an almost haphazard fashion, seldom offering Western readers the kind of inevitable showdown between supernatural menace and righteous avenger that’s de rigeur in grindhouse flicks. In a less charitable mood, I might suggest that Umezu was simply making it up as he went along, adding whatever Grand Guignol flourishes tickled his fancy; in a more critically responsible frame of mind, I’d argue that Umezu uses non-sequitors, heightened realism, and Freudian imagery to create a hallucinatory atmosphere that thumbs its nose at logic or teleology.

In the afterword to Cat-Eyed Boy, artist Mizuho Hiroyama offers a more geneorus assessment of Umezu’s approach to storytelling:

But just what is this unforgettable bizarreness that lies at the core of Umezu’s world? Is it a child’s nightmare? I think that this probably the best way to describe it. It’s simply fear. The escalating fear and imagination of a child who is unable to fall asleep in a pitch-dark room late at night, thinking about the worst-case scenarios and wondering, “What would I do if this happened?”

I think Hiroyama is on to something here: as anyone who’s read The Drifting Classroom knows, that entire series reads like a child’s nightmare, filled with terrifying monsters, barren wastelands, and irresponsible, ineffectual adults whose inability to save the day forces the stranded students to rely on themselves.

These same motifs recur throughout Umezu’s oeuvre. The eleven stories that comprise Cat-Eyed Boy, for example, are chock-full of demons — some grotesque, some comic — vengeful spirits, dead parents, and spiteful adults. Cat-Eyed Boy, a child-like creature who’s half-human, half-demon, finds himself relegated to the margins of both worlds, making him especially vulnerable to predation, in spite of his obvious strength and cunning. Like Sho and his Drifting Classroom peers, Cat-Eyed Boy must frequently outsmart unscrupulous adults (and a few monsters) to save his own skin.

Cat-Eyed Boy’s role varies from story to story: in some, he’s an active participant, a trickster figure who cajoles or deceives, while in others, he’s an observer. The strongest entry of the collection, “The Tsunami Summoners,” is, not coincidentally, the one in which Umezu portrays his odd little hero as a truly grotesque figure, one whose liminal status arouses genuine pity in readers. On one level, “Summoners” is an origin story, explaining where Cat-Eyed Boy came from, how he was exiled from the demon world, and why humans greet him with such suspicion, despite his frequent efforts to intervene on their behalf. On another, it’s a superb example of Umezu-style comeuppance theater, as a small coastal village is punished not only for mistreating one of their own members but for ignoring an ancient warning about a sea-borne menace. Everything about the story works beautifully: the crack pacing, the unforeseen plot twists, and the genuine pathos of Cat-Eyed Boy’s situation as he tries to protect the same villagers who tormented his sole human friend. The summoners are a particularly effective menace, as their initial appearance is relatively benign – they look like brain-shaped rocks, perfect for building walls and houses – allowing them to insinuate themselves into every aspect of the villagers’ lives before anyone is aware of the danger they pose.

Other standouts include “The One-Legged Monster of Ondai,” a cautionary tale about the evils of lepidoptery; “The Thousand-Handed Demon,” a blood bath in which a evil spirit possesses a statue of the Buddhist deity Kwannon; and “The Stairs,” a story about a boy so eager to be see his late mother that he ignores all warnings about the perils of crossing between the lands of the living and the dead.

Several stories were simply too long or scattershot to leave much of an impression. The chief offender is “The Band of One Hundred Monsters,” a rambling tale in which a group of hideously deformed humans aspire to become demons. I thought it was going to be an extended riff on the creative process, as the story initially focuses on the interaction between the “monsters” and a manga-ka known for his bizarre horror tales. Instead, Umezu quickly dispatches the manga-ka and steers the narrative in a wholly unanticipated direction, with the Band of One Hundred murdering pretty yet soulless people. That narrative u-turn does little to bind the two halves of the story together, nor does it take the story in a particularly interesting direction; the notion that beauty is only skin-deep has been explored in countless horror stories to better effect, as Umezu’s earlier work “The Mirror” attests.

Viz presents Cat-Eyed Boy in two generously sized volumes, totaling almost 1,000 pages of story. Both are beautifully packaged, with French flaps, creamy paper stock, and color pages. I particularly liked the endpapers, which catalog the various demons found in both volumes. And what a rogue’s gallery it is — these monsters are considerably more grotesque than anything Umezu conjured for earlier series, sporting myriad eyes, warty skin, tentacles, and grossly misshapen bodies. Most of the stories aren’t terribly spooky or shocking by contemporary standards, but the sheer oddness of the character designs will get under your skin like images from a particularly vivid nightmare.

This is a revised version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on August 12, 2008.

CAT-EYED BOY, VOLS. 1 – 2 • BY KAZUO UMEZU • VIZ • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Cat-Eyed Boy, Vols. 1-2

by

Kazuo Umezu’s writing defies easy categorization. His horror stories unfold in an almost haphazard fashion, seldom offering Western readers the kind of inevitable showdown between supernatural menace and righteous avenger that’s de rigeur in grindhouse flicks. In a less charitable mood, I might suggest that Umezu was simply making it up as he went along, adding whatever Grand Guignol flourishes tickled his fancy; in a more critically responsible frame of mind, I’d argue that Umezu uses non-sequitors, heightened realism, and Freudian imagery to create a hallucinatory atmosphere that thumbs its nose at logic or teleology.

In the afterword to Cat-Eyed Boy, artist Mizuho Hiroyama offers a more geneorus assessment of Umezu’s approach to storytelling:

But just what is this unforgettable bizarreness that lies at the core of Umezu’s world? Is it a child’s nightmare? I think that this probably the best way to describe it. It’s simply fear. The escalating fear and imagination of a child who is unable to fall asleep in a pitch-dark room late at night, thinking about the worst-case scenarios and wondering, “What would I do if this happened?”

I think Hiroyama is on to something here: as anyone who’s read The Drifting Classroom knows, that entire series reads like a child’s nightmare, filled with terrifying monsters, barren wastelands, and irresponsible, ineffectual adults whose inability to save the day forces the stranded students to rely on themselves.

These same motifs recur throughout Umezu’s oeuvre. The eleven stories that comprise Cat-Eyed Boy, for example, are chock-full of demons — some grotesque, some comic — vengeful spirits, dead parents, and spiteful adults. Cat-Eyed Boy, a child-like creature who’s half-human, half-demon, finds himself relegated to the margins of both worlds, making him especially vulnerable to predation, in spite of his obvious strength and cunning. Like Sho and his Drifting Classroom peers, Cat-Eyed Boy must frequently outsmart unscrupulous adults (and a few monsters) to save his own skin.

Cat-Eyed Boy’s role varies from story to story: in some, he’s an active participant, a trickster figure who cajoles or deceives, while in others, he’s an observer. The strongest entry of the collection, “The Tsunami Summoners,” is, not coincidentally, the one in which Umezu portrays his odd little hero as a truly grotesque figure, one whose liminal status arouses genuine pity in readers. On one level, “Summoners” is an origin story, explaining where Cat-Eyed Boy came from, how he was exiled from the demon world, and why humans greet him with such suspicion, despite his frequent efforts to intervene on their behalf. On another, it’s a superb example of Umezu-style comeuppance theater, as a small coastal village is punished not only for mistreating one of their own members but for ignoring an ancient warning about a sea-borne menace. Everything about the story works beautifully: the crack pacing, the unforeseen plot twists, and the genuine pathos of Cat-Eyed Boy’s situation as he tries to protect the same villagers who tormented his sole human friend. The summoners are a particularly effective menace, as their initial appearance is relatively benign – they look like brain-shaped rocks, perfect for building walls and houses – allowing them to insinuate themselves into every aspect of the villagers’ lives before anyone is aware of the danger they pose.

Other standouts include “The One-Legged Monster of Ondai,” a cautionary tale about the evils of lepidoptery; “The Thousand-Handed Demon,” a blood bath in which a evil spirit possesses a statue of the Buddhist deity Kwannon; and “The Stairs,” a story about a boy so eager to be see his late mother that he ignores all warnings about the perils of crossing between the lands of the living and the dead.

Several stories were simply too long or scattershot to leave much of an impression. The chief offender is “The Band of One Hundred Monsters,” a rambling tale in which a group of hideously deformed humans aspire to become demons. I thought it was going to be an extended riff on the creative process, as the story initially focuses on the interaction between the “monsters” and a manga-ka known for his bizarre horror tales. Instead, Umezu quickly dispatches the manga-ka and steers the narrative in a wholly unanticipated direction, with the Band of One Hundred murdering pretty yet soulless people. That narrative u-turn does little to bind the two halves of the story together, nor does it take the story in a particularly interesting direction; the notion that beauty is only skin-deep has been explored in countless horror stories to better effect, as Umezu’s earlier work “The Mirror” attests.

Viz presents Cat-Eyed Boy in two generously sized volumes, totaling almost 1,000 pages of story. Both are beautifully packaged, with French flaps, creamy paper stock, and color pages. I particularly liked the endpapers, which catalog the various demons found in both volumes. And what a rogue’s gallery it is — these monsters are considerably more grotesque than anything Umezu conjured for earlier series, sporting myriad eyes, warty skin, tentacles, and grossly misshapen bodies. Most of the stories aren’t terribly spooky or shocking by contemporary standards, but the sheer oddness of the character designs will get under your skin like images from a particularly vivid nightmare.

This is a revised version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on August 12, 2008.

CAT-EYED BOY, VOLS. 1 – 2 • BY KAZUO UMEZU • VIZ • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)