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Skyblue Shore Volumes 1 and 2

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Are hot janitors a Thing? After reading Dengeki Daisy and Skyblue Shore, which both feature handsome yet tortured twentysomething janitors, I am now convinced that anyone who wants to find cute men in Japan needs to start staking out custodial closets in local high schools. Skyblue Shore is a fun shoujo manga, with some hints of darkness that keep it from being overly sweet.



Skyblue Shore Volume 1 by Nanpei Yamada

Tomo used to visit the beach daily as a little girl. One day she met a boy who gave her an agate that he found while beach combing. While she went back to the beach daily, she never saw him again. Years later, Tomo’s grown older and she’s left her love of the beach behind. She’s on her way to school when someone starts feeling her up on the bus. A tall, dark and handsome man notices what’s going on and throws the groper off the bus, yelling that no one is going to touch one of his students. He leaves behind a keychain that has the same type of agate that Tomo keeps as a souvenir. This is a fairly formulaic beginning to a manga. Stories about children who reconnect as teenagers are common but even while Skyblue Shore evokes plenty of shoujo cliches, it does so in a refreshing way. The teenage Tomo is a fairly typical shoujo heroine. She’s pretty, popular, and enthusiastic but considers herself average. What makes her stand out a bit from her character type is her tendency to exhibit a strong nurturing streak due to the fact that she’s had to take care of her flighty mother. Tomo stumbles across a sullen boy who has a hairtie that exhibits the same construction techniques as the mysterious stranger’s broken keychain. Ten offers to fix her keychain and she trails him back to a shack on the roof of the school. She barges in and finds an apartment furnished with things from the beach, with elaborate driftwood assemblages. Ten, is of course, the boy who gave Tomo the agate when they were children. While he figures out who she is fairly quickly, she doesn’t connect Ten with her long-lost friend. His older brother Riku is the junior janitor at the school who has a habit of defending high school girls from perverts.

The pairing of an enthusiastic girl and sullen boy can be found plenty of times in shoujo manga. But I enjoyed seeing the relationship between this particular couple in Skyblue Shore. Ten starts taking Tomo beachcombing, and she’s delighted to rediscover one of her favorite childhood pastimes. She exhibits the same degree of excitement about being on the beach that she had as a little girl, but what happened to change Ten from being a happy little boy to a prickly teenager who hides behind his hair? Tomo spends more time with Riku, and promptly develops a hopeless crush on him despite his tendency to treat her like a little sister. Ten clearly cares about Tomo too, so the classic love triangle is all set up. Tomo starts appearing by Ten’s side after school, asking if he’s found any treasures at the beach. When Ten tells Riku that he’s taken on Tomo as his apprentice beachcomber, he says “I think…she’s been waiting a long time for me.”

I enjoyed all the details about the sea that Yamada included. Ten shows Tomo how to bleach sand dollars, and you can practically smell the salty air when the characters go down to the beach. Yamada’s character designs are clean and attractive, and I like the way she varied the body types of the brothers. Riku is clearly more mature, with more of a weighty, adult look while it is clear that Ten and Tomo haven’t finished growing yet.

Skyblue Shore Volume 2 by Nanpei Yamada

Skyblue Shore might initially seem like a charming, slice of life shoujo series that is only differentiated from other similar manga by the beach setting. Where it starts to stand out is the theme of past psychological trauma and potential insanity that is interwoven with all of the nice scenes of Tomo and Ten hunting for agates. A dark female character with unhealthy ties to Riku is introduced in the person of Michiru, who only sporadically attends school. When she comes back she definitely doesn’t approve of Tomo and Riku’s friendship. Tomo observes some close encounters between Riku and Michiru, and is dismayed. While Riku doesn’t cross any lines, it is obvious that they have a shared history and Michiru seems very emotionally damaged. Ten can see straight through Michiru and warns Tomo to be careful of who she makes friends with. Riku shares the fact that he and Ten lost their sister to the sea when Tomo almost drowns. She comforts him, and he asks her to be a good friend to Ten and Michiru. She starts to treat Michiru like a bit of a project, trying to bring her out of her shell and getting her to socialize with some of the other students. When Michiru stops coming to school, Tomo gets her to come by using the only threat she can. She says “Unless you drag your lazy carcass to school, I’m going to claim Riku for myself!”

Riku and Ten are clearly emotionally damaged by their loss, even though Riku might seem to do a better job of appearing normal. It doesn’t seem quite fair for Tomo to be put in the position of emotional caretaker for her group of friends. The blend of slice-of-life stories inter cut with past revelations of tragedy reminded me a little bit of Oyayubihime Infinity without the fantasy elements. Skyblue Shore is only six volumes long, and I’m curious to see if the characters actually manage to work through their various emotional issues and achieve some form of happiness.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

From the stack: A Single Match

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If I had to pick a favorite boutique comics publisher, it would probably be Drawn & Quarterly, simply for the volume of work they’ve released that I really, really enjoy. If I isolate the portion of their catalog devoted to Japanese comics, their success rate is somewhat lower. I appreciate their efforts to bring avant-garde manga to English-reading audiences, but I don’t always particularly enjoy the individual works.

I like the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, particularly his autobiography, A Drifting Life., and his early genre work, Black Blizzard. I found Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy more of its time than enduring. Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow was pure pleasure, but Imiri Sakabashira’s The Box Man struck me as a fleeting, flashy fever dream. I’m happy to report that Oji Suzuki’s collection of short stories, A Single Match, wound up on the positive end of the spectrum, though that wasn’t an instantaneous verdict.

Suzuki has a very distinct rhythm and sensibility, and it isn’t immediately accessible. His stories have a quality that’s both dreamlike and naturalistic, and it took a few stories for me to yield to the style. In dreams, you find yourself recognizing people and places you’ve never been before, accepting circumstances that are totally alien to your experience and constructing memories that you claim as your own, even though you know that they aren’t. It’s a bit unsettling to see that illogically coherent frame of reference captured so precisely on paper, and since the experience of dreams isn’t an entirely comfortable one to begin with, the feeling of unease can be magnified.

“Tale of Remembrance” is an extraordinary example of this real-but-not approach. Narrative perspective seems to shift before you realize it. Inky blackness frames indelible images like a forlorn, faceless girl floating in the sky. Specific impressions that seem like memory are transformed into unsettling visual metaphors. Emotional undercurrents run from tender to suggestively menacing. It’s quite a reading experience, and it’s certainly not the only one of its kind in this collection.

Even the more ostensibly straightforward stories like “Mountain Town” keep you on uncertain footing. In this piece, a boy accompanies his father to return a scooter that he’d used for a part-time job. The journey is fraught with tension, unspoken and verbalized. The boy seesaws between uncomplicated comfort in his father’s company and painful awareness of the man’s shortcomings. Suzuki’s illustrations here are generally fairly concrete, though there are flashes of abstraction, like a memory is being filled in with a raw, emotional conceptualization.

As much as I ended up enjoying this collection, I have to admit to initial unease and impatience. It’s not a work that grabs you from the first page, and I’m not even sure the works are best appreciated as a single reading experience. They were published in Seirindo’s legendary alternative anthology, Garo, and I found myself wondering how they would have read in that context. The notion of getting a small dose of Suzuki’s work in the midst of a variety of other styles and subjects was appealing to me. When I read the stories again, I’ll sprinkle them in between other works to see if my theory is correct.

And I certainly will read them again. It’s nice to be challenged by a work, especially when the work rewards you for rising to that challenge. And I would happily read any of Suzuki’s work that Drawn & Quarterly chooses to publish, though maybe not all at once.

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13

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In the mold of Kate and David’s recent co-review of Salvatore, Kate takes the lead along with David and MJ, in a collaborative look at Tezuka’s Black Jack.

Black Jack, Vols. 12-13 | By Osamu Tezuka | Published by Vertical, Inc. | Buy at Amazon

KATE: One of the things that strikes me most about Black Jack is its consistency: every volume has one or two dud stories, but on the whole, the series is uniformly good, even when Tezuka is essentially repeating himself with a theme-and-variation on an earlier plot. If you were going to point to one story in volumes twelve or thirteen as an example of what Tezuka does best, what would it be and why?

DAVID: While I agree that it’s a consistently entertaining series, I do have a clear favorite from these two volumes. It’s “A Night in a Cottage” from the 13th volume. Black Jack is out driving on a lonesome road at night, and he meets a very pregnant woman who’s harboring a great deal of emotional pain. There are some great twists in this story, which I won’t spoil, but what I like best about it is how Tezuka constructs things so that Black Jack’s mythology is stripped away. The woman knows nothing about Black Jack’s notoriety, so he can abandon some of his public posture, and readers can see what parts of his personality endure when he isn’t playing for an audience. It’s really written well, and it’s kind of a gift for fans of the character.

MJ: I don’t know if I can say that this story is what Tezuka does best, because it feels a little atypical for the series, but I’d say my favorite here is “The Pirate’s Arm.” It’s the story of a student gymnast whose arm develops gangrene. Black Jack must amputate the arm, but he replaces it with a prosthetic that appears to have the ability to talk. Frequently, the series’ more heartwarming stories aren’t necessarily its best, but this one really works for me. It’s surprisingly subtle, with a real payoff in the end.

DAVID: I liked that one a lot, partly because I could imagine it providing inspiration to future mangaka.

KATE: Both of those stories were on my short list, too, though my favorite was “Wildcat Boy,” from volume 12. It’s no secret that Tezuka loved the movies, and “Wildcat” is a thoughtful tribute to two cinema legends: Francois Truffaut and Satyajit Ray. As one might guess from the title, the story features a patient who was raised by ocelots — at least, that’s what I think they are — and views human beings with suspicion. You don’t need to know anything about “The Wild Child” or “The World of Apu,” however, to appreciate the story, as it’s a compelling, if slightly ham-fisted, meditation on that age-old question: is civilization really man’s natural state? Like many “Black Jack” stories, the final twist reveals Jack to be wiser and more attuned to the natural world than his money-grubbing might suggest.

So far, we’ve focused on specific stories we liked. Were there any stories in volumes 12 or 13 that you felt didn’t work? If so, why?

MJ: I really liked that story too, Kate. And if it’s ham-fisted, I think it might be necessarily so. Though I think we three tend to appreciate subtlety a great deal, I suspect Tezuka knew his readers well.

As for stories that don’t work well here, the first that jumps to mind for me is “A Challenge of the Third Kind,” in which Black Jack is summoned to operate on an alien. While the concept is not so far out of line with the leaps of logic the series establishes as standard, there’s a line crossed here somewhere that strains that standard to the point of exasperation. Even as a gag manga, I had difficulty enjoying that story, and I’m a pretty generous reader when it comes to this kind of fantasy.

DAVID: As for low points in these two volumes, I’d pick “Looking Good” from volume 12. For me, a good Black Jack story must include one of these three things: sufficiently gruesome medical content; an emotionally compelling patient; or creepy Pinoko antics. “Looking Good” had none of these things, and, beyond that, it didn’t really have much in the way of internal logic.

It’s about a thug who’s running a protection racket on local school festivals, which is potentially hilarious, whether you like school festivals in manga or not. (I’m very much in the pro-festival camp, though that doesn’t mean I don’t relish them when they go very wrong.) It seems like the story never quite came together on basic terms, nor did it live up to its goofy potential.

KATE: I’m with MJ: I find Tezuka’s forays into science fiction and the supernatural kind of clumsy. I can believe that Black Jack would operate on himself in the Australian outback or perform a full-body skin graft because both acts are proof of his surgical mojo. But when it involves aliens or ghosts? Too gimmicky for me; those stories suggest a “very special Halloween edition of House, MD” or a Scooby Doo episode. (Just add meddling kids and stir!)

“The Cursed Operation,” which appears in volume 13, is a good example of what I mean. After a mummy arrives at a hospital for x-rays, strange things start to happen. Jack scoffs at the doctors and nurses who refuse to carry out their duties, declaring his intent to clear the hospital’s surgical backlog by operating on several patients at once. Strike one: the spooky happenings are neither scary nor funny. Strike two: Tezuka has already used the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot in earlier volumes. Strike three: Tezuka tries to freshen up the “operating on a bunch of people at once” plot by including the ancient mummy as a patient. As a result, the story feels perfunctory; it’s the kind of story that Tezuka could produce on autopilot, and it shows; there’s nothing remotely surprising or interesting about the outcome.

Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to ask you about the art. Do you have a favorite scene or character from volumes 12 and 13? What makes it work for you?

DAVID: I was very taken with “Death of an Actress” in volume 13. The character design is delightful, and I always love Tezuka’s way of rendering a beautiful woman. I enjoy that because that beauty is very much in Tezuka’s unique style. If you held these beauties up against more conventional renderings of that kind of woman, they wouldn’t stand a chance, but within this context, it conveys. I also love the Hollywood glamor of the story, the fading glory, and the cruel, showbiz cynicism that comes across very efficiently. It’s not the flashiest piece in either volume, but I thought the drawings worked really well with the content.

MJ: David, I agree very much with what you say here about the way Tezuka draws a beautiful woman. I think I have a special fondness for his rendering, maybe because it’s unconventional.

That said, I do have a favorite scene of my own. It’s from the story you mention earlier, David, “Night Cottage.” There’s a wordless page near the end, when Black Jack is waking up in the cottage that is just so expressive. The morning sun pushing through the trees, Black Jack’s moment of panic when he realizes his companion is gone–I think it’s a beautifully crafted scene. Also, I especially enjoy the character of Black Jack when he’s *not* in control, so this brief, silent moment is one I like a great deal.

KATE: For me, it’s all about the character designs. Tezuka is often accused of being too “cartoony” (whatever that means), but in Black Jack, his flair for physical exaggeration works exceptionally well. Tezuka is able to pack a tremendous amount of information into his character designs, which allows him to jump into each story with a minimum of exposition. Going back to “Wildcat Boy,” for example, we almost don’t need to be told that Apu has been raised by wild animals; it’s evident in the way Tezuka draws Apu’s hands, which look more like claws than fingers, and Apu’s teeth, which are sharp and pointed. Even as Black Jack attempts to “civilize” Apu, the boy never loses his feral appearance; in a nice touch, he arches his back and hisses.

MJ: I think it’s true that Tezuka’s style is “cartoony,” but I also don’t think of that as a negative. The ability to evoke a fully-realized character using broad strokes is part of his genius, as far as I’m concerned. It’s depressing to me that this something people cite as a problem with his work.

DAVID: Speaking of character design, I’m compelled to mention something I always mention when I write about this series: Pinoko. I love her. She’s so creepy and sad, yet strangely cute. If I had to vote for my favorite kid sidekick of all time, she’d win by a mile, because she’s so very, very wrong on so many levels.

MJ: Oh, I so agree, David. I think we’re reminded of that especially here in “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2,” in which Black Jack is asked to operate on a cystoma similar (but not quite similar enough) to Pinoko in her original form. I’m struck here by how much she’s treated like a child, and maybe even how much she acts like one, in a story that serves as such a clear reminder of her origins.

KATE: Even though I’m firmly in the anti-Pinoko camp, I also found “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” quite moving. Pinoko’s desire to have a friend (or “brother,” as she says) who shares the same history is surprisingly touching; it underscores just how unnatural and isolating her situation is, and how misunderstood she feels. Jack’s reaction, too, is oddly affecting; though he balks at playing Pinoko’s father, his desire to protect her from disappointment is evident in the delicate (and somewhat deceptive) way he tries to manage her expectations about the operation.

So what I guess I’m saying is that “Teratoid Cystoma, Part 2” might be on my short list of great Black Jack stories, even though I’m not a Pinoko fan.

And is it just me, or does Pinoko sound oddly like Sean Connery in the English translation?

DAVID: I can honestly say I’ve never made the Connery connection.

KATE: Itsssh those schlurry “ess” sounds that irresistibly reminds me of Connery.

MJ: I can definitely see the Connery connection, though I think in my head she’s a bit more… Cindy Brady. Probably Connery is preferable. :D

DAVID: I’m entirely behind the Cindy Brady comparison. They both seem to not be quite human and make me uneasy.

KATE: As our heated debate over Pinoko suggests, Black Jack really belongs to the world of pop culture more than many of Tezuka’s other mature works. There’s a pulpy, operatic quality to the stories in Black Jack that reminds me of my favorite television shows, and I get the feeling that’s exactly what Tezuka intended. I love his more self-consciously literary works, too, but Black Jack is probably his most entertaining series, and the easiest to recommend to civilians and continuity freaks, as anyone — and I mean anyone — could pick up either volume 12 or 13, read a story, and get the gist of the series.

Images Copyright © Tezuka Productions. Translation Coypright © Vertical Inc.

Harlequin Manga – Pregnant Women and Showbiz Babies

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It has been far too long since I’ve read some harlequin manga! Much like the romance novels themselves, these manga are perfect to read when you want to switch your brain off for a little while. I’m coming down with a cold, so I relished the opportunity to read about pregnant women who somehow manage to attract the attention of millionaires. I think millionaires must really like motherly types, I have no other logical explanation. All of these books are available for rental at emanga.com.

Claiming his Pregnant Wife – Sometimes it can be tricky to adapt books, even formulaic ones like Harlequin novels. This is a middling example of Harlequin manga, just because there were so few transitions between scenes it felt more like an outline of a story than the story itself. Erin is a tourist in Italy when she becomes stranded and happens to meet a beautiful Italian man named Francesco. They start to date during her vacation and she discovers that he’s been hiding the fact that he’s an incredibly wealthy businessman. They quickly marry, but their new marriage starts to disintegrate when Erin suspects him of being a womanizer like her father. Some of the character motivations seemed to come out of left field – all of a sudden Erin starts not trusting Francesco due to her psychological issues with her parents’ marriage, but this isn’t really hinted at earlier in the manga. It generally had a very choppy feel, with characters suddenly introduced, and various reasons for the couple to be apart worked through. The art was a little static, and looked rushed, with the characters sometimes displaying awkward poses. Not the best example of a Harlequin manga.

The Millionaire’s Pregnant Mistress – This title had more of the loopy plot developments that I expect and enjoy in a good Harlequin manga. Tess is a hard-working chambermaid at a resort hotel who had a one night stand with a rich guest. He turns out to be Benjamin Adams, a millionaire movie producer who is haunted by the death of his wife and unborn son. He wasn’t haunted enough to stop himself from having a one-night stand with a maid though! He makes sure to tell Tess just how emotionally damaged he is after she tells him that she’s pregnant by saying “”Your existence itself will dig deeper into my wounds!” Benjamin decides that he doesn’t want a repeat of his past tragedy and will move her into his mansion to make sure she and the baby are safe during the pregnancy. While he’s planning on taking responsibility for the baby, he doesn’t plan to give Tess anything other than support payments after the baby is born. Tess has a hard time adjusting to the millionaire lifestyle and keeps trying to work at the hotel while she’s living at the mansion. Benjamin and Tess bond over their shared love for the movie Psycho (!) and begin to strike up a friendship. While the art in this title showed most people having problems with triangle-shaped chins, overall the art was a little more fluid and Tess’s glossy hair, limpid eyes, and devotion to her beater of a car made her an appealing heroine.

Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby!

I was happy when I started reading this volume and saw that instead of the rushed, less detailed art provided for many of these harlequin titles, it opened with a detailed scene of married but estranged actors confronting each other on the red carpet, complete with glossy hair and borders of floating flowers. If there aren’t flowers used as backgrounds in every few pages of a Harlequin manga I feel cheated. Jennifer is an actor and married to Italian superstar Matteo. They’re in the process of divorcing because Matteo romanced the actress that played the evil temptress in their most recent movie. Apparently she is also a temptress in real life. Temptress! There’s a series of flashbacks that show how they first fall in love, when Jennifer was appearing in a play and lured Matteo in because she didn’t care about his fame and wealth. Matteo liked a challenge! Now, as they split up Jennifer’s harpy of a mother keeps lecturing her about the evils of men, and Matteo’s trusty staff don’t put her phone calls through to him. Harpy! Betrayal! Jennifer gets cornered at a party by another womanizing actor named Jack, whose hairstyle, plucked eyebrows, and eyeliner somehow reminded me of John Taylor circa 1983. Duran Duran! Actually many of the fashions in this series ranging from Jennifer’s side-ponytail to the harpy mother’s blouse with attached bow evoked a certain over the top 1980s glamour, which I found amusing because this manga was produced in 2008. Matteo saves her, they get trapped in an elevator, and they make love. Love in an elevator! Jennifer finds herself pregnant, and she and Matteo begin to rebuild their relationship. Because if you need to trap a man, get pregnant! This was highly entertaining, and the lush art did a great job of evoking the fabulous lifestyles of the protagonists.

Random weekend question: comebacks

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I’m seriously considering selling my copy of Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth (DMP). Copies are going for a small fortune on Amazon, and opportunism may overcome my tendency to hoard. This leads me to ask which books you’d like to see back in print from the sad limbo of licensed titles that have faded from active publication.

I’d have to go with Viz’s Four Shôjo Stories, a collection featuring the work of Moto Hagio, Keiko Nishi, and Shio Satô. Copies are expensive, and it seems like something that should be more readily available. In fact, there are a fair number of really interesting, old Viz books that I’d like to see make a comeback, but this one tops my list.

What’s your choice?

License request day: Zipang

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From the Manga Moveable Feast to a lively but technologically challenged Manga Out Loud podcast, it’s all about World War II this week. Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp) addresses history directly and brutally, and Ayako (Vertical) invents a tale of history’s victims, so one might be forgiven the impulse to rewrite history. That leads us to this week’s license request.

Kaiji Kawaguchi’s Zipang, which yielded an astonishing 43 volumes in Kodansha’s Morning, sends visitors from the present into the past and explores the potential consequences of that kind of junket. In this case, it’s a contemporary Defense Force vessel, the Mirai, which takes a wrong turn on the way to Hawaii and winds up in the Pacific on the eve of the decisive Battle of Midway.

The crew of the Mirai encompasses a number of different viewpoints on the tricky subject of time travel, from those who yearn to rewrite history whenever the opportunity presents itself to those who don’t so much want to divert a butterfly, lest that butterfly be headed someplace really, really important. I admit that I’m not especially interested in either war stories or treatises on the elasticity of time, but this book is supposed to be really, really good.

It won the Kodansha Manga Award in 2002. It was one of the Official Selections at the 2007 Festival International de la Bande Desinée. Four volumes were apparently published as a part of Kodansha’s Bilingual Comics project back in the day, but I can’t find confirmation of that claim, and I can only imagine what they’d cost, if they do exist. You’re in better shape if you’re able to read French, as Kana is publishing the book in that language, and they’re up to the 29th volume at this point.

Highly regarded as Kawaguchi is, his only work to see complete publication in English was Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (Viz, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic), which I think is out of print. Its five volumes don’t seem to be fetching the prices that some out-of-print titles do, but I’m not sure how easy it is to find all five volumes. Casterman’s Sakka imprint published it in French in 11 volumes.

The likelihood of this request being fulfilled seems rather slim. It’s long, it’s manly, and I’d wager it displays a shortage of girls in body stockings doing cartwheels. This is the kind of title that makes publishers ask you why you’re wishing bankruptcy on them when you bring it up. But if I could go back in time and rewrite the history of manga in English, I would divert whatever butterfly I could to improve the chances of books like this.

Manga Moveable Feast: Barefoot Gen and Manga! Manga!

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I thought for the Manga Moveable Feast, I write a little bit about where I first encountered Barefoot Gen, in the back of the classic Frederik L. Schodt book Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. This might be a thinly disguised way of attempting to hide the fact that I didn’t hunt down the collected volumes so my only way of participating in the MMF is to go with what’s on my shelves, but the manga excerpts translated in the Schodt book were also some of the first manga I read. After presenting an overview of the history of manga, Schodt chose the following creators to illustrate the variety stories found in manga for an English speaking audience: Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, Reiji Matsumoto’s Ghost Warrior, Riokyo Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles, and Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen.

I can’t think of a more jarring transition than flipping from the tribulations of Marie Antoinette to the aftermath of the atomic bomb. The story opens at the start of a normal day, with Gen getting ready to go to school. The bomb drops and his neighborhood becomes a nightmare of destruction, filled with injured people he can’t even begin to help. The schoolboy runs from person to person, seeing a woman with her face melted off, a burned man begging for water, and a little girl with a face full of glass shards. Finally Gen finds his family only to discover his father and most of his siblings trapped beneath a house while a fire rages nearby. Gen gets his pregnant mother away, and she gives birth to his little sister. The child’s first sight is the devastation of war.

Going back and reading this excerpt many years after first encountering it, I’m finding it easier to read. I think when I first read this sample of Barefoot Gen back in the eighties, I didn’t have the background in the visual vocabulary of manga to easily parse the contrast between the stylized, cartoony art style and the images of the bomb’s aftermath. After reading more Tezuka in the intervening years (whose deceptively simple artwork is used to portray any number of heavy situations), I’m finding these pages of Barefoot Gen less strange than I remember. Barefoot Gen is the essence of a didactic manga, with the sole aim to show the horrors of Hiroshima. I wonder if its value as a cultural artifact might be equal to or greater than its literary value. Shodt effectively added Barefoot Gen to the manga canon for English readers by just including it in his book.

3 Things Thursday: To the polls

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Hello lovely readers! After a week full of roundtables & discussion posts, I’m beginning to really tire of the sound of my own voice. So to mix things up a little, this week’s 3 Things is going to be a question.

Readers: What 3 series would you most like to see discussed here at Manga Bookshelf?

You can choose any series you like, but to give you an idea of what’s immediately possible, here are a few photos (in various states of focus) of what I’ve got on my bookshelves: (click on images for larger view)

Some upcoming posts I currently know of include Ayako (next week!) and Black Jack (very soon!) so you need not spend your votes on those!

Okay. Go!

Two on friendship

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Weird as it may be to say for someone who reads a fair amount of shônen manga, I think friendship is an under-examined subject in comics. There are some great ones that offer insights into unromantic bonds among unrelated people, but new examples are always welcome. I’ve recently enjoyed two relative newcomers to this genre, both of which address the shifting fortunes of friendship. They’re very different, but each is well worth a read.

Sarah Oleksyk’s Ivy (Oni Press) is about as frank an examination of emotional growing pains as you’re likely to find. Its titular heroine is suffering through the restrictions of high-school life in a small town, trying to make decisions about her future that she knows her mother would oppose, and wondering why her closest friends seem to be distancing themselves from her. Readers won’t wonder, as Ivy doesn’t seem like an easy person to be around. To be perfectly honest, she’s kind of awful, but she’s awful in achingly specific, recognizable ways.

Oleksyk doesn’t seem to be doing that thing where a creator will trick you into loving her unsympathetic protagonist. She seems more hopeful that you won’t judge Ivy too harshly and that you’ll see the bits of her that track with the bits of you that you may not care to remember. That was my experience with the book. I could identify with both the friends who find Ivy increasingly hard to take (“She makes fun of everything I say!”) and the spikes of temper and feelings of ill use and jealousy that seem to bubble out of Ivy before she even realizes it. There are tons of moments that acutely express feelings I’ve had in the past, even if I haven’t shared the identical experience that triggered them.

That kind of pungent, “I’ve felt that before” specificity informs the entire book, even when “I’ve felt that before” is accompanied by the less flattering sensation that I’ve read some of this before. While Oleksyk’s characters never feel less than uniquely alive, some of their experiences cover very well-traveled ground. Oleksyk brings freshness to Ivy’s first serious romantic relationship (which you will probably watch through spread fingers with some bad ex’s face floating unbidden in your memory), but her conflict with her mother and troubles with a teacher felt very predictable. It’s not that these threads aren’t executed well or aren’t true to the character; it’s that these specific arcs have been portrayed so often and so well that it’s hard not to feel that you’ve been there and done that.

But, though it all, Oleksyk remains true to the fact that her heroine isn’t a particularly nice person. Ivy is worthy of interest and sympathy, but she has a lot of growing up to do. That clear-eyed understanding, combined with a note-perfect facility for teen turmoil (along with splendid, expressive art), make Ivy a standout.

(Comments based on a digital review copy provided by the publisher. I haven’t seen the physical book, so I can’t comment on its production values.)

In a much lighter vein is the first volume of Yuuki Fujimoto’s The Stellar Six of Gingacho (Tokyopop), which follows six friends who are all children of various vendors in a small market street. Mike, the green grocer’s daughter, has noticed that the group has been drifting apart as they’ve gotten older and split off into different classes at school. She’s made new friends and developed new interests herself, but she doesn’t want to lose the special bond that she’s formed with this neighborhood pack. So she comes up with things they can do as a group, particularly when they’re tied to their shared identity as vendors’ kids.

The best parts of this book are tied to Market Street. Perhaps it reveals too much in the way of postmodern hippie leanings on my part, but I love stories that feature small businesses and independent entrepreneurs. Fujimoto seems to share my admiration, and the bustle of Market Street, the interactions between various shop owners and their collective efforts, play an important role beyond just giving the ensemble cast a commonality. Market Street has a warm sense of place, and it’s easy to see why Mike wants to nourish the parts of her that are spring from it.

Not unexpectedly, things tend to sag when events move away from the neighborhood. The slow-building subplot of Mike’s dawning romantic feelings for longtime friend Kuro (the fishmonger’s son) is nice enough, but it feels generic compared to the ensemble elements. When the kids are at school, the book resembles any number of competent middle-school romances. If Fujimoto figures out how to ground Mike and Kuro’s developing relationship in the atmosphere and events of Market Street, my concerns will be nullified. (I’ll also be happy if she devotes more individual attention to the other members of the ensemble.)

Fujimoto does end the volume on a wonderful high note. Its final story introduces Market Street’s curmudgeonly granny of a candy shop owner. I’ve expressed my fondness for this type of character before, and I love this specimen’s playfully combative relationship with the kids and her abiding loyalty to her neighborhood, no matter how often she carps about details. Her loyalty is returned in just the right proportion in a lovely story about neighbors doing right by each other and generations finding unexpected ways to connect.

If I were to complain about anything about the book, it would be the positively miniscule type size of the many conversational asides Fujimoto gives her characters. It’s hard to see how they could be any larger, but they’re an absolute chore to decipher, and the affection the book earns overall makes me not want to miss a word.

(The Stellar Six of Gingacho originally ran in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume and The Hana to Yume for a total of ten volumes.)