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Bokurano: Ours 1-2 by Mohiro Kitoh: B

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Fifteen kids—most of them, except for one boy’s kid sister, in 7th grade—are taking part in a summer program called “Seaside Friendship and Nature School.” Chafing at the instruction to go out and observe nature, the kids decide to explore a nearby cave, where they inexplicably discover a computer lab and a strange guy who calls himself Kokopelli.

Kokopelli tells the kids he’s working on a game in which the “chosen heroes” will pilot a giant robot as it faces off against alien invaders, and offers them the chance to play. Of course, they’re all interested and when he asks them to seal their contract before explaining the rules, they comply. It’s only when Kokopelli’s subsequent demonstration claims the life of a fighter pilot that they begin to grasp that the battle—and the damage it causes—is real.

Over the course of these first two volumes, the kids begin to learn exactly what they’re in for. After the disappearance of Kokopelli, “assistance” is provided by (possibly untrustworthy) Koyemshi, a floating creature almost cute enough to be a plushie if not for his menacing set of pointed teeth. He doles out information sparingly, and it’s not until two of their comrades have died that the kids learn the truth: the giant robot will fight to defend humanity from the invaders, but derives the power to do so from the life force of its pilot.

Obviously, the kids want to quit, but Koyemshi points out that they signed a contract and warns that if they should refuse to fight, Earth will be destroyed within 48 hours. The same fate awaits if they should lose a battle. As he puts it, “Win, save the planet and die… or lose and die when your planet is destroyed. Those are your options.” Believing that they really are helping to save the world, the kids soldier on.

At this point, the feel of the story reminds me a lot of another VIZ Signature title, Ikigami. For those unfamiliar with the story, Ikigami envisions a Japan in which the government attempts to encourage its citizens to lead a more productive life by instilling in them the fear of death. Anyone could receive a death notice (an ikigami) at any time informing them that they have 24 hours left to live, and the series follows each recipient in turn as they deal with the news.

Bokurano is structured similarly, focusing on each pilot as he or she “gets the call.” There are merits and flaws to this approach: obviously, the current pilot receives a lot of attention, and it’s interesting to see how each approaches the responsibility differently. One boy cares nothing for human casualties while another carefully takes the battle out into the harbor to minimize damage. One girl uses her final hours to sew morale-boosting uniforms for the group. Unfortunately, this also means that at any given time there are about a dozen characters relegated to the background, waiting for their turn to contribute to the story.

Because of lack of time spent with individual characters, it’s hard to care about them much, despite their awful predicament. I might realize I like someone based on how he handles his turn as pilot, but I know the opportunity to see things from his perspective will be brief. The most compelling aspect of the story to me is the notion of where these invaders came from in the first place, and what the human population as a whole thinks about giant monsters in their midst.

During Kokopelli’s demonstration, as he occupies the sole chair in a circle of many, he admits that he’s as much a pawn as the kids are and that he isn’t from our planet. It would appear, then, that he is the final pilot from a previous incarnation of this “game” who was sent to Earth to find a new set of players. Is this “invasion” real? Why are there precisely fifteen enemies and no more? This may not be a game for the young pilots or the humans threatened by these monsters, but is it a game for someone, somewhere?

Dark, grim, and mysterious, Bokurano is probably not for everyone, but I’ll definitely be reading more.

Bokurano: Ours is published in English by VIZ. The series is complete in Japan with eleven volumes.

This review was originally published at Comics Should Be Good.

Review copy for volume two provided by the publisher.

7 Billion Needles, Vols. 1-2

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First published in 1950, Hal Clement’s Needle was a unique mixture of hard science fiction and police procedural. The story focused on an alien detective who crash-lands on Earth while chasing an intergalactic criminal. With his ship destroyed and his symbiant companion dead, The Hunter takes up residence inside a teenager’s body, eventually persuading his host to help him find the fugitive — no mean feat, as the fugitive can also hide, undetected, inside a human host.

The story was notable, in part, for Clement’s meticulous, detailed study of the alien’s physiology. Drawing on mid-century research on microorganisms, Clement imagined a highly intelligent, adaptable creature capable of manipulating its body to squeeze through tiny spaces and make use of its host’s sensory organs to learn more about its surroundings. Needle was also notable for the way in which Clement folded these speculative passages into an old-fashioned detective story; once The Hunter begins communicating directly with Bob, his host, the two retrace the fugitive’s steps, investigating everyone who might have come into contact with it and systematically ruling out suspects through careful observation of their behavior.

Nobuaki Tadano’s 7 Billion Needles (2008-10) draws inspiration from Clement’s novel, preserving the basic concept while tweaking the storyline to work in a graphic format. Gone are the long passages explaining how Horizon (as the alien detective is called in 7 Billion Needles) insinuates himself into his human host; in their place are more direct, dramatic scenes showing us how Horizon’s host, a sullen teenage girl named Hikaru, wrestles with the emotional and physical burden of helping him pursue Maelstrom, a shape-shifting creature so powerful he’s left a trail of dead planets in his wake.

As a result, 7 Billion Needles reads more like horror than hard science fiction, placing more emphasis on monster-hunting and raw adolescent emotion than the mechanics of Horizon and Hikaru’s symbiotic relationship. Tadano’s choices make good sense from the standpoint of pacing and visual drama; so much of the original novel took place inside Bob, it’s hard to imagine how an artist would have brought those passages to life in comic-book form. (That summary makes Needle sound impossibly dirty, but rest assured, it isn’t.) Tadano’s monster, too, is much better defined than Clement’s; Clement’s fugitive only appears in the final chapters of the book, the nature of his crime never fully explained, whereas Maelstrom, Tadano’s creation, is something out of a good B-movie, causing his host du jour to undergo grotesque transformations before going all-out alien.

The real genius of 7 Billion Needles, however, is the way Tadano uses teen angst as a key plot element. In the very first pages of volume one, we learn that Hikaru is an orphan, living with an aunt and uncle not much older than she is. As the story unfolds, Tadano seeds the conversation with nuggets of information about Hikaru’s past; in volume two, for example, we learn that Hikaru and her father had lived on a small island, where they became social pariahs, enduring threats, taunts, and vandalism from their neighbors. Not surprisingly, Hikaru is withdrawn at the beginning of 7 Billion Needles, openly defying teachers by wearing headphones in class and avoiding even the most basic interaction with her peers. Once she agrees to help Horizon, however, she must begin talking to other people — the only way Horizon can detect Malestrom’s presence is for Hikaru to interact with Maelstrom’s host. Her awkward attempts to connect with other students, and her fumbling efforts at friendship, add a raw emotional energy to 7 Billion Needles that is largely absent from Clement’s original story.

The series’ artwork is its only shortcoming. As Deb Aoki noted in her review of volume one, all the female characters have the same bland, plastic face, making them difficult to distinguish from one another. (Tadano’s rather weak efforts at creating a memorable supporting cast also contribute to the impression of sameness.) Some of the monster designs, too, lack inspiration — a key shortcoming in a genre known for its nightmarish, otherworldly imagery. When we first see Maelstrom in his true form, he looks like a tyrannosaurus rex; not until the second volume are we treated to a more terrifying and unsettling image of Malestrom as a grotesque composite of all the human beings he’s ingested. Perhaps most disappointing is Tadano’s over-reliance on the flash-boom, using big bursts of light and sound effects to indicate Horizon’s powers without really showing us what’s happening.

On the whole, however, 7 Billion Needles is an intelligent update on Needle, substituting the heat of adolescent angst and monster-slaying for the cool detachment of hard science and old-fashioned gumshoeing. Recommended.

Review copies provided by Vertical, Inc. Volume two will be released on November 23, 2010.

7 BILLION NEEDLES, VOLS. 1-2 • BY NOBUAKI TADANO • VERTICAL, INC. • RATING: 16+

Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso

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Short Cuts has the unique distinction of being one of the first manga I ever loathed. In fairness to Usamaru Furuya, I read it early in my relationship with manga, when the only titles I knew were Lone Wolf and Cub, Tokyo Babylon, InuYasha, Mermaid Saga, and X/1999. I found Short Cuts bewildering, frankly, as I knew very little about ko-gals — one of Furuya’s favorite subjects — and even less about the other cultural trends and manga tropes that Furuya gleefully mocked. Then, too, Furuya’s fascination with teenage girls, panties, casual prostitution, and incest grew tiresome: how many times can you play the am-I-shocking-you card before the shtick gets old? With the release of Genkaku Picasso, however, I thought it was a good time to revisit Short Cuts and see if I’d unfairly dismissed a great artist or correctly judged him as an unrepentant perv.

What I found was a decidedly mixed bag, a smorgasbord of jokes about girl cliques, lecherous salarymen, Valentine’s Day gift-giving, travel guides for foreigners, and, yes, sex. Some of the best strips tackle obvious targets in unexpected ways. Mr. Pick-on-Me, a recurring character, is one such example: he’s a robot whose sole job is to endure harassment from school kids, providing them a more attractive target for bullying than each other. He proves so effective, however, that the school administrators begin bullying him, too, necessitating the purchase of more robots. Another recurring character, Mitsu Cutie, is an assassin who assembles lethal weapons from bento boxes and Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Though Furuya is hardly the first person to wring laughs from a sweet-faced character’s degenerate behavior, the gag is surprisingly funny, not least for the way in which it carefully filters spy thriller conventions through the lens of shojo manga; it’s as if Takao Saito and Arina Tanemura teamed up to produce a story about a twelve-year-old hit girl.

Furuya is also a first-class mimic, capable of channeling just about any other artist’s style in service of a good joke. In one gag, for example, he twists a TV-addled teen’s face into a perfect imitation of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s parasite aliens, while in another, he shows a woman with ridiculously long eyelashes performing her daily grooming routine, revealing her true identity only in the final panel: she’s Maetel, the heroine of Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999. Even Tezuka take his lumps: in Furuya’s version of Astro Boy, the iconic robot looks like the rotund, bespectacled Dr. Ochanomizu, while his maker resembles Astro, though in Furuya’s telling, the mad scientist likes baggy knee socks, a hallmark of ko-gal fashion.

The Astro Boy strip is one of many poking fun at ko-gals, Japan’s own answer to the Valley Girl. Like their Orange County counterparts, kogals are an easy target: their speech and attire are distinctive and easily parodied, as are their devotion to shopping, brand names, and hanging out in the Shibuya district. That’s not to say that Furuya’s jokes are bad; to the contrary, there are some genuinely inspired panels. In one strip, for example, we see a shrine featuring monumental sculptures of ko-gals attended by elderly male priests in short skirts and baggy socks, while in another, a balding, middle-aged man apprentices himself to become a ko-gal, applying himself with the steely resolve of a samurai or geisha-in-training.

A lot of the ko-gal humor is rather mean-spirited, however, portraying girls as hopelessly dim, materialistic, and uninterested in sex unless it comes with a financial reward. Though the male characters are ridiculed for their willingness to pay teenage girls for sexual favors, Furuya allows the reader to have his cake and eat it, too, laughing with recognition at his weakness for panty flashes while being treated to… panty flashes. From very cute girls. Furuya even pokes fun at himself, punishing one of his female characters for her dawning awareness of his “Lolita complex.” (He first attempts to white her out, then resorts to drawing her as a monster.) In the final panel of the “cut,” he’s asserted control over the character again, blackmailing her into silence. The whole sequence is done with a nudge and a wink, as if to make us complicit in Furuya’s predilection for teenage girls; it’s a classic non-apology, the equivalent of saying, “No offense, but sixteen-year-olds are hawt, dude!”

In many ways, Genkaku Picasso seems like one of the two-page “cuts” dragged out to epic lengths. The story focuses on Hikari Hamura, a weird, asexual twit who becomes so involved with his sketch book that he finds a beautiful girl’s attention a nuisance. While sitting on the bank of a river with his classmate Chiaki, a bizarre disaster kills them both. She’s reincarnated as a pocket-sized angel; he’s reborn with a new supernatural gift, the ability to draw other people’s dreams. The central joke of the series is that Hikari is a terrible dream interpreter, reading even darker intent into other students’ nightmares than is implied by the imagery.

The need to show where Hikari’s interpretations go astray proves Genkaku Picasso‘s biggest weakness. Consider “Manba and Kotone,” the third story of volume one, in which one of Hikari’s classmates is plagued by images of a teenage girl being tortured and tied up. As Ng Suat Tong points out in his review of Genkaku, the punchline is squicky: these images aren’t a dark fantasy, but pictures from a magazine shoot in which the girl volunteered to pose for her father, a professional photographer. Handled in two panels, the joke would hit like a nasty rim shot, but as the driving force behind the chapter’s storyline, it becomes… well, seriously creepy, pushing the material into the decidedly unfunny territory of incest and parent-child power dynamics.

I actually liked Genkaku Picasso more than Tong did, partly because I think Furuya is having a ball subverting shonen cliches; it’s the kind of series in which doing your best means staving off body rot, not winning a tournament, and a quiet, philosophical moment between two teens is interrupted by a fiery helicopter crash. I also liked some of the dream sequences, which showcase Furuya’s incredible versatility as an artist. However pedestrian the script may be in explaining the images’ meaning — and yes, there are some borderline Oprah moments in every story — the dreams are nonetheless arresting in their strange specificity.

After reading Short Cuts and Genkaku Picasso, I’m convinced of Usamaru Furuya’s ability draw just about anything, and to tell a truly dirty joke. I’m not yet persuaded that he can work in a longer form, but perhaps if he’s adapting someone else’s story — say, Osamu Daizi’s No Longer Human — he might find the right structure for containing and directing his furious artistic energy.

Review copy of Gengaku Picasso provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

SHORT CUTS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • NO RATING (MATERIAL BEST SUITED FOR MATURE READERS)

GENKAKU PICASSO, VOL. 1 • BY USAMARU FURUYA • VIZ • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Presents

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Back in 2007, John Jakala coined the trademark-worthy phrase “comeuppance theater” to describe horror stories in which a mean, violent, or greedy person gets his just desserts: a vain woman becomes visibly grotesque, a murderer dies at the hands of his victim’s ghost. In order for comeuppance theater to be dramatically persuasive, the author needs to do more than just dream up a suitably ironic punishment for the villain; he needs to convince us that the villain is sufficiently deserving of said punishment, that the villain is, in fact, monstrous in his desires or behavior and not simply an average joe exercising bad judgment. We may not be rooting for the villain’s demise — we may even feel a twinge of sympathy for him or self-identification with his plight — but if the author has done his job, the villain’s punishment seems necessary for restoring the social order.

In Presents (CMX), Kananko Inuki puts an interesting spin on the material, using our love of gifts as the jumping-off point for some funny, nasty, and intelligent episodes of comeuppance theater. The series’ host is Kurumi, a strange little girl who doles out presents to bad people and victims alike. Some gifts prove the recipients’ undoing: in “Present of Love,” for example, a manipulative college student goads her suitor into buying expensive jewelry that he can’t afford, even though she loathes him. His last gift to her — a set of earrings that Kurumi promised would “bring them together” — initiates a chain of events that unite the foolish pair in death. Other gifts provide victims a tool for payback: in “The Scary Present,” Kurumi gives a giant, man-eating box to a girl whose big sister gives horrific, mean-spirited gifts, while in “The Return Present,” Kurumi helps a bullied teen find an appropriate present for her tormentor.

Not all the stories follow this exact template; Kurumi becomes less central to the plots in volumes two or three, sometimes functioning as a passive observer, other times not appearing in the story at all. Volume two, for example, opens with a peculiar — and not entirely successful — trio of stories about Christmas gifts’ potential to corrupt little kids. Other stories read more like fairy tales: in “Dream Present,” a young woman endures a series of painful rituals in order to win a prince’s hand in marriage (in homage to Cinderella’s stepsisters, she even dispenses with a few toes), while in “Konotori” (or “stork”), magical cabbages bestow fertility on deserving couples.

The most potent stories shed light on the indignities of childhood, especially playground politics. Many of Presents‘ female characters are preoccupied with their place in the school’s pecking order, selecting uglier or quieter classmates to serve as foils more than friends. Rinko, the mean-girl villain of “The Return Gift,” is a classic example, calmly admitting that her friendship with the shy, slow Suzuko makes her “relax and feel better about herself,” then quietly fuming when Suzuko begins coming into her own socially and academically. The principal characters in “The Keepsake” and “The Most Wanted Present” are similarly opportunistic, demanding extreme fealty from lonely, passive classmates; when these eager-to-please girls die in an effort to honor their promises, their tormentors suffer retribution from beyond the grave.

Frenemies are a staple of young adult literature, of course, but the bald presentation of the issue in Presents conveys the cruelty of the behavior more effectively than a more restrained, realistic depiction could, capturing the intensity of both the bully and the victim’s feelings in an immediate, visceral fashion. Inuki’s imagery in all three stories is cartoonishly grotesque: Rinko, for example, develops monster zits that look more like the handiwork of an alien virus than P. acnes, while Mamiko, the manipulative frenemy in “The Keepsake,” winds up with a grotesque scar on her chest in the shape of her dead friend’s profile. (Mamiko coveted Sakiko’s cameo brooch.) The pimples and the scars make visible Rinko and Mamiko’s true selves; though both are fully aware of what they’re doing (“I was happy to see the look of distress on Sakiko’s face,” Mamiko narrates), it’s not until they see their deformed likenesses that they grasp how hurtful their behavior really is.

The fact that bullies, mean girls, and big sisters factor so prominently into Presents suggests that Inuki was writing for a younger audience, a supposition borne out by her fondness for goosing the story with fleeting but gross images: a box of cockroaches, pus-covered wounds, rotting corpses. It’s a pity, then, that CMX opted for a Mature rating, as I think the series works well for teens, depicting the emotional horrors of childhood in a vivid, gruesomely funny way. The stories are varied enough to sustain an adult’s interest as well; readers with fond memories of Tales from the Crypt or The Twilight Zone will find a lot to like about Inuki’s work, from the efficiently of her storytelling — many of Presents‘ best chapters are less than twenty pages — to the pointedness of her punishments.

PRESENTS, VOLS. 1-3 • BY KANAKO INUKI • CMX • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading is an occasional feature that highlights titles that aren’t getting the critical attention — or readership — they deserve. Click here for the inaugural column; click here for the series archive.

My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga

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Whether by accident or design, the very first manga I read and liked were horror titles: “The Laughing Target,” Mermaid Saga, Uzumaki. I’m not sure why I find spooky stories so compelling in manga form; I don’t generally read horror novels, and I don’t have the constitution for gory movies. But manga about zombies? Or vampires? Or angry spirits seeking to avenge their own deaths? Well, there’s always room on my bookshelf for another one, even if the stories sometimes feel overly familiar or — in the case of artists like Kanako Inuki and Kazuo Umezu — make no sense at all. Below is a list of my ten favorite scary manga, which run the gamut from psychological horror to straight-up ick.

10. Lament of the Lamb
By Kei Toume • Tokyopop • 7 volumes
Kei Toume puts a novel spin on vampirism, presenting it not as a supernatural phenomenon, but as a symptom of a rare genetic disorder. His brother-and-sister protagonists, Kazuna and Chizuna, begin exhibiting the same tendencies as their deceased mother, losing control at the sight or suggestion of blood, and enduring cravings so intense they induce temporary insanity. Long on atmosphere and short on plot, Lament of the Lamb won’t be every vampire lover’s idea of a rip-snortin’ read; the manga focuses primarily on the intense, unhealthy relationship between Kazuna and Chizuna, and very little on blood-sucking. What makes Lament of the Lamb so deeply unsettling, however, is the strong current of violence and fear that flows just beneath its surface; Kazuna and Chizuna may not be predators, but we see just how much self-control it takes for them to contain their bloodlust.

9. School Zone
By Kanako Inuki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
In this odd, hallucinatory, and sometimes very funny series, a group of students summon the ghosts of people who died on school grounds, unleashing the spirits’ wrath on their unsuspecting classmates. School Zone is as much a meditation on childhood fears of being ridiculed or ostracized as it is a traditional ghost story; time and again, the students’ own response to the ghosts is often more horrific than the ghosts’ behavior. Inuki’s artwork isn’t as gory or imaginative as some of her peers’, though she demonstrates a genuine flair for comically gruesome thrills: one girl is dragged into a toilet, for example, while another is attacked by a scaly, long-armed creature that lives in the infirmary. Where Inuki really shines, however, is in her ability to capture the primal terror that a dark, empty building can inspire in the most rational person. Even when the story takes one its many silly detours — and yes, there are many WTF?! moments in School Zone — Inuki makes us feel her characters’ vulnerability as they explore the school grounds after hours. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09

8. Mail
By Housui Yamazaki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
If you like you horror neat with a twist, Mail might be your kind of manga: a meticulously crafted selection of short, spooky tales in which a handsome exorcist goes toe-to-toe with all sort of ghosts. The stories are a mixture of urban legend and folklore: a GPS system which directs a woman to the scene of a crime, an accident victim who haunts the elevator shaft where he died, a possessed doll. Through precise linework and superb command of light, Hosui Yamakazi transforms everyday situations — returning home from work, logging onto a computer — into extraordinary ones in which shadows and corners harbor very nasty surprises. Best of all, Mail never overstays its welcome; it’s the manga equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, offering a number of short, trenchant variations on a single theme and then wrapping things up neatly.

7. After School Nightmare
By Setona Mizushiro • Go! Comi • 10 volumes
Masahiro, a charming, popular high school student, harbors a terrible secret: though he appears to be male, the lower half of his body is female. At a nurse’s urging, he agrees to visit the school infirmary for a series of dream workshops in which he interacts with classmates who are also grappling with serious problems, from child abuse to pathological insecurity. The students’ collective dreams are vivid and strange, unfolding with the peculiar, fervid logic of a nightmare; buildings flood, stairwells lead to dead ends, and characters undergo sudden, dramatic transformations. Making the dream sequences extra creepy is the way Setona Mizushiro renders the students, choosing an avatar for each that represents their true selves: a black knight, a faceless body, a long, disembodied arm that grasps and slithers. Attentive readers will be rewarded for their patient observation with an unexpected but brilliant twist in the very final pages.

6. The Drifting Classroom
By Kazuo Umezu • VIZ Media • 11 volumes
It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves from their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to their own time. (Their entire elementary school has slipped through a rift in the space-time continuum, depositing everyone in the distant future.) The story is as relentless as an episode of 24: characters are maimed or killed in every chapter, and almost every line of dialogue is shouted. (Sho’s petty arguments with his mother are delivered as emphatically as his later attempts to alert classmates to the dangers of their new surroundings.) Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups. If that isn’t the ultimate ten-year-old’s nightmare, I don’t know what is. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 10/15/06

5. Mermaid Saga
By Rumiko Takahashi • VIZ Media • 4 volumes
This four-volume series ran on and off in Shonen Sunday for nearly ten years, chronicling the adventures of Yuta, a fisherman who gained immortality by eating mermaid flesh. Desperate to live an ordinary existence, Yuta spends five hundred years wandering Japan in search of a mermaid who can restore his mortality, crossing paths with criminals, immortals, and “lost souls,” people reduced to a monstrous condition by the poison in mermaid flesh. Though the stories follow a somewhat predictable pattern, Takahashi’s writing is brisk and assured, propelled by snappy dialogue and genuinely creepy scenarios. The imagery is tame by horror standards, but Takahashi doesn’t shy away from the occasional grotesque or gory image, using them to underscore the ugly consequences of seeking immortality. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09.

4. Dororo
By Osamu Tezuka • Vertical, Inc. • 3 volumes
The next time you feel inclined to criticize your parents, remember Hyakkimaru’s plight: his father pledged Hyakkimaru’s body parts to forty-eight demons in exchange for political power, leaving his son blind, deaf, and limbless at birth. After being rescued and raised by a kindly doctor, Hyakkimaru embarks on a quest to reclaim his eyes and ears, wandering across a war-torn landscape where demons take advantage of the chaos to prey on humans. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore (e.g. a nine-tailed fox), while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination (e.g. a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath). Though the story ostensibly unfolds during the Warring States period, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear. For my money, one of Tezuka’s best series, peroid. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/27/09

3. Parasyte
By Hitoshi Iwaaki • Del Rey • 8 volumes
Part The Defiant Ones, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Parasyte focuses on the symbiotic relationship between Shin, a high school student, and Migi, the alien parasite that takes up residence in his right hand after failing to take control of Shin’s brain. The two go on the lam after another parasite kills Shin’s mother — and makes Shin and Migi look like the culprits. If the human character designs are a little blank and clumsy, the parasites are not; Hitoshi Iwaaki twists the human body into some of the most sinister-looking shapes since Pablo Picasso painted Dora Maar. The violence is graphic but not sadistic, as most of the action takes place between panels, with only the grisly aftermath represented in pictorial form. The best part of Parasyte, however, is the script; Shin and Migi trade barbs with the antagonistic affection of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, revealing Migi to be smarter and more objective than his human host. Shin and Migi’s banter adds an element of levity to the story, to be sure, but their heated debates about survival are also a sly poke at the idea that human beings’ intellect and emotional attachments place them squarely atop the food chain. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/2/10

2. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
By Eiji Otsuki and Housui Yamakazi • Dark Horse • 13+ volumes
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is comprised of five members: Karatsu, a monk-in-training; Numata, a hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture; Yata, an odd duck who communicates primarily through a puppet that he wears on his left hand; Makino, a chatty embalmer; and Sasaki, a hacker with an entrepreneurial streak. Working as a team, the quintet helps the dead cross over, using their myriad talents to locate bodies, speak with ghosts, and resolve the spirits’ unfinished business. The set-up is pure gold, giving the episodic series some structure, while allowing Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamakazi the flexibility to stage grisly murders and discover corpses in a variety of unexpected places. Think Scooby Doo with less wholesome protagonists and scarier spooks and you have a good idea of what makes this offbeat series tick. And yes, the gang even has their own van. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09

1. Gyo
By Junji Ito • VIZ Media • 2 volumes
From the standpoint of craft, Uzumaki is a better manga, but it’s hard to top the sheer creepiness factor of Gyo, which taps into one of the most primordial of fears: being eaten! Here’s how I explained its appeal to David Welsh at The Comics Reporter:

Like many other children of the 1970s, Jaws left an indelible impression on me. I wasn’t just terrified of swimming in the ocean, I was reluctant to immerse myself in any standing body of water — swimming pools, bathtubs, ponds — that might conceivably harbor a shark. That irrational fear of encountering a great white somewhere it’s not supposed to be even led me to wonder what it might be like to bump into one on land — could I outrun it?

I’m guessing Junji Ito also suffers from icthyophobia, because Gyo looks like my worst nightmare, a world in which hideously deformed fish crawl out of the sea on mechanical legs and terrorize humans, spreading a disease that quickly jumps species. As horror stories go, many of Gyo‘s details aren’t terribly well explained — how, exactly, the fish acquired legs remains unclear despite talk of military experiments gone awry — but the imaginative artwork appeals on a visceral level. Gyo‘s highpoint comes midway through volume one, when a great white shark chases the hero and his girlfriend through a house, even scaling the stairs (no pun intended) in pursuit of its next meal. The scene is utterly ridiculous, but it works — for a few terrible, thrilling pages I learned the answer to my long-standing question, What would it be like to be chased by a shark on land? In a word: scary.

In other words, this is my worst nightmare:

So those are ten of my favorite spooky manga! What horror manga are on your top-ten list? Inquiring minds want to know!

Cross Game 1 by Mitsuru Adachi: A-

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When the first volume of Cross Game arrived at my house, I’m pretty sure my exact words were, “Eee!” Happily, I liked it every bit as I thought I would.

The back cover really says it best: “Cross Game is a moving drama that is heartfelt and true, yet in the brilliant hands of manga artist Mitsuru Adachi, delightfully flows with a light and amusing touch. The series centers around a boy named Ko, the family of four sisters who live down the street and the game of baseball. This poignant coming-of-age story will change your perception of what shonen manga can be.”

Warning: it’s impossible to discuss one of the nicest aspects of this series without revealing a major spoiler. Proceed at your own risk.

The first of the three volumes of Cross Game that VIZ has bundled together in an attractive omnibus serves as a prologue, of sorts. We meet protagonist Ko Kitamura when he’s in fifth grade, a mischievous and lazy kid whose parents run a sporting goods shop. Nearby, Mr. Tsukishima runs a batting center and his four daughters are a part of Ko’s life, though none more so than sunny Wakaba, who was born the same day as Ko and who alone has the power to motivate him. She’s a very special girl, with a knack for befriending other kids despite their appearance or reputation; the influence her acceptance has on her classmate Akaishi, commonly regarded as somewhat of a hoodlum, is destined to be lifelong.

Tragedy strikes at swimming camp when Wakaba attempts to save someone else and ends up drowning herself. Despite her physical absence from the story after this point, Wakaba’s presence remains a palpable one. As the story jumps ahead four years, we find Ko still continuing to perform the daily workout he promised her he would do as a means of improving his baseball skills and Akaishi leading the junior high baseball team (and staying out of trouble). Ko hasn’t joined the team because of some jerks that were on it when he was a first year, but once Akaishi tells him that on the last morning of her life, Wakaba passed by his parents’ store and mentioned that she’d dreamed about Akaishi and Ko going to Koshien together, he begins training without another word necessary. Ko may be a slacker if left to his own devices, but if it’s something Wakaba wanted, he is going to make sure it becomes reality, no matter what. It’s clear Akaishi feels the same.

The boys move into high school, where the interim principal has hired an unprincipled baseball coach with a good record at Koshien. Ko, Akaishi, and their friend Nakanishi don’t want to play for such a fellow and opt to remain on the junior varsity team; as the volume ends they’re preparing to show up the varsity team in an upcoming scrimmage game. Tying in with this is the sad story of Aoba, Wakaba’s younger sister. Aoba is passionate about baseball and is even the captain of the junior high team. Unfortunately, because she’s a girl she can only ever pitch in practice games and can never be deemed more than a devoted fan. Aoba and Ko clash personally, as well, as she still resents him for the closeness he shared with Wakaba, though it’s clear they’re destined to end up together.

Cross Game is a pretty low-key story that’s part slice-of-life and part sports manga. Typically, the protagonists in the latter don’t have such a touching reason for wanting to excel at their sport, and neither do they feature two guys nurturing a bittersweet memory of the same beloved girl in their hearts. The characters really grow on you—Ko seems a little bratty at first, but shows time and again that he’s a good person, particularly in how he treats Momiji, Wakaba and Aoba’s little sister—and I love that Ko’s two best friends are kind of burly and unattractive. You don’t see that a lot in manga.

I have two minor complaints, but I’ve been given to understand that they’re both common attributes of Mitsuru Adachi’s manga. The first is that some of the character designs—particularly of children—are positively dumpy. Too, a lot of the recurring characters have faces that are difficult to remember, though this is not the case at all for the primary players. Secondly, the fourth wall gets broken all the time. Adachi himself appears and the characters are often shown reading his manga. The story doesn’t take itself too seriously, so this is not as glaring as similar moments in NANA, for example, but I found it kind of irksome all the same.

The second omnibus of Cross Game, this time containing volumes four and five of the original Japanese releases, is due in January. I am looking forward to that scrimmage game—and Ko finally getting to show off his amazing baseball abilities—so much that it isn’t even funny.

Cross Game is published in English by VIZ, who is bundling the seventeen-volume series into eight chunky tomes. This one is comprised of the first three volumes and the others will contain two each.

This review was originally published at Comics Should Be Good.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Tidbits: Shonen Jumping for Joy

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Welcome back to Tidbits, a new feature for shorter reviews! This time I take a look at three continuing series from VIZ’s Shonen Jump imprint. First up, it’s volumes 28-31 of One Piece, followed by volumes 9-12 of Slam Dunk and a single volume (the third) of the aesthetically pleasing Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee.

One Piece 28-31 by Eiichiro Oda: B+
Volumes 28-30 consist almost entirely of fighting, as the forces of the all-powerful “Kami” of Skypiea, Eneru, clash with the Shandians (fighting to regain their lost city), while the Straw Hat pirates (just lookin’ for some gold) are caught in the middle. Eneru, as it turns out, has staged the whole thing as a survival game, and figures that after three hours, only five of the original 81 combatants will survive. After this, we get periodic updates as to how many remain, a device I found strangely satisfying.

Although some of the battles are between characters we’ve never seen before, those encounters are usually brief. While Luffy spends the entirety of volume 29 stuck inside a giant serpent, many of the other Straw Hats get a chance to shine, especially Chopper and Robin, whose battles with Eneru’s minions show off the versatility of their respective powers. Nami, too, gets more experience using her new weapons and Conis, a resident of Skypiea, marshals her courage to defy the Kami and warn the people of his plans to destroy the island. There’s been some discussion lately about manga that passes the Bechdel Test, and these volumes exemplify why One Piece does so with flying colors.

Speaking of Robin, I am liking her more and more. This is the first time we’ve really seen her on her own and though it’s always been evident how intelligent and competent she is, it’s nice to see she’s also trustworthy and kind of a badass. She’s generally reserved but is passionate about archaeology, and through her we begin to get hints about a 100-year gap in the history of the world, something that could turn out to be huge. At one point she references “the unspoken history that the land below has ceased to talk about,” and later discovers that Shandora “fought against the enemy.” Thirty volumes in and we’re just starting something so big and potentially awesome? Oda, I think I love you.

After Eneru puts in motion his plan to destroy Skypiea, a mass exodus of its residents ensues. Volume 31 departs from the present panic to flesh out the history of the island and how it ties in with Mont Blanc Noland. This is actually the best part of the Skypiea arc so far and explains quite a few things while being a durn good story in and of itself. The arc doesn’t quite wrap up here, but now that I fully understand the significance of the golden bell in the city of Shandora, I care a lot more about the outcome than I have done in recent volumes!

Slam Dunk 9-12 by Takehiko Inoue: B+
It takes some willpower not to devour each new release of Slam Dunk, but it’s so immensely satisfying to read multiple volumes back-to-back that the wait is worth it!

Volume nine marks the start of the Kanagawa Prefectural Tournament, in which the Shohoku team is able to take part thanks to Hanamichi’s friends taking responsibility for the on-court brawl that occurred in the previous volume. Shohoku is underestimated at first, but the return of Miyagi and Mitsui to the team—both of whom are greeted with somewhat awed recognition from the crowd—makes them a force to be reckoned with. They progress steadily through the tournament, eventually ending up in the final four against Kainan, a school that has made it to Nationals sixteen years in a row.

Hanamichi is his usual annoying self to begin with, demanding that the ball be passed to him and proclaiming himself a genius at every opportunity. After fouling out in each of the first four games, and after recognizing the skills and strengths of his teammates, he finally realizes that he’s not such hot stuff after all. Despite occasional relapses, this marks a real turning point for Hanamichi, as he is able to accept tutelage more readily and function better as a part of the team. For example, though he originally harbored dreams of outscoring Rukawa, once he makes snagging rebounds his focus instead, he’s able to contribute a great deal to Shohoku’s success. His progress and maturation combined with a slightly more humble attitude go a long way toward making him more likable, and it’s quite touching when he gets his first rousing cheer from the crowd.

Structurally, Slam Dunk is very similar to The Prince of Tennis. Though I love the latter a lot, Slam Dunk is the more exciting read, a fact I’d chalk up to the nature of the sport. In tennis, our lead characters battle either singly or in pairs against their foes, while the rest are relegated to commentary until it’s their turn. Here, all the principle characters are on the court at the same time, which gives more immediacy to the way they’re able to motivate each other. True, the characters in Eyeshield 21 all play simultaneously, too, but because basketball moves at a faster pace than football, the effect here is exhilarating, bordering on addictive.

Unfortunately, there’s no more Slam Dunk due until December! Perhaps I’ll investigate whether Inoue’s more dramatic basketball manga, REAL, can help stave off the cravings.

Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee 3 by Hiroyuki Asada: C+
Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee is the story of Lag Seeing, a twelve-year-old boy who has just become a Letter Bee (government mail carrier) in the perpetually dark country of Amberground, inspired by Gauche Suede, a Letter Bee he met five years ago. Lag had hoped to reunite with Gauche, but after learning that his hero disappeared six months after he last saw him, he meets with Gauche’s sister, Sylvette, and promises to find out what happened to her brother.

Gauche was by far the more interesting of the two characters featured in volume one, so it’s nice to get a few glimpses of him here. These tibits—and the bonus story about reuniting an aging dingo (animal companion) with the Letter Bee he faithfully served—are the best things about the volume. Lag is still not a very interesting protagonist and I’ve grown to pretty much hate his dingo, Niche. I’m sure she’s intended to be comic relief, but the story would be better served by cutting her unfunny antics and devoting that page space to clarifying the narrative, which is still going on and on about the importance of “heart.”

Back in January when I reviewed volume two, I said I’d give Tegami Bachi one more chance to win me over. As problematic as the series continues to be, after what we learn about Gauche’s disappearance and mysterious memory loss in this volume, I can’t imagine myself stopping without learning what happened to him. I don’t think this counts as “won over” so much as “minimally intrigued,” but either way, I’ll probably keep reading.

Review copies for volumes nine, eleven, and twelve of Slam Dunk provided by the publisher.

The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography

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Reading The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography, I was irresistibly reminded of a quip attributed to Thomas Carlyle: “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” Though the Dalai Lama has lead one of the most exemplary lives in recent memory, demonstrating uncommon wisdom, patience, and pragmatism in his efforts to publicize Tibet’s plight, Tetsu Saiwai’s paint-by-numbers biography reduces the Dalai Lama from a worldly religious leader to a saintly cipher.

Saiwai’s work takes its inspiration from Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama’s 1991 autobiography, and Kundun, its subsequent adaptation by Martin Scorsese. Like Kundun, The 14th Dalai Lama focuses on the first twenty-odd years of Tenzin Gyatso’s life, from 1937, when he was pronounced the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, to 1959, when he fled to Dharamsala, India, to escape escalating violence between Tibetan nationals and Chinese military forces. Many of the scenes in Saiwai’s book have analogues in Scorsese’s film: we see Tenzin Gyatso correctly identify objects that belonged to his predecessor, thus revealing himself to be the next Dalai Lama; we watch him spend time with Austrian mountaineer (and former SS officer) Heinrich Harrer, a relationship explored in the film Seven Years in Tibet; and we follow him to Beijing, where Chairman Mao exploits the Tibetan leader’s sincerity and youthful naivete for propaganda. Saiwai also offers numerous — if brief — scenes dramatizing the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, showing us both the internal disagreement within the Dalai Lama’s advisory circle and the growing unrest in the streets of Lhasa.

Readers familiar with Scorsese’s film will experience deja vu reading Saiwai’s work, as the manga feels like a shot-by-shot remake. It isn’t, of course, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Saiwai relied too heavily on Scorsese’s movie for guidance on what events to include in the narrative.

The comparison between the film and the manga reveals another drawback to The 14th Dalai Lama: it lacks the visual drama of Kundun. One of the movie’s most arresting aspects was its cinematography; though Scorsese’s crew wasn’t allowed to film in Tibet (most of the movie was shot in Morocco), the art director collaborated with Tibetan cast members to meticulously recreate the costumes, religious ceremonies, and interiors of the Potala Palace. Almost every frame of the movie was saturated in rich color — azure skies, crimson robes, golden objects — an almost painterly affectation that suggested the radiance of a Titian canvas. Saiwai’s unadorned, grayscale artwork, by contrast, seems impoverished; there’s very little detail, even in his depictions of religious rituals, and his efforts to represent Tibet’s rugged terrain barely suggest how dry and unforgiving the landscape can be.

What Kundun and The 14th Dalai Lama share, however, is an uncritical, even devotional, attitude to their subject. In his 1997 review of the film, Roger Ebert contrasted Scorsese’s saintly portrayal of the Dalai Lama in Kundun with his all-too-human depiction of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ:

Kundun is like one of the popularized lives of the saints that Scorsese must have studied as a boy in Catholic grade school. I studied the same lives, which reduced the saints to a series of anecdotes. At the end of a typical episode, the saint says something wise, pointing out the lesson, and his listeners fall back in amazement and gratitude. The saint seems to stand above time, already knowing the answers and the outcome, consciously shaping his life as a series of parables.

In Kundun, there is rarely the sense that a living, breathing and (dare I say?) fallible human inhabits the body of the Dalai Lama. Unlike Scorsese’s portrait of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, this is not a man striving for perfection, but perfection in the shape of a man.

The same could be said for Saiwai’s work: in almost every scene, the Dalai Lama displays preternatural wisdom, sagely counseling those around him. We never see the Dalai Lama in exile, when he faced new challenges to his regime’s authority — moments that might reveal him to be a more human, more canny individual than is suggested by the carefully selected episodes from his early life. I say this not to criticize the Dalai Lama, but to recognize him as a spiritual leader with uncommon insight into the modern condition, as someone who regularly engages members of the scientific community, who intelligently uses mass media to disseminate Buddhist teaching, and who views his faith not as a set of practices to be unquestionably preserved and transmitted to future generations, but as a religion capable of evolving; can you imagine the Pope speculating that his successor might be a woman?

Like his portrayal of the Dalai Lama, Saiwai’s characterization of Chinese-Tibetan relations is devoid of nuance. Saiwai characters’ explain in simple, stark terms what Chinese “modernization” efforts meant for Tibet: devastation of natural resources, and systematic efforts to erradicate the indigenous language, agricultural practices, and religion. (In the introduction to Essential Tibetan Buddhism, Robert Thurman notes that fewer than twenty of the country’s 6,267 monasteries remain open.) Yet nowhere does Saiwai address the long and fraught relationship between China and Tibet — a serious omission, as this history helps explain why China viewed Tibet as part of its territory, and why other nations were reluctant to acknowledge Tibetan sovereignty. These historical facts in no way justify Chinese occupation of Tibet, or diminish the horror of what the Tibetan people have endured; as Thurman observes, nearly 1.3 million have perished under Chinese rule, some while performing hard labor, others for opposing the regime. A story as sad and complex as Tibet’s, however, deserves a more thoughtful treatment than it’s given in Saiwai’s book.

Given the limitations of the text, the best audience for The 14th Dalai Lama are young readers. The book’s directness and sincerity make it an engaging read, while its note of moral outrage over Chinese atrocities may prompt teens to learn more about the 1950 invasion. Readers already familiar with the conflict won’t find much here to enrich their understanding of the man or the region, though they may come away from the manga with a renewed sense of the Dalai Lama’s resilience and courage.

Review copy provided by Penguin Books.

THE 14TH DALAI LAMA: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY • BY TETSU SAIWAI • PENGUIN BOOKS • 208 pp.

Cat-Eyed Boy, Vols. 1-2

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Kazuo Umezu’s writing defies easy categorization. His horror stories unfold in an almost haphazard fashion, seldom offering Western readers the kind of inevitable showdown between supernatural menace and righteous avenger that’s de rigeur in grindhouse flicks. In a less charitable mood, I might suggest that Umezu was simply making it up as he went along, adding whatever Grand Guignol flourishes tickled his fancy; in a more critically responsible frame of mind, I’d argue that Umezu uses non-sequitors, heightened realism, and Freudian imagery to create a hallucinatory atmosphere that thumbs its nose at logic or teleology.

In the afterword to Cat-Eyed Boy, artist Mizuho Hiroyama offers a more geneorus assessment of Umezu’s approach to storytelling:

But just what is this unforgettable bizarreness that lies at the core of Umezu’s world? Is it a child’s nightmare? I think that this probably the best way to describe it. It’s simply fear. The escalating fear and imagination of a child who is unable to fall asleep in a pitch-dark room late at night, thinking about the worst-case scenarios and wondering, “What would I do if this happened?”

I think Hiroyama is on to something here: as anyone who’s read The Drifting Classroom knows, that entire series reads like a child’s nightmare, filled with terrifying monsters, barren wastelands, and irresponsible, ineffectual adults whose inability to save the day forces the stranded students to rely on themselves.

These same motifs recur throughout Umezu’s oeuvre. The eleven stories that comprise Cat-Eyed Boy, for example, are chock-full of demons — some grotesque, some comic — vengeful spirits, dead parents, and spiteful adults. Cat-Eyed Boy, a child-like creature who’s half-human, half-demon, finds himself relegated to the margins of both worlds, making him especially vulnerable to predation, in spite of his obvious strength and cunning. Like Sho and his Drifting Classroom peers, Cat-Eyed Boy must frequently outsmart unscrupulous adults (and a few monsters) to save his own skin.

Cat-Eyed Boy’s role varies from story to story: in some, he’s an active participant, a trickster figure who cajoles or deceives, while in others, he’s an observer. The strongest entry of the collection, “The Tsunami Summoners,” is, not coincidentally, the one in which Umezu portrays his odd little hero as a truly grotesque figure, one whose liminal status arouses genuine pity in readers. On one level, “Summoners” is an origin story, explaining where Cat-Eyed Boy came from, how he was exiled from the demon world, and why humans greet him with such suspicion, despite his frequent efforts to intervene on their behalf. On another, it’s a superb example of Umezu-style comeuppance theater, as a small coastal village is punished not only for mistreating one of their own members but for ignoring an ancient warning about a sea-borne menace. Everything about the story works beautifully: the crack pacing, the unforeseen plot twists, and the genuine pathos of Cat-Eyed Boy’s situation as he tries to protect the same villagers who tormented his sole human friend. The summoners are a particularly effective menace, as their initial appearance is relatively benign – they look like brain-shaped rocks, perfect for building walls and houses – allowing them to insinuate themselves into every aspect of the villagers’ lives before anyone is aware of the danger they pose.

Other standouts include “The One-Legged Monster of Ondai,” a cautionary tale about the evils of lepidoptery; “The Thousand-Handed Demon,” a blood bath in which a evil spirit possesses a statue of the Buddhist deity Kwannon; and “The Stairs,” a story about a boy so eager to be see his late mother that he ignores all warnings about the perils of crossing between the lands of the living and the dead.

Several stories were simply too long or scattershot to leave much of an impression. The chief offender is “The Band of One Hundred Monsters,” a rambling tale in which a group of hideously deformed humans aspire to become demons. I thought it was going to be an extended riff on the creative process, as the story initially focuses on the interaction between the “monsters” and a manga-ka known for his bizarre horror tales. Instead, Umezu quickly dispatches the manga-ka and steers the narrative in a wholly unanticipated direction, with the Band of One Hundred murdering pretty yet soulless people. That narrative u-turn does little to bind the two halves of the story together, nor does it take the story in a particularly interesting direction; the notion that beauty is only skin-deep has been explored in countless horror stories to better effect, as Umezu’s earlier work “The Mirror” attests.

Viz presents Cat-Eyed Boy in two generously sized volumes, totaling almost 1,000 pages of story. Both are beautifully packaged, with French flaps, creamy paper stock, and color pages. I particularly liked the endpapers, which catalog the various demons found in both volumes. And what a rogue’s gallery it is — these monsters are considerably more grotesque than anything Umezu conjured for earlier series, sporting myriad eyes, warty skin, tentacles, and grossly misshapen bodies. Most of the stories aren’t terribly spooky or shocking by contemporary standards, but the sheer oddness of the character designs will get under your skin like images from a particularly vivid nightmare.

This is a revised version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on August 12, 2008.

CAT-EYED BOY, VOLS. 1 – 2 • BY KAZUO UMEZU • VIZ • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Demon Sacred, Vols. 1-2

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Demon Sacred is shojo manga’s answer to the everything bagel, substituting hot scientists, dragons, pop idols, twins, secret government research facilities, and time-traveling aliens for garlic chips and sesame seeds. That such an unlikely combination of ingredients proves complimentary is nothing sort of miraculous — it’s hard to imagine how rock stars and rifts in the space-time continuum could co-exist in the same manga without the whole enterprise descending into complete silliness, but Natsumi Itsuki walks the fine line between stupid and clever with the grace of a high-wire acrobat.

Consider the first three chapters of the series: in them, we’re introduced to Rena, the sole survivor of an incident involving unicorns; her fourteen-year-old daughters Rina and Mona, one of whom has developed a disease that causes her to age backwards; and the girls’ guardian Shinobu, a handsome, pony-tailed researcher who is toiling away on a cure for Return Syndrome and — natch — earned a PhD from Harvard before his eighteenth birthday. Those three storylines alone provide ample material for a good shojo fantasy, but Itsuki cranks up the narrative nuttiness to eleven in subsequent chapters, tossing in a handsome “demon” — in fact, a shape-shifting alien from another dimension — who knew the twins’ mother, and a second, more powerful demon who assumes the form of the girls’ favorite pop singer.

A cynic might dismiss these additional characters as pandering to teen girl taste, but Mika and K2 serve an important role in advancing the plot, shedding light on Rina and Mona’s past (Mom disappeared when they were four) and offering a potential cure for Rina’s condition. Ditto for some of the comic-relief episodes, in which K2 impersonates a real-life idol; if Itsuki always played it straight, the story would seem positively ludicrous instead of charmingly overstuffed. Remember, the opening pages of the series involve a stampede of unicorns emerging from the aurora borealis and trampling a group of tourists in the Finnish countryside. Even Madeline L’Engle didn’t have the guts to try that.

I’d be the first to admit that Demon Sacred isn’t as well constructed as Itsuki’s Jyu-Oh-Sei, a tight, logical exercise in hard science fiction; if anything, Demon Sacred feels freer and messier than her earlier work. That impression of spontaneity stems from the casual way in which Itsuki assembles plot elements, like a chef rummaging through the refrigerator and grabbing whatever looks appetizing. There’s no obvious rationale for inter-dimensional, time-traveling aliens to assume the form of mythical Earth-beasts, other than the fact it tickled Itsuki’s authorial fancy. Yet that kitchen-sink quality is a big part of Demon Sacred‘s appeal; I’d be lying if I denied my pleasure in seeing a character quote from the Book of Revelations, or imagining a universe in which griffins, unicorns, and fire-breathing dragons could assume the form of popular singers.

It’s hard to guess how Itsuki will resolve the myriad subplots introduced in the first two volumes, but the story unfolds in such a feverish, urgent fashion that it’s easy to forgive the occasional narrative shortcuts or capitulations to shojo convention. (See “hot young scientist” and “pop idols,” above.) Demon Sacred may not be the best new manga of 2010, but it’s a strong contender for most addictive.

Review copies provided by Tokyopop.

DEMON SACRED, VOLS. 1-2 • BY NATSUMI ITSUKI • TOKYOPOP • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Manga Artifacts: Magical Mates

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It’s hard to remember a time when the only translated manga featured explosions, monsters, and naked women, but for most of the 1980s and 1990s, manly-man manga was the norm; American publishers barely acknowledged that female comic fans existed in or outside Japan. There were licensed manga with female protagonists, to be sure, but The Legend of Mother Sarah and Mai The Psychic Girl were clearly written for male audiences, as the reductive tagline on Mai‘s front cover attests: “She is pretty. She is psychic. She is Japanese.” (Read: “She might go out with you.”) That began to change in the mid-1990s, when a few publishers made the then-radical decision to introduce manga for girls. VIZ released Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven (1995) and A, A’ (1997); Mixx made a hit out of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon (1997); and Antarctic Press, home of Ninja High School and Hurricane Girls, dabbled in shojo with Mio Odagi’s Magical Mates (1996).

If VIZ took the high road, introducing readers to one of Japan’s most influential and beloved creators, and Mixx took the middle road, courting female fans of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and the Sailor Moon anime, Antarctic took the cheap road, licensing a self-published work by an obscure artist. The fact that Magical Mates reached American shores at all had more to do with who Odagi knew than the quality of her work. As Jason Thompson explains in a recent House of 1000 Manga column, Odagi was a member of Studio Do-Do, a small group of artists that had an inside connection at Antarctic Press: Ippongi Bang, whose friendship with Antarctic staffers helped open the door for her fellow Studio Do-Do artists.

Flipping through the six issues that comprise Magical Mates, Mio Odagi’s lack of skill is painfully obvious. The stories — which focus on a trio of tarot-reading, spell-casting teens — abound in the kind of poorly drawn panels and non-sequitors that would make a Hana to Yume editor pull out her hair. Odagi lavishes considerable attention on her characters’ eyes, rendering their irises and lashes with a meticulous precision that’s fundamentally at odds with the slapdash way she draws the rest of their bodies. She also struggles with backgrounds; her characters often appear to be floating above the picture plane, unencumbered by gravity.

Each story revolves around a romantic entanglement of one sort or another: in “Love on a Friendship Bracelet,” for example, Rinko, Kana, and Noemi help the manager of the boys’ soccer team express her feelings to the arrogant star player, while in “The Priestesses’ Love Letter,” the girls play matchmaker for the class brain and the rock guitarist she secretly adores. Not much connects the episodes, save for running gags about Rinko’s vanity — she vies with Kana and Noemi to be the “star” of the series — and about Rinko’s long-suffering suitor Eiji, a short, bespectacled nerd with an alter ego: The Student President of Darkness, a malicious teen who carries out Eiji’s darker wishes.

The Student President of Darkness gag embodies what’s good and bad about Magical Mates. Eiji’s frequent transformations are the kind of problem that could easily be fixed by logic or a lanyard; the fact that he’s always absent when the President is sabotaging a soccer match or flooding a water park doesn’t seem to register with Rinko or her friends. Yet for all the suspension of disbelief that Eiji’s Jekyll-and-Hyde persona demands, these transformations serve an important function, adding a badly needed element of emotional authenticity to Magical Mates; Eiji’s jealousy feels more real than anything else in the series, providing a reliable source of comic relief and dramatic conflict.

More striking than the stories themselves is Antarctic Press’ attempt to position Magical Mates as a comedy that older male readers would enjoy. Each issue featured advertisements for comics such as Warrior Nun Areala, Codename: Scorpio, and the NC-17 vampire comic Tabou, which had a tie-in with an adult film. Though the covers seem less deliberately calculated to appeal to male readers than the advertising, issue four is a notable exception: all three girls have been given a sexy makeover with super-long legs, savage tans, and skimpy bathing suits that are completely out of character. The one fan letter that Antarctic published — which appears on the back page of issue four — comes from a male reader who complains that he doesn’t like Magical Mates‘ cover art or title. “It’s got that Sailor Moon stigma,” he notes. “I hope readership picks up, and that people don’t get the wrong idea and think this is some sort of bland children’s comic.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to fault Antarctic for treating Magical Mates as something other than a “children’s comic,” as its tone and episodic structure seem best suited for young readers. Yet at the time Mates debuted, there was no obvious market for girls’ manga. The Sailor Moon anime was just beginning to reach female audiences here in the US — it was still two years away from becoming a big hit — and American publishers had been neglecting the female comics market for decades. Antarctic made a logical gamble, presenting Mates as a wacky comedy starring three cute girls rather than a wacky comedy written for girls, never acknowledging that Odagi’s artwork, plotlines, and sensibility owed a significant debt to the magical girl genre.

Had it been marketed differently, Magical Mates still might not have found an audience — Moto Hagio, after all, bombed with readers, despite her impeccable pedigree and formidable talent. Yet Mates is significant because it anticipated the kind of shojo that caught on with American girls in the following decade, with its focus on romance, wacky hijinks, and unabashedly teen pursuits, from telling fortunes and swapping love charms to visiting amusement parks.

Readers curious about Magical Mates can find inexpensive copies of all six issues on eBay; note that Antarctic initially planned a nine-issue series, but canceled the last three.

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.

Eyeshield 21 1-3 by Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata: B

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Though I’ve long professed an ardent love for sports manga, I did secretly wonder if my enthusiasm would wane when the featured sport is one in which I have zero interest, like, say, football. Would the inherent charms of sports manga be able to compensate for my real-world disinterest? Eyeshield 21 has proven to me that the answer to this question is “yes.”

Sena Kobayakawa has justed started his first year at Deimon High School, where he’s looking forward to reinventing himself after years of serving as gopher for bullies (when not fleeing from them). Picked as an easy recruitment target by the demonic Himura, captain of football team, Sena finds himself volunteering to be the team’s manager. Once Himura witnesses Sena’s speed and natural running back moves, though, he is suited up and disguised (so that other teams won’t try to steal him) and given the moniker Eyeshield 21.

Although he’s initially not too thrilled about this, the passion and skill of Himura and the completely adorable (and completely enormous) lineman, Kurita, kindles his interest in the game. His running abilities lead the Deimon Devil Bats to their first victory ever. Their next opponents, the Ojo White Knights, prove much tougher, and it’s then Sena meets his rival—Shin, a player who’s nearly as fast as he is, but much, much stronger. Although there’s really no chance for the Devil Bats to prevail, they still manage to score two touchdowns against the superior team and Sena achieves a sense of personal victory when he’s finally able to evade one of Shin’s tackles.

As volume three comes to a close, the Devil Bats have been eliminated from the spring tournament but have turned their eyes and hopes towards fall, with the eventual goal of playing in the Christmas Bowl. Things are looking up a little—they’ve finally found their fourth member, a monkey-like boy named Raimon with some mad catching skills and the presence of Sena’s childhood friend, Mamori, as team manager seems destined to attract even more recruits. Aside from Himura and Kurita, no one knows that Sena is Eyeshield 21 (since his green eyeshield is magically sufficient to obscure his identity), and he can only watch in some consternation as the mysterious player’s legend begins to grow. When he happens to encounter Shin on the street, he realizes he can admit his real identity to him, but there’s no time to bond because the two of them have to unite to take down some thieves on a motorcycle. It’s actually kind of awesome.

So yes, Eyeshield 21 manages to entertain me even though it’s about football, a sport I find excruciatingly dull. There are loads of visual aids to help explain the game, the tone is optimistic and silly, and the characters are all memorable, too. Himura’s brand of crazy is responsible for most of the gags in the series: he looks like a demon, seems to have sufficient dirt to blackmail everyone into doing his bidding, keeps a ferocious dog chained up at school, and casually totes around all manner of weaponry. There’s a lot of attention devoted to Haruto, a teen idol whose fans persist in calling him the ace of the White Knights, even though he knows he isn’t. Shin’s a cool character, and Sena is okay, too, but really, my heart belongs to Ryokan Kurita.

Kurita is very big and round, very strong, very sweet, and prone to get weepy when he’s emotional. I think a visual aid is necessary here to truly convey his cuteness.

Aww!

Ultimately, Eyeshield 21 is lots of fun. I’m chuffed my library has recently acquired the full run of the series; expect to see more here in months to come!

Hetalia: Axis Powers, Vol. 1

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To say that Hetalia: Axis Powers has a devoted fanbase is like saying that Cookie Monster is partial to Oreos; it’s the kind of series that inspires fans to write their own Hetalia stories by the truckload (there are over 14,000 posted at FanFiction.net), dress up as their favorite countries, and debate the virtues of various characters with quasi-religious intensity.

Part of Hetalia‘s appeal lies with the artwork: manga-ka Hidekaz Himeyura populates his stories with cute, attractive young men in lavishly detailed military costumes that are tailor-made for cosplay. The other part of Hetalia‘s appeal lies with its cheerfully subversive premise: all the major participants in World War II are represented as petulant bishies whose behavior mimics the way these countries interacted in the 1930s, and whose personalities conform to well-rehearsed national stereotypes. Whether or not you cotton to Hetalia will depend largely on whether you find the underlying concept a stellar example of the Japanese ability to kawaii-ify anything or proof that Japan’s younger generation doesn’t grasp just how terrible World War II really was.

I fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum: I’m not offended by Hetalia, but I’m not amused, either. Himaruya has certainly done his homework, seeding the dialogue with salacious historical tidbits and inserting flashbacks to major European wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet he never challenges the basic stereotypes that guide all the characterizations: Japan is prissy and horrified by European cuisine, England views America as his ill-behaved offspring, America loves hamburgers and talks with his mouth full, Germany is efficient and belligerent, and Northern Italy adores pasta and shirks responsibility. The endless stream of nationality-as-destiny jokes grows tiresome quickly; imagine spending an afternoon with someone who insists on referring to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” every time you mention a recent trip to Paris, and you have some idea of how stale the better gags become on their third or tenth repetition.

From time to time, Himaruya inserts the kind of pointed, tasteless joke that suggests at true subversion. In one scene, for example, Germany finds himself at a supermarket check-out, fuming because Korea is holding up the line, demanding reparations and an apology for how he’s been treated. A more skilled writer could have done something with this moment, perhaps using it as a jumping off point for exploring the complicated relationship between Japan and Korea. Instead, Himaruya treats this moment as just another wacky example of a country behaving according to national character, as if Korea’s legitimate protests over Japanese occupation were akin to Italians loving red wine or Russians placing ineffectual curses on their enemies. I’m mildly horrified to contemplate how Himaruya will treat German anti-Semitism — a personal quirk?

Which brings me to my biggest criticism of Hetalia: Axis Powers: there’s a strong whiff of pointlessness about the whole enterprise. Himaruya goes to great pains to get the history right, but it’s never clear what the series’ underlying message really is; why depict one of the ugliest, most brutal periods in human history as a cute, interpersonal drama if you’re not trying to make some greater point about the folly of international alliances, or the dangers of aggressive nationalism? I have no doubt that Trey Parker and Matt Stone could run with the Hetalia premise and turn it into something genuinely funny, rude, and intelligent, but Himaruya just doesn’t have the historical insight or the courage to do much with the material except make all the participants look very pretty.

Review copy provided by Tokyopop. Volume one of Hetalia: Axis Powers will be released on September 21, 2010.

HETALIA: AXIS POWERS, VOL. 1 • BY HIDEKAZ HIMARUYA • TOKYOPOP • 152 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Toto! The Wonderful Adventure, Vols. 1-5

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If you’ve ever been to Canal Street in New York City — the Counterfeit Capital of North America — you know that there are two types of goods for sale there. The first are inept knock-offs: the “Cooch” purse with plastic handles, the “Rollex” with cubic zirconia insets and a flimsy metal band. The second are just as fake as the first, but are executed with enough panache that style-conscious women get a secret thrill in owning them: the plastic “Birkin” bag that looks like the real thing but costs $30, the canvas “Louis Vuitton” wallet that comes in prettier colors than the original.

The same principles apply to manga as well: there are series which shamelessly imitate a best-selling title like Dragonball or InuYasha, rehearsing the same plot without capturing the original’s charm, and there are copycats which bear a strong resemblance to the original but nonetheless work well on their own terms. Toto! The Wonderful Adventure falls into the latter category, a good-natured rip-off of One Piece and Rave Master that accomplishes in five volumes what many shonen series need twenty or thirty to pull off.

As one might guess from the title, Yuko Osada dresses up his swashbuckling treasure hunt with frequent allusions to Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The hero, Kakashi (literally, “scarecrow”), is an orphan who dreams of leaving his small island home for grand adventures, but lacks the brains to realize his ambition. When a zeppelin makes an unscheduled stop on the island, he stows away, thus beginning an odyssey that loosely mirrors the plot of Baum’s novel. Kakashi finds a puppy in the ship’s cargo hold, then meets a feisty teen named Dorothy who attends St. Kansas Academy, practices “tornado” senjutsu (a martial art involving spinning kicks), and plans to visit Emerald City. As Kakashi and Dorothy follow the Yellow Brick Road — here played by an old railway line — they acquire traveling companions, each modeled on one of Baum’s iconic characters: Noil, a kind but cowardly soldier who aspires to be a comedian; Dam, a big, blustering army officer with a metal arm; and Paisley, the Northern Investigator for the W.I.T.C.H. organization.

Central to the story is the relationship between Kakashi and Toto, the puppy he rescues in volume one. Though Toto initially appears benign, he has a big secret: his collar grants him the kind of amazing, destructive powers that make him of special interest to the military. It doesn’t take long before Kakashi and Dorothy find the Western army bearing down on them, anxious to reclaim their lost weapon.

Though the story’s Oz jokes add novelty value, Toto! barks like a typical wacky shonen adventure, with lengthy set-pieces that follow the same basic formula: Kakashi et al. arrive in a town, befriend one of the locals, and narrowly evade capture by the army. Some of these story arcs are genuinely delightful; in volumes two and three, for example, Kakashi and Dorothy stumble into the once-glorious Dego City, a former railroad hub that’s been stripped bare by the Imperial Army in its never-ending quest for scrap metal. The heroes’ getaway is executed with a perfect mixture of suspense and humor, culminating in a scene that Miyazaki would be proud to include in one of his films. Other storylines feel more labored. In volumes four and five, for example, Kakashi and friends get swept up in a feud between rival gangs: Alice and the Wonder Family in one camp, the Uchiyaka (literally, “rabbit gun”) in the other. Osada piles on the Lewis Carroll references, double- and triple-crosses, and crazy shoot-outs, but the frenzied pace and frequent jump cuts render these chapters almost incoherent.

At times, Osada’s dogged capitulation to shonen formula invites not-so-flattering comparisons between Toto! and more popular series. He populates his story with a dim but determined hero (with a dead explorer father, no less), a feisty female sidekick, a comic-relief character with an outsized Afro, and a posse of villains-turned-allies — in this case, a group of sky pirates called the Man Chicken Family. Osada even provides a complex mythology to explain Toto’s power — something involving twelve directions and twelve “accessories” — that feels like a complete afterthought, an editor’s attempt to make Toto! behave more like One Piece or Rave Master.

Yet for all Kakashi’s earnest declarations about “family” and “adventure,” and all the wacky villains, epic battles, and amazing artifacts pilfered from One Piece and Rave Master, Toto! has undeniable charm. The characters have great rapport, for one thing; though their interactions follow the standard shonen model of friendly antagonism, their obvious loyalty to and affection for one another is contagious. The girls are on equal footing with the boys, for another; Dorothy and Paisley prove stalwart and resourceful, getting significant butt-kicking turns in the spotlight. The art is terrific, too; Osada’s crisp linework and vivid caricatures evoke Eiichiro Oda and Hiro Mashima’s styles without feeling slavishly derivative of either.

Best of all, Toto! is brief. By the time the series concludes, Kakashi has realized his life’s greatest goal: to see the world with friends. It’s not clear whether volume five was intended to be the final installment, or if the editors at Weekly Shonen Magazine canceled it prematurely; either way, Toto! The Wonderful Adventure is proof that a hero’s journey from ignorance to enlightenment needn’t take fifty volumes to convincingly achieve.

TOTO! THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURE, VOLS. 1-5 • BY YUKO OSADA • DEL REY • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Black Blizzard

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First published in 1956, Black Blizzard is a juicy pulp thriller that will irresistibly remind Western readers of The 39 Steps, The Defiant Ones, and The Fugitive. The hero is twenty-five-year-old Susumu Yamaji, a down-on-his-luck pianist who stands accused of murdering the ringmaster of a traveling circus. The circumstantial evidence against him is so compelling that even Susumu — who was in a drunken stupor at the time — believes he did it. After surrendering to authorities, Susumu is handcuffed to hardened criminal Shinpei Konta, a middle-aged man who’s spent most of his adult life drifting in and out of jail. (When Susumu admits to his crime, Shinpei sniffs, “Just one? Tch! That’s nothing! I’ve been convicted five times. Twice for murder.”) An avalanche provides the shackled pair an opportunity to escape into a raging snowstorm, police hot on their trail.

Written in just twenty days, Black Blizzard unfolds at a furious clip, pausing only to allow Susumu a chance to tell Shinpei about his involvement with the circus. The two principals 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 time on the lam. 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.

The plot may be pilfered from Manhunt — Tatsumi claims Mickey Spillane as an influence — but the art leaves a fresh impression. Tatsumi already had a substantial amount of work under his belt at the time he wrote Blizzard — seventeen novel-length stories, as well as several volumes’ worth of short ones — but was moving in the direction of what he called “manga that isn’t manga,” stories that exploited the medium’s capacity for representing action in a more dynamic, cinematic fashion. Black Blizzard is filled with slashing diagonal lines, dramatic camera angles, and images of speeding trains; it’s as if Giacomo Balla decided to try his hand at sequential art, filling the pages with as many signifiers of motion as he could muster without lapsing into abstraction:

This kineticism extends to even the smallest gestures; in the very first panels, for example, we see a pair of hands banging out notes on a keyboard:

The composition couldn’t be simpler — just a few speedlines and sound effects convey the action — but these details, when coupled with the claw-like position of the hands, suggest the pianist’s extreme agitation, an impression confirmed just a few panels later when we first see Susumu’s sweat-drenched face.

Tatsumi’s regard for anatomy is, at times, careless; Susumu has Rachmaninoff-sized mitts, to judge from the awkward way in which his hands are drawn, while other cast members look stumpy, with grossly foreshortened legs. Yet for all the obvious flaws in his draftmanship, Tatsumi’s gestural approach to characterization proves well-suited to the material’s relentless pace, efficiently communicating each cast member’s personality, age, and plot function with a few artfully rendered lines and shapes. Shinpei, in particular, is a terrific creation, with a broad, sagging jaw and two thick, diagonal lines for eyebrows, making him a dead ringer for a jack-o-lantern.

Drawn & Quarterly has done a fine job of adapting Black Blizzard for Western readers, thanks, in large part, to a crisp translation by Akemi Wegmuller that captures the unique cadences of mid-century noir; one can almost imagine Shinpei referring to an attractive woman as a “tomato.” The volume also includes an interview with Tatsumi; read in tandem with “The Joy of Creation,” one of the later chapters in A Drifting Life, the interview sheds light on Tatsumi’s creative process as well as the work’s initial reception. Editor and designer Adrian Tomine has given Black Blizzard a retro-chic makeover, dying the trim yellow and boldly announcing the book’s price in the manner of a dime-store novel. It’s an attractive design (see above), but I can’t help wishing that Drawn and Quarterly had used Masami Kuroda’s original painting:

It’s a minor complaint, to be sure, but the original cover — to my mind, at least — is a closer expression of the story’s pulpy roots and futurism-tinged artwork.

That said, Black Blizzard is a welcome addition to the growing body of mid-century manga now available in English, providing an all-too-rare glimpse into the early stages of the gekiga movement. And while it lacks the visual and narrative polish of Tatsumi’s mature work, I’ll take the sweaty hyperbole of Black Blizzard over the dour verismo of The Push Man any day; Black Blizzard has a vital, improvisatory energy missing from Tatsumi’s later period, even though his command of the medium was clearly more assured in the 1960s and 1970s.

BLACK BLIZZARD • BY YOSHIHIRO TATSUMI • DRAWN & QUARTERLY • 132 pp. • NO RATING