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The Box Man

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BoxmanA few weeks ago, Salon columnist Laura Miller offered a radical suggestion for bookworms: make a New Year’s resolution to read outside your comfort zone. Though I like to think my manga-reading habits are broad and adventurous, I cheerfully acknowledge that there are certain categories that I strenuously avoid. All things mecha, for example: I lost interest in Bokurano Ours when I realized that it would be a grim variation on the standard children-piloting-giant-robots scenario. Underground manga, for another: I know as a manga critic I’m supposed to think Short Cuts and Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show are brilliant, sophisticated, daring, etc., but their disturbing imagery made me kind of queasy. These are blind spots, I know, so I decided to address my hang-ups head-on by making 2010 The Year of Reading Everything.

The Box Man (Drawn & Quarterly), my first experiment, reminded me why I usually shun books that purport to “push even the limitless boundaries of the comic book medium”: that phrase seems to be a coded way of saying “weird stuff that might strike normal folk as ugly, pointless, or offensive.” And indeed, The Box Man certainly challenges the “boundaries of the medium,” if not the boundaries of good taste: the art has a studied naivete, there’s no real plot to speak of, and there are numerous images that verge on tokusatsu porn. (More on that in a minute.)

The Box Man is a collection of trippy set-pieces connected by a baldly literal conceit: a journey. The book opens with a man in sunglasses and his companion, a cat with a carapace, loading a box onto the back of a scooter. The two then set off into the night, encountering goons, wrestlers, aliens, two-headed pigs, VW-sized protozoa, and lounge singers in the back alleys and sewers of an unnamed city. Though they’re chased and menaced throughout the book, there isn’t an obvious rationale for any of the activity; it’s action for action’s sake. The lack of plot isn’t fatal, but when the goings-on include wrestling matches that pit monsters against humans in grotesquely sexual ways… well, call me a nice Irish Catholic girl, but it seems like those sequences ought to serve some clear purpose. (They don’t.) Even my attempts to contextualize these images within the greater history of shunga print-making only went so far; yes, I can see these images’ relationship to, say, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, but no, I’ve never had the urge to frame something like that and hang it over my sofa, nor do I find the Creature Double Feature angle a playful update on the tradition.

It’s a shame that these images take up so much space in the middle of the book, as it’s obvious that creator Imiri Sakabashira has a fertile imagination. Sakabashira loves to take the familiar and make it strange, grafting a human head onto a crab’s body, for example, or stocking the local fish market with the kind of toothy critters normally found miles below the ocean’s surface. It’s also undeniable that Sakabashira has serious drawing chops; his streetscapes have a vital energy and specificity that’s missing from a lot of manga, filled with meticulously-drawn signs, clothes lines groaning under the weight of laundry, weedy lots, and tangled power lines.

Yet for all the obvious craft that went into The Box Man, I could never quite abandon myself to the artwork. I’ve always found surrealism one of the shallower manifestations of modernism, an overly intellectualized attempt to repackage Romantic interest in dreams, the supernatural, and the occult as a penetrating critique of positivism. I would never deny the artistry of Dali or Ernst, but I would never put their best work on par with, say, Picasso’s, as those melting clocks and fireside angels always seemed more like stunts than meaningful statements about the modern condition. The same problem bedevils The Box Man: it’s vivid and hallucinatory and nightmarish, yet in the end, all that furious activity doesn’t signify very much.

THE BOX MAN • BY IMIRI SAKABASHIRA • DRAWN & QUARTERLY • 124 pp. • NO RATING (BEST SUITED FOR MATURE AUDIENCES)

The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer: C+

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deadandthegoneFrom the back cover:
When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey’s Pizza. He was worried about getting elected as senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college. He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closer in orbit to the earth and catastrophically altering the earth’s climate. He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive. And when Alex’s parents disappear in the aftermath of the tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.

Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It enthralled and devastated readers with its look at an apocalyptic event from a small-town perspective. Now this harrowing companion book examines the same events as they unfold in New York City, revealed through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker.

With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities.

Review:
Seeing as how The Dead and the Gone is a companion book to Life As We Knew It, I expected that they’d have fundamentally the same plot. Apparently, I should’ve anticipated they’d have the same pitfalls, as well.

The story this time focuses on ambitious teenager Alex Morales, whose dreams of a bright academic future are cut short when an asteroid knocks the moon much closer to Earth, sending everyone into panic and claiming the lives of both of Alex’s parents. Forced to care for his two sisters, he does some awful things in order to survive and tries to make the best decisions he can, though sometimes ends up making mistakes. Faith is important to the Morales family, especially to super-pious Briana, who believes that her parents aren’t really dead but just stricken with amnesia from which they will miraculously recover someday.

One of the most annoying things about Life As We Knew It was its whiny protagonist and how she’d seem to improve, only to backslide. The same thing happens in this book with Alex’s younger sister, Julie, though eventually I realized Alex himself is a large part of the problem there. I’ve read three of Pfeffer’s books by now and have noticed that she tends to repeat things. This book is no exception, since a large part of it is taken up by variations on the following scene, repeated at least five or six times:

Alex: *accuses Julie of something*
Julie: I hate you! *runs off, slams door*
Alex: *goes in to talk to Julie and apologize*

After a while, I ended up sympathizing with Julie because Alex kept blaming everything on her! I was also irritated by the open-ended conclusion, predicted something waaaaaay in advance about Briana, and literally laughed out loud at the ridiculous fever dream Alex has while he’s sick with the flu.

That said, I do tend to like these apocalyptic YA books, so at least I enjoyed the basic plot even if the Morales family got on my nerves. I think I’ve learned by now, though, that Pfeffer’s books just aren’t my thing.

Ultimo, Vol. 1

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ultimo1The scene: a country road in twelfth-century Japan. The players: Yamato, a bandit with a Robin Hood streak; Dr. Dunstan, a Westerner in sunglasses and a flashy yukata; and Yamato’s gang. The robbers surround Dunstan to search his cart for anything of worth, settling on two large crates. Though Dunstan warns them that the consequences of opening the boxes will be dire — “if you wake them, you will die,” he explains — Yamato ignores his advice, prying off the lids to discover what look like two porcelain boys. Both figures spring to life, with Vice — the “ultimate evil one,” in case you didn’t guess from his name — slaughtering six robbers in short order. Though Yamato is badly outclassed — he has a sword, Vice has a variety of lethal powers that would be the envy of the US military — he vows to defend his friends. Yamato’s brave gesture gives the second doll, Ultimo, an opening to jump into the battle and send Vice packing.

Flash forward to the present: a teenage slacker named Yamato is searching for a one-of-a-kind birthday gift for a pretty classmate when he stumbles across an odd-looking puppet in an antique store. Though Yamato has never seen the puppet before, he’s overwhelmed by a sense of deja vu. Much to his surprise, the puppet’s eyes open, and he lunges forward shouting, “Nine centuries, Yamato-sama! Ultimo missed you very much!” Before Yamato can fully ponder the implications of Ultimo’s outburst, Vice appears on the scene, forcing Yamato and Ultimo into a bus-throwing, glass-shattering smackdown in the streets of Tokyo.

…

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Manhwa Monday: Welcome, February!

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Today’s featured review comes from Kate Dacey over at The Manga Critic, for Sirial’s trippy all-ages tale One Fine Day (Yen Press). Kate begins her review with the definition of “whimsical,” a word that I expect even the series’ detractors must agree best fits the bill. As Kate says, “One Fine Day is whimsical in the fullest sense of the word, at once ‘lightly fanciful’ and ‘subject to erratic behavior or unpredictable change.'”

As a fan of the series myself, I especially appreciate Kate’s description of its most fanciful scenes, such as one in which “No-Ah and friends throw a lavish party for his grandparents’ antique furniture, here represented as beautiful fairies and enormous woodland creatures.” If you’ve been wondering if One Fine Day is for you, I highly recommend checking out Kate’s review.

Meanwhile, out in the cold of cyberspace, ReversedMiso laments the demise …

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La Satanica by Momoko Tenzen: B+

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lasatanicaWhen Shoji Mashita spots his classmate Motoki Matsushima lovingly caressing his (Mashita’s) desk, he abruptly realizes that Matsuhima has feelings for him. He narrates that he’s okay with this, since he respects Matsushima as a friend, but he can’t resist tormenting him since his reactions are so violent. Eventually, Mashita realizes that he has feelings for Matsushima, too, and they share a pretty intense encounter in the boys’ bathroom until Matsushima suggests they adjourn to his home and Mashita suddenly gets cold feet.

Matsushima tries to figure out what he’s done wrong, and Mashita finally confesses that he’s afraid of the next step. From this point on, the boys become fairly obsessed with doing it. I prefer stories more about love than lust, myself, but the depiction of their awkwardness is well done and one really must appreciate that they take a whole chapter to really, really make sure that it’s what both of them want. “Are you only doing this for my sake? Are you positive about this?” “If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be.” That alone earns La Satanica major points in my book.

I’ve been impressed by Tenzen’s powers of characterization in her short stories, so it’s no surprise that they’re on even better display in this full-length story. Both characters are very endearing, to the point where it’s almost embarrassing to see them in bed together, and Tenzen’s expressive art makes the heartfelt confessions of their feelings and insecurities that much more sympathetic. The result is a BL manga that manages to be sweet and sexy simultaneously, which is no small feat.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.

Kimi ni Todoke, Vol. 3

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Kimi ni Todoke (From Me to You), Vol. 3
By Karuho Shiina
Published by Viz Media


Buy This Book

As Sawako becomes accustomed to having real friends, a whole new world opens up to her. Suddenly she’s being invited to dinner, enjoying giddy, pointless conversation, and having boys make excuses to walk her home. She lets her friends help her improve at sports and even learns to address a few of them by name–possibly the most difficult challenge of all. Unfortunately her newfound popularity (especially with school hottie Kazehaya) earns her the attention of one of adolescence’s least desirable entities: the love rival.

Though Kimi ni Todoke doesn’t attempt to be anything more than just another tale of teen friendship and love, mangaka Karuho Shiina uses the simplicity of her heroine so effectively, it actually feels as though she’s breaking new ground. Everything Sawako experiences in this volume–affection, attraction, even jealousy–is so genuinely new to her, it is able to become fresh again for readers as well. Perhaps the most satisfying thing in this volume, however, is watching Sawako begin to demonstrate her own personal strength, as she eventually does with a popular girl who tries to sabotage her budding relationship with Kazehaya.

Another of this series’ refreshing qualities is that Shiina consistently avoids letting her supporting characters fall into typical shojo traps. Just as Chizu and Ayane refuse to let nasty rumors destroy their newfound friendship with Sawako in volume two, Kazehaya seems unlikely to let his feelings be swayed by the machinations of Sawako’s “rival.” Whether this level of loyalty and self-awareness is authentic to the teenage experience is another question (it certainly bears little resemblance to mine) but perhaps this is the key to the series’ charm. For those of us whose teen years were truly isolating, Kimi ni Todoke is like a soothing balm, healing up old wounds one by one.

It is a pleasure to note that, three volumes in, this series has truly lost none of its original charm. With its unusually warm take on typical teen drama, Kimi ni Todoke provides a heartfelt testament to the sweetness of youth.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Two Fables by Roald Dahl: B

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Two_fables_coverFrom the front flap:
Roald Dahl is recognized as a master in two quite different fields: the short story and the novel for children. In these two new fables, Dahl has once again written startlingly original stories that, while owing something to the clarity and verve of his writing for children, are firmly intended for adults. In “The Princess and the Poacher,” the beastially ugly Hengist is granted a dark wish, but cannot bring himself to fulfill it. In “Princess Mammalia,” Mammalia is driven to attempt murder when her beauty dazzles every man in the kingdom except the one who has what she truly wants.

Deftly told, these pared-down tales explore the intertwinings of love and power, beauty and desire.

Review:
Two Fables contains two odd short stories that share some common themes and some bizarre, Rorschach-y illustrations by Graham Dean.

In “The Princess and the Poacher,” Hengist, an unfortunately ugly young man, is quite naturally interested in maidens fair but, as Dahl aptly puts it, “no maidens, fair or otherwise, were interested in Hengist.” In an attempt to distract himself from the ladies he can’t have, he takes to solitary walks in the woods and discovers a talent for stealth that ultimately leads to a life of crime as a poacher. One day, seeking a challenge, he ventures into the king’s woods and ends up saving the princess from being gored by a boar.

In gratitude, the king makes a proclamation that Hengist is free to ravish any female in the land. But now that all women are powerless to resist him, Hengist suddenly finds that he doesn’t want any of them. Alone of all the males in the court, he treats the princess courteously and, in the end, wins her love, which was the king’s plan all along. I don’t really get why the king wanted his daughter to marry a poor, uneducated commoner like Hengist, since Dahl never spells it out, but perhaps it’s a political maneuver to avoid having a scheming son-in-law in his household. This seems likely, given the outcome of the second tale.

In “Princess Mammalia,” the titular princess awakes on the morning of her seventeenth birthday to discover she has become a dazzling beauty. She promptly begins exercising her power over men, growing contemptuous of their obedience. Like Hengist, once members of the opposite sex become powerless to resist her, Mammalia loses interest. Tiring of humiliating her admirers, she soon sets her sights on usurping her father’s throne, but the king, like his peer in the first story, is a clever fellow and devises a way to test his daughter’s loyalty. This story’s a little more concise than the first, with a more definite ending, so I liked it a bit better for that.

In the end, this is an extremely quick read that, as the flap promises, delivers an intriguing hybrid of Dahl’s fairy tale style and more adult subject matter. I’d never read anything by Dahl intended for a grown-up audience before, and it was an interesting experience. Like any fable ought, these stories also deliver a clear (though sexually tinged) moral: irresistibility (whether mandated by law or achieved through beauty) is seldom as enjoyable as daydreams might suggest.

All My Darling Daughters by Fumi Yoshinaga: A

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allmydarling“A mother is an imperfect woman.”

So thinks Yukiko Kisaragi, the central hub around which the collection of stories in All My Darling Daughters revolves. As the story begins, Yukiko’s mother, Mari, has just undergone a successful cancer operation and decides that, from now on, she’s going to live her life the way she wants. To Yukiko’s dismay, this involves getting remarried to an aspiring actor and much younger man, Ken Ohashi, whom she met at a host club. At first, Yukiko is convinced it’s a con, and maintains a guarded demeanor around Ohashi, but once he proves his love for Mari really is genuine, she breaks down. “She’s always belonged entirely to me,” she sobs.

From there, stories focus on those Yukiko knows. The second chapter is about a strange student named Maiko who forces herself on Izumi, a lecturer friend of Ohashi’s; the third features Sayako, a pretty friend of Yukiko who has decided to investigate arranged marriage; the fourth is about middle school friends of Yukiko and how their career plans went awry; and the final chapter focuses on Yukiko’s grandmother and her relationship with Mari. Meanwhile, we catch glimpses of how Yukiko’s life is evolving through a series of revelations about what has occurred “off-camera.”

At first I had a hard time understanding how some of these stories related to each other. Sayako’s story, for example, is incredibly touching and sad, but her mother does not play much of a role. The story of the forceful student seemed entirely out of place. But then the common thread hit me: this book is not just about mothers and daughters. It’s about the relationship between any caregiver and a child, and how something that might seem inconsequential to one could affect the other for the rest of their lives.

Sayako is crippled in love because her well-meaning grandfather told her, “You mustn’t discriminate among people.” Maiko has a warped view of relationships because someone indoctrinated her with a servile disposition—even though Izumi repeatedly says, “Who told you that?” it’s a perception she is unable and even unwilling to shake. Yukiko’s middle school friend is unable to fulfill her lofty goal of being a trailblazer for women in the workplace because an abusive father forces her to leave home early and quit school. Even Mari’s not immune, since her mother’s denigrating comments (made with good intentions, we later learn) about her appearance gave her a lifetime complex about her looks.

By the end of the volume, it’s apparent that Yukiko really is living a charmed life. Mari may be an imperfect mother, but she’s honest about her foibles and the two share an incredible relationship. Yukiko even achieves a sense of peace about her new step-dad, realizing “this strange boy is necessary for my mom.” Yukiko’s husband, Jun, is sweet yet equally imperfect, and a casual remark near the end of the volume reveals they’ve made headway in conquering a problem of equality in their marriage. Career-wise, Yukiko is the most successful of her group of middle school friends, prompting former chum Saeki to think, “At least one of us fulfilled her modest dreams.” And who is it whose fierce yet loving care enabled Yukiko’s life to turn out so well? I’ll give you one guess.

In addition to all of this thoughtful, integrated writing, Yoshinaga also employs her distinctive artistic style in the service of the story. True, the bulk of the panels contain talking heads in white space, but sometimes these headshots are exactly what one needs to get the point across. The most effective example of this occurs in the third chapter, when a two-page spread of close-ups is used to convey how Sayako and a prospective husband, Mr. Fuwa, have instantly achieved a content companionship. And if you don’t get sniffly when this technique is used again in the final two pages, you might just be a robot.

Review originally published at Manga Recon. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Blackout by Keith R. A. DeCandido: C-

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blackoutFrom the back cover:
New York City in 1977 is vampire heaven. Serial killer Son of Sam is often blamed for their hits, and a citywide blackout gives them free reign of the streets, allowing them to get away with murder. Spike and his beloved Drusilla are in the Big Apple taking advantage of the situation, as is Vampire Slayer Nikki Wood, who has hunkered down with her son, Robin, in a Times Square apartment where she thinks they’ll be safe.

But no matter where she goes, Nikki has to watch her back. Spike has only one thing on his mind: to slay a Slayer. Adding to Spike’s list of challenges is a corrupt local vampire community that catches wind of his presence, and when they start messing with him, things get bloody interesting.

Review:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that “Fool for Love” is one of the best episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Occurring near the beginning of the fifth season, this episode finds Buffy asking Spike how exactly he managed to best two Slayers in his time and Spike concluding that, in the end, all Slayers have a death wish. The themes of this episode tie in with the magnificent fifth season finale, “The Gift,” and it’s incredibly important for the characters concerned and the series as a whole.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the tie-in novel that fleshes out Spike’s encounter with Nikki Wood, the second Slayer to meet death at his hands, is so crappy.

The plot isn’t too bad: we first meet Nikki in 1973 when she learns about her destiny and begins training, and pick up with her later in 1977 when she’s quite the badass and a local folk hero, preferring to live amidst the poor and disenfranchised of New York rather than with her Watcher, whose swanky place is located in a neighborhood where the residents can depend on police protection. A vampire-led criminal organization is her chief bane, and Spike becomes problem number two. They have a series of charged meetings and only after she cleverly uses him to exterminate her other foes do they finally have that climactic battle on the subway depicted in “Fool for Love.”

It seems that DeCandido has done his work making the narrative fit the two times we see Nikki and Spike in the series (she also appears in season seven’s “Lies My Parents Told Me”) as well as incorporating the 1977 blackout into the story. Spike and Dru sound mostly like themselves—though DeCandido gets the color of her eyes wrong—and it’s clear that Nikki is resourceful and special.

So… what’s the problem? DeCandido cannot write a non-stereotypical black character to save his life! Every single male black person is wearing outlandish, pimp-like attire, sporting an afro, and talking jive. Nikki’s the only female black character we see, but she is consistently being compared to heroines of blaxploitation films and greeted with hails like, “Right on, Big Mamma Jamma!” Maybe the dialogue is the result of DeCandido’s misguided efforts to evoke a seventies feel by loading every single sentence with period-appropriate slang, but it’s cringe-inducing. Here’s Nikki’s first line as an example:

No, sugar, they ain’t got nothin’ to do with that cat. Don’t worry, they’re gone and they ain’t never comin’ back, you dig?

In the end, what could’ve been a fairly decent story is ruined by DeCandido’s writing, which I can describe as nothing less than embarrassing. I feel like I ought to apologize to African-Americans on his behalf.

Monday Morning Link-Blogging

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A few links caught my eye this morning, so I’ll share them along with a couple of my own. First of all, I have a short review of the final two volumes of the melodramatic Korean romance 100% Perfect Girl in today’s Manga Minis column at PopCultureShock. Thinking about this manhwa, I first considered saying something along the lines of, “Recommended for fans of Hot Gimmick and Black Bird,” but the truth is, 100% Perfect Girl is a little bit different.

By “different” I truly don’t mean “better,” so don’t get me wrong there. I possibly mean “more interesting” though, for the simple reason that, unlike either of the manga series I mentioned, the author of 100% Perfect Girl spends a whoooole lot of time psychoanalyzing her lead characters and doing a pretty good job of it too. While she still makes the mistake of romanticizing their seriously destructive relationship (and to some extent the male lead’s abusive nature) she also picks it apart at every opportunity. …

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