Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Features & Reviews

3 Things Thursday: Manga for Christmas

by 11 Comments

So, I know I put a lot of new, awesome manga in my gift guide this year, but when it comes to my own Christmas list, I admit I bulked it up with oldies. There are a few older shoujo series in particular that I’ve been collecting over time, and it looks like this Christmas, I just might complete my collections! At least one I’ve read all the way through already, and all I’ve read to a point, with the help of libraries, friends, and (in one case) scanlations, as some volumes have rapidly fallen out of print and are difficult to purchase without paying hundreds of dollars to some unscrupulous Amazon or Ebay seller.

Out-of-print shoujo is one of my deepest woes, and since the more we talk about these dwindling series, the more likely Viz is to consider omnibus treatment (or so we hope and dream), I’ll dedicate today’s 3 Things to three shoujo series I’m hoping to own in completion after this Christmas!

I’m Gettin’ Manga For Christmas

1. Basara, vols. 24-27 | Yumi Tamura | Viz Media – Oh, how long I’ve been collecting this series! Perhaps my greatest regret as a latecomer to manga is that I wasn’t aware when this series was originally being published of what it was, or how sad I’d one day be when its middle volumes started going out of print after I became a fan. Fortunately, most of the trickiest ones I’ve already picked up, including the legendary volume 20, which goes for $125+ online, but which I happened to stumble upon at a convention two years ago for 20% off the original retail price. My quest for this series has seemed endless, but with just four volumes left, I’m counting on Santa to pick up the slack. You wouldn’t let me down, Santa, right? RIGHT? And by “Santa” I mean “my in-laws.” :D

My post-Christmas marathon reads will be epic.

2. Please Save My Earth, vols. 11, 12, 15, & 18 | Saki Hiwatari | Viz Media – Back when I was a manga n00b, I read this series scanlated in its entirety, with no concept of how difficult its volumes would be to find once I started trying to buy them up myself. I’ve been cobbling together my collection since late 2007, buying new when possible, but also snatching up some of the harder-to-buy volumes as trades or used books when I could find them. Having recently acquired the elusive volume 7, I have just a few, scattered volumes to pick up before I can re-read that series, which I shall do with relish as soon as my collection is complete.

This series is a special pet of mine, because it’s one that I desperately want to recommend, but with a major stumbling block. “This is the greatest series ever. You’ll have to pay upwards of $25 (plus shipping) just to read the first volume, and after that, well… But seriously, it is the greatest ever!”

3. X/1999, vols. 8, 9, 16-18 | CLAMP | Viz Media – I’ve slacked off on collecting this series, partly because I’m a bigger fan of Tokyo Babylon (which I own in its entirety and have reread several times), and partly because it’s unfinished anyway, but I realize my assessment of it is hardly fair, since I’ve never read past volume 7. My collection’s holes begin there, and I’ve never been able to move forward. I thought it was time I persevered, so I put my missing volumes near the top of the list this year.

My greatest difficulty with X/1999 of course, as a fan of Tokyo Babylon, is that it’s painful for me to watch what’s become of my beloved Subaru in the aftermath of that series. It’s also a bit painful to know that the story is not about him, when he’s the one who’s already got all my loyalty and interest. Can I overcome my issues and join the ranks of other CLAMP fans, who laugh at my TB obsession in the face of their obvious superiority? Thanks to Santa, we may soon find out!

So, that’s what I’m hoping to score this holiday season. How about you?

Pretty maids all in a row

by

I saw a story on the BBC about these all-girl pop groups that are cropping up in Japan under the sponsorship of just about everyone, from corporations to vegetable growers associations to urban redevelopment committees. And it reminded me of the truth that, when you put four or more attractive people in a row and give them some common purpose, your chances of achieving your aims improve at least slightly, depending on how appealing those four or more young people are.

They can come together by inspiration or design, it really doesn’t matter all that much. Origins in inspiration are obviously more highly regarded than manufacture, but, one or the other, people can still develop attachments to even the most cynically constructed assemblages. If they look good standing in a row, if their types connect in comforting ways, you’re in good shape.

The tale of local-produce promotional singing sensations mentioned above also reminded me of the truth that success replicates, even if you’ll never quite capture the lightning in a bottle that inspired the original. Entire comics companies have been born out of a desire to replicate the grim and gritty success of Wolverine. Intriguing notions become franchises, for better or worse.

In the case of the cast of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Azumanga Daioh (Yen Press), they are the best they are at what they do, and what they do is be funny and cute, particularly funny. Azuma’s ensemble seems to have inspired a host of imitators, temperamentally balanced groups of girls with their weapons set on “charm.” That they will almost certainly never rank any higher than second place, given that it’s unlikely that Azumanga Daioh will ever drop from first, isn’t reason for them not to exist. People didn’t stop writing plays about crazy, southern drunks after Tennessee Williams or musicals about neurotic people after Stephen Sondheim.

Of course, not all of these imitations fully justify their existence. I thought the four cute girl students of Ume Aoki’s Sunshine Sketch (Yen) were totally forgettable, like adorable collectibles rather than proper characters, in spite of their promising art-school setting. The music-club girls of Kakifly’s K-On (Yen) are just better enough that I can see myself spending a few volumes with them.

Yes, there’s the serious one, the loud one, the dingbat, and the rich girl. Yes, there’s the obnoxious teacher who should probably find another career. Yes, they go to the beach and wear kimonos and maid costumes. They basically go through all of the Stations of the Cross. But I enjoyed their company, and I got a reasonable number of chuckles out of their delivery of admittedly familiar situations. I can even abstractly appreciate the thoroughness with which Kakifly has abetted the audience’s wish fulfillment – there isn’t even the silhouette of a male character to present competition.

But, at the same time, I’m not the author’s ideal reader, either. I didn’t read the magazine, then collect the paperbacks, then watch the anime, then download the soundtrack of the anime, then buy the DVDs, then collect the figurines, play the video game, and track down the sexy fan comics, all while discussing with my friends which character I’d ideally like to marry, judging them for their choices. If that sounds like I’m judging the franchise for being cynically commercial, I’m not. Kakifly and company took a successful formula, turned it into something likable, and built a mini empire out of that. It’s better than building an empire based on something awful, right?

BL Bookrack: December

by 3 Comments

Welcome to 2010’s final installment of BL Bookrack, a monthly feature co-written with Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

This month, we take a look at four one-shots from Digital Manga Publishing’s Juné imprint, Intriguing Secrets, The Object of My Affection, A Place in the Sun, and Temperature Rising.

Intriguing Secrets | By Rize Shinba | Published by Juné | Rated YA (16+) | Buy at Akadot – After an accidental collision with a teacher in the hallway, high school student Mizue is sentenced to weed the school’s overgrown yard alongside his classmate Umehara, known to be the “class clown.” Umehara’s also been the center of some ugly classroom gossip, so Mizue is surprised to discover that he’s actually a pretty nice guy. He’s even more surprised to find himself drawn to Umehara in a vaguely romantic way, something of which he becomes immediately ashamed. When Umehara seeks him out in the art club room and asks him to paint his portrait, Mizue begins to wonder if his new friend might feel the same way, but every potential advance by Umehara is followed by a joke. Could Umehara’s teasing be a cover for something more?

Admittedly, it would be difficult to think of a more generic BL premise than the one just described. But if the worst that can be said about Intriguing Secret is that it’s unremarkable, that’s also its greatest strength. With its quietly mundane atmosphere, this manga promises love in the most ordinary places. Even its leads are an example of this message. Sure, Mizue seems to have some artistic talent, and Umehara is able to charm his classmates with a joke, but the two are so resoundingly noncommittal to who they are as people, it’s difficult to know what, if anything, they actually value. Mizue is reluctant to even say that he “likes” painting, while Umehara shrugs off everyone with a nearly audible “whatever.” Yet somehow, over the course of the series, they learn to be certain of each other, at the very least.

Though it may seem like I’m not making much of a point in the series’ favor, this practiced indifference is what actually makes the story work. With so little to build itself around, really nothing exists here but the romance itself, and this romance is undeniably sweet, from start to finish. Rize Shinba’s artwork is nearly as nondescript as her characters’ ambitions, yet, like everything else in this story, there is a quiet sweetness about it that holds everything together, as long as nobody’s trying to dig too deep.

Like a gauzy fabric on a warm summer day, Intriguing Secrets is comfortable and pretty, if not quite substantive.

-Review by MJ

The Object of My Affection | By Nanao Okuda | Published by Juné | Rated YA (16+) | Buy at Akadot – Sometimes it’s not such a bad idea to judge a book by its cover. I knew nothing about The Object of My Affection or its creator, Nanao Okuda, but found the art style so appealing that I had to check it out. I’m very glad I did, because Okuda spurns typical yaoi characterizations, instead creating some sympathetic and emotionally accessible characters.

Back in high school, shrimpy Hiroki Wakamiya was dazzled by the athleticism of Wataru Anzai, a player on a rival school’s basketball team. He promised to catch up to him, and by the time college rolls around, he has improved (and grown) enough that he is recruited by the school Anzai plays for. His hopes of competing directly against his hero are dashed, however, when it’s revealed that Anzai has a busted knee and can no longer play.

Wakamiya is disappointed, but still finds himself drawn to Anzai, especially for his “inner strength contrary to the image given by his slender physical frame.” Anzai doesn’t like to show his vulnerability to anyone, but finds himself able to trust the honest and forthright Wakamiya. Though confessions of love are a little abrupt, their relationship unfolds at a believable pace, with Anzai taking on the role of encouraging coach as Wakamiya competes for a starting position on the team. I love that Okuda is much more concerned with depicting what these guys mean to each other than what they do in the bedroom.

Unfortunately, only the first four stories in this volume are about Wakamiya and Anzai. The rest focus on other players on the team and, though all are good and feature a head-over-heels seme in love with a guy who is elusive in some way, they lack the feeling of mutual need that makes the featured couple so compelling. Still, I enjoyed this title enough that a copy of Okuda’s only other English release—Honey/Chocolate—is now on its way to my front door.

-Review by Michelle Smith

A Place in the Sun | By Lala Takemiya | Published by Juné | Rated YA (16+) | Buy at Akadot – “The things we could do if only we had more freedom,” muses Shu Tonosawa, one of the lead characters in the title story of A Place in the Sun, a collection of quirky tales by Lala Takemiya. Although Tonosawa is the only character to state this aloud, it’s actually a theme Takemiya plays with in several of the stories.

“Topping Boys” features a pair of long-time friends now in culinary school together. Yusuke, the more serious and talented of the two, compares his friend Hirosue to pasta, because he’s compatible with just about anything. To him, Hirosue’s seemingly endless string of short-term relationships is due to his propensity to fall in love too easily. In fact, the only person Hirosue really loves is Yusuke, but because he thinks all relationships are doomed to end, he’s not willing to destroy what they have.

“Afraid to Love” takes a similar approach, with one guy unwilling to admit his feelings to his friend because he’s afraid boredom will ultimately result. “A Place in the Sun” isn’t as overt with the characters’ emotions, but one definitely gets the sense that Tonosawa would be happy simply to bask in the radiance of his bright and cheerful coworker Midori, glad to be able to support him in all his endeavors without ever introducing romance into the equation.

While such a book might be disappointing for hardcore BL fans, I personally love stories that don’t turn out how one expects. When three of five stories in a collection don’t end with the couple getting together, and yet are still clearly love stories, I’m pretty impressed. I’m guess I’m just a sucker for the bittersweet.

I’m also a sucker for the awesomely random, so the fact that “Dustbin Space,” the longest story in the collection, features a romance between a guy who fails to sort his trash properly and an irascible garbageman is just icing on the cake!

-Review by Michelle Smith

Temperature Rising | By Souya Himawari | Published by Juné | Rated Mature (18+) | Buy at Akadot – Teens Minori and Mizumo have grown up together, ever since Mizumo’s irresponsible parents left most of their children in the care of Minori’s family. Unwilling to take money from his caretakers, Mizumo has struggled to support himself and his siblings since he was in the fifth grade. When, in high school, Minori finally discovers that Mizumo’s primary income has been coming from compensated sex with older men, he offers to pay Mizumo for the service himself, in order to keep him out of strangers’ beds. But when Minori eventually realizes he’s fallen in love with Mizumo, he isn’t sure how to handle the new lack of balance in their relationship.

What a profoundly mixed bag this manga is. To a great extent, everything about it is horrifyingly wrong. A fifth grade boy is caught stealing and subsequently blackmailed into sex by the college student who catches him. Though the experience is (in his words), “gross and scary,” the kid lights up afterwards when the college student pays him and decides to make it into a career, since it’s a way to make money that “feels pretty good.” This is the backstory for a decidedly lighthearted romance? Seriously? Add to that a huge cast of characters, including a mass of half-developed siblings (carried over from the less explicit Happiness Recommended) so ultimately unimportant to the story that’s being told, it’s odd that any time was spent inserting them at all, and you end up with something both hopelessly confused and perhaps outright offensive.

Though this manga’s execution leaves much to be desired, what’s not quite clear is what mangaka Souya Himawari’s intentions were for it in the first place, and that’s where she gains herself back some points. There’s a strong scent of ambition here in all the intricately created (yet barely used) supporting characters and even in Mizumo’s presumably damaging background that is undeniably intriguing, despite the lack of follow-through. And for all that’s wanting in this story’s development, the book’s primary romance is actually pretty compelling, thanks to the real sense of history and unspoken familiarity Himawari creates between them, even in the book’s earliest pages. There’s so much untapped potential in these characters she obviously loves, it’s almost painful to watch their story play out as some kind of twisted, schoolboy retelling of “Pretty Woman.” Yet it’s difficult to turn away when there’s so much natural depth to be found.

While it’s impossible not to conclude that Temperature Rising ultimately fails, there’s enough romantic potential and strong characterization to warrant the read. And I’d really love to see the fanfiction.

-Review by MJ

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Manga Artifacts: Princess Knight

by

What Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946) was to shonen, his Princess Knight (1953-56) was to shojo. Both were long-form adventure stories that employed the kind of camera angles, reaction shots, and action sequences that suggested a movie, rather than an illustrated novel or a comic strip. Neither could be said to be the “first” shonen or shojo manga, but both had a profound influence on the artists who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, offering a new storytelling model for them to emulate.

Princess Knight debuted in Shojo Club magazine in 1953, serialized in three-to-four page installments over a three-year period. The story proved so popular it inspired a radio play, a ballet, and a sequel, Twin Knight (1958-59), which followed the adventures of Princess Sapphire’s children. Ever the tinkerer, Tezuka revisited the story twice in the 1960s: first for Nakayoshi magazine, from 1963-66, and then for Shojo Friend, from 1967-68. Both the Nakayoshi and Shojo Friend versions re-told the original story with new artwork and subtle changes to the cast of characters. While the Nakayoshi version was a certifiable hit, and came to be regarded as the definitive edition of Princess Knight, Tezuka’s fourth go-round with the series was, by the author’s own admission, a commercial flop, an ill-conceived tie-in with an anime version that was airing on Fuji TV at the same time.

The basic outline of the 1953 and 1963 stories is the same: a mischievous angel named Tink gives the unborn Princess Sapphire an extra heart — and a boy’s heart, no less. Before Tink can recover the spare, however, Sapphire is born into the royal family of Goldland, a country in which only men can inherit the throne. Eager to avoid a crisis of succession, Sapphire’s parents raise her as a boy — a fraud that their enemy, Duke Duralmin, reveals just before Sapphire is crowned the new king. Sapphire escapes, then adopts a new, masked persona, using the skills she acquired as a king-in-training — horseback riding, swordsmanship — and the physical strength granted by her male heart to rescue her subjects from Duralmin’s tyranny.

Reading Princess Knight in 2010, it’s impossible to ignore Tezuka’s myriad borrowings. The story is an affectionate pastiche of Christianity, Greek mythology, and European fairy tales, at once utterly derivative and completely fresh in the way it appropriates plot points from “Cinderella,” Hamlet, Dracula, and “Eros and Psyche.” A Disney-esque sensibility smooths over the rough edges of this collage; resourceful mice and talking horses provide both aid to the heroine and comic relief, while the deities bear a strong resemblance to the prancing satyrs and nymphs of Fantasia‘s “Pastoral” interlude. Characters even burst into song, prompting Tezuka to draw several elaborate, full-page spreads that resemble Busby Berkeley routines.

What makes this pastiche especially interesting is the way in which Tezuka’s childhood fascination with the Takarazuka Revue informs his female characters. As Natsu Onoda Power observes in God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga, Tezuka never fully camouflages Sapphire’s female identity; Sapphire adopts male speech patterns and dress, yet retains feminine attributes — a shapely waist, thin eyebrows — when in drag. Neither the reader nor the other characters doubt she is a woman; only Friebe, a beautiful female knight who falls in love with Sapphire, is convinced of Sapphire’s maleness. Like the otoko yaku (male role specialists) of Takarazuka, Sapphire doesn’t impersonate a man so much as embody a feminine ideal of masculinity. Kobayashi Ichizo, founder of the Takarazuka Revue, intuitively understood that female audiences favored such idealized portrayals over verisimilitude. “When a woman performs as a man,” he explained, “she is able to craft an image of a man that is better than a real man, from a woman’s perspective.” (Power, 118)

For young readers, however, the real draw is the story’s mixture of swashbuckling adventure and conventional romance. Sapphire scales walls, dons disguises, duels with her rivals, and escapes from prison several times, yet is still beautiful enough to win the heart of a pirate king and a Prince Charming (no, really — her primary love interest is named Franz Charming), even when she’s posing as a man. It’s an irresistible fantasy: a girl can be brave, strong, and resourceful, and still inspire the kind of devotion normally accorded more passive, conventionally feminine characters. Small wonder Princess Knight beguiled several generations of Japanese girls.

American readers interested in reading Princess Knight have two options. The first is a bilingual edition published by Kodansha in 2001, which reproduces the Nakayoshi version from 1963-66. The small trim size and occasionally colorful translation don’t do the material any favors (“Get away from me, you shitty little cherub!” an evil witch screeches), but the artwork is reproduced very cleanly, making it easy to appreciate Tezuka’s draftsmanship. A number of Japanese booksellers have been offering used copies on eBay; expect to pay anywhere from $7.00 to $30.00 per volume. (I purchased all six volumes through mkbooks2003.) The second is a brief excerpt from the Shojo Club version, which was reproduced in the July 2007 issue of Shojo Beat. For readers who don’t want to commit to buying the bilingual editon, the chapters reproduced in Shojo Beat offer a nice, representative sample of the work, and are accompanied by a helpful contextual essay. Expect to pay $6.00 to $18.00 for a back issue in good condition.

UPDATE, 1/28/11: Vertical, Inc. has just announced that it has licensed the Nakayoshi edition of Princess Knight for the North American market. The series will be published in two installments: volume one will be released on October 4, 2011 and volume two on December 6, 2011. Both volumes will retail for $13.95. Anime News Network has more details. Hat tip to CJ for breaking the news to me!

Manga Artifacts is a monthly feature exploring older, out-of-print manga published in the 1980s and 1990s. For a fuller description of the series’ purpose, see the inaugural column.

From the stack: Ayako

by

I’m not going to claim that I’ve loved everything of Osamu Tezuka’s that I’ve read. Pinocchio remodels are right after Peter Pan tales in the list of things that make me lose patience, so I’ve only sampled Astro Boy (Dark Horse). Swallowing the Earth (DMP) had a crazy verve that couldn’t quite compensate for its ultimate clumsiness.

Ayako (Vertical) adds another to the roster of Tezuka works that I just can’t fully endorse, and I’m still figuring out why that is. It’s a sprawling, serious-minded saga of familial disintegration, which can promise all kinds of good times, but those fail to materialize in this case. Tezuka is on his almost-best behavior here, and while it makes me feel rather shallow for saying so, I wish he’d worn the lampshade a bit more often.

The weird and marvelous thing about Tezuka is that the puckish quality of his storytelling – the human tempura, the pansexual masters of disguise, the just-a-trunk warriors – doesn’t diminish its force. He can still make moving and persuasive arguments about morality, family and leadership without resorting to austerity. It seems that, without those flights of fancy, his gruesome assessment of selfishness and cruelty becomes almost exhausting, even rote.

The title character is the illegitimate daughter of the patriarch of a family of landed gentry trying to hold onto their property after the end of World War II. Ayako is the fulcrum of all of the family’s greedy, sexy secrets, and she suffers accordingly as her extended clan vent their frustrations, ambitions and shame on her. Given the structure of her life, it’s hard to imagine how she could emerge as a proper character, and she really doesn’t. She’s an acre of family land where the bodies are buried.

With her rendered somewhat useless in terms of specific reader empathy, who’s left? Ayako’s half-siblings seem united only in their willingness to abdicate anything like responsibility or conscience. Her prisoner-of-war older brother is spying for the occupying forces. Her sister is dabbling with the socialists, politically and emotionally. Even her amateur sleuth youngest brother is unwilling to translate his curiosity and surprisingly developed sense of justice into sustained action.

But that’s the point, I think – that moral compromise is kind of an incurable cancer, and that people, no matter what they were like at the beginning, are doomed once they take that wrong step. A tale like that can have compelling moments, but I think that progressive decay as a narrative structure becomes exhausting after a while. It certainly does here. It’s a harangue at the characters and the culture they inhabit, not an argument in which the audience can engage, which is usually the nature of Tezuka’s morality plays.

Since I’m (obviously) still working out my thoughts on this piece, I’ll point you to a couple of better-argued pieces on Ayako (which I didn’t let myself read until after writing the above). First up is Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey, whose evaluation tracks with my own. Then, there’s Alexander (Manga Widget) Hoffman, who finds a lot to admire in the work.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Let’s Get Visual: Duds

by

MICHELLE: After a few months of this column, I feel like I’m better able to think critically about the artistic aspect of manga. I expected to be able to better appreciate good art when I see it, but hadn’t anticipated that I’d also more readily notice flaws. This month, MJ (of Manga Bookshelf) and I turn our attention to problematic pages or, as I like to call them, “duds.” (Click on images to enlarge.)

Fairy Tail, Volume 10, Page 84 (Del Rey)

MJ: Wow. I’m… a little bit stymied by that image.

MICHELLE: It is a doozy, isn’t it? Actually, that page was the inspiration for this whole column. There I was, innocently reading volume ten of Fairy Tail, then I turned the page and was brutally accosted by that monstrosity!

So, as is probably pretty obvious, the speaker is unhinged. Mangaka Hiro Mashima has opted to depict this by freezing the guy in the act of making a weird face and forcing readers to read two huge bubbles full of ranting speech before we can proceed to the final (and uninteresting) panel on the bottom of the page. Now, maybe this is a tactic to make us feel as trapped as the girl does, having to sit there and listen to this lunatic ramble on, but it doesn’t do a good job at conveying his insanity. The page feels flat and lifeless; a better choice would have been to inject more movement into the scene, break up the speech, and maybe allow the guy the opportunity to change expressions throughout his tirade.

MJ: I honestly feel accosted by the page. Its primary image is loud, but not particularly expressive in any other way than that, and the text feels overwhelming to the point where I can’t really even bring myself to try to read it all. Not only that, the page is so top-heavy, I find it difficult to even look at. That bottom image is completely wasted there, not that it’s much of a waste.

MICHELLE: Yeah, it’s weird how an amount of text that would be perfectly reasonable to read in a prose novel suddenly looks so daunting in a speech bubble, but it really does. And you’re absolutely right that it’s loud without being expressive. Everything about this page is just so glaringly bad that I knew we had to build a column around lousy art so that I’d have an excuse to talk about it with someone!

MJ: Well, feel free to talk as much as you like, because I’ve rarely seen something so pointlessly hideous. And though I hate to think that I’m reacting purely out of aesthetics, I can’t deny that it offends me greatly on that level.

MICHELLE: I think that’s pretty much the only basis on which you can be expected to react, since you haven’t read the manga in question. For me, it completely yanked me out of the story, which I find inexcusable.

And though I appreciate the offer to further vent my spleen, perhaps we should proceed on to your dud of choice.

Baseball Heaven, pages 133-134 (approx.) (BLU Manga)

MJ: Okay, then. My “dud” comes from Ellie Mamahara’s Baseball Heaven, a BL manga I expressed no great love for in our BL Bookrack column a couple of months ago. I assume I don’t need to describe what’s happening in the scene, and chances are I don’t need to tell anyone what’s wrong with it, either, but of course that’s why we’re here.

I look at this scene, and there’s simply no passion in it. None at all. Here we have a guy, supposedly in an altered state of mind, making the moves on his teammate who has rebuffed him in the past, and not only do we not get any real sense of how either of them are feeling (we wouldn’t even know the one was drunk if it wasn’t for indications in the word balloons and flushed cheeks), but there’s absolutely no sexual tension between them conveyed through the artwork. And while I can appreciate that perhaps we’re meant to believe that athletes might be stiff and awkward with each other, surely the drunk guy, at least, would have a little heat in his body language here.

The artist goes through the motions, placing them physically near each other and indicating that the one is, perhaps, touching the other’s behind, but there is just no real feeling between them at all. Even when their faces are so close together, Mamahara is unable to provide any magnetic reaction between them. I should feel that they *want* to touch each other. It should feel painful for them not to. Instead, it leaves me completely cold.

MICHELLE: I definitely see what you mean! Personally, I keep staring at that first panel on the second page. They look so stiff and awkward. It’s not that I expect the position of a character’s legs to help drive the emotional content of a scene, but when they’re as oddly placed as the blond guy’s are, it feels unnatural and, by extension, makes everything else going on in the scene feel the same way.

MJ: I think I’d go so far as to say that in a scene like *this* one, I kind of *do* expect the position of a character’s legs to help drive the emotional content of the scene. It’s just as I was saying before, there should be a sense that the characters want desperately to touch each other (this includes legs) even if they might be scared to do so. I should see that in the legs and every other part of the body, at least in the drunk guy who is initiating the contact in the first place. It’s a seduction scene with no actual seduction going on.

Also, I feel like the panels are getting in the way of us viewing the scene, which is a weird and uncomfortable feeling. And unlike in last month’s selection where this was done to elicit response from the reader, here it just feels like clumsiness on the part of the artist. She provides these little glimpses of their faces and legs in the smaller panels, but since there is no tension in those panels, they don’t add anything to the scene. They just steal space from the main action, such as it is.

Wow, I’m really ranting now, aren’t I? Please stop me.

MICHELLE: You’re quite right, but I shall stop you as requested by introducing my second dud!

Moon Boy, Volume 9, Page 3 (Yen Press)

MICHELLE: Initially, it was the affronted rooster in the lower left that caught my eye and made me pause to really take in the complete and utter randomness of this page.

You’ve got a young person of indeterminate gender, swaddled in coat and boots, flushed and exhaling a gust of wintry air, possibly due to the exertion of just having decapitated a nearby snowman. This person is surrounded by such seasonal items as a piece of pie, a cookie, a beehive (with fake bees), an inverted dog bowl, and a pair of barnyard pals.

This was enough to have me snickering, but closer inspection reveals several problems in proportion and perspective. For one, take a look at that snowman’s nose. I’m pretty sure that is supposed to be the traditional carrot, but the artist was unable to draw it from a head-on perspective so instead it looks like a giant almond. Secondly, check out the boots. The right foot is clearly much larger than the left, and I don’t think it’s just an issue of angle—the detail on the top of each foot is different! Finally, actually wearing the mitten dangling by the person’s right hand on said hand would cause the heart pattern to appear on the palm side rather the back of the hand, where such designs typically go.

This is just sloppy and, above all, weird. What do these items have to do with each other? I also found it odd that one of the designs in the border is actually a musical symbol called a mordent. The mordent belongs to a class of musical embellishments called “ornaments,” which could carry a Christmassy connotation, except that I don’t credit this artist with that much cleverness.

MJ: I’ll admit I’m not too picky about things like perspective and such, but I am somehow disturbed by the way his fingers are digging into the poor snowman’s head. What did that poor (decapitated) snowman ever do to anyone? It’s as though he’s digging right into its scalp. Which looks oddly fleshy. And now I’m feeling shuddery.

MICHELLE: I don’t think I would have noticed the perspective problems if not for the chicken, to be honest, but spotting it here did spur me to notice other problems in the rest of the volume, notably a few deformed thumbs and some confusing action scenes that I wrote about in my review of the volume. I wasn’t sure what to make of the hands, honestly. If it’s that cold, why aren’t you wearing your mittens, kid?

MJ: If he put on his mittens, he wouldn’t be able to grab that piece of pie when it comes down. ;)

MICHELLE: Well, pie is important…

And that’s it for us this month. Do you have some duds of your own you’d like to share? We’d love to hear about them!

Ayako

by

Ayako is an odd beast. Structurally, it resembles a Russian realist novel, using a once-powerful family of landowners to embody the political and economic upheaval caused by America’s seven-year occupation of Japan (1945-52). Temperamentally, however, Ayako feels more like a John Frankenheimer movie, with subplots involving a Communist organizer, an assassin who stashes orders in his empty eye socket, and a witness whose family condemns her to lifelong imprisonment in an underground cell. Though Tezuka makes a game effort to reconcile his literary and cinematic influences, the results are uneven: Ayako is powerful, disturbing, and, at times, flat-out ludicrous, yet it lacks the winking self-awareness of MW or the profound humanism of Ode to Kirihito, instead offering an engrossing but not entirely persuasive portrait of a family torn apart by the emergence of a new social order in post-war Japan.

Ayako revolves around the Tenge clan. The patriarch, Sakuemon, is a glutton and a bully, indulging his voracious appetites for food and sex while aggressively policing his family’s behavior. His sons aren’t much better: Ichiro, the eldest, is a manipulative coward who barters his wife for Sakuemon’s loyalty; Jiro, the middle son, is a disgraced war veteran who’s been coerced into spying for the US military; and Shiro, the youngest, is a fierce truth-teller who is slowly corrupted by his family’s secrets.

Two events threaten the Tenge’s equilibrium. The first — a murder — condemns the youngest family member to a dungeon, lest Ayako reveal a key piece of evidence linking a clan member to a murdered political dissident. Though the Tenge women are appalled by the plan, they’re powerless to help; the rest of the family views Ayako as a threat, as she’s both Sakuemon’s daughter and Ichiro, Jiro, and Shiro’s half-sister. The second — a decree from the government — forces the Tenge clan to redistribute their land among tenant farmers. Despite Ichiro’s vigorous protests, the government arrives on the property, intent on razing the structure that has kept Ayako out of public view for more than a decade.

Though the characters’ behavior is more extreme than anything found in Tolstoy or Sholokhov — unless I missed the incest in The Don Flows Home to the Sea — the spirit of Russian realism informs Ayako. Tezuka had already been to the Russian realist well before, loosely adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in 1953. He wasn’t alone in taking inspiration from Russian literature; other Japanese artists — most notably Akira Kurosawa — adapted Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky’s work, too, transplanting the settings from Russia to Japan. (Kurosawa’s Red Beard, borrows liberally from Dosteoveksy’s 1861 novel Humiliated and Insulted; The Idiot and The Lower Depths follow the original source material more faithfully.) It’s not hard to imagine what made these Russian authors so attractive to Japanese artists of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the realists’ work was both grand and intimate, using sympathetic characters to dramatize the toll — physical, economic, and psychological — of social unrest and change.

Of course, the realist approach has a potential pitfall: characters can feel contrived, lacking an identity outside the cause they represent. Ichiro and Jiro, the eldest brothers in Ayako, both have obvious symbolic intent: Ichiro represents the last vestiges of feudal Japan, a landlord in danger of losing his fields, his farmers, and his source of power, while Jiro embodies the complicated relationship between the Japanese and their American overlords, caught between the Japanese desire to restore normalcy and the American desire to refashion Japanese society in its own image. For all their symbolic baggage, Ichiro and Jiro still register as fundamentally human: they’re flawed, inconsistent, and corrupted by what little power they have, yet both are strongly driven to pursue what they believe to be in their best interests.

Ayako, however, is more a receptacle for other characters’ anger and lust than a true individual. She’s an innocent victim who endures over a decade of isolation, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse at Shiro’s hands, emerging from her ordeal with no real beliefs or desires of her own. Her lack of individuality makes her the most transparently symbolic member of the Tenge clan; it’s not much of a stretch to interpret her character as a representation of occupied Japan. That symbolism is underscored by one of the book’s most arresting sequences. In it, we see Ayako writhe and shed her skin like a molting insect, casting aside her girl’s body for a woman’s. The images are stark: Ayako is rendered in white lines on a jet-black background, and her ecstatic expression suggests an erotic awakening — a metaphorical re-enactment of lost innocence during a period of confinement and darkness.

The symbolic intent of Tezuka’s characters is more apparent in Ayako than in some of Tezuka’s other mature works, I think, because Ayako is more  self-consciously literary than MW or Ode to Kirihito. The absence of humor or cartoonishly evil characters — two staples of MW and Kirihito — cuts both ways. On the one hand, Ayako is sobering and adult; we can appreciate the gravity of the characters’ actions because Tezuka doesn’t punctuate serious moments with low comedy; there’s no reprieve from our discomfort with the characters’ behavior, no mustache-twirling villains on whom to pin our disgust. On the other hand, Tezuka has a natural instinct for blending high and low, using pulp genres as vehicles for exploring big questions about human nature. The heightened reality of the stories is fundamental to their success; Tezuka uses his character’s extreme behavior and dramatic physical transformations to tear away masks, to lay bare real hypocrisy, selfishness, and cowardice. That pulpy spirit asserts itself from time to time in Ayako (see “spy who stashes orders in his eye socket,” above), but there isn’t quite enough of it; the thriller elements feel tacked on, rather than fundamental to elucidating Tezuka’s central themes.

Yet Ayako is compelling, in spite of its flaws. It’s a fierce, angry work, at once intensely critical of American efforts to re-engineer Japanese society, and intensely critical of the old Japanese social order, portraying the Tenges as feudal overlords out of step with the modern world. It isn’t Tezuka’s best work, but it’s one of his most ambitious, a sincere and emotionally wrenching attempt to show the lingering effects of World War II on the Japanese psyche. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Vertical, Inc.

AYAKO • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 704 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

I Wish I Wrote That!

by 9 Comments

It’s been an interesting month in the manga blogosphere, some of which is due, no doubt, to Noah Berlatsky’s recent, scathing criticism of the manga blogging community’s treatment of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. Now, my intent is not to bring more attention to that article, which has already gotten too much (from me and many others). It is far from Noah’s finest hour, and certainly not something that would inspire me to say, “I wish I wrote that!”

That said, though the main subject of my writer’s envy this month was not conceived as a direct response to Noah’s article, I’d bet that his article influenced its timing, and perhaps even some of its tone. That would be, of course, Erica Friedman’s wonderful guest review of Hagio’s collection, posted at the beginning of the month at David Welsh’s The Manga Curmudgeon.

A quote:

I think there’s a real risk, though, in over-analyzing this volume. Moto Hagio’s stories are, as I said at the beginning, masterful largely because she did not set out to be so. She wrote from the heart, stories that girls could understand, enjoy, identify with. She was the Stephanie Meyer of her time and only now, when we look back on a body of literature that spans decades, we see that it’s a little silly to dismiss it (or glorify it) because it’s shoujo manga. What A Drunken Dream offers is as much or as little as we want to see. If we stare too hard past the cute girl looking back at us in the mirror, we might in fact see the deathly crone behind her…but why would we want to do that? Can’t we just take the cute girl at face value? Isn’t she “important” enough on her own?

Thank you, Erica, for putting the work into real perspective, and for speaking eloquently without talking down to the stories’ intended audience. I wish I wrote that!

Other writings I’ve loved this month include Kate Dacey’s reworking of her early take on Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack, proving that it’s entirely possible to admire and respect an important artist’s work while still addressing ways in which it may be problematic. Also, Vom Marlowe’s article, The cycle of criticism, filled me with quite a bit of joy and gratitude.

We’ll be taking next Friday off here at Manga Bookshelf, but keep an eye out the week after for our regular features and some exciting news to share! In the meantime, what do you wish you’d written this month?

Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George: B+

by

From the back cover:
Deborah and Simon St. James have taken a holiday in the winter landscape of Lancashire, hoping to heal the growing rift in their marriage. But in the barren countryside awaits bleak news: the vicar of Winslough, the man they had come to see, is dead—a victim of accidental poisoning. Unsatisfied with the inquest ruling and unsettled by the close association between the investigating constable and the woman who served the deadly meal, Simon calls in his old friend Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Together they uncover dark, complex relationships in this rural village, relationships that bring men and women together with a passion, with grief, or with the intention to kill.

Peeling away layer after layer of personal history to reveal the torment of a fugitive spirit, Missing Joseph is award-winning author Elizabeth George’s greatest achievement.

Review:
Somehow, I had formed the impression that Missing Joseph was all about Deborah St. James—whom I frequently find irksome—and her baby angst. Because of that, I put off reading it for quite a while until I was so strongly in the mood for an Elizabeth George mystery that no amount of histrionics would be able to dissuade me. As it turns out, it’s hardly about that at all and though Deborah learns an Important Lesson by the book’s end, she doesn’t play a very large role.

Deborah and Simon St. James have been going through a rough period in their marriage, because she is fixated on having a biological child, although doctors have cautioned against this, while Simon would be fine adopting one. They agree to put this fundamental disagreement aside and go on holiday to Lancashire. On their first evening in the village of Winslough, Simon hears a troubling story about the local constable and his ladyfriend, who has recently been investigated for the death of the vicar. The death was ruled an accident—she fed him hemlock at dinner, which apparently bears some resemblance to wild parsnip—but the fact that she and the constable are romantically involved is suspicious, so Simon calls Lynley to investigate the case.

I love mysteries where the story is sometimes told from the point of view of possible culprits, and Missing Joseph delivers admirably on this score. It’s very different from something like Naked Heat, which features celebrity caricatures for suspects instead of fully fleshed-out regular people. The primary cast, aside from the regulars, is the constable, the ladyfriend, her rebellious tween daughter, and the vicar’s housekeeper. Relationships are intertwined and secrets are closely kept, and it was quite fascinating watching Lynley slowly unravel the facts of the case. The manner of the vicar’s death was never in doubt, and yet I could not predict the outcome.

With all this praise, why a mere B+? I’ll answer in the form of some advice for the author.

Dear Ms. George:

When writing an overweight character whom you intend to describe as a “whale,” whose gait is lumbering, whose “bulk” is “enormous,” whose flesh feels like “a quadruple batch of lumpy bread dough,” it is probably best not to stipulate their exact weight. You see, some Americans are quite capable of converting stone into pounds and might realize, in so doing, that this character does not weigh so much more than they themselves do.

If you must write about an overweight character in these terms, which I strongly discourage, it would be better to leave some of the details to the reader’s imagination.

Grumpily yours,
Michelle

There are a few minor problems, as well. Deborah and Simon have evidently been having this argument about biological versus adopted children for a while now, but it’s not until they go on holiday that he actually asks her why she’s so intent on having biological kids. Simon may be a highly logical man, but he’s not an insensitive one; I found it far-fetched that he would not have posed this question right away. Also, Deborah is irritatingly dense in the moments before she learns her Important Lesson, which makes it even more cheesy. Still, it might bode well for a lessening of future angst. We shall see.

All in all, I enjoyed Missing Joseph quite a lot and it has rekindled my desire to get caught up on the Lynley mysteries. Expect to see more in the near future!

3 Things Thursday: Ladies to look up to

by 24 Comments

In checking my pingbacks this morning, I found I’d received one from Daniella Orihuela-Gruber’s wrap-up of this year’s Great Manga Gift Guide. In it, she describe my 2010 gift guide as being, “full of great choices for the manga-loving ladies on your list.”

While I do think of my blog’s primary audience as being adult women, this comment surprised me. “I’m an omnivorous reader,” I thought. “Surely my gift guide is more diverse!” I then rushed right over to take a look, certain my heterogeneous tastes would be plain for all to see. And though I wasn’t exactly wrong, I was indeed surprised by what I found.

Though my suggestions were spread over several major demographic categories (seinen, josei, shoujo) and numerous genres within those categories, the one thing that really stood out when I took in the collection as a whole is that a full 16 out of the 18 suggested gift ideas were written by female mangaka. They’re a pretty diverse group of artists, writing for a range of different audiences, so it would be inaccurate to describe my guide as a list of books for women, but I can’t deny that it’s strongly dominated by female creators. And It’s probably worth noting that the remaining two series feature female leads.

Now, I enjoy work by many male artists (several of whom are certain to appear on my “Best Of” lists for this year), and certainly I don’t consider the gender of the writer when I’m looking for something to read. Still, the guide is pretty revealing, and I suspect the facts speak for themselves.

So, with this discovery fresh in my mind, I thought I’d use this week’s 3 Things to talk about three of my favorite female mangaka.

3 Female manga artists to admire and adore

1. Fumi Yoshinaga – As the only mangaka (to date) to have received a week-long celebration of her very own here at Manga Bookshelf, did anyone doubt she’d make this list? With an impressive body of work that I’m pleased to say actually is mainly written for women, and some of the warmest, most charming dialogue ever to grace the printed page, Yoshinaga is the ultimate kindred spirit for female readers like me, who crossed over from our youthful obsession with prose and somehow never looked back.

It’s difficult to choose a favorite of her works, though they are favorites of mine in several genres. I think it’s possible that Ichigenme is my favorite yaoi manga of all time, while Antique Bakery and Flower of Life fill me with pure, pure shoujo joy. And though she tends to draw a lot of men, she also shines in All My Darling Daughters. Yoshinaga is a gem. It’s that simple.

2. Natsume Ono – I’ve had a rockier road with Natsume Ono, beginning with Not Simple, which was not a tremendous favorite, but she’s won me over completely with books like Ristorante Paradiso, Gente, and (most of all) my beloved House of Five Leaves, another of my favorite series of the year.

There’s a deep melancholy running through Natsume Ono’s work, but not one that begs for unwarranted attention. Instead, it simply offers a muted, gray background that allows her richer colors to display their true beauty, like vibrant autumn leaves against an overcast sky. That sounds terribly trite, I know, but I hardly know how else to describe it, except to say that there’s a surprising beauty to Ono’s work, peeking out between the sketchy lines of her unique, unmistakable art style. Now, if only someone would license her BL titles, my adoration could become complete!

3. CLAMP – This may seem like an obvious (and perhaps overdone) choice, but I simply can’t deny my love for CLAMP, whose work was perhaps the strongest influence in shaping my tastes as a beginning reader of manga. Series like xxxHolic and Tokyo Babylon contain imagery so deeply embedded into my emotional core as a reader that I can call them up in my memory at any given moment, as clearly and as viscerally as if they were sitting in front of me on the page. There’s a visual clarity to CLAMP’s work–their solid lines, the heavy use of black–that conveys an absolute certainty about the story they are telling. It’s mezmerising, truly.

Though some of their series have been aimed squarely at female readers, most of their current catalogue is serialized in magazines for boys and men, which is something I find quite interesting, given their enormous female fan base here in the US, and the strong homoerotic subtext in much of their work. Of course, my only wish is that they’d stop teasing, and finally write some official BL. :D

It pains me deeply not to be able to include Ai Yazawa and Hiromu Arakawa on this list as well. Though I am, of course, cheating simply by mentioning them at all. *sigh*

So, readers, who are three of your favorite female mangaka?

Off the Shelf: Four for the girls

by and 9 Comments

Welcome to another edition of Off the Shelf with MJ & Michelle! I’m joined, as always, by Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

This week, we take a look at an upcoming debut from Tokyopop, as well as some continuing series from Yen Press and Viz Media.

MICHELLE: Once upon a time I worked for a circus and I lived in Omaha.

MJ: I’ve been to Omaha, if that counts for anything.

MICHELLE: That’s actually a lyric from the stage play version of The Wizard of Oz, which I was in in the sixth grade. For some reason, it gets stuck in my head all the time.

MJ: It serves as an interesting conversation-starter!

MICHELLE: I should try it at a party sometime. Anyway, I expect you’ve been doing some reading!

MJ: Indeed I have! I’ve had a pretty shoujo-tastic week, I have to say. Pretty snark-tastic, too, if I think about it, since both of the books I plan to discuss tonight feature wry humor in place of the usual wide-eyed shoujo optimism.

First on the docket, I’ve got the debut volume of The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko by mangaka Ririko Tsujita, due out in a couple of weeks from TOKYOPOP. The series’ title refers to Kanoko, a third year junior high school student who prides herself on perfect objectivity. To maintain this emotional purity, she spurns any kind of social interaction with her classmates, preferring to simply observe (and, of course, take copious notes). When her interest is piqued by a classroom love triangle, Kanoko is shocked to find herself somehow drawn into the fray by each of the parties involved, and even more so to find herself accidentally befriending them.

My experience with this manga was a bit of a roller-coaster ride. I was immediately drawn in by Kanoko and the gloriously idiosyncratic friendships she develops against her will. Then, amidst a deep sigh of contentment, I was jerked right out of my shoujo-induced bliss by the volume’s second chapter, which begins with Kanoko having transferred to a new school, leaving everything I’d just learned to care about abruptly behind. My dissatisfaction continued through at least two more chapters before I finally realized that this is actually the premise of the series. That’s also when I realized that it’s brilliant.

Using Kanoko’s impossibly frequent school transfers as a structural conceit, Tsujita sets herself free from the bothersome constraints of reality, while also weaving in some of the most wonderfully real characterization I’ve seen in a manga comedy. It’s as though some sleep-deprived manga editor spliced together pages of Kimi ni Todoke with Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, absent-mindedly inventing a new and delicious flavor of shoujo satire that manages to consistently maintain the gag while telling an unexpectedly heartwarming story at the same time. And in a fantasy space like this, of course, Kanoko’s original, accidental friends are able to pop up as needed, to help our heroine learn and grow, even as she snarks her way through another anonymous middle school.

The real secret to the story’s success, however, is Kanoko herself. She’s smart, hilarious, and even kind of heroic, like a super-hero version of Harriet the Spy. She wards off bullies by genuinely not caring what they think of her, and blows off “friendly” saboteurs with little more than a sneer. I seriously wanted to applaud several times during the first chapter alone. She’s also deeply damaged and a complete mess, but even that’s not overplayed. It’s astonishingly well done.

MICHELLE: That truly sounds awesome. I, too, was unaware of the series’ structure, but had managed to pick up somewhere or other that Kanoko is a unique heroine, which is why I’ve been looking forward to this volume’s release. I note from the exterior of the book that TOKYOPOP has a new logo and it looks quite snazzy. Were any differences apparent on the inside of the book?

MJ: I didn’t notice anything new inside, other than this very pleasant sight on the book’s page of credits, “Editor – Asako Suzuki.” :)

You know, the thought I had as I was writing this, Michelle, was that this ability to mix satire with an actual, forward-moving story is what I’ve fruitlessly hoped for from Otomen all this time.

MICHELLE: Oh, that is a welcome sight indeed! And yeah, I’m beginning to see more disappointment with Otomen‘s lack of forward movement popping up online. I usually buy new volumes as they come out, but after the disappointment I mentioned when I discussed volumes six and seven here back in September, I just couldn’t bring myself to buy volume eight.

MJ: So now that I’ve blathered on, what have you got for us tonight?

MICHELLE: Back in the waning days of Manga Recon there was this review copy for Angel Diary volume ten that no one had claimed, so I ended up reviewing it. And, actually, it was pretty interesting. It was primarily a fight between siblings, and though it didn’t make me want to read the series from the beginning, it at least made me want to see what happened next. Well, I’ve now read volumes eleven through thirteen (the final volume) and, unfortunately, what happens next is really not too much.

Briefly, the premise of the story is that Dong-Young, the Princess of Heaven, has fled an arranged marriage with the King of Hell and come to Earth disguised as a boy. Of course, one of her classmates is Bi-Wal, the King of Hell, and they end up falling in love. In volume eleven, there’s some brief resolution to the battle between Bi-Wal and his brother, Ryung, and then Dong-Young decides to get serious about becoming the Queen of Heaven which means going home and devoting herself to studying.

At first I thought, “Oh, this is the Boys Over Flowers school of story conclusions, with one member of a couple going away for an extended period of time.” With two volumes left at this point, I expected there would be several chapters, at least, of Dong-Young hard at work and maybe even the pair waiting quite a while to finally get married. Alas, much of this period is skimmed over and the series ends shortly into volume twelve. The rest of this volume and the whole of the thirteenth are bonus chapters about supporting characters, frequently as big-eyed bratty kids.

I didn’t like or follow this series enough to feel disappointed by this ending, but it certainly lacks substance. I’m glad I wasn’t more invested otherwise I might have been annoyed. I will say, though, that I associate this series with Moon Boy a lot, since they both began with Ice Kunion around the same time and are now wrapping up in the same month, and between the two series, this one is superior. Everything makes sense and Kara’s art is frequently nice to look upon. In fact, I must confess that I felt some squee for Bi-Wal’s chief aide, Hee-Young, mostly because he has really cool hair.

MJ: Is “superior to Moon Boy” really much of a recommendation? :D

MICHELLE: I guess not. If one were in the mood for some utter fluff with pretty boys in it, though, Angel Diary would probably be a decent choice.

MJ: I’m a fan of Kara’s artwork in another Yen Press series, Legend, so though I may snark, I can well imagine the appeal of her very pretty men and their undeniably cool hair.

MICHELLE: I actually scored the first few volumes of Legend recently, and look forward to checking it out.

So, what’s your other wry shoujo read for this week?

MJ: My second shoujo-snark-tastic selection for the evening is the third volume of Kaneyoshi Izumi’s Seiho Boys’ High School, from Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint. Now, you’ll recall that the series’ second volume is what originally won me over, but I’d say that it’s the third that earned it a place in my recent holiday gift guide. And though, in part, this is because it simply maintained the second volume’s quality, it also has some particular merit of its own.

The volume starts a bit slowly, with townie Miyaji coerced into dressing up as a boy-dressing-up-as-a-girl to help Dorm 1 spice up their entry for the school’s play competition. Things move up quickly from there, however, with the introduction of a new love interest for our hero, Maki, and an unexpected development in Nogami’s flirtation with the school nurse.

As in the series’ previous volumes, what really makes this manga shine is Izumi’s honest treatment of her teenaged male characters, even within the context of a fairly light comedy. Though perhaps the more impressive achievement is her demonstrated ability to make a bunch of (mostly) heterosexual horndogs actually appealing to female readers. That Nogami, for instance, the most hideously crass of the bunch, is even remotely sympathetic as a character is an accomplishment indeed. She’s not above poking fun at her readership either, as she proves in the volume’s final chapter with the revelation that Maki’s new love interest is a dedicated fujoshi.

And though Maki is definitely the most average guy of the bunch, he’s also the one who consistently tugs at my heartstrings, whether he’s struggling with overcoming his continued attachment to his lost girlfriend or discovering that there’s more to a popular classmate than he’d previously thought. He’s a fragile sort of everyman, but it really works for this series.

MICHELLE: I’ve seen the girl-dressed-as-boy-dressed-as-girl plot before, as well as the school nurse (there’s one in the second book I plan to discuss tonight, actually) but it sounds like Izumi is able to make some tried-and-true shoujo ideas feel original.

MJ: Yes, she really does, and it’s by doing little more than playing them honestly. Though her terrific sense of humor certainly doesn’t hurt.

So, school nurses, eh? Bring ’em on!

MICHELLE: If your theme this week has been wry shoujo, then mine is “final volumes of light shoujo (or sunjeong).” I wasn’t too impressed with the first two volumes of Cactus’s Secret, in which prickly Miku expects the easygoing object of her affections, Fujioka, to pick up on her feelings despite the fact that she gets angry and yells at him all the time. The series has gradually improved, though, and the scene in the third volume where Fujioka finally admits/realizes that he likes Miku too is truly sweet. Shortly into the fourth and final volume, alas, a buxom new school nurse is introduced and I began to fear that a lame plot centering on Miku’s jealousy would soon unfold. And, in fact, that’s sort of what happens, but in a much better way than I’d anticipated.

Rather than be outraged because Fujioka is spending time with a physically beautiful lady, Miku is actually made insecure by the fact that Fujioka, whom she has pressured into considering his future, has apparently been able to discuss something with the nurse that he couldn’t share with her. It’s a classic case of opposites getting together and realizing, “Hey, we really are majorly different here!” Miku is very focused on her future, so the fact that Fujioka isn’t bothers her. Because she does care so much, he feels unable to reveal to her how clueless he is, lest he lose estimation in her eyes.

Finding the nurse a good confidante herself, Miku eventually realizes what Fujioka’s been feeling and the two end up working things out. Just like Angel Diary, this series ends pretty abruptly and is followed by a couple of bonus stories featuring supporting characters. Even so, I found the conflict in this volume to be engaging and honest, evolving organically from who these characters are. Cactus’s Secret doesn’t rank as one of my favorite shoujo series ever, but it just might deserve a Most Improved award based on the difference between its first and last volumes!

MJ: I wasn’t impressed by the first volume of this series, which kept me from continuing on, and now I’m torn by a desire to watch it improve and a desire to avoid being disappointed by an abrupt ending!

MICHELLE: I think it’s worth it, personally. The creator is also really young, so it’ll be interesting to see her develop, assuming her future endeavors are licensed here.

MJ: You make a compelling argument! I do tend to get attached to flawed works that show promise for their creators.

MICHELLE: Like Heaven’s Will?

MJ: That’s exactly the manga that sprang to mind! You know me too well, my friend.

MICHELLE: As my husband always says, “That’s my gig!”

MJ: So true.

Tune in next week for December’s BL Bookrack, and then again on December 29th for this year’s final Off the Shelf!

Black Jack, Vols. 1-2

by

Black Jack practices a different kind of medicine than the earnest physicians on Grey’s Anatomy or ER, taking cases that push the boundary between science and science fiction. In the first two volumes of Black Jack alone, the good doctor tests his surgical mettle by:

  • Performing a brain transplant
  • Separating conjoined twins
  • Operating on a killer whale
  • Operating blind
  • Operating on a man who’s been hit by a bullet train
  • Operating on twelve patients at once… without being sued for medical malpractice.

Osamu Tezuka’s own medical training is evident in the detailed drawings of muscle tissue, livers, hearts, and brains. Yet these images are beautifully integrated into his broad, cartoonish vocabulary, making the surgical scenes pulse with life. These procedures get an additional jolt of energy from the way Tezuka stages them; he brings the same theatricality to the operating room that John Woo does to shoot-outs and hostage crises, with crazy camera angles and unexpected complications that demand split-second decision-making from the hero.

At the same time, however, a more adult sensibility tempers the bravado displays of surgical acumen. Black Jack’s medical interventions cure his patients but seldom yield happy endings. In “The Face Sore,” for example, a man seeks treatment for a condition that contorts his face into a grotesque mask of boils. Jack eventually restores the man’s appearance, only to realize that the organism causing the deformation had a symbiotic relationship with its host; once removed, the host proves even more hideous than his initial appearance suggested. “The Painting Is Dead!” offers a similarly bitter twist, as Jack prolongs a dying artist’s life by transplanting his brain into a healthy man’s body. The artist longs to paint one final work — hence the request for a transplant — but finds himself incapable of realizing his vision until radiation sickness begins corrupting his new body just as it did his old one. Jack may profess to be indifferent to both patients’ suffering, insisting he’s only in it for the money, but that bluster conceals a painful truth: Jack knows all too well that he can’t heal the heart or mind.

The only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for Black Jack was the outdated sexual politics. In “Confluence,” for example, a beautiful young medical student is diagnosed with uterine cancer. Tezuka diagrams her reproductive tract, explaining each organ’s function and describing what will happen to this luckless gal if they’re removed:

As you know, the uterus and ovaries secrete crucial hormones that define a woman’s sex. To have them removed is to quit being a woman. You won’t be able to bear children, of course, and you’ll become unfeminine.

Too bad Tezuka never practiced gynecology; he might have gotten an earful (and a black eye or two) from some of his “unfeminine” patients.

I also found the dynamic between Jack and his sidekick Pinoko, a short, slightly deformed child-woman, similarly troubling. Though Pinoko has the will and libido of an adult, she behaves like a toddler, pouting, wetting herself, running away, and lisping in a babyish voice. She’s mean-spirited and possessive, behaving like a jealous lover whenever Jack mentions other women, even those who are clearly seeking his medical services. These scenes are played for laughs, but have a creepy undercurrent; it’s hard to know if Pinoko is supposed to be a caricature of a housewife or just a vaguely incestuous flourish in an already over-the-top story. Thankfully, these Pygmalion-and-Galatea moments are few and far between, making it easy to bypass them altogether. Don’t skip the story in which Jack first creates Pinoko from a teratoid cystoma, however; it’s actually quite moving, and at odds with the grotesque domestic comedy that follows.

If you’ve never read anything by Tezuka, Black Jack is a great place to begin exploring his work. Tezuka is at his most efficient in this series, distilling novel-length dramas into gripping twenty-page stories. Though Tezuka is often criticized for being too “cartoonish,” his flare for caricature is essential to Black Jack; Tezuka conveys volumes about a character’s past or temperament in a few broad strokes: a low-slung jaw, a furrowed brow, a big belly. That visual economy helps him achieve the right balance between medical shop-talk and kitchen-sink drama without getting bogged down in expository dialogue. The result is a taut, entertaining collection of stories that offer the same mixture of pathos and medical mystery as a typical episode of House, minus the snark and commercials. Highly recommended.

This is a synthesis of two reviews that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 10/26/2008 and 11/4/08. I’ve also reviewed volumes five and eleven here at The Manga Critic.

BLACK JACK, VOLS. 1-2 • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC.

From the stack: Genkaku Picasso vol. 1

by

Between my fondness for Usumaru Furuya’s “Palepoli” strips in Viz’s Secret Comics Japan and my abiding love of episodic “psychic helper” manga, Genkaku Picasso (also from Viz) seemed likely to be a slam dunk. It’s not.

It’s about a high-school student who suffers a near-death experience and resumes life with the ability to see traumatic auras around his classmates, then capture their distress on his sketch pad. If he wants to continue to fend off premature death, he has to help these shrouded people with their issues. He’s the self-isolating type, so this isn’t a natural set of responsibilities for him, but at least he’s got the nagging, tiny ghost of a dead friend to prod him into doing the right thing.

There aren’t many surprises in the various adolescent traumas that our hero must confront, so the book’s interest is reliant on Furuya’s ability to layer compelling weirdness onto things like eating disorders, over-identification with pop idols, and daddy issues. There are some intermittent flourishes, some dollops of lurking nastiness, but the kids are on the dull side, and their woes need more verve than Furuya seems inclined to provide.

In fact, I sometimes found myself wondering if Furuya hadn’t determined on creating a satire without having any particularly novel observations on his subject other than “these are things that routinely happen in these stores.” The chapters sort of ramble through a set number of pages, not in an idiosyncratic, arrhythmic way, but in a “I have 20 pages of story to fill 50 pages of magazine” manner. I invariably lost interest before each tale’s conclusion, and I ended up concluding that, with Furuya, less may be more. He seems at his strongest when he’s being concise.

Part of the book’s problem might be that the protagonist, Hikari “Picasso” Hamura, isn’t especially pleasant company. He’s crabby when engaged, which can be a fun quality in a fictional character, and I wanted to like the fact that he doesn’t yearn for his classmates’ approval like so many of his shônen peers. But Hamura needs to be dragged into things too much, and he carps too much about how difficult his lot is. Beyond being annoying, it doesn’t read as organic. It feels more like a vamp, and a routine one at that.

The apparent time-killing gives me occasion to actively look for things that annoy me, even though I find Genkaku Picasso to be drawn very well. By volume’s end, I was improbably put out with Hamura’s pouty, blush-bruised lips. I know that the lips should barely have registered, that I had been given time to fixate on something minor and off-putting while so little was actually happening, and that it was less about the lips themselves than the fact that I’d had so little else to fill in the gaps of a rather lazy satire of a familiar formula.

I’m still looking forward to Furuya’s Lychee Light Club, due out from Vertical in April. It promises a much higher degree of adolescent perversion without any filter necessitated by placement in a shônen magazine while still being able to twist shonen conventions into knots. Maybe it was overly optimistic to expect that from Genkaku Picasso?

Manhwa Monday: Enter the Dae-Bon-So

by Leave a Comment

Welcome to another Manhwa Monday! Our featured article this week comes from the iSeeToon blog, where Jeong-Woo Seon (aka “mirugi”) continues to explain the Korean manhwa industry to its English-speaking audience, this time delving into manhwa created for the Dae-Bon-So, an old school manhwa rental system.

The article goes on to name some series that were specifically created for the Dae-Bon-So, including one of my personal favorites, Kyungok Kang’s sci-fi girls’ manhwa, In the Starlight, available in English from NETCOMICS.

From the article: “History of ‘Dae-Bon-So Manhwa’ was not clear exactly, however it begun after Korean War in 1950’s. ‘Dae-Bon-Son Manhwa’ was welcomed in 1960’s, while Korean culture is improving. There were very few TVs at then, ‘Dae-Bon-So’ was only 1 place to enjoy culture content with cheap price. ”

As with their earlier articles, iSeeToon has promised a future rewrite with more polished English, but what’s there now still makes for an interesting and informative read. Read the full article here!

This week in reviews, at Manga Maniac Cafe, Julie takes a look at volumes four and five of Goong and volume four of Jack Frost (all from Yen Press). At Mania.com, Kate O’Neil reviews volume four of Time and Again (Yen Press). Michelle Smith discusses that volume as well over at Soliloquy in Blue, along with the final volume of Moon Boy (Yen Press). Over at LiveJournal, user driftingsong talks about an untranslated series, My Lovable Fatty. And last week at Manga Bookshelf, I take a look at Korean-created March Story in our latest Off the Shelf column.

That’s all for this week!

Is there something I’ve missed? Leave your manhwa-related links in comments!

Follow Friday: Braaaaaains

by 5 Comments

Some bloggers and twitterati are must-follows quite specifically for their wealth of knowledge about manga, various genres of manga, and/or the the history and workings of the Japanese manga industry. There’s a lot of range to be found here, of course, and some are more useful than others. Sure, manga luminaries like Fred Schodt can be found on Twitter, but most of the time you can be certain that a guy who follows only 31 people is unlikely to have a conversation with you.

Since, for me, the internet is about conversation, whether it be the direct back-and-forth of Twitter, or the never-ending meta discussion that carries on, blog-to-blog, I find the most delicious brains are the ones who are not only willing to engage readers, but who are driven and energized by doing so. Fortunately, there are a lot of very knowledgeable people who fall into this category. I’ll name here just a few.

Erica Friedman of Okazu is not only the go-to blogger for yuri manga, but also quite knowledgeable about the industry as a whole, both in the US and Japan. She’s also an avid Twitterer, which means that readers have the opportunity to converse with her in a casual setting about nearly anything at all.

Sean Gaffney‘s fairly casual, under-the-radar blog can be a bit deceptive. He’s a guy who reads a lot of manga, both in English and in Japanese, and has a breadth of knowledge about the industry that I’ve certainly turned to for help from time to time. Sean, too, is very active on Twitter, where he’s always willing to share what he knows about manga.

Though professional duties take precedence nowadays, Ed Chavez the blogger is not dead. He may not have the same time to devote to keeping us up-to-date on the latest doujinshi and other news from Japan, he’s still a guy who knows more than most of the rest of us put together. Keep up with him on Twitter for whatever he’s got time to share.

For in-depth thought on the state of the American manga market, career bookseller Matt Blind is the guy you want to befriend. Though his blogging has taken a hit lately, thanks to a whoooole lot less available time, he still shows up on Twitter as often as he can.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The are a whole lot of brains out there to be tasted and enjoyed. Where do you find some of your favorite brains?