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Breaking Down Banana Fish, Vols. 9-10

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Hello readers, and welcome to the fifth installment of our roundtable, Breaking Down Banana Fish!

This month we take on volumes nine and ten, in which Ash faces Arthur in their final showdown, Eiji is nabbed by the fuzz, Yut-Lung reveals his vulnerable side, and government conspiracy runs amok.

I’m joined this month by Michelle Smith (Soliloquy in Blue), Khursten Santos (Otaku Champloo), Connie C. (Slightly Biased Manga), and Robin Brenner (No Flying, No Tights). Eva’s taking a break this time around, but she’ll be back with us in January as we head into the second half of the series!

Just a note: We’ll be moving to three volumes per installment beginning in January, so if you’re following along, be sure to read up through volume 13!

I would like to take just a moment to thank everyone on the roundtable for working to make time for this project. Nineteen volumes is a large commitment to make, and I have a great deal of gratitude toward these women for sticking it out, especially Eva who will have to marathon five volumes to catch up next time around! Thanks also to Viz for printing this series in its entirety. Perhaps if we’re very lucky, it might receive an omnibus treatment somewhere down the line, to put it all back in print.

Read our roundtable on volumes one and two here, volumes three and four here, volumes five and six here, and volumes seven and eight here. On to part 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

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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Saturday Morning Cartoon: Super Dimension Fortress Macross

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Today’s Saturday morning cartoon is the opening to the classic Super Dimension Fortress Macross! I recently finished watching this series for the first time since I saw the early Robotech episodes in 1985.

I have very specific memories of going to my Grandma’s house after school and watching Robotech in her basement. I absolutely loved the show, but back then it was impossible to rewatch or see repeat episodes. I think many of my memories of the show actually came from reading the later novelizations. So when I was watching some episodes of Macross I could tell that I was seeing them for the first time even though I’d read the scenes before, like most of the Max and Miriya romance.

I’d put off trying to rewatch this series for a long time. I think I tend to put aside some of the things I was into as a kid, just because I don’t think adult nostalgia will ever measure up to the first experience of discovering a new fictional world. I’m leery of tarnishing memories, and think that sometimes reliving childhood fandom isn’t the most productive use of one’s time. There’s nothing worse than the sinking feeling of finding out that something you loved as a child is actually a little bit lame. I remember this sinking feeling all too well when I realized that Aslan in the Narnia books was Jesus a couple years after I first read and loved the books, which was probably around the same time I first saw Robotech. So that was one reason for my trepidation and procrastination about watching Super Dimension Fortress Macross as an adult.

I was surprised at how well this series held up. Part of it I think is due to some of the appealing character designs. It is easy to overlook the occasionally glitchy animation when the character designs are so strong.

Of course, what looks not very fluid today was absolutely groundbreaking to a 10 year old in 1985. Watching the series again, I was able to see how it really lay the groundwork for later philosophical fighting mecha shows. Macross has plenty of space opera, but for all the scenes of transforming mecha fighting aliens, at the core of the show is a longing for peace and a lot of heart. I was glad to finish rewatching Super Dimension Fortress Macross with the knowledge that my 10-year-old self did have excellent taste in after school cartoons. Macross is the reason why I to this day think that airplanes that transform into fighting robots are awesome. Really, it doesn’t get much better than that.

I Wish I Wrote That!

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Time for another installment of I Wish I Wrote That! This month’s roundup will be rather brief, not because there hasn’t been a lot of great writing going on in the manga blogopsphere, but because I’ve had less time than usual to read it!

This month’s centerpiece is about comics, but not manga, and that would be Vom Marlowe’s recent ode to one of my favorite webcomics, Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosch. Here’s a little taste of Vom’s reaction to first reading Allie’s Boyfriend Does Not Have Ebola, Probably and its Better Pain Scale:

“I laughed so hard I made unattractive snorting noises and startled the dog, who looked around for invading postmen or other villains.

Now when I have to rate the pain, I admit fully and upfront that I often ask myself, “Am I being mauled by a bear?”

It never fails to make things a little better.”

Vom’s entire post is delightful, and she points out quite a few of the comic’s most charming moments, particularly posts about Allie’s new dog and her recent cake epic. If I actually had written this, I think the only thing that would be different is that mine would have included maybe a thousand additional words on This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult. “Clean all the things?”

In the category of “Less ‘I Wish I Wrote That’ than ‘I’m So Glad She Did'” I submit Kate Dacey’s recent review of 13th Boy, which fills me with pure joy and reassurance that I’m truly not alone, and also Caddy C.’s Friday Feminism with Fumi Yoshinaga, because everyone should write more about Fumi Yoshinaga, including me.

And lastly, in the category of “Stuff That Resonates With Me in a Weirdly Good Way,” this somewhat ambivalent take on Viz’s March Story by David Welsh. What I enjoyed so much about this is David’s process as he tries to figure out how he feels about the book, and the fact that he displays all of that right there in the review.

That’s all for this month! See you in December for more I Wish I Wrote That!

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+)

AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

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AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga edited by Sean Michael Wilson

I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes in manga are decidedly mainstream. I do enjoy the occasional wacky seinen title, but I generally read manga for my daily dose of escapism and don’t go out of my way to be challenged. I have a soft spot for anthology titles, because back in the dark days before the current manga explosion, all I had to read were my Eclipse/Viz floppy comics and the manga excerpted in Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics. I was interested to check out this anthology when it first came out, but decided to purchase it later. So I was excited when I managed to snag a copy in a ComicsAlliace twitter giveaway.

AX is carefully curated, with stories selected that show the true variety of Japanese alternative comics. I was blown away by the variety of art styles in this volume, from the detailed European forest city overrun by mushrooms in “Mushroom Garden” to the bean-head motorcycle lovers in “Enrique Kobayashi’s Eldordo”. “Into Darkness” featured a lush garden entwining around a corpse, while “The Neighbor” showed an inexplicable feud developing with flat, sparse sketches. The themes of the stories ranged from the surreal as shown in “Six Paths of Wealth” where a mother pushes her daughter to engage in some unconventional behavior with insects, to the everyday life of a salaryman who suddenly decides to take up boxing in “The Song of Mr H.”

As with any anthology there were a few stories that weren’t to my taste. I might be a prude, but I don’t tend to get much out of stories where the main point of the narrative is to be transgressive mainly by showing sex acts or bodily functions. If I wanted to read stuff like that, I figure I could always seek out something like Prison Pit. Fortunately the way the selection of the stories was paced, when I was reading I wasn’t mentally checking off repetitive themes like “Penis, sex with a cursed plant-woman, the runs, giant penis, penis again.” Instead there was more variation in the way the anthology was put together, so my running tally of themes was more like “Naked woman, fable about insanity told with assassins, boy falls in love with a butterfly, massive existential angst and vomiting, penis, symbolic story about a relationship breakup.”

The production quality for the book from Top Shelf Productions was excellent. I am always a sucker for paperback books with french flaps, and I appreciated the inclusion of author notes for all the stories collected in the anthology. I appreciated the variety of artists represented, especially the inclusion of many female artists. With Drunken Dreams and AX being published, 2010 is ending as a good year for providing readers with access to important and influential manga. I hope that this book does well enough that we get a second volume published. With so much commercial, slickly produced manga (that I dearly love!) out there, it is also good to take a step back and gain a wider appreciation for the sheer variety of stories that can be told in the comics medium. AX will be a great addition to the bookshelf of any well-rounded manga fan.

3 Things Thursday: The Daily Grind

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For a woman in her early forties, I’m relatively new to the traditional workweek, and from a former outsider’s perspective, I can recognize that it has its pros and cons. On one hand, I’ve found it fairly restrictive–imposing an alarming level of structure and routine on parts of one’s life it seems as though it shouldn’t even touch. On the other, having spent years churning out eight shows a week on a pretty steady basis, the vast bulk on Saturdays and Sundays, I’ve come to fully appreciate the previously unknown wonder that is “the weekend.”

Either way, whether it’s the theater, the office, the restaurant, or any of the other seemingly infinite number of workplaces operating daily in the world, the one thing nearly all of us have in common is the imperative of work. And that imperative ensures that we will encounter any number of long, difficult days.

Most of us have our own ways of dealing with the stress of the daily grind. For instance, I usually play music in my office while I’m working, which helps me to stay focused and (hopefully) relaxed. I also bring my lunch to work, so that I can spend my lunchtime hanging out on Twitter or writing midday blog posts, like 3 Things Thursday, which has become a nice noontime break for me each week. Then there are days like today, of course, where my workload is so overwhelming that even lunchtime becomes a forgotten luxury.

So. Since it was the workday, today, that kept me from posting 3 Things in a timely manner, I thought I’d pick out a few favorite manga that center on the workplace! Too bad I wrote about Antique Bakery just last week!

3 favorite manga that take place at work:

1. Ristorante Paradiso | Natsume Ono | Viz Media – It’s a rare workplace, of course, that offers up such a smorgasbord of distinguished older gentleman, and isn’t it a shame? A short summary from my discussion at Off the Shelf: “A young woman, Nicoletta, seeks out her mother (who abandoned her for love) with the intention of outing her as a divorcée to her current husband. But things immediately become more complicated as she finds herself torn between resentment over her mom’s happiness and a desire to be a part of the life her mom has built for herself. Meanwhile, everyone else is similarly conflicted over something–the mom, everyone at the restaurant she runs with her husband, and the much older man Nicoletta develops feelings for. No easy solutions are presented, but nothing becomes overly-dramatic either. It’s a fairly quiet story about a bunch of people just being people, for better or worse.”

If only restaurant work was always as elegant as the world of Ristorante Paradiso!

2. Suppli | Mari Okazaki | Tokyopop – I’ve fallen behind on this smart story about a twenty-something office lady and her trials in work and love. I’ve also never reviewed it.

Here’s a quick summary from the lovely Michelle Smith: “When Minami’s boyfriend breaks up with her, she realizes she has no friends, and so instead throws herself into the only thing in her life—her job at an advertising agency. Gradually, her eyes open to the people around her, and she gets to know them. Two of her male coworkers are also interested in her, one who kind of ineptly pines around and says the wrong thing all the time and another who has suffered his own heartbreak and attracts Minami by virtue of his neediness.”

Far too little of this type of josei has made it over this way. I cross my fingers for more!

3. Black Jack | Osamu Tezuka | Vertical, Inc. – It’s an unconventional choice, perhaps, but the world is Black Jack’s workplace, and I can hardly think of a another manga character as consumed by his work as he is. From my discussion of volume ten: “Though Ode to Kirihito provides the kind of overarching narrative I generally prefer, the sheer length of Black Jack allows for a more intense study of a single character than you’re likely to find almost anywhere. Black Jack is absolutely, gorgeously ambiguous in just about every way … He’s not really above anything, including lying, cheating, and outright revenge. One of the most riveting stories in this volume, for instance, is one in which he’s approached by his estranged father who begs him to perform a vital facial reconstruction on his current wife (the woman he left Black Jack’s mother for). Black Jack agrees to do the surgery, but he wreaks his vengeance in a truly coldblooded fashion.”

Aaaaand, that makes my day seem really not so bad. :D

So, readers, what are some of your favorite work-centered manga?

Tokyopop Quick Takes – Karakuri Odette, Neko Ramen, How to Draw Shojo Manga

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Karakuri Odette Volume 4

I think this takes the prize for most consistently charming shoujo manga. I mean, take a look at the riff on Revolutionary Girl Utena in the cover illustration. How cute is that!? Odette makes a new friend when she meets Shiroyuki, a rich girl who lives in isolation because she can read people’s minds. When Shiroyuki meets Odette she’s happy that she can’t read her thoughts, and Odette encourages Shiroyuki to start attending school. Shiroyuki thinks that Odette must be picked on at school and is determined to save her. Unfortunately Odette already seems to have things well in hand, despite her tendency to immediately do other people’s classroom chores when asked. There’s also an appearance by Kurose, Odette’s juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold non-boyfriend. He starts getting stalked by another girl, which awakens feelings of jealousy in Odette. Suzuki’s pacing is great. There are little hints here and there that show Odette might becoming something more than just an android. Her dependence on her battery seems to be lessening, and her experiences of new emotions through her interaction with her friends seems to be increasing. There are only two volumes left in this series, and I’ll be sorry to see it end.

Neko Ramen 2

People who liked the first volume of this series about Taisho, a cat who inexplicably runs a ramen shop, will find the second volume equally enjoyable. There are plenty of gags about Taisho switching out different theme corners of his shop in an effort to find an added attraction. He goes through options like a petting zoo and spiritual fortunes in short order. Taisho also does curry experiments, with disastrous results.It felt to me like there were a few more long form comics included in this volume as opposed to the 4-coma strips. The longer stories focused on Taisho’s famous cat model father and a food competition that seemed like a satirical take on the food battles often found in cooking manga like Iron Wok Jan. Hapless businessman Tanaka gets a shock when his father has a mid-life crisis and confesses his secret desire to open a ramen shop. This is one of those manga that I think is best read in spaced-out stages, because while the jokes are funny, there’s a certain element of sameness for the reader when reading a bunch of similar gags back to back.

How to Draw Shojo Manga

I’m not an artist, but I think that this how to draw book will be interesting for shoujo fans since it was put out by the editorial teams of some of Hakusensha’s manga magazines. There’s a simple story used as a framing device – enthusiastic but slightly clueless aspiring manga artist Ena gets put through her paces under the guidance of Sasaki, a manga editor. Topics like what tools to use, drawing people and objects, composing panel layouts, working on storyboards, and developing characters are briefly touched on. While this volume is too slender to use as a true drawing textbook, it does introduce a lot of terminology and concepts that provide a basic overview of the manga-making process. Some of the details included are likely to be too specific to the Japanese system to be very useful for American aspiring manga artists. An appendix on alternate routes to publication, like how to create a webcomic, might have been useful. Still, I enjoyed leafing through this book but I was tortured by the inclusion of some of the examples from untranslated Hakusensha manga. Now I’m curious about English Tutoring School Wars, Go! Hiromi, Go!, and especially the Tea Prince’s Princess which appears to feature a hot guy playing the cello with some unfortunate bowing technique. I do think this title would be a popular addition to any library’s collection of how to draw books.

Review copies for Neko Ramen and How to Draw Shojo Manga provided by the publisher.