Manga

LIVES, Vol. 1

January 21, 2011 by Katherine Dacey

Everything you need to know about LIVES is summed up by the following category tags: “big breasts,” “meteor,” “stranded,” “strategically torn clothing,” and “survival.” (Kudos to the Baka-Updates moderator who felt the need to give “strategically torn clothing” its due as a category. But what, no “hungry predators”?)

Plot-wise, LIVES resembles Battle Royale, Gantz, and King of Thorn in using a catastrophic event — in this case, a meteor shower — to deposit normal people into a hostile environment — here, a dense jungle inhabited by carnivorous monsters. It doesn’t take long for the refugees to discover the particularly nasty secret behind these beasties: they were originally human beings as well, and some can still transform back into their bipedal selves, with no memory of terrorizing their fellow survivors.

Art-wise, Taguchi delivers the goods, with scene after scene of expertly staged carnage. His monsters are perhaps a little too neat, lightbox chimaeras that originated in the pages of National Geographic, but they’re agile and vicious enough to be convincing. His humans also offer balm for tired eyes: the hero, Shingo, has abs that would shame The Situation’s, and the harem of doe-eyed, big-bosomed ladies wear just enough clothing to prevent the story from shading into pornography. (In a hilarious touch, all of the women’s shoes are in immaculate condition, even though their tops and skirts have been reduced to scraps. Paging Imelda Marcos!)

What’s missing is subtext. LIVES is the umpteenth manga to suggest when man lives in a “state of nature” — no rulers, no rules of law — that a “war of all against all” prevails, creating an environment where lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” While other manga-ka have attempted to explore what happens to the human psyche when all social constraints disappear, Masayuki Taguchi focuses exclusively on those consequences that Thomas Hobbes forget to mention in The Leviathan: costume failures, near-rapes, faintly incestuous relationships, and hyper-violent showdowns between monsters and would-be meals. There’s nothing wrong with carnage and cheesecake; I’m all for brainless fun. But when the narrative falls into an all-too-predictable pattern of grope-chase-chomp-regroup in the very first volume, a little subtext goes a lot farther than a cool monster or a torn shirt in making things interesting.

Review copy provided by Tokyopop. Volume one will be released on February 1, 2011.

LIVES, VOL. 1 • BY MASAYUKI TAGUCHI • TOKYOPOP • 196 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Tidbits: Catching Up with Shojo Beat

January 18, 2011 by Michelle Smith

New and recent Shojo Beat releases are piling up, which means it’s time for another Tidbits column! In this installment, you’ll find reviews of three newer series—volume three of Dengeki Daisy, plus volumes five and six of Honey Hunt and Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You—while two old favorites, Ouran High School Host Club and Skip Beat!, bring up the rear!

Dengeki Daisy 3 by Kyousuke Motomi: B
In one of her author’s notes, Kyousuke Motomi writes that Dengeki Daisy was originally intended to be only three chapters long. This was pretty obvious in the second volume, where the sudden introduction of a lot of plot felt pretty awkward, but things have evened out by this third volume.

Though the threat that someone is after the software that Teru Kurebayashi’s brother, Soichiro, was working on before his death persists, the focus here is mostly on Teru’s relationship with Tasuku Kurosaki, the surly custodian at her school who secretly doubles as DAISY, the anonymous contact Soichiro recommended Teru seek out in times of trouble.

Teru’s been living at Kurosaki’s place after her own was burglarized, but feels as if she’s imposing. She’s unable to tell whether he cares that she’s moving out, and he’s unable (or unwilling) to admit that he’ll miss her, so she goes through with the move, only to realize her new roommate has rented the place next door. I would find this terribly cheesy in any other series, but somehow I’m okay with it here.

Similarly, a couple who obviously has feelings for one another and yet stubbornly refuses to confess would normally annoy me, but there’s something about these two that I find sympathetic. Kurosaki’s been giving Teru mixed signals, so she can’t tell exactly what she means to him. Kurosaki has the advantage of knowing Teru’s feelings—she’s confided in DAISY—but feels unworthy because of something he did in his past that he’s unsure he’ll be forgiven for. Their relationship progresses at just the right speed, and though I might wish they’d spend less time saying mean things to one another they don’t mean, it’s nice getting both characters’ perspective on their strong feelings, rather than solely the female’s point of view.

I was a little unsure about Dengeki Daisy after the disappointing second volume, but this one has assured me that it’s a keeper.

Honey Hunt 5-6 by Miki Aihara: B-
When Honey Hunt is at its dramatastic best, it can be a fun read, but sometimes it’s so immensely frustrating I contemplate hurling it across the room.

Yura Onozuka is the daughter of celebrity parents, and after they divorce in spectacular fashion, she vows to best her mother in show business. Even though her success as an actress comes quite easily, this is still the most interesting aspect of the story, since she seems to have found something she truly enjoys and is surprisingly good at. Unfortunately, lately Yura has begun to lose focus on her career goals, instead spending most of her time mooning over her pop-star boyfriend, Q-ta.

Probably I am supposed to find the efforts of Yura’s manager, Keiichi, to break up the lovebirds sneaky and wrong, but I honestly applaud him. I find Q-ta creepy—he says things like “I wish she’d give up acting so she could be all mine”—and want to shake Yura violently by the shoulders every time she ignores someone telling her she should forget about him and concentrate on her work. As much as Q-ta wants her to give up everything to be with him, the minute he gets the chance to work with his idol, he bails on a special date without a moment’s hesitation. His career is important but hers isn’t.

What makes it worse is that when Q-ta asks Yura to accompany him to New York—even though things are starting to go quite well for her professionally—she drops everything and goes! She says at one point that she’ll at least fulfill her current obligations and graduate high school, but we never see her actually do these things. To her, it’s more important to be needed by some dude than to do something for herself. Ugh.

Honey Hunt went on hiatus after these chapters, so at present, the story remains in limbo. As much as it gets on my nerves, if the series should ever relaunch (as Aihara claims it will), I will undoubtedly continue reading in the hopes that Yura gets a clue at last.

Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You 5-6 by Karuho Shiina: A-
Unintentionally scary-looking Sawako Kuronuma began to come out of her shell when befriended by her well-liked classmate, Shota Kazehaya, and she has recently come to realize that what she feels for him is not only admiration but love. This discovery is spurred in part by the machinations of Kurumi, another girl who loves Kazehaya.

I love how mangaka Karuho Shiina deals with Kurumi, because the girls actually end up bonding over their feelings for Kazehaya. They both like the same qualities in him—his ability to see the best in people, his honesty—and come to understand each other through their shared appreciation of the same person. If not for their rivalry, they might even have become friends, but, as Sawako wonders, would they have understood each other so well without it?

Never entirely setting aside progress between Sawako and Kazehaya, the romantic woes of Sawako’s friend, Chizu, soon take center stage. It’s pretty common for a shoujo manga to focus on the heroine’s pals once the main couple has reached a kind of stasis, but here it feels organic and not like filler (I’m talking to you, Love*Com). Sawako, having awoken to the possibilities of romance, wants for her friends to be happy, too. She believes the guy for Chizu is Ryu, a childhood friend who adores her, but Chizu’s heart belongs to Toru, Ryu’s older, newly engaged brother.

Chizu is a really fabulous character—she experiences any and all emotions with gusto, and somehow appears tough and girly simultaneously—and easily carries the story about her unrequited love. Like Sawako, I think Ryu’s the guy for her, and I would totally read a spin-off manga about the two of them. Chizu’s starring turn gives me hope for a similarly illuminating focus on Ayane, who seems to have no difficulty acquiring boyfriends but hasn’t yet managed to find love.

Ouran High School Host Club 15 by Bisco Hatori: B
The president of the Host Club, Tamaki Suoh, has been uncharacteristically serious lately, so the other members organize a Curry Creation Orienteering Tournament to cheer him up, with the secondary purpose of teaching a new student how to express her own opinions. Lesson learned, she promptly disappears, but not before Tamaki admits to her (and himself) that he’s in love with Haruhi and “probably [has] been for a long time.”

Later, Hunny and Mori, the two third-years in the club, announce that they’re about to graduate and that they’ll be pursuing different majors at Ouran’s affiliated university. The fact that mangaka Bisco Hatori has finally acknowledged the passage of time is a sign that the series is winding down, and I am amused by some of the characters’ baffled reactions. “For some reason I feel as though we’ve spent several long years together already,” muses Haruhi.

For the most part, this is all hijinks as usual, but Ouran can usually be counted upon for at least a few pages of genuine romantic progress between good-hearted but excitable Tamaki and pragmatic Haruhi. On a couple of occasions throughout in the volume, Haruhi tentatively reaches out to comfort Tamaki, who’s always spazzing about one thing or another, only to withdraw at the last moment. Finally, in a very sweet scene, she discovers him dozing in the club room and pats his hair while he sleeps. That might not seem like much, but for someone as undemonstrative as Haruhi, it’s truly a significant step! Moments like that are what keep me reading this series.

Skip Beat! 21-22 by Yoshiki Nakamura: B+
Skip Beat! is one of those series that doubles as a panacea for me; I highly recommend it for raising one’s spirits when one has been sidelined with a stomach bug.

Kyoko Mogami has achieved a small measure of success as an actress, most notably as Mio, a villainous role in a drama. She’s been tapped to essentially recreate that character for a new drama, but it just doesn’t feel right. These two volumes deal with Kyoko’s efforts to get into her new role, Natsu, and differentiate her from Mio. Meanwhile, the director is demanding, her co-stars are snooty, and one in particular seems bent on getting Kyoko fired.

The process of Kyoko learning to understand and then wholly inhabit a role always makes for a great read. For help, she turns to the more experienced Ren Tsuruga—a successful actor who loves Kyoko but keeps mum because of their age difference—and with only a little bit of scolding and advice ends up discovering the essential qualities that make Natsu tick.

I love how Nakamura draws Kyoko in character, too—she’s clearly identifiable as the same person, but her expressions and body language change completely. Maybe the awed reactions from the director and co-stars are a little much once she returns with her new take on the part, but I can’t be bothered to care. Skip Beat! is a story about a talented girl who works very hard to achieve her goals—who doesn’t want to see her succeed in spectacular fashion?

Review copies for Honey Hunt 6 and Skip Beat! 22 provided by the publisher.

Manga Artifacts: Hotel Harbour View

January 14, 2011 by Katherine Dacey

Back in 1990, before anyone had hit on the magic formula for selling manga to American readers, VIZ tried a bold experiment. They released a handful of titles in a prestige format with fancy covers, high-quality paper, and a large trim size, and called them “Viz Spectrum Editions.” Only three manga got the Viz Spectrum treatment: Yu Kinutani’s Shion: Blade of the Minstrel, Yukinobu Hoshino’s Saber Tiger, and Natsuo Sekikawa and Jiro Taniguchi’s Hotel Harbour View. While neither the imprint nor the format survived, these three titles helped pave the way for VIZ’s later efforts to establish its Signature line.

Hotel Harbour View, by far the strongest of the three, is a stylish foray into hard-boiled crime fiction. In the title story, a man patronizes a once-elegant bar in Hong Kong, telling the bartender that he’s waiting for the person who’s supposed to kill him, while in the second story, “A Brief Encounter,” an assassin returns to Paris, where his former associates — including his protege — lie in wait for him.

As editor Fred Burke observes in his afterword, both stories are as much about style and genre as they are about exploring what motivates people to kill. The characters in both stories are deeply concerned with scripting their own lives, of behaving the way hit men and high-class call girls do in the movies. None of them wear simple street clothes; all of them are in costume, wearing gloves and suits and garter belts. (In one scene, for example, an assassin asks a bystander to hand him his hat, even though he lies dying in a pool of blood. “Just don’t feel right without it,” he explains.) Their words, too, are carefully chosen; every conversation has the kind of pointed quality of a Dashiell Hammett script, with characters trading quips and telling well-rehearsed stories about their past. A brief surveillance operation, for example, yields this tersely wonderful exchange between two female assassins:

“She’s French, isn’t she? Parisienne.”
“How can you tell?”
“She looks arrogant and stubborn. The sort who ruins men.”
“He loves her. That’s why he came back to Paris.”
“And how can you tell?”
“I’m a Parisienne, too.”

[As an aside, I should note that Gerard Jones and Matt Thorn’s excellent translation brings Sekikawa’s script to life in English; each character has a distinctive voice, and the dialogue is thoroughly idiomatic.]

The violence has a cinematic flavor as well; Taniguchi’s balletic gunfights call to mind the kind of technically dazzling shoot-outs that became a staple of John Woo’s filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Taniguchi uses many of the same tricks. He follows a bullet’s trajectory from the gun barrel to its point of impact, showing us the victim’s terrified face as the bullet closes in on its target; stages elaborate duels in which passing trains demand split-second timing from the well-armed participants; and shows us a hit gone bad from dozens of different angles. In one the book’s most stylish sequences, we see a gunman’s reflection in a shattered mirror; as the “camera” pulls back from that initial image, we realize that we’re seeing things from the killer’s point of view, not the gunman’s. A dramatic cascade of glass destroys his reflection as he slumps to the floor — a perfect movie ending for a character obsessed with orchestrating his own death.

Like Taniguchi’s other work, there’s a slightly stiff quality to the artwork. His characters are drawn with meticulous attention to detail, yet their faces remain impassive even when bullets fly and old lovers betray them. That detachment can be frustrating in other contexts, but in Hotel Harbour View it registers as sang-froid; the characters’ composure is as essential to their performances as their costumes and studied banter, as each self-consciously fulfills their role in the drama.

Though Hotel Harbour View is out of print, copies are still widely available through online retailers; I ordered mine directly from Amazon. You’ll also find a robust market for second-hand copies; expect to pay between $4.00 and $20.00 for a copy in good to excellent condition.

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.

HOTEL HARBOUR VIEW • SCRIPT BY NATSUO SEKIKAWA, ART BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • VIZ MEDIA • 94 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

January 11, 2011 by Katherine Dacey

As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts—sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:

It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Tidbits: Sports Manga for the Win!

January 2, 2011 by Michelle Smith

Welcome to another installment of Tidbits! This time I turn my attention to sports manga, a genre for which I nurture an inexplicable adoration. First up is Crimson Hero, a shoujo tale that attempts to balance volleyball and romance, followed by six early volumes of Eyeshield 21 and four later ones from The Prince of Tennis, in which the Seishun Academy tennis team finally makes it to the semifinals of Nationals.

Crimson Hero 14 by Mitsuba Takanashi: B
I’m not entirely sure it’s accurate to classify Crimson Hero as sports manga. Ostensibly, it’s about Nobara Sumiyoshi and the rest of the girls on the volleyball team at Crimson High as they pursue their goal of winning the Spring Tournament. In reality, there are only a dozen pages of volleyball in this volume, and only half of those feature the girls.

When last we left off, Haibuki, one of the aces on the guys’ team, had run off because he learned that Nobara was secretly going out with his teammate, Yushin. Also, some other guy named Kaz was spreading rumors about Nobara that caused her to break up with Yushin. It was really a mess, which I ranted about in more detail here.

Thankfully, Takanashi almost immediately addresses all of the things I found so annoying! Kaz abruptly apologizes and disappears. It was totally random, but whatever; I’m glad he’s gone. Yushin and Nobara discover where Haibuki is and both implore him to return. When Yushin goes to great lengths to win Haibuki back from another school that’s been attempting to recruit him, Haibuki realizes that Yushin kept his relationship with Nobara a secret only because he thought it would be best for the team and finally stops being a petulant brat. Hooray!

Though I mock some of the emotional moments in this volume, the truth is that when done well, it’s honestly very entertaining. It’s not the most original story in the world—earnest but academically challenged girl is sought after by two boys with contrasting personalities—but I like it. I still wish they would just play some volleyball already, though.

Eyeshield 21 4-9 by Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata: B
In addition to his fearsome talent for gathering information and blackmailing others to get his way, Hiruma, the demonic captain of the Deimon Devil Bats football team, also excels at motivation and promotion. It’s through his efforts that a crowd of Deimon students turns out to watch the Devil Bats defeat the Zokugaku Chameleons, which in turn leads to a record turnout at the next recruitment meeting.

A handful of new players joins the team, including the absolutely adorable Komusubi, who looks like a muppet and idolizes Kurita, and the Devil Bats proceed to a tie game against their next opponent, which earns them a spot in a televised face-off against a visiting American team. A summer training trip to America soon follows, with the all-important fall tournament season only a few weeks away.

At this point, Eyeshield 21 is following the sports manga formula pretty closely: the team gets better, important positions are filled, and everyone tries hard to get stronger as they face increasingly more formidable opponents. Just because it’s formulaic, though, doesn’t make it any less good. There’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be derived from watching someone earnestly work hard to achieve their goals, and even if much of what happens in this series is completely over-the-top, it’s still a fun read.

My favorite aspect of the story, though, is how those with less inate talent are not forgotten. This is best exemplified by what’s going on with “The Hah?! Brothers.” These three thugs were originally blackmailed into playing by Hiruma, but have gradually become genuinely invested in the team’s goals. Jumonji, their leader, was particularly upset to see his friends’ contributions belittled in an article, and works hard to help them improve themselves. I’m not sure why, but I find the idea of a former delinquent finally finding something to care about and strive for really moving. A scene in which the crowd cheers them for the first time actually made me teary-eyed!

Now if only there were fewer poop jokes…

The Prince of Tennis 36-39 by Takeshi Konomi: C+
When one is a long-time fan of The Prince of Tennis, as I am, one becomes accustomed to and can forgive a lot of the ridiculousness that goes on in the series. For example, it’s a given now that characters will be introduced who are supposed to be in junior high, even though they look thirty, and who have at their disposal an arsenal of highly improbable shots with silly names like “Super Ultra Delicious Swinging Mountain Storm.” Sets will also almost always end at 7-6, after a grueling tie-break, and characters frequently are one point away from defeat when they suddenly “evolve” and rally valiantly. It’s repetitive, but hey, how much variation can one really expect?

For the National Tournament, mangaka Takeshi Konomi kicks things up a notch with the introduction of a technique so eyeroll-inducing that even I can’t refrain from snerking. It’s called “the selfless state,” and manifests as a glowing aura that spectactors can detect instantly. “There it is!!” cries the peanut gallery, “The selfess state!!” It enables the player to instinctively recreate any opponent’s move that he’s ever seen, which results in even more shouting from the sidelines as familiar shots are recognized by the crowd. Our hero Ryoma Echizen can do it, naturally, but he’s been doing so for ten volumes or so now so it’s time to tweak it still further.

Volumes 36 through 39 of the series focus on Seishun’s semifinal match-up against a school from Osaka called Shitenhoji. After Fuji loses the first singles match, Seishun retaliates with a doubles victory followed by a singles win via forfeit. If they win the next doubles match, they’re going to the finals. Enter Seishun’s captain, Kunimitsu Tezuka, who not only can achieve the selfless state, but a special variation thereof called “the pinnacle of mastery.” Not to be outdone, Shitenhoji puts up Senri Chitose, whose ability to access “the pinnacle of brilliance” makes him go all sparkly.

Stoic Tezuka is my favorite character, so I don’t begrudge him the opportunity to be a badass, particularly since he missed most of the Kanto Tournament due to injury, but there’s only so much ridiculousness I can take. I mean, there’s one two-page spread where these guys just stand there and glow at one another! Tezuka ultimately wins, of course. After a brief interlude provided by a yakiniku eating contest, the finals begin, but Ryoma is nowhere to be found and Tezuka seems poised to reinjure himself in pursuit of victory.

These volumes make me sigh heavily. And yet… for all my complaining, I will eagerly buy the last three volumes of the series and be bummed out if the sequel isn’t licensed soon.

Review copy for volume 39 of The Prince of Tennis provided by the publisher.

Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1

December 27, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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+)

The 2010 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

December 24, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

While there’s no shortage of boring or cliche manga available in English — even with fewer titles being released this year — grade-A turkeys are going the way of the dodo. I had so much difficulty compiling this year’s Manga Hall of Shame Nominees, in fact, that I turned to Twitter for help. Some folks named The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan for being dull and incomprehensible; others fingered Saving Life for unsexy fanservice and dopey characters; one person chastised You Higuri for foisting Nighthead Genesis on the world; and one brave soul bucked conventional wisdom by naming AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga as her Worst of 2010. (You can see more reader nominations at #badmanga2010.) The conversation made me laugh, but it also helped me clarify my own thinking about the subject. Common to all five titles on this year’s list is a flagrant disregard for the reader; no matter how interesting the initial premise, these stories derailed quickly, thanks to lousy artwork, disjointed storytelling, and/or a juvenile fixation on body parts and bodily functions.

5. Che Guevara: A Manga Biography
By Kiyoshi Konno and Chie Shimano • Penguin Books
In the opening pages of Che Guevara: A Manga Biography, the creators promise to reveal the flesh-and-blood person behind the iconic images on t-shirts and posters. The authors never deliver on that promise, however, instead relying heavily on Guevara’s own self-promoting essays for most of their information. That commitment to primary sources might be laudable if the authors made any effort to reveal the inconsistencies in Guevara’s beliefs, but Guevara’s heroism is never in doubt; he’s always portrayed as brave, strong, and capable, even when abandoning his first family or serving in Fidel Castro’s administration. (The authors also gloss over Guevara’s enthusiasm for the Stalinist regime, perhaps because it’s hard to put a positive spin on anyone or anything associated with that period in Soviet history.) More frustrating still is how choppy and uneven the manga is; the authors compress major battles and periods of Guevara’s life into one or two pages, leaving no room for them to explore these events with any nuance. Clumsy character designs and endless talking-head scenes complete the not-so-pretty picture.

4. Scarlet
By Hiro Madarame • BLU Manga
Hiro Madarame may draw achingly pretty manga, but her stories are surprisingly ugly and unpleasant, filled with Tragically Gay Characters and manipulative, shrewish women who drive men to homosexuality. The nadir of this slim anthology is the titular story, which includes a brutal rape scene that’s disturbing both for its sadism (it wouldn’t be out of place in David Fincher’s ultra-gory Seven) and for the speed with which the victim and the attacker reconcile. It’s true that many domestic abuse victims go through cycles of leaving and reuniting with their tormentors, but Madarame presents this act of violence as testament to her characters’ deep attachment to one another, rather than evidence of their pathologically unhealthy relationship. Call me a curmudgeonly old feminist if you must, but romanticizing rape and possessive behavior — no matter what the gender or sexual orientation of the parties involved — just isn’t very sexy. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/31/10

3. Pink Innocent
By Kotori Momoyuki • Del Rey
The title screams soft-core porn, but Pink Innocent is, in fact, G-rated shojo comedy. The story revolves around Kotona, a ditzy rich girl who stalks and smothers Reiji, a befuddled nerd who finds Kotona almost as annoying as readers will. The jokes are profoundly unfunny: Kotona destroys Reiji’s computers, burns down his apartment, and stars in her class production of Romeo and Juliet so that she can woo him. (One shudders to think what she’ll do in future volumes: carpet bomb his home by accident? Run over his brother with a car?) Adding insult to injury is the artwork: it’s sub-par Arina Tanemura, with sparkles on top of sparkles, and a heroine so saucer-eyed she resembles a chibi squid. Unless Orange Planet was a bigger hit than I remembered, it’s hard to fathom what inspired Del Rey to license Pink Innocent; shojo fans deserve better than this dumb, repetitive stinker.

2. “Black Sushi Party Piece” and “Arizona Sizzlet,” AX: An Alternative Collection of Manga
Edited by Sean Michael Wilson • Top Shelf
David Welsh said it best when he declared, “While AX is one of the books I’m happiest to have bought this year, it does contain some seriously bad manga.” Many of the stories in AX push the boundaries of good taste, aesthetic and otherwise, but the best of them — “Puppy Love,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Push-Pin Woman” — are genuinely thought-provoking. Two, however, earn demerits for their sheer pointlessness. The first, “Black Sushi Party Piece,” is a festival of excrement, anuses, and Butt Head-ugly character designs, with no real ambition other than to turn the stomach. The second, “Arizona Sizzler,” features a desert showdown between an irritated young woman and an enormous set of genitals. I have no doubt that in the hands of someone like Terry Gilliam this kind of cock-and-balls story might be funny, but the crudeness of the execution robs “Sizzler” of any potential playfulness; instead, it seems like a dumb joke dragged out to epically unfunny lengths, the manga equivalent of a Benny Hill sketch. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 5/21/10

1. The Qwaser of Stigmata
Story by Hiroyuki Yoshino • Art by Kenetsu Satō • Tokyopop
The creators of Qwaser of Stigmata have erected a sturdy framework on which to hang boobs and bishonen: their story takes place at a parochial boarding school filled with nubile teens, allowing them to indulge every manner of fetish, from schoolgirls in short skirts to hotties of the cloth. Alas, Hiroyuki Yoshino and Kenetsu Sato’s only novel idea was to substitute Russian Orthodoxy for Catholicism, the go-to religion of manga-ka in search of cool outfits and arcane rituals. The rest of the story is a fever-dream of incoherent fight scenes, topless girls, and… breast feeding. (That’s the source of the characters’ super-strength: breast milk. I’m not making this up. Really.) The central plot, which revolves around a Russian icon, makes even less sense than the fight scenes; I’m not an expert on any form of Eastern Orthodoxy, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that an observant person would find it offensive. (Or silly.) The saddest part is that an imaginative artist could write a boffo manga about the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a long and rich history, filled with mystics, heretics, and believers so hard core they’d set fire to themselves before accepting small changes to the liturgy. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic, 8/11/10

So… I turn the floor over to you: what titles do you think belong in this year’s Manga Hall of Shame?

Osamu Tezuka: A Bibliography for English Speakers

December 21, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

For the English-language reader interested in learning more about Osamu Tezuka, there’s a growing body of scholarship exploring his life and work. Frederik L. Schodt, who was a personal friend of Tezuka’s, has done more than just about anyone to introduce Tezuka’s manga to Western audiences, writing in an accessible style that eschews academic formality but is nonetheless rigorous and well-researched. Schodt reproduced a chapter from Tezuka’s Phoenix in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), paid tribute to Tezuka’s work with an essay in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and devoted an entire book to one of Tezuka’s best-known characters in The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution (2007). Readers who find Schodt’s approach congenial should also investigate Helen McCarthy’s recent book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009); like Schodt, McCarthy is interested in bringing Tezuka’s work to a wider audience of comics fans and moviegoers, rather than subjecting Tezuka’s work to close readings.

Academics, too, have been exploring Tezuka’s work from a variety of perspectives, as numerous articles in The International Journal of Comic Art, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Mechademia attest. Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World-War II Manga (2009) is among the most user-friendly of these recent scholarly tomes; she writes in a clear, unfussy style that provides readers insight into the historical, social, and economic conditions in which Tezuka lived and worked. Readers may also find Philip Brophy’s Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (2007) a helpful bridge between mainstream and academic discourse about Tezuka. Though Marvel of Manga is as much a museum catalog as a scholarly work, Brophy’s contextual essays do a fine job of introducing the different stages of Tezuka’s career, as well as some of the themes that were central to Tezuka’s work.

A word about this bibliography: it isn’t comprehensive, nor is it intended to be. What I’ve done is compile a list of resources that a journalist, college student, or serious comic fan would find helpful in learning more about Tezuka’s life and work. The list is divided into three sections: the first focuses on articles and books about Tezuka, the second on websites, and the third on Tezuka’s manga in translation. Please feel free to suggest resources I have overlooked; this list is meant to be a living document, updated on a regular basis.

ARTICLES AND BOOKS ABOUT TEZUKA

Arnold, Andrew D. “Born Again.” Rev. of Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka. Time 17 July 2004. Web. 21 December 2010.

Bird, Lawrence. “States of Emergency: Urban Space and the Robotic Body in the Metropolis Tales.” Mechademia 3 (2008): 127-48. Print.

Brophy, Philip, ed. Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga. Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007. Print.

Covert, Brian. “Manga, Racism & Tezuka.” Japan Times Weekly 18 April 1992: 1-4. Print.

Eiji, Otsuka. “Disarming Atom: Osamu Tezuka’s Manga at War and Peace.” Trans. Thomas LaMarre. Mechademia 3 (2008): 111-25. Print.

Gravett, Paul. “The Father Storyteller: The Life and Role of Osamu Tezuka, Originator of Story Manga.” Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 34-47. Print.

Inuhiko, Yomata. “Stigmata in Tezuka Osamu’s Works.” Trans. Hajime Nakatani. Mechademia 3 (2008): 97-109. Print.

Kuwahara, Yasue. “Japanese Culture and Popular Consciousness: Disney’s The Lion King vs. Tezuka’s Jungle Emperor.” Journal of Popular Culture 31.1 (1997): 37-48. Print.

LaMarre, Thomas. “Speciesism, Part II: Tezuka Osamu and the Multispecies Ideal.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 51-85. Print.

Kinsella, Sharon. Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Print.

Ma, Sheng-mei. “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia.” Mechademia 4 (2009): 183-96. Print.

MacWilliams, Mark Wheeler. “Japanese Comics and Religion: Osamu Tezuka’s Story of the Buddha.” Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture. Ed. Timothy J. Craig. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. 109-37. Print.

McCarthy, Helen. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. Foreword by Katsuhiro Otomo. New York: Abrams, 2009. Print.

O’Luanaigh, Cian. “Osamu Tezuka: Father of Manga and Scourge of the Medical Establishment.” The Guardian 21 July 2010. Web. 21 December 2010.

Onoda, Natsu. “Drag Prince in Spotlight: Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Osamu Tezuka’s Early Shojo Manga.” International Journal of Comic Art 4.2 (2002): 124-38. Print.

——— . “Tezuka Osamu and the Star System.” International Journal of Comic Art 5.1 (2003): 161-94. Print.

Palmer, Ada. “‘You, God of Manga, Are Cruel!’: Karma and Suffering in the Universe of Osamu Tezuka.” Manga and Philosophy. Ed. Adam Barkman and Joseph Steiff. Chicago: Open Court, 2010. Print.

Patten, Fred. Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews. Foreword by Carl Macek. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2004. Print.

Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Print.

Randall, Bill. “Achieving Godhood in Pen and Ink.” Rev. of Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka. The Comics Journal 246 (2002): 109-13. Print.

——— . “Behold Japan’s God of Manga: An Introduction to the Work of Osamu Tezuka.” The Comics Journal 5 (2005): 46-57. Print.

Schilling, Mark. “Tezuka, Osamu.” The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. Trumbull, CT: Weatherhill, 1997. 263-68. Print.

Schodt, Frederik L. The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007. Print.

——— . “A Tribute to the God of Comics.” Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996. 233-74. Print.

Thorn, Matt. “Tezuka’s Modernism.” Introduction. Adolf: The Half-Aryan. By Osamu Tezuka. Trans. Oniki Yoji. San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1997. 7-11. Print.

WEB RESOURCES

Anthropology of Anime and Manga: Site includes a useful overview of Tezuka’s Phoenix saga, with links to English and Japanese resources.

Osamu Tezuka, Father of Manga: Site provides a biography, timeline, and a brief discussion of Tezuka’s influences.

Tezuka in English: Site maintained by American scholar Ada Palmer; provides a comprehensive list of Tezuka’s work in translation, as well as overview of Tezuka’s star system.

TezukaOsamu.net: Official website of Tezuka Productions, Inc. (Link is to English-language content.) Includes summaries of major works, as well as Japanese-language previews of manga such as The Three-Eyed One, Unico, IL, and New Treasure Island.

Wikipedia entry on Osamu Tezuka. See also the Wikipedia entries on Tezuka’s anime and manga, as well as the Wikipedia entry on Tezuka’s star system. The quality of the entries varies considerably; use in conjunction with other sources.

TEZUKA IN TRANSLATION

Adolf. San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1995-97. 5 volumes.
Apollo’s Song. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Astro Boy. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2002-04. 23 volumes.
Ayako. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010.
Black Jack. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2008-10. 12 volumes, ongoing.
The Book of Human Insects. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2011. [N.B. Announced at New York Comic-Con 2010. Also known as Human Metamorphosis.]
Buddha. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2006-07. 8 volumes.
Crime and Punishment. Tokyo: The Japan Times, Inc., 1990.
Dororo. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2008. 3 volumes.
Lost World. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003.
Metropolis. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003.
MW. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Nextworld. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2003. 2 volumes.
Ode to Kirihito. 2nd ed. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2010. 2 volumes.
Phoenix. San Francisco: VIZ Media, LLC, 2004-08. 12 volumes.
Princess Knight. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001. 6 volumes.
Swallowing the Earth. Gardena, CA: Digital Manga Publishing, 2009.

Manga Artifacts: Princess Knight

December 19, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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.

Ayako

December 17, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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

December 15, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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.

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!

December 12, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

My Dinner With Fumi: that’s what I would have called the English-language edition of Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! The fifteen stories contained within this slim volume celebrate good food and good conversation, documenting Yoshinaga’s interactions with friends, assistants, and fellow artists at real restaurants around Tokyo. No culinary stone goes unturned, as Yoshinaga — or, as her fictional alter ego is called, Y-naga — visits a Korean restaurant, a French bistro, an Italian trattoria, a sushi joint, an all-you-can-eat dim sum buffet, and a bakery famous for its bagels. (Bagels in Tokyo? Call me a recovering New Yorker, but that sounds horribly wrong, especially since Y-naga views the absence of a hole in a the middle as a sign of quality.)

I can think of few mediums less suited to showcasing food than manga, but Yoshinaga’s drawings of steaming dumplings, seafood stews, and sashimi are convincing, despite the absence of color. She renders the food’s textures and shapes in meticulous detail, in the process suggesting the care with which each item was prepared. Her characters’ obvious enjoyment of the meals also helps sell the conceit; watching them rhapsodize over rare ingredients or extol the virtues of dessert makes the reader feel like another member of the party.

Much as I enjoyed the foodie shop-talk, what really sold me on Not Love But Delicious Foods was Yoshinaga’s willingness to poke fun at herself. Y-naga is a sartorial disaster, wearing a frumpy headband, thick glasses, and a scowl as she toils over her comics; only the prospect of a restaurant meal can persuade her to trade her sweatpants for a dress and to comb her hair. Once transformed, however, Y-naga is just as uncouth as her work attire would suggest, spilling copious amounts of food and wine on herself, talking with her mouth full, and flirting aggressively with a handsome dinner companion after drinking too much wine. Yet Y-naga’s dinner conversations reveal that she isn’t a buffoon; she’s surprisingly self-aware, rejecting one potential boyfriend because he’s indifferent to food (he doesn’t like to talk about it the way she does), farming out an incompetent assistant to other artists so that he can improve his skills, and apologizing profusely to a gay friend for “paying my rent by drawing manga with gay themes,” even though her books contain “no real gay themes.”

And that, I think, is the real strength of Not Love But Delicious Foods: the people remain central to the story, even though the Tokyo restaurant scene is the ostensible subject of the manga. As the characters chatter enthusiastically about what they’re eating, we realize that Yoshinaga’s real objective is showing us the important role that food plays in bringing people together, drawing them out, and cementing friendships. It’s a sentiment that’s expressed throughout the manga, as characters find common ground in their mutual enthusiasm for creme brulee and osso bucco. One contentious conversation even prompts the omniscient narrator to praise good food for its diplomatic value; in Yoshinaga’s world, detente is just a dish away. “But through the power of skirt steak, their hearts resumed beating as one,” the narrator observes. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! will be released on December 21, 2010.

NOT LOVE BUT DELICIOUS FOODS MAKE ME SO HAPPY! • BY FUMI YOSHINAGA • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Bunny Drop, Vols. 1-2

December 8, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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+)

The Best Manga of 2010: The Manga Critic’s Picks

December 6, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

For all the upheaval within the manga industry — the demise of CMX, Del Rey, and Go! Comi, the layoffs at VIZ — 2010 proved an exceptionally good year for storytelling. True, titles like Black Butler, Naruto, and Nabari no Ou dominated sales charts, but publishers made a concerted effort to woo grown-ups with vintage manga — Black Blizzard, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories — edgy sci-fi — Biomega, 7 Billion Needles — underground comix — AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga, The Box Man — and good old-fashioned drama — All My Darling Daughters, Bunny Drop. I had a hard time limiting myself to just ten titles this year, so I’ve borrowed a few categories from my former PCS cohort Erin Finnegan, from Best New Guilty Pleasure to Best Manga You Thought You’d Hate. Please feel free to add your own thoughts: what titles did I unjustly omit? What titles did I like but you didn’t? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. Cross Game
By Mitsuri Adachi • VIZ Media
In this sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy coming-of-age story, a family tragedy brings teenager Ko Kitamura closer to neighbor Aoba Tsukishima, with whom he has a fraught relationship. Though the two bicker with the antagonistic gusto of Beatrice and Benedict, their shared love of baseball helps smooth the course of their budding romance. To be sure, Cross Game can’t escape a certain amount of sports-manga cliche, but Mitsuri Adachi is more interested in showing us how the characters relate to each other than in celebrating their amazing baseball skills. (Not that he skimps on the game play; Adachi clearly knows his way around the diamond.) The result is an agreeable dramedy that has the rhythm of a good situation comedy and the emotional depth of a well-crafted YA novel, with just enough shop-talk to win over baseball enthusiasts, too.

9. AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga
Edited by Sean Michael Wilson • Top Shelf
The next time someone dismisses manga as a “style” characterized by youthful-looking, big-eyed characters with button noses, I’m going to hand them a copy of AX, a rude, gleeful, and sometimes disturbing rebuke to the homogenized artwork and storylines found in mainstream manga publications. No one will confuse AX for Young Jump or even Big Comic Spirits; the stories in AX run the gamut from the grotesquely detailed to the playfully abstract, often flaunting their ugliness with the cheerful insistence of a ten-year-old boy waving a dead animal at squeamish classmates. Nor will anyone confuse Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Einosuke’s outlook with the humanism of Osamu Tezuka or Keiji Nakazawa; the stories in AX revel in the darker side of human nature, the part of us that’s fascinated with pain, death, sex, and bodily functions. Like all anthologies, the collection is somewhat uneven, with a few too many scatological tales for its own good, but the very best stories — “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “Push Pin Woman,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Puppy Love,” “Inside the Gourd” — attest to the diversity of talent contributing to this seminal manga magazine. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/21/10

8. Neko Ramen
By Kenji Sonishi • Tokyopop
If you’ve ever lived with a cat or dog, you know that no meal is complete without a pet hair garnish. Now imagine that your beloved companion actually prepared your meals instead of watching you eat them: what sort of unimaginable horrors might you encounter beyond the stray hair? That’s the starting point for Neko Ramen, a 4-koma manga about a cat whose big dream is to run a noodle shop, but author Kenji Sonishi quickly moves past hair balls and litter box jokes to mine a richer vein of humor, poking fun at his cat cook’s delusions of entrepreneurial grandeur. Taisho is the Don Quixote of ramen vendors, dreaming up ludicrous giveaways and unappetizing dishes in an effort to promote his business, never realizing that he is the store’s real selling point. The loose, sketchy artwork gives the series an improvisational feel, while the script has the pleasant, absurdist zing of an Abbott and Costello routine. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/2/10

7. Ayako
By Osamu Tezuka; Vertical, Inc.
Combining the psychological realism of Dostoevsky with the social consciousness of Tolstoy and Zola, Osamu Tezuka uses conflicts within the once-powerful Tenge clan to dramatize the social, political, and economic upheaval caused by the American occupation of post-war Japan. No subject is off-limits for Tezuka: the Tenge commit murders, spy for the Americans, join the Communist Party, imprison a family member in an underground cell, and engage in incest. It’s one of Tezuka’s most sober and damning stories, at once tremendously powerful and seriously disturbing, with none of the cartoonish excess of Ode to Kirihito or MW. The ending is perhaps too pat and loaded with symbolism for its own good, but like Tezuka’s best work, Ayako forces the reader to confront the darkest, most corruptible corners of the human soul. As with Apollo’s Song, Black Jack, and Buddha, Vertical has done a superb job of making Tezuka accessible to Western readers with flipped artwork and a fluid translation.

6. Bunny Drop
By Yumi Unita; Yen Press
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a thirty-something bachelor unexpectedly becomes a parent to a cute little girl, leading to hijinks, misunderstandings, and heart-tugging moments. That’s a fair summary of what happens in Bunny Drop, but Yumi Unita wisely avoids the pitfalls of the single-dad genre — the cheap sentiment, the unfunny scenes of dad recoiling in horror at diapers, runny noses, and tears — instead focusing on the unique bond between Daikichi and Rin, the six-year-old whom he impetuously adopts after the rest of the family disavows her. (Rin is the product of a liaison between Daikichi’s grandfather and a much younger woman.) Though Daikichi struggles to find day care, buy clothes for Rin, and make sense of her standoffish behavior, he isn’t a buffoon or a straight man for Rin’s antics; Unita portrays him as a smart, sensitive person blessed with good instincts and common sense. Clean, expressive artwork and true-to-life dialogue further inoculate Bunny Drop against a terminal case of sitcom cuteness, making it one of the most thoughtful, moving, and adult manga of the year.

5. Black Blizzard
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi • Drawn & Quarterly
Written in just twenty days, this feverish pulp thriller plays like a mash-up of The Fugitive, The 39 Steps, and The Defiant Ones as two convicts — one a hardened criminal, the other a down-on-his luck musician — go on the lam during a blinding snowstorm. The heroes are more archetypes than characters, drawn in bold strokes, but the interaction between them crackles with antagonistic energy; they’re as much enemies as partners, roles that they constantly renegotiate during their escape. Evocative artwork — slashing lines, dramatic camera angles, images of speeding trains — infuses Black Blizzard with a raw, nervous energy that nicely mirrors the characters’ internal state. Only in the final, rushed pages does manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi falter, tidily resolving the story through an all-too-convenient plot twist that hinges on coincidence. Still, that’s a minor criticism of a thoroughly entertaining story written during a crucial stage of Tatsumi’s artistic development. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 9/9/10

4. House of Five Leaves
By Natsume Ono • VIZ Media
Timid ronin Akitsu Masanosuke can’t hold a steady job, despite his formidable swordsmanship. When a businessman approaches him with work, Masanosuke readily accepts, not realizing that his new employer, Yaichi, runs a crime syndicate that specializes in kidnapping. Masanosuke’s unwitting participation in a blackmailing scheme prevents him from severing his ties to Yaichi; Masanosuke must then decide if he will join the House of Five Leaves or bide his time until he can escape. Though Toshiro Mifune and Hiroyuki Sanada have made entire careers out of playing characters like Masanosuke, Natsume Ono makes a persuasive case that you don’t need a flesh-and-blood actor to tell this kind of story with heartbreaking intensity; she can do the slow-burn on the printed page with the same skill as Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Samurai Rebellion) and Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai) did on the big screen. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/20/10

3. Twin Spica
By Kou Yaginuma • Vertical, Inc.
Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to a faculty member who blames her father for causing a fiery rocket crash that claimed hundreds of civilian lives. Yet for all the setbacks she’s experienced, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility. Twin Spica follows Asumi through every stage of training, from physics lectures to zero-G simulations, showing us how she befriends her fellow cadets and gradually learns to rely on herself, rather than her imaginary friend, Mr. Lion. Though Twin Spica was serialized in a seinen magazine, it works surprisingly well for young adults, too, an all-too-rare example of a direct, heartfelt story that’s neither saccharine nor mawkish. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/3/10

2. All My Darling Daughters
By Fumi Yoshinaga • VIZ Media
The five vignettes in All My Darling Daughters depict women negotiating difficult personal relationships: a daughter confronts her mother about mom’s new, much younger husband; a college student seduces her professor, only to dump him when he tries to court her properly; a beautiful young woman contemplates an arranged marriage. Like all of Yoshinaga’s work, the characters in All My Darling Daughters love to talk. That chattiness isn’t always an asset to Yoshinaga’s storytelling (see Gerard and Jacques), but here the dialogue is perfectly calibrated to reveal just how complex and ambivalent these relationships really are. Yoshinaga’s artwork is understated but effective, as she uses small details — how a character stands or carries her shoulders — to offer a more complete and nuanced portrait of each woman. Quite possibly my favorite work by Yoshinaga.

1. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
By Moto Hagio • Fantagraphics
Not coincidentally, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories was my nomination for Best New Graphic Novel of 2010 as well. Here’s what I had to say about the title over at Flashlight Worthy Books:

Moto Hagio is to shojo manga what Will Eisner is to American comics, a seminal creator whose distinctive style and sensibility profoundly changed the medium. Though Hagio has been actively publishing stories since the late 1960s, very little of her work has been translated into English. A Drunken Dream, published by Fantagraphics, is an excellent corrective — a handsomely produced, meticulously edited collection of Hagio’s short stories that span her career from 1970 to 2007. Readers new to Hagio’s work will appreciate the inclusion of two contextual essays by manga scholar Matt Thorn, one an introduction to Hagio and her peers, the other an interview with Hagio. What emerges is a portrait of a gifted artist who draws inspiration from many sources: Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Frances Hodgson Burnett and L.M. Montgomery.

For the complete list — including nominations from David “Manga Curmudgeon” Welsh, Brigid “MangaBlog” Alverson, Lorena “i heart manga” Ruggero, and Matthew “Warren Peace Sings the Blues” Brady — click here. To read my full review of A Drunken Dream, click here.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Done because there are too menny… great manga, that is, to confine myself to a traditional top ten list. With apologies to Thomas Hardy, here are some of the other titles that tickled my fancy in 2010:

Other Awesome Debuts: Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me Happy (Yen Press), Saturn Apartments (VIZ), 7 Billion Needles (Vertical, Inc.)
Best Continuing Series: Itazura na Kiss (DMP), Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Suppli (Tokyopop), 20th Century Boys (VIZ)
Best New All-ages Manga: Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical, Inc.)
Best New Series That’s Already on Hiatus: Diamond Girl (CMX), Stolen Hearts (CMX)
Best New Guilty Pleasure: Demon Sacred (Tokyopop), Dragon Girl (Yen Press)
Best Reprint Edition: Cardcaptor Sakura (Dark Horse), Little Butterfly Omnibus (DMP)
Best Manga I Thought I’d Hate: Higurashi When They Cry: Beyond Midnight Arc (Yen Press)
Best Finale: Pluto: Tezuka x Urasawa (VIZ)

3 Reasons to Read One Piece

December 2, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

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.