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Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight 4 by Joss Whedon: B

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From the back cover:
Buffy Summers unlocked the power of the Slayer in hundreds of young women, but in the future only one Slayer remains. Melaka Fray—introduced by Buffy creator Joss Whedon and artist Karl Moline in 2001—returns to comics in Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

When Buffy attempts to solve the mystery of her scythe, she’s propelled into the future, and into the path of Fray. In order to save their worlds, the two Slayers must fight against a threat more powerful than the two of them combined, while back in the twenty-first century, the Scottish Slayer base falls prey to a mystical bomb courtesy of the Biggest Bad—Twilight.

Review:
It’s been a long time since I reviewed any of the Season Eight comics. I’ve been keeping up with the individual issues, but just haven’t felt inclined to reread them when the collected editions come out. I still haven’t liked any arc as much as Brian K. Vaughan’s “No Future for You” (issues 6-10), and somewhere along the way things have gotten so ridiculous that I just refuse to admit/believe that any of these events can be considered canon. Season Eight will be ending soon—the fortieth and final issue is due on January 19 (Buffy’s birthday)—so it seems like a good time to get caught up with reviews and potentially air a few gripes.

Volume four collects issues 16-20 of the series, comprising the Whedon-penned arc “Time of Your Life” as well as Jeph Loeb’s one-shot, “After These Messages… We’ll Be Right Back!” And, actually, this arc is pretty good. Warning: spoilers ahead!

Following up on a message she received while in Japan, Willow concludes that she and Buffy need to go to New York because of some timey-wimey ripple of a future event that’s going to occur there. Once they arrive, a portal opens, sending Buffy two hundred years into the future (and leaving a slavering beastie in her place), into the path of a Slayer named Melaka Fray. Fray, some may remember, once had a comic series of her own and fans were curious how Fray’s future (where there’s only one Slayer) would tie in with the series’ continuity, in which Buffy essentially activates all the potential Slayers in the world.

Fray’s main foe is her twin brother, Harth. A vampire, he’s got tons of minions and has recently been linked to a dark-haired madwoman who speaks in riddles. One assumes this is hinting at Drusilla, but it’s actually Dark Willow, still alive and planning something unspecific with Harth. Stuff happens—my favorite bits demonstrate how the two Slayers approach their job differently—but the basic gist is that present-day Willow reopens the portal and Buffy is determined to go back to her own time, even if it means that Fray and her future will cease to exist. When Dark Willow blocks her way, Buffy stabs her with the scythe.

Now, this is pretty interesting and reads much better when collected all together than as single issues. My major problem with it, though, is that I have no idea what Willow’s motivation was. Why was she working with Harth? What was she helping him to achieve? Vampire dominion over earth? Why would she do that? If I had to guess I’d say that maybe she wanted the future to look as shitty as possible so that Buffy would be determined not to let things turn out like that. But the final page of the arc shows that Melaka and her version of the future didn’t disappear at all. It’s quite a sad end for Willow, all alone and dead on some dingy futuristic rooftop.

Coming off the end of this arc is the fluffy but fun “After These Messages,” in which Buffy has a dream in the style of the cartoon series version of the show that never panned out. It takes place during high school, so Joyce is there, and reminds Buffy of how simple her life used to be. It’s not just a throwaway piece, though, as Buffy gets some advice from Dream Angel that convinces her that she shouldn’t tell Willow about what happened in the future.

If I recall rightly, this is the last arc that I enjoyed, but we shall see. It could be that the others will also fare much better when read back-to-back instead of in monthly installments. Stay tuned!

Flying the Heavenly Skies

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Thanks so much for your input on my Previews order! Many people provided thoughtful feedback on how I might best squander around $10 of my monthly comic budget, and the winner was…

The Beautiful Skies of Hou Ou High, written and illustrated by Arata Aki, published by Digital Manga! Here’s how the publisher describes it:

Houou High is a famous and incredibly prestigious all-boys school. It’s also the stomping grounds for the sons of the most well-renowned families from all walks of life, which gives rise to rumors that it holds a monopoly on money and power. Our protagonist, Kei Saeba, ends up enrolling in this veritable garden of blooming amateurs due to her mother’s guile. Now she must pretend she’s a boy for three years or she “will be erased”!

Another source told me that Kei is sent to this school because she likes girls and her mother wants to fix that via deep boy immersion, because that always works. I don’t have a particular aversion to reverse-harem stories and have enjoyed some of them very much, but blithe conversion comedy sets my phasers on kill.

It originally ran in Mag Garden’s Comic Avarus, home to notable titles like Alice in the Country of Hearts, Monochrome Factor, Tactics, Vassalord, and Your and My Secret, all from Tokyopop. That’s not a terrible track record, to be honest, but it’s still on the mixed side. We’ll see. Three months from now, I may come back to bitterly denounce you all. Won’t that be fun?!

From the stack: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vol. 11

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I always feel a little badly about my follow-up with reviews, as I tend to focus on early volumes of manga series with mostly cursory remarks on later installments unless my opinion changes materially or I feel the book is underappreciated. While my opinion of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) hasn’t changed, I did want to highlight the fact that the eleventh volume, written by Eiji Otsuka and illustrated by Housui Yamazaki, is pretty extraordinary, even by the standards of this uniformly excellent series.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, first of all, you really should be. The premise is simple at its core and extremely portable in terms of the kinds of stories Otsuka and Yamazaki tell. It’s about a group of unemployable students at a Buddhist university who combine their unique talents to form a side business dedicated to helping misplaced corpses with their unfinished business. Their various skills include hacking (with computers as opposed to cleavers), embalming and autopsy, channeling a foulmouthed alien entity, detecting dead bodies, and actually speaking to the deceased to find out how they ended up where they ended up.

It’s witty and gruesome, and Otsuka uses the episodic nature of the series to explore not only the ways humans respond to death, but contemporary culture as a whole. The satire is generally just the right kind of sly, which I think results in part from Yamazaki’s open, friendly cartooning. Yamazaki can certainly pull off grisly visuals, but he seems fond of the ways people look different from one another in age, size and shape. Even the terrible people who wander in and out of the narrative have that certain vulnerability you get from the fact that they look distinct, that you could imagine seeing them in your world.

The stories tend to run a few chapters each, but my favorite arcs tend to be longer. The second volume tells a single story, and it’s a glorious mystery with supernatural elements. The eleventh volume includes what I think is the second-longest story arc in the series, and it never flags. Otsuka packs it with both solid plot and smart embellishments.

It’s about mysterious happenings at an elite private school that center around a spooky little girl with an unsavory past named Chihaya. She has a connection to Sasayama, the retired detective/civil servant who often drags our heroes into worthwhile (but unprofitable) scenarios. Chihaya is an amazing character – steely, secretive, and purposeful, but entirely credible as a kid. I would love it if she got a spin-off or at least returned for another big, meaty arc.

Otsuka and Yamazaki have a great time with the social discord of the school setting and the ways little girls can be awful to each other, particularly at the elite levels. They also poke smart fun at the state of journalism and public perceptions of crime and youth. And they give their core cast some great moments. Corpse-finding Numata gets some surprising time in the spotlight, with his slacker-dope persona revealing some unexpected but totally logical nuances. Hacker Sasaki doesn’t get as much panel time, but she has a few terrific bits that remind readers of why she’s the brains of the operation.

The second arc in the book isn’t as good, but that’s mostly a matter of comparison. In an average volume, its look at the seedy underbelly of a beloved institution would be entirely welcome, and it’s not unwelcome here. It just can’t compete with Chihaya’s tightly written, sharply observed plight. If you want to give it a more charitable reading, start at page 171, then pick up at the beginning.

I mentioned this series as a worthy contender for an Eisner nomination, and I’ll happily restate that, particularly based on the strength of this volume. It’s a great comic, and I’d love it if more people gave it a chance.

Joseon Female Detective Damo, Vol. 2

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Joseon Female Detective Damo, Vol. 2 | By Bang Hak-gi | Cheonnyeon-ui Sijak

Cover for Joseon Female Detective Damo Vol. 2Joseon Female Detective Damo (조선여형사 다모) was originally published as a newspaper or shinmun manhwa in Sports Seoul in 1994. It followed a previous series that the manhwa-ga, Bang Hak-gi (방학기), had published in 1979, called Damo Nam-sun (다모 남순이), which was serialized in Sports Seoul. In 2003, MBC turned Damo into a popular television miniseries, starring Ha Ji-won in the title role. Although the manhwa has not been translated into English, the drama is available for legal viewing in U.S. and Canada by streaming online at Dramafever.

(The first volume is currently out-of-print, which is why my reviews are beginning with the second volume. Fortunately, the drama remained sufficiently faithful to the original story, and the manhwa itself—no doubt due to its original form as a weekly serial—provided enough context to allow the reader to follow along without having read the first volume.)

The word damo (다모 or 茶母) originally indicated a female servant who served tea in government offices. However, by the late Joseon dynasty, the meaning of the term had evolved to refer to female police detectives, who were important for searching and interrogating female suspects in Joseon’s gender-segregated society. Set during the late 17th century, Joseon Female Detective Damo tells the story of one such detective, Chae-ok, who serves under the chief inspector of the Left Police Bureau, Hwangbo Yun.

At the start of the second volume, Chae-ok, who habitually goes disguised as a man, has gone undercover to infiltrate a ring of counterfeiters. With a fellow servant, Ma Chuk-ji, she helps a prisoner named Noh escape from the notoriously well-guarded Seorin jail. Having won Noh’s trust, Chae-ok and Ma Chuk-ji follow him to his hideout, where they realize that the criminal activities go far beyond just counterfeiting money. Noh and his men are illegally smuggling in weapons—specifically Japanese-style swords and guns—suggesting a much more dangerous criminal conspiracy that can only be backed by a high-ranking official.

Scan of Chae-ok and Ma Chuk-ji from Damo Vol. 2
Ma Chuk-ji on the left, Chae-ok on the right.

Meanwhile, Chae-ok’s superior, Hwangbo Yun is fired from his position as chief inspector of the Left Police Bureau because of the prison break. However, he has already anticipated his dismissal, which in combination with the infiltration operation, is part of his ambitious plan to promote his government career by exposing a high-profile crime. A flashback shows that Hwangbo Yun is an illegitimate son of a nobleman; due to this status, he was originally barred from civil service and served instead as a low-ranking military officer. (Due to the literati culture of the time, the military was held in lower esteem than the civil bureaucracy. The police bureau on the other hand was considered part of the civil service.) He received his appointment to the Left Police Bureau through a matter of luck: after surviving a murder attempt by his half-brother, the investigation into the crime brings Yun to the attention of the head of the Left Police Bureau, who appoints him to the chief inspector position. However, the appointment also won him many enemies, including Jeong Pil-jun, the Minister of War and the main antagonist of the series. Jeong Pil-jun is the man responsible for Hwangbo Yun’s dismissal, and the Left Police Bureau suspect that he is also behind the counterfeiting and smuggling ring.

Scan of Hwangbo Yun and Jeong Pil-jun from Vol. 2
Hwangbo Yun on the left, Jeong Pil-jun on the right.

Noh takes Chae-ok and Ma Chuk-ji to the criminals’ mountain stronghold, where they meet the leader, Cheon Seung-gi. They learn that the goal of the conspiracy is revolution: Cheon Seung-gi is gathering dissatisfied commoners and other dissidents and training them into a small army, whose purpose is to overthrow the Yi Joseon dynasty. Their cry is “Justice now!” (a rough translation of “이재궁궁”), a prayer for a better world. Cheon Seung-gi, despite his idealism, has his own dark past, as a former eunuch who is on the run after murdering his adulterous wife. Chae-ok and Ma Chuk-ji must now try to find evidence that conclusively proves that Cheon Seung-gi is taking orders from a government official and uncover that official’s identity. Despite their best efforts, they get nowhere, which leads them to conclude that they have to trick Cheon Seung-gi into revealing his patron. The volume ends as their trap is set, using Ma Chuk-ji’s wife, Tabak-nyeo, to get close to the criminals’ leader.

Scan of Cheon Seung-gi from Vol. 2
Cheon Seung-gi.

Although this manhwa is not rated, the dark subject matter, including visual depictions of violence and sex, make it very much a series for adults. (The drama, by comparison, would receive at most a Teen (13+) rating.) While the stylized art prevents the images from seeming explicit, they do represent what in a more realistic style would be very graphic scenes. Although featuring a strong female protagonist in a historical setting sends a feminist message, readers should be warned that the series does contain misogynistic content that goes beyond the sexism of the historical period. In particular, Cheon Seung-gi has a deep-seated hatred of women, and I found the two scenes where he murders women to be disturbing.

These warnings aside, the manhwa depicts the historical period with considerable realism and takes the time to provide background information that is not common knowledge. As the manhwa’s intended audience is supposed to have learned about Korean history in school, it suggests that the manhwa-ga put in considerable time into researching the setting and making the manhwa educational as well as entertaining. (Certainly, the experience of reading this manhwa has drastically expanded my knowledge of historical vocabulary.)

The strength of the manhwa is in its moral ambiguity. While the drama does address the issue of how both sides are in the right, the manhwa takes it one step further and shows how both sides are in the wrong. In this volume, Bang Hak-gi delves into extensive flashbacks for Hwangbo Yun and Cheon Seung-gi, showing past context that is important to understanding both characters. Neither Hwangbo Yun nor Cheon Seung-gi are pillars of virtue, and at times, they are thoroughly dislikable characters. The manhwa takes a sharp and critical look at all the social problems of the era through the lens of a protagonist who, as a woman and as a slave, is at the bottom of the hierarchy and sees the situation most clearly. It is telling that Chae-ok’s weapon of choice in the manhwa is a flail (also known as nunchaku), a commoner’s weapon, rather than the sword wielded by her drama counterpart, and yet she never loses a fight in this volume.

Since Damo is an older series, the art is very different from the more well-known examples of magazine or jabji manhwa. Bang Hak-gi’s style lends itself well to action scenes, drawn with thick, dynamic lines that almost make the characters seem to move on the page:

Scan of Chae-ok fighting from Vol. 2
Series of panels where Chae-ok is fighting off pursuers during the prison break with a backflip kick.

While figures and backgrounds are rendered without much detail, the manhwa-ga does pay considerable attention to the form of the bodies in his action scenes and makes good use of the limited space on the page. The faces are often drawn in vivid close-ups, and characters that would otherwise look similar are often distinguished by evoking differences in expression and posture. Also impressive is his ability to render landscapes in a minimal number of lines:

Scan of river and mountain landscapes from Vol. 2
Series of panels depicting a river on the left and a mountain landscape on the right.

As someone who had enjoyed the drama adaptation of this series, I enjoyed this opportunity to read the original manhwa. Despite the familiarity of the story, the manhwa proved to strike a much darker tone and a somewhat cynical perspective in comparison to the drama. The complex and nuanced portrayal of the characters grabbed my attention and made me curious to find out what happens next after the cliffhanger ending of this volume. For readers who are interested in historical crime stories with a generous side of political intrigue and martial arts action, Joseon Female Detective Damo will be a perfect fit.

Random Sunday question: Which Who?

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As one must on a long weekend, I’ve been watching marathon television, particularly the most recent season of Doctor Who on BBC America. In spite of our extended time together, I’m just not warming up to the Eleventh Doctor. To be honest, I’m shocked that I miss the Tenth Doctor, as I always found him to be a bit much (his five minutes in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire felt like 40), but there you go. So, if you’re up to the point that you can have an opinion of the Eleventh Doctor, what might that opinion be? In favor? Opposed? Abstaining?

Chi’s Sweet Home 4 by Konami Kanata: B+

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From the back cover:
Welcome to the neighborhood, Chi and family! Now in her new residence, Chi will be introduced to many friends of the furry and feathery kind. With so many fresh smells to investigate, endless adventures await. So settle in, because here pets will never be chased… unless they are chasing each other.

Review:
Chi’s Sweet Home is one of those series that goes to the top of the to-read pile whenever a new volume is released. It’s always a true pleasure to read, with colorful cuteness guaranteed on every page.

This volume focuses mostly on the Yamada family’s move to a new, pet-friendly apartment complex and Chi’s reactions to her new environment. I love that so much time is devoted to her acclimation, and how familiar smells gradually embolden her enough to rub herself all over all the new stuff and proclaim it to be hers, too. She also meets a few animals at the new place, though more of her interactions so far have been with a gregarious (but well-trained) dog named David than with snooty long-haired kitty, Alice.

As usual, mangaka Konami Kanata perfectly captures several moments that ought to be familiar to cat owners: the pitiful mewling and pawing at a door that separates the kitty from its people, the inability to fathom what a scratching post is for, and the perils of claw trimming. In fact, I think this last was actually understated; I’ve had cats practically all my life and I still feel unqualified to attempt this task!

It’s not all cuteness, though. Chi’s Sweet Home has occasionally had some bittersweet moments—early volumes contrasted Chi’s cozy new home to her fading memories of her mother and siblings—and this volume is no exception. It’s sad to see how much confusion human-induced change causes to poor Chi and how baffled she is by her friend Blackie’s abrupt departure. I don’t know whether to hope and/or expect that a reunion will be forthcoming or to admire this slightly darker streak in the story.

We’re getting close to being caught up with the series in Japan. The fifth volume is due in February and then, after being spoiled on a bimonthly release schedule, we will suddenly be called upon to wait much longer for our Chi fix. I guess we could always turn to Crunchyroll for solace.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1

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A poor man’s Dawn of the Dead — that’s how I’d describe Highschool of the Dead, a slick, violent zombie story that borrows shamelessly from the George Romero canon. Whether that’s a good thing depends a lot on your relationship with Romero. If you thought Dawn of the Dead was a sly poke at American society — its consumerism, class divisions, and latent racism — Daisuke Sato and Shouji Sato’s manga will seem awfully thin, as the authors are more concerned with dishing out panty shots than revealing how threadbare the social fabric really is. If you found Romero’s film unnecessarily burdened with subtext, however, you might just cotton to the Satos’ ultra-violent update.

As the title implies, the story begins at an ordinary high school in Tokyo. When the staff contract a mysterious disease that transforms them into zombies, they wreak havoc, infecting hundreds of other people as they chomp, rend, and tear their way through campus. A small band of students take refuge on the roof, hoping for a helicopter rescue. What they discover, however, is that the entire city has descended into chaos, leaving them little choice than to find a safer place to wait out the crisis.

From a narrative point of view, Highschool of the Dead follows the zombie playbook to the letter. The zombies are slow and shambling; the the story takes place in a closed environment where the zombies’ sheer numbers give them a decided advantage; and the characters can barely stand each other, setting aside their mutual contempt only for the zombie-fighting cause. But while Romero made the most of his film’s shopping mall setting, the Satos treat their high school’s corridors and classrooms as just another indoor space filled with convenient weapons. (Call me crazy, but I don’t remember nail guns lying around the Newton North science labs.) The fight scenes are choppy and poorly staged, giving little indication of how the characters are moving through the space or where, exactly, they are in relation to the school’s main entrance. Even the violence-porn flourishes lack imagination: zombies die by baseball bat, power drill, broom handle, sword, and fire hose, but none of the characters improvises an interesting weapon out of something unique to the school.

The script is as predictable and clumsy as the fight scenes; the characters speak in exposition-heavy soundbites that bear little resemble to real conversation. (Sample: “Rumor has it that your childhood girlfriend ended up in your class when she stayed back and is going out with Igou now, right?”) Daisuke Sato assigns each character a few defining personality traits, raising the possibility that the characters’ economic and social disparities might inform the way they interact. The characterizations are so meager and inconsistent, however, that it’s tough to remember who’s who; I learned more from reading the Wikipedia article on Highschool of the Dead than from the manga itself, never a good sign when the characters, in fact, do have important backstories that shape their opinions of one another.

The biggest problem with Highschool of the Dead is its relentless commitment to cheesecake. The Satos work fanservice into as many scenes as possible, taking full advantage of every stairwell, fight, fall, and female death to flash derrieres and panties; only an episode of Strike Witches has more up-skirt imagery. Adding insult to injury is Shouji Sato’s willful disregard for basic female anatomy. Several of the female characters’ bust lines are so monstrously distended that it would be impossible for the characters to actually stand up and walk in real life, let alone fight zombies. (Hint to aspiring manga artists: large breasts do not look like grossly misshapen lemons or balloon animals.) I realize that costume failures and nubile girls are a staple of horror movies, but when the cheesecake is so poorly done, it’s hard to imagine who would find it arousing; the Satos could take a few tips from Robert Rodriguez on how to incorporate plausible, sexy women into a monster flick.

And when the scariest thing about a zombie story is the way the female characters’ breasts are drawn, well… I’d say the creators have fallen down on the job. The bottom line: unless you’re a die-hard zombie fan or panty-shot connoisseur, you’re better off seeking undead thrills elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volume one of Highschool of the Dead will go on sale January 25, 2011.

HIGHSCHOOL OF THE DEAD, VOL. 1 • STORY BY DAISUKE SATO, ART BY SHOUJI SATO • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Pretty maids all in a row

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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?

Manga Artifacts: Princess Knight

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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

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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.)

Ayako

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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+)

Black Jack, Vols. 1-2

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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

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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?

Bunny Drop, Vols. 1-2

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Fictional bachelor dads come in two flavors. The first is easily flummoxed by diapers, sippy cups, tantrums, and stomach aches, reacting in abject horror to bodily functions and extreme emotions (see Three Men and a Baby), while the second behaves more like a stand-up comedian than an engaged parent, commenting wryly on his charges’ behavior without doing much to guide or correct them (see Yotsuba&!). Daikichi, the singleton hero of Bunny Drop, is a pleasant corrective to these familiar stereotypes: he’s a sensitive, well-meaning thirty-year-old who steps up to the plate when his grandfather dies, leaving behind an illegitimate six-year-old daughter.

What begins as an impulsive decision — Daikichi is offended by his family’s reluctance to accept responsibility for gramps’ kid — quickly evolves into a serious commitment. Daikichi is humble enough to realize his limitations as a father, enlisting help from co-workers, friends, and family members in his efforts to find day care for Rin and impose some structure on her life, even though he isn’t entirely certain what kind of boundaries and routines are appropriate for a six-year-old. Yumi Unita wrings some humor out of Daikichi’s attempt to understand Rin’s unique point of view, but steers clear of easy laughs and easy victories. The early moments of rapport between Daikichi and Rin feel earned, not contrived, while Rin’s quirks reflect the bizarre circumstances of her early upbringing, as well as her deep fear of being abandoned.

Though Unita’s character designs are highly stylized and her panels free of busy detail, the spare, unfussy quality of her artwork is deceptive; her seemingly simple faces and bodies actually speak volumes about each character’s personality and history. The few lines on Daikichi’s face, for example, not only establish his age and his homeliness, they also give readers a window into his relationship with Rin. We see his growing attachment to the girl through the softening of his brow and jawline, and note the tension in his face when trying to negotiate new office hours for himself. (His co-workers are puzzled and angered by Daikichi’s decision to take care of Rin. “Just because it’s a relative’s child,” one underling complains, “why must you be the sacrifice, Kawachi-San?”)

With Rin, Unita focuses as much on the character’s body language as on her facial expressions. In the first volume, Rin appears closed off from everyone: rounded shoulders, downcast eyes, pursed lips, and folded arms. As Rin begins to trust Daikichi, however, her face and posture change: her limbs unfurl and her eyes brighten, and her repertory of faces soon includes pouty defiance and bravado. That same attention to detail extends to supporting cast members as well. Rin’s mother, whom Daikichi meets in volume two, comes across as impossibly young, swimming in an outfit too big for her slight frame, and fidgeting throughout her conversation with Daikichi, twisting her hair and avoiding eye contact in the manner of a sullen teenager.

The introduction of Rin’s mother suggests that future installments of Bunny Drop will continue to focus complex issues — what constitutes a family? who has the right to call himself a parent? what’s in the best interest of a damaged child? — in lieu of sitcom ones. (See sippy cups, bad dreams, and the stomach flu, above.) That Unita can take such potentially overwrought material and fashion a thoughtful, funny, and honest look at child-rearing is testament to her skill as a storyteller and — one suspects — as a parent. Easily one of 2010’s best new titles.

BUNNY DROP, VOLS. 1-2 • BY YUMI UNITA • YEN PRESS • RATING: TEEN (13+)

3 Reasons to Read One Piece

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Why would any sane person commit to reading a series that’s still going strong after sixty volumes? I can think of three compelling reasons why you should set aside your shonophobia — that’s Latin for “fear of incredibly long series with interminable fight scenes and characters who do their best” — and give Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece a shot.

1. THE ARTWORK

Though many shonen manga-ka love to populate their stories with flamboyantly ugly villains, Eiichiro Oda’s character designs are more memorable than his competitors’. That’s because Oda doesn’t just add a few scars and a crazy hairdo to distinguish the bad guys from the good; he creates every villain from scratch, making each garment, prop, tattoo, wart, and weapon a direct reflection of the character’s personality and personal history. The same goes for other supporting players: Oda emphasizes the greenness of one pirate’s kiddie followers by giving them vegetal hairdos, and the isolation of a pirate castaway by stuffing the character’s body into an empty treasure chest, with only Gaimon’s unkempt hair and feet poking out. (Gaimon gets one of the series’ best lines: “I used to have two eyebrows!” he exclaims, musing on his twenty years stranded on a remote island.)

Oda’s entire approach to drafting shows a similar thoughtfulness: his pirate ships, tropical islands, and sea coast villages are rendered in clean lines, with a minimum of screen tone. Oda relies instead on playful shapes to help set the stage, from a sea-going restaurant that looks like a cross between a carp and a Hong Kong dim sum parlor, to an island populated by rabbit-cobras, pig-lions, and rooster-foxes.

The only blind spot in Oda’s artwork is his female characters. Though he can draw a marvelous, gnarled pirate queen, as gloriously repulsive as any of the series’ other villains, his young, attractive girls are blandly interchangeable. Even as more female characters are introduced in later story arcs, their appearance seems more calculated to satisfy the male gaze than reveal much about their personality — besides, of course, the near-universal tendency among shonen artists to make a girl’s bust- and neckline a reliable predictor of her villainy.

2. THE LOVING SEND-UPS OF SHONEN CLICHES

One of the reasons I don’t read more shonen manga: I find the characters’ compulsion to shout the name of their fighting techniques kind of silly. (OK, a lot silly.) If anything, it brings back memories of the old Super Friends TV show in which the Wonder Twins clinked rings and announced that they’d be taking “the form of an ice sled!” or “the form of a green-striped tiger!” (If that was meant to be comedy and not a complete abdication of imagination on the writer’s part, I missed it.) Granted, InuYasha and Naruto boast cooler-sounding and more effectual powers, but the minute InuYasha yells “Wind Scar!”, I’m ripped out of the scene, pondering the need for such verbal displays.

In One Piece, however, Oda pokes fun at the practice by assigning his characters goofy powers with goofy names that are fun to say. Monkey D. Luffy’s Gum-Gum attacks are the most frequent and obvious example, as he pretzels himself into a Looney Tunes assortment of weapons and shields, but his crew mates also have a few tricks up their sleeves. The best of them, by far, is Tony Tony Chopper, a blue-nosed reindeer who also happens to be the ship’s doctor. His Human-Human powers enable him to assume a variety of forms, including a gargantuan were-reindeer that wouldn’t be out of place in the pages of Lycanthrope Leo.

Oda also walks a fine line between openly mocking his hero and using him to exemplify the “friendship, effort, and victory” motto that undergirds every Shonen Jump title. Monkey is, to put it nicely, one of the dumbest shonen heroes in the canon — and that’s part of his charm. Unlike, say, Naruto or Lag Seeing (of Tegami Bachi fame), Monkey’s single-minded pursuit of treasure is portrayed as a kind of insanity, not a sign of a stellar character. Monkey goes to extreme lengths to prove himself — not unusual for a shonen hero — but his behavior is clearly meant to be ridiculous. (In the very first pages of the series, he stabs himself in the face with a knife to demonstrate his imperviousness to pain, much to the horror of the assembled pirates.) Yet for all his ill-advised bravado, he’s a kind-hearted goof; anyone who demonstrates valor or integrity is invited to join his crew, regardless of the original circumstances under which they met Monkey. Again, those qualities don’t make Monkey unique, but they do make him appealing; he’s an indestructible hero who’s utterly fallible.

3. THE EXCELLENT ADAPTATION

Any text as thick with puns and pirate-speak as One Piece runs the risk of falling flat in translation, but the English-language adaptation is fluid, funny, and eminently readable. I can’t gauge how faithfully the VIZ edition adheres to the original Japanese, but the script’s buoyant, goofy tone complements the artwork perfectly, leading me to think that VIZ’s editorial team has given American audiences a reasonable approximation of the Japanese-language reading experience. Heck, they’ve even made Oda’s reader correspondence sound like a real, mischievous person answered those fan letters. Now that’s a good adaptation.