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The 2011 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

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With TOKYOPOP’s untimely demise this year, critics lost one of their most reliable sources of shame-worthy manga. Though I won’t miss reading J-Pop Idol, Dragon Sister, Innocent W, or Zone-00 — to name just a few of the D-list titles that TOKYOPOP foisted on fans — I will miss reviewing them, as they helped me develop my voice as a critic, challenging me to expand my litany of complaints beyond “boring,” “cliche,” and “awful.” Few of the titles on this year’s Hall of Shame list inspired the same level of creative vitriol that TOKYOPOP’s worst titles did, but they do share one important trait with Qwaser of Stigmata: no one will confuse them with such recent gems as A Bride’s Story, Stargazing Dog, or A Zoo in Winter.

So without further ado, I present the 2011 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees:

5. AMNESIA LABYRINTH (Seven Seas)

For a manga that features incest, murder, and at least one character with a split personality, Amnesia Labyrinth is shockingly dull. That dullness can be attributed to two things: the source material and the hero. As writer Nagaru Tanigawa explains in the afterword to volume one, Amnesia Labyrinth was “based on a story that, while it didn’t have enough to become a full-fledged novel, had been kicking around in my head for years” — in short, a half-baked idea. Worse still, Souji, the lead character, is so passive it’s hard to believe that he’s an athletic superstar, academic genius, and a lady killer; if anything, he seems more like a collection of cool traits than an actual person. Teenage boys may find Souji an appealing surrogate, but older readers will find the series’ main draw — the mystery — too underdeveloped to be interesting, and the characterizations too thin to inspire identification with any of the cast members. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 2/8/11

4. HIGH SCHOOL OF THE DEAD (Yen Press)

This slick, violent zombie story plays like a poor man’s Dawn of the Dead, substituting sadism and sex for the social commentary of George Romero’s classic horror flick. Popular as it may be, a quick scan of volume one reveals myriad issues, from poorly staged fight scenes to tin-eared dialogue. The biggest problem with Highschool of the Dead, however, is the endless parade of panty shots and costume failures. The Satos work fanservice into as many scenes as possible, taking full advantage of every stairwell, fight, fall, and female death to expose cleavage — and poorly drawn cleavage, at that. (Hint to aspiring manga artists: large breasts do not resemble grossly distended lemons.) And when the scariest thing about a zombie story is the way the female characters’ bosoms are drawn, it’s safe to say that the creators ought to spend a little more time watching 28 Days or I Am Legend, and a little less time watching Naughty Naked Co-Eds. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/27/10

3. GANDHI: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY (Penguin Books)

This slim volume reduces Gandhi’s life to a string of four-page vignettes that do little to reveal who he was or what he believed; important episodes in every stage of his career are drained of historical nuance, preventing the reader from fully appreciating the complexity of the political situations in South Africa or India. Adding insult to injury is the script: the dialogue abounds in awkward sentences, anachronistic sentiments, and cringe-worthy typos that consistently undercut the story’s serious message. (Makes you wonder: did anyone at Penguin Books actually proofread Gandhi?) More disappointing still is the artwork: it’s plain and lifeless, relying too heavily on computer shortcuts and pre-fab backgrounds to create a genuine sense of place or time. My suggestion: skip the manga and rent Richard Attenborough’s 1982 movie of the same name. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/6/11

2. THE BEAUTIFUL SKIES OF HOUOU HIGH (DMP)

In this unfunny comedy about sexual orientation, a gay teen’s mother enrolls her daughter in an all-boys’ boarding school — mom’s idea of a “cure” for lesbianism. A more skillful storyteller might use the set-up to critique homophobia, or the idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, but Arata Aki takes the easy road, using Kei’s dilemma as a pretext for wacky hijinks. Though the theme of gender exploration is extended to include male cast members — several boys in Kei’s dorm exhibit stereotypically feminine behavior and interests — Aki doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with these supporting characters; their antics provide comic relief, not commentary on the fluidity of gender norms. Lame gags and confusing subplots remind the reader at every turn that Houou High isn’t concerned with real human sexuality, but in wringing cheap laughs out of a gay character’s humiliation. In a word: yuck. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 2/28/11

1. TENJO TENGE (VIZ)

Flipping through the first volume of VIZ’s “Full Contact” edition, it’s easy to see why DC Comics censored the original English print run of Tenjo Tenge. The story abounds in the kind of gratuitous nudity and sexual encounters that make an unadulterated version a tough sell at big chain stores like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble. DC Comics’ solution was an inelegant one: they re-wrote the script, drew bras and panties on naked girls, and cut some of the most offensive passages. As an advocate of free speech, I can’t condone the bowdlerization of any text, especially in the interest of a more commercially viable age-rating , but as a woman, it’s hard to celebrate the restoration of a graphic rape scene or images of naked girls throwing themselves at the heroes, especially when the plot is violent and silly. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/3/11

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So now I turn the floor over to you, readers: what titles made your Worst of 2011 list?

A tip for first-time visitors: you might want to read my Comment Policy before busting out words like “feminazi” in defense of a favorite title. Your comment is much less likely to be deleted if you’re friendly, funny, and logical, as those qualities facilitate dialogue.

The 2011 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

by 52 Comments

With TOKYOPOP’s untimely demise this year, critics lost one of their most reliable sources of shame-worthy manga. Though I won’t miss reading J-Pop Idol, Dragon Sister, Innocent W, or Zone-00 — to name just a few of the D-list titles that TOKYOPOP foisted on fans — I will miss reviewing them, as they helped me develop my voice as a critic, challenging me to expand my litany of complaints beyond “boring,” “cliche,” and “awful.” Few of the titles on this year’s Hall of Shame list inspired the same level of creative vitriol that TOKYOPOP’s worst titles did, but they do share one important trait with Qwaser of Stigmata: no one will confuse them with such recent gems as A Bride’s Story, Stargazing Dog, or A Zoo in Winter.

So without further ado, I present the 2011 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees:

5. AMNESIA LABYRINTH (Seven Seas)

For a manga that features incest, murder, and at least one character with a split personality, Amnesia Labyrinth is shockingly dull. That dullness can be attributed to two things: the source material and the hero. As writer Nagaru Tanigawa explains in the afterword to volume one, Amnesia Labyrinth was “based on a story that, while it didn’t have enough to become a full-fledged novel, had been kicking around in my head for years” — in short, a half-baked idea. Worse still, Souji, the lead character, is so passive it’s hard to believe that he’s an athletic superstar, academic genius, and a lady killer; if anything, he seems more like a collection of cool traits than an actual person. Teenage boys may find Souji an appealing surrogate, but older readers will find the series’ main draw — the mystery — too underdeveloped to be interesting, and the characterizations too thin to inspire identification with any of the cast members. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 2/8/11

4. HIGH SCHOOL OF THE DEAD (Yen Press)

This slick, violent zombie story plays like a poor man’s Dawn of the Dead, substituting sadism and sex for the social commentary of George Romero’s classic horror flick. Popular as it may be, a quick scan of volume one reveals myriad issues, from poorly staged fight scenes to tin-eared dialogue. The biggest problem with Highschool of the Dead, however, is the endless parade of panty shots and costume failures. The Satos work fanservice into as many scenes as possible, taking full advantage of every stairwell, fight, fall, and female death to expose cleavage — and poorly drawn cleavage, at that. (Hint to aspiring manga artists: large breasts do not resemble grossly distended lemons.) And when the scariest thing about a zombie story is the way the female characters’ bosoms are drawn, it’s safe to say that the creators ought to spend a little more time watching 28 Days or I Am Legend, and a little less time watching Naughty Naked Co-Eds. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/27/10

3. GANDHI: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY (Penguin Books)

This slim volume reduces Gandhi’s life to a string of four-page vignettes that do little to reveal who he was or what he believed; important episodes in every stage of his career are drained of historical nuance, preventing the reader from fully appreciating the complexity of the political situations in South Africa or India. Adding insult to injury is the script: the dialogue abounds in awkward sentences, anachronistic sentiments, and cringe-worthy typos that consistently undercut the story’s serious message. (Makes you wonder: did anyone at Penguin Books actually proofread Gandhi?) More disappointing still is the artwork: it’s plain and lifeless, relying too heavily on computer shortcuts and pre-fab backgrounds to create a genuine sense of place or time. My suggestion: skip the manga and rent Richard Attenborough’s 1982 movie of the same name. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/6/11

2. THE BEAUTIFUL SKIES OF HOUOU HIGH (DMP)

In this unfunny comedy about sexual orientation, a gay teen’s mother enrolls her daughter in an all-boys’ boarding school — mom’s idea of a “cure” for lesbianism. A more skillful storyteller might use the set-up to critique homophobia, or the idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, but Arata Aki takes the easy road, using Kei’s dilemma as a pretext for wacky hijinks. Though the theme of gender exploration is extended to include male cast members — several boys in Kei’s dorm exhibit stereotypically feminine behavior and interests — Aki doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with these supporting characters; their antics provide comic relief, not commentary on the fluidity of gender norms. Lame gags and confusing subplots remind the reader at every turn that Houou High isn’t concerned with real human sexuality, but in wringing cheap laughs out of a gay character’s humiliation. In a word: yuck. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 2/28/11

1. TENJO TENGE (VIZ)

Flipping through the first volume of VIZ’s “Full Contact” edition, it’s easy to see why DC Comics censored the original English print run of Tenjo Tenge. The story abounds in the kind of gratuitous nudity and sexual encounters that make an unadulterated version a tough sell at big chain stores like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble. DC Comics’ solution was an inelegant one: they re-wrote the script, drew bras and panties on naked girls, and cut some of the most offensive passages. As an advocate of free speech, I can’t condone the bowdlerization of any text, especially in the interest of a more commercially viable age-rating , but as a woman, it’s hard to celebrate the restoration of a graphic rape scene or images of naked girls throwing themselves at the heroes, especially when the plot is violent and silly. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/3/11

*  *  *  *  *

So now I turn the floor over to you, readers: what titles made your Worst of 2011 list?

A tip for first-time visitors: you might want to read my Comment Policy before busting out words like “feminazi” in defense of a favorite title. Your comment is much less likely to be deleted if you’re friendly, funny, and logical, as those qualities facilitate dialogue.

The Manga Hall of Shame: Wounded Man

by

Nicholas Cage, I have a swell idea for your next project: option the rights to Wounded Man. This mid-eighties schlockfest is tailor made for you. It has a hero with extravagantly bad hair, bad guys so charismatic they beg for Christopher Walken or Sharon Stone to play them, and copious amounts of acrobatic sex and violence. And while it lacks the evil Nazis and mad scientists of Offered, another Kazuo Koike gem set in South America, Wounded Man does Offered one better: the series’ main villain is a pornographer. But not the sleazy, sad-sack type who might be the prime suspect on a Law & Order: SVU episode — no, the chief villain in Wounded Man runs a studio called God’s Pornographic X-Rated Films, a.k.a. GPX. She also wears a caftan and carries a parasol.

You know she’s evil.

Wounded Man begins in Brazil, where Yuko Kusaka, an ambitious young NHK reporter, is pursuing a story about a modern-day gold rush in the Amazon basin. Yuko is intent on finding “Rio Baraki,” a prospector who’s rumored to be Japanese. Baraki finds her first, however, savagely attacking her in a city park. “You’d better thank me because this could be much worse!” he tells Yuko. “Go back to Japan if you don’t want anymore trouble!” (He also talks to her at great length about the unsavory eating habits of Amazonian fish, dialogue that’s so unsafe for work I’ll do the honorable thing and not reprint it here.)

What Baraki doesn’t count on is that Yuko falls madly in love with him, following him deep into the jungle in spite of his dire warnings. She and her camera crew are ambushed by bandits, tied up, and sexually tortured; Baraki rescues them. She then jettisons her crew and tags along with Baraki. Once again, she’s ambushed, tied up, and sexually tortured; once again, Baraki rescues her. Baraki and Yuko then fight; they have sex; and Baraki tells Yuko his sad story, a story even more screwed up than all crazy, non-con antics that preceded it.

Baraki, it turns out, was once Keisuke Ibaraki, star quarterback at USC. After a big game, a group of thugs kidnapped him and his high school sweetheart, threatening them with death if Baraki refused to make an X-rated film with a famous female tennis player. Baraki turned GPX down; his heart belonged to Natsuko, and no amount of money would compromise his resolve. Not even the prospect of starvation undermined his commitment to Natsuko — naked and locked in a dungeon, the two survived by drinking each other’s urine before Natsuko finally died. Baraki lived, and has been plotting his revenge ever since he escaped GPX’s clutches.

I’m not making this up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a couple of porn-addled teenagers were responsible for the script, however; the whole story feels like something concocted by Dirk Diggler in one of his pitiful bids for movie-actor legitimacy. Though the ostensible genre is action/adventure, the story’s epic sex scenes take up more than half the first volume alone, with only the occasional fist-fight or manly swim through piranha-infested waters to relieve the tedium. The most reprehensible aspect of all the fornicating, however, is how little of it is genuinely consensual. Yuko is molested by Baraki, by random smugglers and poachers, even by members of her own television crew in a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Deliverance, yet Koike and artist Ryochi Ikegami play these episodes for maximum titillation, trotting out one of the hoariest, most offensive cliches from the rape culture playbook: the victim who falls for her attacker because the sex is so amazing.

I wish I were making this up.

Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami find other ways to offend as well. The Brazilian characters are drawn as crude caricatures, with hulking physiques, gap-toothed smiles, and leering eyes; their primary role in the story is menacing Yuko. The few female characters are equally ridiculous, shunning clothing the way six-year-olds shun brussell sprouts; I’ve never seen so much laughably gratuitous nudity in a manga before. (The naked tennis player is kind of disconcerting, however, as she looks an awful lot like Martina Navatarola.)

The series’ greatest offense, however, is the way Yuko is portrayed. She may be a judo champ, capable of delivering a high-flying kick, and a rising star at the NHK, scoring high ratings with her investigative journalism, but her behavior is so petulant, so dumb, and so completely contradictory that Koike undermines her identity as a competent, strong woman. “That’s right, I hate you,” she tells Baraki during one of their numerous fights. “But at the same time, I love you so much! I’m so in love with you and I get so weak just being touched by you.” Her frequent hysterical outbursts would be comical if they didn’t serve to infantilize and diminish her, robbing her of any meaningful agency or identity outside of sex object.

Really, I wish I were making this up.

I’d be the first to admit that Wounded Man is luridly fascinating. It’s hard to imagine who thought any of it was a good idea, though it unfolds in such a fast, furious, and utterly unironic fashion that readers may be swept up in the story despite their better judgment. In short, Wounded Man is perfect fodder for a Nick Cage movie. Agents, are you listening?

WOUNDED MAN, VOLS. 1-9 • STORY BY KAZUO KOIKE, ART BY RYOICHI IKEGAMI • COMICSONE • RATING: MATURE (COPIOUS NUDITY AND VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, STRONG LANGUAGE, INANE PLOT TWISTS)

The Manga Hall of Shame: Wounded Man

by 40 Comments

Nicholas Cage, I have a swell idea for your next project: option the rights to Wounded Man. This mid-eighties schlockfest is tailor made for you. It has a hero with extravagantly bad hair, bad guys so charismatic they beg for Christopher Walken or Sharon Stone to play them, and copious amounts of acrobatic sex and violence. And while it lacks the evil Nazis and mad scientists of Offered, another Kazuo Koike gem set in South America, Wounded Man does Offered one better: the series’ main villain is a pornographer. But not the sleazy, sad-sack type who might be the prime suspect on a Law & Order: SVU episode — no, the chief villain in Wounded Man runs a studio called God’s Pornographic X-Rated Films, a.k.a. GPX. She also wears a caftan and carries a parasol.

You know she’s evil.

Wounded Man begins in Brazil, where Yuko Kusaka, an ambitious young NHK reporter, is pursuing a story about a modern-day gold rush in the Amazon basin. Yuko is intent on finding “Rio Baraki,” a prospector who’s rumored to be Japanese. Baraki finds her first, however, savagely attacking her in a city park. “You’d better thank me because this could be much worse!” he tells Yuko. “Go back to Japan if you don’t want anymore trouble!” (He also talks to her at great length about the unsavory eating habits of Amazonian fish, dialogue that’s so unsafe for work I’ll do the honorable thing and not reprint it here.)

What Baraki doesn’t count on is that Yuko falls madly in love with him, following him deep into the jungle in spite of his dire warnings. She and her camera crew are ambushed by bandits, tied up, and sexually tortured; Baraki rescues them. She then jettisons her crew and tags along with Baraki. Once again, she’s ambushed, tied up, and sexually tortured; once again, Baraki rescues her. Baraki and Yuko then fight; they have sex; and Baraki tells Yuko his sad story, a story even more screwed up than all crazy, non-con antics that preceded it.

Baraki, it turns out, was once Keisuke Ibaraki, star quarterback at USC. After a big game, a group of thugs kidnapped him and his high school sweetheart, threatening them with death if Baraki refused to make an X-rated film with a famous female tennis player. Baraki turned GPX down; his heart belonged to Natsuko, and no amount of money would compromise his resolve. Not even the prospect of starvation undermined his commitment to Natsuko — naked and locked in a dungeon, the two survived by drinking each other’s urine before Natsuko finally died. Baraki lived, and has been plotting his revenge ever since he escaped GPX’s clutches.

I’m not making this up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a couple of porn-addled teenagers were responsible for the script, however; the whole story feels like something concocted by Dirk Diggler in one of his pitiful bids for movie-actor legitimacy. Though the ostensible genre is action/adventure, the story’s epic sex scenes take up more than half the first volume alone, with only the occasional fist-fight or manly swim through piranha-infested waters to relieve the tedium. The most reprehensible aspect of all the fornicating, however, is how little of it is genuinely consensual. Yuko is molested by Baraki, by random smugglers and poachers, even by members of her own television crew in a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Deliverance, yet Koike and artist Ryochi Ikegami play these episodes for maximum titillation, trotting out one of the hoariest, most offensive cliches from the rape culture playbook: the victim who falls for her attacker because the sex is so amazing.

I wish I were making this up.

Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami find other ways to offend as well. The Brazilian characters are drawn as crude caricatures, with hulking physiques, gap-toothed smiles, and leering eyes; their primary role in the story is menacing Yuko. The few female characters are equally ridiculous, shunning clothing the way six-year-olds shun brussell sprouts; I’ve never seen so much laughably gratuitous nudity in a manga before. (The naked tennis player is kind of disconcerting, however, as she looks an awful lot like Martina Navatarola.)

The series’ greatest offense, however, is the way Yuko is portrayed. She may be a judo champ, capable of delivering a high-flying kick, and a rising star at the NHK, scoring high ratings with her investigative journalism, but her behavior is so petulant, so dumb, and so completely contradictory that Koike undermines her identity as a competent, strong woman. “That’s right, I hate you,” she tells Baraki during one of their numerous fights. “But at the same time, I love you so much! I’m so in love with you and I get so weak just being touched by you.” Her frequent hysterical outbursts would be comical if they didn’t serve to infantilize and diminish her, robbing her of any meaningful agency or identity outside of sex object.

Really, I wish I were making this up.

I’d be the first to admit that Wounded Man is luridly fascinating. It’s hard to imagine who thought any of it was a good idea, though it unfolds in such a fast, furious, and utterly unironic fashion that readers may be swept up in the story despite their better judgment. In short, Wounded Man is perfect fodder for a Nick Cage movie. Agents, are you listening?

WOUNDED MAN, VOLS. 1-9 • STORY BY KAZUO KOIKE, ART BY RYOICHI IKEGAMI • COMICSONE • RATING: MATURE (COPIOUS NUDITY AND VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, STRONG LANGUAGE, INANE PLOT TWISTS)

The 2010 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

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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 (Penguin)

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 (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 (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 SIZZLER,” FROM AX: AN ALTERNATIVE COLLECTION OF MANGA (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 (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?

The Manga Hall of Shame: Color of Rage

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When reading historical manga, I grant the artist creative license to tell a story that evokes the spirit of an age rather than its details. What rankles my inner historian, however, are the kind of anachronisms that result from sheer laziness or paucity of imagination: modern slang, gross disregard for well-established fact. Alas, Color of Rage is filled with the kind of historical howlers that would make C. Vann Woodward or Leon Litwack gnash their teeth in despair.

The story begins in 1783. Off the coast of Japan, a whaling ship sinks in turbulent seas, claiming the lives of all but two crew members: George, a Japanese man, and King, an African-American slave. The two wash ashore, cut away their shackles, and set out in search of a community where they can live peacefully — no small challenge, given how conspicuous King is among such a homogenous population. Of course, this being a manga by Kazuo Koike, George and King’s journey is anything but picaresque, as they bump up against the vigorous defenders of Edo-era status quo: ruthless daimyo, yakuza thugs, samurai-for-hire.

For such a far-fetched premise to work, its principal characters’ thoughts, words, and actions need to make sense in historical context, yet George and King behave like modern action heroes deposited in feudal Japan, not products of the eighteenth century. During scenes of limb-severing carnage, for example, they banter with the consummate skill of Harrison Ford and Will Smith, pausing occasionally to deliver speeches about finding a place where “color doesn’t matter” — a noble sentiment, to be sure, but one cribbed from a Civil Rights speech circa 1964, not an eighteenth century abolitionist’s tract. A similar sense of historical amnesia informs another scene in which King declares that conditions are worse for Japanese peasants than for slaves in the American South, leaving me to wonder how a slave working on a colonial plantation would have any comparative basis for making such an assertion or, frankly, any notion of the “American South,” given that the Revolutionary War was still in full swing at the time King was gang-pressed into whaling. Other historical oversights abound: how did a Japanese man end up in the galley of an American whaling ship? Where did George learn to speak fluent English? Who taught King to handle a sword? And so forth.

colorofrageinteriorThe bigger problem, however, is that King entertains notions of race, class, and gender that would have been as alien to American colonists as they were to Japanese farmers and overlords. His blind commitment to addressing inequality wherever he encounters it — on the road, at a brothel — leads him to do and say incredibly reckless things that require George’s boffo swordsmanship and insider knowledge of the culture to rectify. If anything, King’s idealism makes him seem simple-minded in comparison with George, who comes across as far more worldly, pragmatic, and clever. I’m guessing that Koike thought he’d created an honorable character in King without realizing the degree to which stereotypes, good and bad, informed the portrayal. In fairness to Koike, it’s a trap that’s ensnared plenty of American authors and screenwriters who ought to know that the saintly black character is as clichéd and potentially offensive a stereotype as the most craven fool in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By relying on American popular entertainment for his information on slavery, however, Koike falls into the very same trap, inadvertently resurrecting some hoary racial and sexual tropes in the process.

Koike’s treatment of female characters, like his handling of racial issues, can be downright ugly. In a valiant effort to head off feminists at the pass, the editors acknowledge Koike’s propensity for writing “samurai-era yarns with a certain sense of chauvinist violence and pulpy sexiness.” Now I’m all for “pulpy sexiness” — doesn’t that sound like fun? But the casual mingling of sex and violence in Color of Rage crosses the line from mere chauvinism to outright misogyny. The nadir is a scene in which King strips a woman naked and crams dirt into her mouth until she chokes. Her crime: being turned on by the sight of King’s big, strapping body (which, I might add, artist Seisaku Kano treats as a kind of fetish-object throughout the book). Richard Wright might have known how to make the moment horrific, tragic, and peculiarly just, but someone as ill-versed in American history as Koike does not. The result is an uncomfortable mixture of kink and racism that hints at the story’s 1970s roots; one wonders what, exactly, Koike had read or seen to inspire such a florid racial fantasy.

The artwork is a hodgepodge of styles and techniques. The best pages appear to be done in charcoal or pastels, and have the soft edges and expressionist lighting I associate with fin-de-siecle modernists such as Käthe Kollwitz. The opening scene, in particular, is beautifully rendered, a harrowing sequence of wordless, slightly abstract panels that reveals how George and King survived their maritime ordeal:

corv2

Most of the art, however, looks like homage to Goseki Kojima’s work on Lone Wolf and Cub, Samurai Executioner, and Path of the Assassin — not a bad thing, given Kojima’s superb draftsmanship and penchant for drawing memorable mugs. Seisaku Kano’s character designs are fine, but his fight scenes are poorly composed, a riot of swords, guts, and bodies in motion that fail to give the reader a clear picture of what’s happening. That might be an OK artistic choice once in a while, perhaps to suggest the chaos of hand-to-hand combat, but as the dominant mode of depicting action it soon grows tiresome, leaving the reader feeling more pummeled than entertained.

Though some of these criticisms could be leveled at Koike’s other work — Lady Snowblood, Crying Freeman and, yes, Lone Wolf and Cub — Color of Rage lacks something common to the aforementioned manga: a sense of play. Koike never takes himself too seriously in these other works, even when the plot takes a dark turn or two. In Color of Rage, however, his sincerity proves his undoing, as he tries to insert a noble black character into a world of vicious overlords and amoral samurai. King’s high-minded speeches and interventions clash violently with the story’s “pulpy sexiness” (for want of a better term), producing something that’s neither dramatically compelling nor fun to read. Die-hard Koike fans may feel the completist’s urge to buy Color of Rage — especially since Dark Horse has given it such a deluxe treatment — but casual readers will find much less here to love.

This is a revised version of a review that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/2008.

COLOR OF RAGE • BY KAZUO KOIKE AND SEISAKU KANO • DARK HORSE • 414 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Manga Hall of Shame: Color of Rage

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RageCoverWhen reading historical manga, I grant the artist creative license to tell a story that evokes the spirit of an age rather than its details. What rankles my inner historian, however, are the kind of anachronisms that result from sheer laziness or paucity of imagination: modern slang, gross disregard for well-established fact. Alas, Color of Rage is filled with the kind of historical howlers that would make C. Vann Woodward or Leon Litwack gnash their teeth in despair.

The story begins in 1783. Off the coast of Japan, a whaling ship sinks in turbulent seas, claiming the lives of all but two crew members: George, a Japanese man, and King, an African-American slave. The two wash ashore, cut away their shackles, and set out in search of a community where they can live peacefully — no small challenge, given how conspicuous King is among such a homogenous population. Of course, this being a manga by Kazuo Koike, George and King’s journey is anything but picaresque, as they bump up against the vigorous defenders of Edo-era status quo: ruthless daimyo, yakuza thugs, samurai-for-hire.

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The Manga Hall of Shame: The Qwaser of Stigmata

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Though I frequently grouse about fanservice , I have a grudging respect for those artists who make costume failures, panty shots, and general shirtlessness play essential roles in advancing their plots. Consider Pretty Face, the story of a teenage jock who undergoes reconstructive surgery after a bus accident, only to end up looking like the girl he has a crush on (at least from the waist up). You don’t need to be a pervert to imagine how Yasuhiro Kano exploits the set-up for maximum T&A potential — even the hero gets groped and ogled, though Rando isn’t above leering at and lusting after girls himself. I loathe Pretty Face, yet I have to admit that Kano obviates the need for gusts of wind and breast-level collisions by making gender confusion such a fundamental part of his story; the fanservice may be gross and stupid, but it isn’t gratuitous.

Then there’s The Qwaser of Stigmata.

Qwaser raises the panty-shot-as-plot-element stakes, then kicks Pretty Face down the stairs, taunts it, and takes its lunch money with a gimmick so offensive I’m almost embarrassed to type the words: the characters rely on breast milk for their superpowers. Those characters have chosen St. Mihailov Academy as ground zero for an epic showdown involving religious icons, nubile maidens, and weapons derived from the periodic table of the elements. (No doubt Dmitri Mendeleev is tossing in his grave right now.) From the standpoint of an artist writing for a shonen magazine like Monthly Champion Red, the parochial school setting provides the perfect vehicle for celebrating fetishes under the guise of world-building. No stone goes unturned, from busty nuns and busty schoolgirls to moe-bait characters in spectacles and knee socks; there’s even a bit of fan service for the ladies that takes the form of a smoldering priest in an eyepatch and a sullen, silver-haired Russian named Alexander “Sasha” Nikolaevich Hell. (Or “Her,” in the Tokyopop translation.)

As with most manga featuring combatants of the cloth, the religious iconography seems more a pretext for cool outfits than an integral part of the story. The characters occasionally pause to contemplate the Theotokos of Tsarytsin, a religious icon depicting the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus, but why they want the icon remains mysterious; only by consulting the Wikipedia entry on Qwaser did I learn that this particular image is “fabled to alter the homeostasis of the world.” For a manga exploring a religion that’s sure to be a mystery to most of its readers, in- and outside Japan, it’s curious that no one ever discusses what Russian Orthodox Christians believe, how they practice their faith, or what caused doctrinal crises within the Russian Church — a pity, because as this Slavophile will tell you, there is a boffo manga to be written about the Old Believers’ showdown with Peter the Great. (Don’t believe me? Rent a DVD of the Mariinski Theater’s production of Khovanshchina, an opera so badass that several characters immolate themselves rather than submit to Peter’s will.) The few other references to religion are more window-dressing than anything else; Qwasers, those holy warriors of the periodic table, fight alongside “Maria Magdalens,” described by Wikipedia’s anonymous authors as “the alter-ego combat partner of a Qwaser whose primary function is to provide soma [breast milk] not unlike how one may refuel a car or even a warplane while in flight.” (After reading that sentence, I’m not sure which is more egregious: the Wikipedia authors’ attempt to write about Qwaser in a pseudo-scientific voice, or the manga-ka’s decision to call these women “Maria Magdalens.”)

If the fanservice and faux-religious elements weren’t quite enough to land Qwaser a spot in The Manga Hall of Shame, the dreadful artwork and ADD plotting put it over the top. The fight scenes are utterly incomprehensible, a blur of speedlines, explosions, and whirling dervishes punctuated by the occasional pin-up drawing of a character brandishing a weapon or enduring some unpleasant, sexually tinged violence. The plotting isn’t much better, as the story skips between cliche scenes of classroom bullying and tortured, confusing conversations between the series’ two principal female characters. The dialogue takes the cake for sheer awfulness, however; it’s the kind of series in which villains state the atomic weight of the elements they’re manipulating, exclaim nonsense like “My heart that burns will slice through you!”, and utter things so vile that that the publisher substitutes the word “bleep” for references to female genitalia and sexual congress.

The bottom line: The Qwaser of Stigmata is a shonen manga that aspires to the subversiveness of porn, but doesn’t have the imagination or the weirdness to rise to the level of genuine kink.

THE QWASER OF STIGMATA, VOL. 1: HOLY WARS IGNITE • ART BY KENETSU SATO, STORY BY HIROYUKI YOSHINO • TOKYOPOP • 200 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Short Takes: Manga Hall of Shame Edition

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I have a special fascination with bad manga. And when I say “bad manga,” I’m not talking about stories that are merely cliche or derivative of other, better series — for better or worse, manga is a popular medium, and popular media survive, in part, by giving audiences what they want, even if that means more of the same — I’m talking about stories so ineptly drawn, so spectacularly dumb, or so offensive that they make Happy Cafe look like Phoenix by comparison. To judge from the coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I’m not alone in my connoisseurship of wretched books; among the most widely reported panels was The Best and Worst Manga of 2010, in which a group of seasoned reviewers singled out titles for praise and punishment. To kick off my Bad Manga Week, therefore, I thought it would be a fun exercise to look at three of the titles that made the worst-of list to see if they were truly suited for inclusion in The Manga Hall of Shame. The candidates: Orange Planet (Del Rey), a shojo farce starring one clueless girl and three hot guys; Red Hot Chili Samurai (Tokyopop), a comedy about a hero who favors spicy peppers over PowerBars whenever he needs an energy boost; and Togainu no Chi (Tokyopop), an action-thriller that proudly boasts its origins as a “ground-breaking bishonen game.”

orangeplanet1ORANGE PLANET, VOL. 1

BY HARUKA FUKUSHIMA • DEL REY • 200 pp. • TEEN (13+)

Haruka Fukushima specializes in what I call “chastely dirty” manga for tween girls — that is, manga that places the heroine in compromising situations, teasing the audience with the prospect of a kiss or a grope that never quite materializes because the heroine is a good girl, thank you very much. In Orange Planet, Fukushima’s sex-phobic lead is Rui, a junior high student who lives by herself — she’s been an orphan since childhood — and pays for her apartment with a paper route. (That must be some paper route, considering she lives in a modern high-rise apartment and not, say, a cardboard box.) Rui is one corner of a highly contrived love square; the other three points are all standard shojo types, from the boy next door and the hot young teacher to the mystery man from the heroine’s past.

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The 2009 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

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I’m pleased to report that 2009 yielded fewer jaw-droppingly bad manga in the vein of Eiken, J-Pop Idol, or Shiki Tsukai — surely the most confusing manga ever written about weather — though it wasn’t devoid of clunkers. Below are my top five nominees for Worst Manga of 2009. Some earned demerits for lousy art or writing; others for gross sexism; and others for insulting my intelligence as a reader. Keep in mind that while I try to read widely, there are definitely titles I’ve missed or avoided — Tantric Stripfighter Trina, anyone? — so I encourage you to share you own nominees for The Manga Hall of Shame, as well as your reactions to this year’s dishonorees.

pigbride5. PIG BRIDE (Yen Press)

Si-Joon, scion of a powerful family, has a strange experience as a child: while lost in the woods, he accidentally becomes engaged to a girl cursed with a pig’s face. Mu-Jeon, she of porcine features, remains a hazy memory for Si-Joon until his sixteenth birthday, when she returns to claim him, demanding that they consummate their marriage right now. There’s just one problem: Si-Joon has his eye on Doe-Doe, a beauty who terrorizes her female classmates but makes nice with the boys. Lest Pig Bride sound like a wacky romantic comedy, let me say that there are few, if any, laffs to be found. The author’s contempt for women her female characters is palpable: the female characters girls are either hysterics (Mu-Jeon pursues Si-Joon with abandon, dignity or common sense be damned) or ice queens (Doe-Doe seems more interested in collecting hearts than actually being with anyone). The hyper-stylized art is similarly awful, with characters sporting grossly distended necks and chins so pointy that they’d made a razor bleed. I love manhwa as much as the next gal, but Pig Bride isn’t doing much for the cause of Korean comics in translation. (Text revised 12/24/09; see end of article for further commentary.)

zone00cvr_01.indd4. ZONE-00 (Tokyopop)

Zone-00 is easily one of the most confusing and unappealing books I’ve read this year, a fever dream of decapitations, impalements, and half-naked bodies. The layout is dark and busy — overstuffed, really — looking more like a Tokidoki handbag pattern than sequential art, with images and word balloons filling every inch of the page. From time to time, Kiyo Qjo’s rich, weird imagination shines through, as when she introduces a pair of possessed Harley Davidsons, or stages a hilarious conversation between a cat and a dog about the merits of fanservice. (The cat is pro-panty shot; the dog is more modest.) Too often, however, Zone-00 seems like a grab bag of half-baked ideas and pin-up drawings in search of a story; about the best I can say for Zone-00 is that the fanservice is equal opportunity, as almost every page features ladies with gravity-defying H-cups and men with granite six-packs. If your vision of the future includes stripper nuns armed to the teeth and shirtless motorcycle gangs, Zone-00 might be your cup of tea; all others are advised to stay away. (Reviewed 9/3/09.)

blackbird13. BLACK BIRD (VIZ)

“You can be eaten, or you can sleep with me and become my bride.” So declares Kyo, a handsome demon who’s been waiting for years to make Misao his wife and secure his position as Head Tengu. (Or something along those lines; drinking her blood is key to becoming the World’s Most Powerful Supernatural Being, hence the scores of demons interested in sampling Misao’s goodies.) Kyo’s declaration underscores the main problem with Black Bird: the entire story revolves around its heroine’s repeated degradation, making a fetish of her injuries and her helplessness. Demons slash her throat, poison her, push her off rooftops, and slam her against walls, yet she never defends herself or runs away, relying instead on Kyo to save her. Kyo’s “rescues” are as icky as the attacks themselves, as Kyo licks Misao’s wounds (he says he’s healing her; I say,  ewwwwwwww), pins her down, and browbeats her for not sticking close to him. Some readers may find him sexy, but grouchy old feminists like me will see him for what he is: a wolf in knight’s clothing, posing as Misao’s savior while manipulating her for his own selfish interests. (Reviewed 7/21/09.)

LuckyStar2. LUCKY STAR (Bandai Entertainment)

Dear Manga Publishers: Please stop licensing 4-koma titles. Most of the translated material in this format is at best dull — wait, was that a joke? — and at worst incomprehensible — wait, the heroine has a semi-romantic relationship with her cat-eared clone? Lucky Star is a prime example of why 4-koma manga don’t work well in English: the punchlines aren’t funny, and the characters are so one-dimensional that their daily travails aren’t interesting enough to hold our attention. (If the only “personality trait” a character manifests is a preference for watching anime over doing homework, I’d say the manga-ka needs to flesh her out just a little bit more.) Add to the mix a translation that, in Melinda Beasi‘s words, “strips the characters of any recognizable voice” and kills the jokes, and you have a recipe for one seriously dull read.

mariaholic1. MARIA HOLIC (Tokyopop)

In a more charitable mood, I might characterize this mean-spirited comedy as a lame attempt at satirizing yuri manga. The jokes aren’t smart enough, however, to qualify as satire; most of them involve humiliating the series’ naive heroine, whose lesbianism is held up to constant ridicule. Author Minaru Endou beats a single joke into the ground, with poor Kanako developing crushes on all of her classmates and suffering nosebleeds whenever she catches sight of them changing, wearing gym clothes, tossing their hair, talking to friends… you get the idea. (Did I mention that Maria Holic runs in Monthly Comic Alive, a magazine aimed at men?) Mariya, Kanako’s cross-dressing nemesis, is a truly repellent character, threatening to expose Kanako and mocking her interest in women. I think we’re supposed to find Mariya deliciously evil — and gee, nothin’ says eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil like cross-dressing — but he comes across as sadistic, homophobic, and desperate; I spent most of volume one wishing for a great big foot to drop from the sky and squash him, a la Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (Reviewed 9/23/09.)

UPDATE, 12/24/09: Kurt Hasseler of Yen Press posted an eloquent and thoughtful rebuttal to my assessment of Pig Bride, which you can read by clicking here. His comments prompted me to revise my review to make it clear that I’m not accusing the author of being a misogynist, but am critiquing the way in which she depicts her female characters. I want to thank Kurt for a spirited and intelligent debate, even if I remain unpersuaded about Pig Bride‘s merits.

The 2009 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees

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I’m pleased to report that 2009 yielded fewer jaw-droppingly bad manga in the vein of Eiken, J-Pop Idol, or Shiki Tsukai — surely the most confusing manga ever written about weather — though it wasn’t devoid of clunkers. Below are my top five nominees for Worst Manga of 2009. Some earned demerits for lousy art or writing; others for gross sexism; and others for insulting my intelligence as a reader. Keep in mind that while I try to read widely, there are definitely titles I’ve missed or avoided — Tantric Stripfighter Trina, anyone? — so I encourage you to share you own nominees for The Manga Hall of Shame, as well as your reactions to this year’s dishonorees.

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The Manga Hall of Shame

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Though my taste in manga is very particular, I’m much less discriminating in my reading habits. My willingness to try anything has yielded some wonderful surprises: Ai Morinaga’s Duck Prince, Taiyo Matsumoto’s No. 5, Shioko Mizuki’s Crossroad, Kazuo Umezu’s Scary Book, Motofumi Kobayashi’s Apocalypse Meow. The flipside of being a gourmand is that I’ve encountered my share of truly dreadful stuff, too — the kind of manga with such incoherent plots, unappealing characters, clumsy artwork, and tin-eared dialogue that they beg the question, Who thought this was a good idea?

Now that I’d donned my flame-proof pants, here are my candidates for the Manga Hall of Shame:

miyuki10. MIYUKI-CHAN IN WONDERLAND | CLAMP • Tokyopop • 1 volume

I’ve read my way through the highs and lows of the CLAMP canon, from the Gothic angst of Tokyo Babylon to the cutesy antics of Kobato, and can say with great confidence that this odd one-shot represents the nadir of this talented quartet’s work. Miyuki-chan probably sounded like a great idea on paper: a young girl falls down a hole and finds herself in a sexed-up version of Lewis Carroll’s famous story. Unfortunately, the story bears almost no resemblance to Carroll’s original; Miyuki-chan is really just a pretext for CLAMP to draw scantily-clad beauties engaging in vaguely naughty behavior, usually by making a pass at Miyuki or inviting her to play strip poker. The stories are short and repetitive, barely spanning 100 pages in total, and are so inane that they don’t work as pornography or parody.

nightmares9. NIGHTMARES FOR SALE | Kaoru Ohashi • Aurora Publishing • 2 volumes

The premise of Nightmares for Sale is pure comeuppance theater: in exchange for having their dearest wishes granted – in this case, by the proprietors of Shadow’s Pawn Shop – bad people receive their just desserts. For this old-as-the-hills premise to succeed, three basic conditions need to be met. First, the audience needs to understand the subject is unrepentantly bad and not merely flawed or misguided. Second, the audience needs to see the chain of decisions that lead to the subject’s downfall. And third, the punishment needs to fit the crime. Alas, manga-ka Kaoru Ohashi doesn’t satisfy these basic criteria in Nightmares for Sale. A few characters get what they deserve, but many of the stories are sloppily executed; we don’t learn how or why the subject is being punished until Shadow appears at the end of the story to tell us. By far the worst chapter is “Children of Darkness,” in which a woman is tormented by the spirit of her unborn child. No matter what your personal convictions on abortion, the story is both macabre and misogynist, and shows an astonishing lack of compassion for the subject’s situation. Not even the artwork can redeem this clunker: it’s both busy and generic, a hot mess of awkwardly posed bodies and poorly applied screentones. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 11/28/07)

armkannon8. ARM OF KANNON | Masakazu Yamaguchi • Tokyopop • 9 volumes

After a nearly three-year absence, archaeologist Tozo Mikami returns to his family with a mysterious object in tow: the Arm of Kannon, an ancient Buddhist relic that, unbeknownst to Mikami’s son Maso, is a parasitic weapon that feeds off its host’s life force while transforming him into a tentacled killing machine. Before we’re too far into volume one, the Arm of Kannon destroys Tozo, choosing Maso as its next host. What follows is an unholy marriage of gore, mystical mumbo-jumbo, and military conspiracy theories, as Maso rapes and dismembers people, gets captured by an army contractor, then kills some more. A third-act detour into the distant past adds unnecessary complications to the plot; it’s as if Yamaguchi got bored with his characters but realized that he hadn’t quite resolved things enough to simply end the story. The art is incredibly detailed, which is a mixed blessing: if you like your entrails rendered with anatomical specificity, Arm of Kannon might be your cup of tea. Anyone in search of a coherent plot or sympathetic characters, however, is advised to look elsewhere.

devilwithin7. THE DEVIL WITHIN | Ryo Takagi • Go! Comi • 2 volumes

If 98.7% of shojo heroines are kind, smart, enthusiastic, and/or sincere — read likeable — Rion, the sixteen-year-old heroine of The Devil Within is a rare outlier: she suffers from a full-on shota complex that makes her seem mentally unbalanced. Forced into choosing among three prospective fiances (all adults), Rion instead pins her hope on a young neighbor who happens to be a fifteen-year-old trapped in a five-year-old’s body. Making this whole distasteful concept even more unpalatable is the way in which manga-ka Ryo Takago treats the principle character; Rion endures truly grotesque forms of abuse from her suitors that results in her abject humiliation. Hats off to anyone who made it through the first volume without squirming — I couldn’t.

dragonsister6. DRAGON SISTER! | Nini • Tokyopop • 2 volumes

Buried beneath the slapstick, speedlines, and extreme mammary close-ups is an intriguing premise: what if ancient China’s greatest warriors were, in fact, women? Dragon Sister! begins around 184 AD, when three brothers—Zhang Jiao, Zhang Bao, and Zhang Liang—acquire a set of magical scrolls capable of granting any wish. In their desire to overthrow the Han Dynasty, the brothers pray that no more heroes will be born. Their scheme backfires, however, transforming them into a cabal of power-hungry girls. As the country descends further into chaos, young nobleman Liu Bei forms a volunteer army to oppose the Zhangs, recruiting two busty babes, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, to aid his cause. None of this is explained very clearly—we never have a sense of who the various factions are, or why Liu Bei remains faithful to a corrupt emperor. Instead, Nini treats us to a seemingly endless parade of costume failures, crude jokes, and scenes of predatory lesbianism, all delivered in speech that vacillates between present-day dudespeak and wuxia film formality. Strictly for the fanservice crowd. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 11/2/08)

gorgeouslife5. THE GORGEOUS LIFE OF STRAWBERRY-CHAN | Ai Morinaga • Media Blasters • 2 volumes

I didn’t think it was possible to dislike anything by Ai Morinaga, but this sadistic boarding-school comedy proved me wrong. There’s no real story here; most of the “action” revolves around Akiyoshi, a fatuous pretty boy, and Strawberry-Chan, his talking frog. Akiyoshi delights in torturing his pet, squashing Strawberry-Chan, burying him alive, and even inflating him like a balloon via a well-placed straw. (If Morinaga is trying to make a greater point with her hero’s perverse antics, I can’t imagine what it is.) Adding insult to injury is the art, which is a riot of misapplied screentones, clashing patterns, and extreme facial close-ups—it’s the best representation of a migraine I’ve ever seen committed to paper, but some of the worst sequential art I’ve seen, period. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 5/31/08)

jpopidol14. J-POP IDOL | Story by MILLENNI+ M, Art by Toko Tashiro • Tokyopop • 2 volumes

Until Tokyopop releases a Glitter Cinemanga, otaku eager for overripe musical drama will have to content themselves with J-Pop Idol. But unlike Glitter, which is bad in a jaw-dropping, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-it way, J-Pop Idol is just plain bad. A big part of the problem is the story, which has been hastily cobbled together from dozens of similar, Star Is Born narratives–so hastily, in fact, that many scenes feel like complete non-sequitors. One of the most egregious examples can be found in the very first pages, when the members of an up-and-coming girl group face a test of their friendship: after winning a major talent competition, only one of them is singled out for a recording contract. From the context, however, it’s impossible to see why producers chose Maki over band mates Kay and Naomi, as Maki lacks the charisma, talent, and sex appeal that distinguished Diana Ross from her fellow Supremes.

The rest of volume one charts Maki’s attempt to build a recording career under the tutelage of handsome idol Ken, who motivates his protege with tough talk and hard lessons. There’s also a subplot involving tuberculosis that might not seem out of place in a Joan Crawford weepie, but seems downright ludicrous in a manga aimed at a teenage audience. The bottom line: J-Pop Idol may have been a “#1 hit mobile manga in Japan,” but that endorsement carries about as much weight as Paula Abdul’s enthusiastic cheerleading on American Idol. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 3/10/08)

seraphicfeather3. SERAPHIC FEATHER | Art by Hiroyuki Utatane, Story by Yo Morimoto and Toshiya Takeda • Dark Horse • 6 volumes

Seraphic Feather has three strikes against it: an overly fussy plot, tin-eared dialogue, and lousy artwork. The story revolves around the discovery of an alien spaceship on the far side of the Moon. Various Earthly factions compete for the downed ship, hoping to unlock its powers using the Emblem Seeds, a high-protein energy bar a mysterious power source. Running in tandem with the main plot are a love story between a young man named Sunao and his childhood friend Kei — who mysteriously re-appears after dying in an explosion on the Moon — and a subplot involving Kei’s brother Apep, who mysteriously sprouts a pair of wings. Making these baroque plot twists harder to take is the dialogue, all of which sounds like it was pilfered from an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The frosting on the cake, however, is the art: Hiroyuki Utatane seems more interested in drawing buxom girls and explosions than advancing the plot. Though characters yell and grab each other by the arm on almost every page, the story is dead in the water long before the end of volume one. Anyone who finds the cover art sexy will find the actual story an even bigger let-down, as it’s much tamer than the bustier and riding crop might suggest.

innocentw2. INNOCENT W | Kei Kusonoke • Tokyopop • 4 volumes

I can’t decide if Kei Kusonoke is exceptionally efficient or just plain disgusting. To wit: on the very first pages of this three-volume series, she treats us to a panty shot of a girl with a gruesome injury. Things don’t improve much from there, as the story quickly devolves into a Wiccan Battle Royale, pitting a group of young witches against an assortment of sadistic weirdos in a remote, wooded area. The hunters rape, torture, and mutilate the young women for sport, leaving a trail of dismembered corpses in the forest before the survivors gain the upper hand. Perhaps more disturbing than the actual story is the artwork. Kusonoke lavishes considerable attention on the characters’ costumes and hairstyles, but can’t be bothered to endow their faces with any expression; it’s as if the entire cast consumed large amounts of valium right before the mayhem began. They look bored. Funny, I was too…

colorofrage11. COLOR OF RAGE | Story by Kazuo Koike, Art by Seisake Kano • Dark Horse • 1 volume

First published in 1973, this historical drama plays like a mash-up of The Last Samurai, Rush Hour, and Mandingo. The story begins in 1783, when a whaling ship goes down off the coast of Japan. Two men — George, who’s Japanese, and King, who’s African-American — wash ashore, cut off their shackles, and head inland, only to discover a landscape populated by unscrupulous samurai and feudal lords who hold the peasants in thrall. For such a far-fetched premise to work, its principal characters’ thoughts, words, and actions need to make sense in historical context. Yet George and King behave like two modern action heroes deposited in feudal Japan, not two products of the eighteenth century; it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine John Cho and Will Smith slashing and wise-cracking their way through a big-screen adaptation. Making things worse are several scenes of brutal misogyny — what the editors euphemistically call “pulpy sexiness” — that are made all the more cringe-worthy by the unexamined racial stereotypes on parade. Kazuo Koike is always pushing the boundaries of good taste — that’s part of what makes Crying Freeman and Lady Snowblood so much fun — but Color of Rage sails way over the line and keeps on going.  (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 5/18/08)

* * * * *

I’ll be the first to admit that this list reflects my own biases. I don’t have much patience for fanservice, sadism, or gore for gore’s sake; if I’m going to be treated to dismembered bodies and panty shots, there needs to be a story and some memorable characters for me to be on board with it. I realize that some folks don’t feel the same way as I do, and that’s OK. There’s plenty of room for all of us under the manga-loving tent, even if we can’t agree on whether Arm of Kannon is awesome or awful. (In other words: hate the manga, not the critic.)

So what manga belong on your all-time worst list and why? Inquiring minds want to know!

POSTSCRIPT, 9/28/09: Over at Okazu, Erica Friedman posts her Yuri Manga Hall of Shame, five blisteringly funny critiques of books like Suzunari and Alice on Deadlines. Go, read, and be glad you dodged a 4-koma manga about cat clone twincest.

The Manga Hall of Shame

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Though my taste in manga is very particular, I’m much less discriminating in my reading habits. My willingness to try anything has yielded some wonderful surprises: Ai Morinaga’s Duck Prince, Taiyo Matsumoto’s No. 5, Shioko Mizuki’s Crossroad, Kazuo Umezu’s Scary Book, Motofumi Kobayashi’s Apocalypse Meow. The flipside of being a gourmand is that I’ve encountered my share of truly dreadful stuff, too — the kind of manga with such incoherent plots, unappealing characters, clumsy artwork, and tin-eared dialogue that they beg the question, Who thought this was a good idea?

Now that I’d donned my flame-proof pants, here are my candidates for the Manga Hall of Shame:

10. MIYUKI-CHAN IN WONDERLAND

CLAMP • Tokyopop • 1 volume

I’ve read my way through the highs and lows of the CLAMP canon, from the Gothic angst of Tokyo Babylon to the cutesy antics of Kobato, and can say with confidence that this odd one-shot represents the nadir of this talented quartet’s work. Miyuki-chan probably sounded like a great idea on paper: a young girl falls down a hole and finds herself in a sexed-up version of Lewis Carroll’s famous story. What better vehicle for Mokona and friends to demonstrate their talent for drawing fabulous costumes, Baroque hairdos, and trippy landscapes? Unfortunately, the story bears almost no resemblance to Alice in Wonderland; Miyuki-chan is just a pretext for CLAMP to draw scantily-clad beauties engaging in vaguely naughty behavior (usually making a pass at the vaguely horrified Miyuki or inviting her to play strip poker). The stories are short and repetitive, barely spanning 100 pages in total, and are so inane that they don’t work as pornography or parody. Strictly for the CLAMP completist.

nightmares9. NIGHTMARES FOR SALE

KAORU OHASHI • AURORA PUBLISHING • 2 VOLUMES

The premise of Nightmares for Sale is pure comeuppance theater: in exchange for having their dearest wishes granted – in this case, by the proprietors of Shadow’s Pawn Shop – bad people receive their just desserts. For this old-as-the-hills premise to succeed, three basic conditions need to be met. First, the audience needs to understand the subject is unrepentantly bad and not merely flawed or misguided. Second, the audience needs to see the chain of decisions that lead to the subject’s downfall. And third, the punishment needs to fit the crime. Alas, manga-ka Kaoru Ohashi doesn’t satisfy these basic criteria in Nightmares for Sale. A few characters get what they deserve: an overly ambitious model grows uglier and uglier, a bully is reincarnated as her victim. Many of the stories are sloppily executed, however; we don’t learn how or why the subject is being punished until Shadow appears at the end of the story to tell us. By far the worst chapter is “Children of Darkness,” in which a woman is tormented by the spirit of her unborn child. No matter what your personal convictions on abortion, the story is both macabre and misogynist, and shows an astonishing lack of compassion for the subject’s situation. Not even the artwork can redeem this clunker: it’s both busy and generic, a hot mess of awkwardly posed bodies and poorly applied screentones. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 11/28/07)

armkannon

8. ARM OF KANNON

MASAKAZU YAMAHUCHI • TOKYOPOP • 9 VOLUMES

After a nearly three-year absence, archaeologist Tozo Mikami returns to his family with a mysterious object in tow: the Arm of Kannon, an ancient Buddhist relic that, unbeknownst to Mikami’s son Maso, is actually a parasitic weapon that feeds off its host’s life force while transforming him or her into a grotesque killing machine, complete with tentacles. Before we’re too far into volume one, the Arm of Kannon destroys Tozo, choosing Maso as its next host. What follows is an unholy marriage of gore, mystical mumbo-jumbo, and military conspiracy theories, as Maso rapes and dismembers people, gets captured by an army contractor (they want the Arm for their own dastardly purposes, natch), then kills some more. A third-act detour into the distant past adds unnecessary complications to the plot; it’s as if Yamaguchi got bored with his characters but realized that he hadn’t quite resolved things enough to simply end the story. The art is incredibly detailed, which is a mixed blessing; if you like your entrails rendered with anatomical specificity, Arm of Kannon might be your cup of tea. Anyone in search of a coherent plot or sympathetic characters, however, is advised to look elsewhere.

devilwithin7. THE DEVIL WITHIN

RYO TAKAGI • GO! COMI • 2 VOLUMES

Go! Comi has licensed some terrific shojo — think Afterschool Nightmare, Crossroad, Tenshi Ja Nai!! — but the perennially popular The Devil Within is not among them. The main problem is its singularly unappealing heroine, Rion, a teenager who was traumatized by a scary movie involving demonic possession. Since the characters in the film attack women, Rion logically concludes that all adult men are evil and develops a full-on shota complex, gushing about the purity and hairlessness of young boys to such a degree I worried that federal authorities might arrest her. The plot is just as awful as its heroine: forced into choosing among three prospective fiances — all adults — Rion instead pins her hope on a young neighbor who happens to be a fifteen-year-old trapped in a five-year-old’s body. Perhaps as punishment for her predilections, Rion endures some truly grotesque forms of abuse from her suitors, making The Devil Within easily one of the most repellent and ridiculous stories I’ve read.

dragonsister6. DRAGON SISTER!

NINI • TOKYOPOP • 2 VOLUMES, SUSPENDED

Buried beneath the slapstick, speedlines, and extreme mammary close-ups is an intriguing premise: what if ancient China’s greatest warriors were, in fact, women? Dragon Sister! begins around 184 AD, when three brothers—Zhang Jiao, Zhang Bao, and Zhang Liang—acquire a set of magical scrolls capable of granting any wish. In their desire to overthrow the Han Dynasty, the brothers pray that no more heroes will be born, only beautiful women. Their scheme backfires, however, transforming them into a cabal of power-hungry girls. As the country descends further into chaos, young nobleman Liu Bei forms a volunteer army to oppose the Zhang sisters (formerly brothers), recruiting two busty babes, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, to aid his cause. None of this is explained very clearly—we never have a sense of who the various factions are, or why Liu Bei remains faithful to a corrupt emperor. Instead, Nini treats us to a seemingly endless parade of costume failures, crude jokes, and scenes of predatory lesbianism, all delivered in speech that vacillates between present-day dudespeak and wuxia film formality. For the fanservice crowd. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 11/2/08)

gorgeouslife5. THE GORGEOUS LIFE OF STRAWBERRY-CHAN

AI MORINAGA • MEDIA BLASTERS • 2 VOLUMES

I didn’t think it was possible to dislike anything by Ai Morinaga, but this sadistic boarding-school comedy proved me wrong. There’s no real story here; most of the “action” revolves around Akiyoshi, a fatuous pretty boy, and Strawberry-Chan, his talking frog. Akiyoshi delights in torturing his pet, squashing Strawberry-Chan, burying him alive, and even inflating him like a balloon via a well-placed straw. (If Morinaga is trying to make a greater point with her hero’s perverse antics, I can’t imagine what it is.) Adding insult to injury is the art, which is a riot of misapplied screentones, clashing patterns, and extreme facial close-ups—it’s the best representation of a migraine I’ve ever seen committed to paper, but some of the worst sequential art I’ve seen, period. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 5/31/08)

jpopidol14. J-POP IDOL

STORY BY MILLENNI+ M, ART BY TOKO YASHIRO • TOKYOPOP • 2 VOLUMES, SUSPENDED

Until Tokyopop releases a Glitter Cinemanga, otaku eager for overripe musical drama will have to content themselves with J-Pop Idol. But unlike Glitter, which is bad in a jaw-dropping, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-it way (read: awesomely bad), J-Pop Idol is just plain bad. A big part of the problem is the story, which has been hastily cobbled together from dozens of similar, Star Is Born narratives–so hastily, in fact, that many scenes feel like complete non-sequitors. One of the most egregious examples can be found in the very first pages, when the members of an up-and-coming girl group face a test of their friendship: after winning a major talent competition, only one of them is singled out for a recording contract. From the context, however, it’s impossible to see why producers chose Maki over band mates Kay and Naomi, as Maki lacks the charisma, talent, and sex appeal that distinguished Diana Ross from her fellow Supremes (or Beyonce from Destiny’s other Children, for that matter). The rest of volume one charts Maki’s attempt to build a recording career under the tutelage of handsome idol Ken, who motivates his protege with tough talk and hard lessons learned on his way to the top. There’s also a subplot involving tuberculosis that might not seem out of place in a Joan Crawford weepie, but seems downright ludicrous in a manga aimed at a teenage audience. The bottom line: J-Pop Idol may have been a “#1 hit mobile manga in Japan,” but that endorsement carries about as much weight as Paula Abdul’s enthusiastic cheerleading on American Idol. (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 3/10/08)

seraphicfeather3. SERAPHIC FEATHER

ART BY HIROYUKI UTATANE, STORY BY YO MORIMOTO AND TOSHIYA TAKEDA • DARK HORSE • 6 VOLUMES, SUSPENDED

I love me a good sci-fi tale as much as the next person, but Hiroyuki Utatane’s Seraphic Feather left me cold. How cold, you ask? Colder than the vacuum of space, I tell you.

The plot revolves around the discovery of an alien spaceship on the far side of the Moon. Various factions compete for the downed ship, hoping to unlock its powers using something called the Emblem Seeds. Running in tandem with the main plot are a love story between a young man named Sunao and his childhood friend Kei, who mysteriously re-appears after dying in an explosion on the Moon, and subplot involving Kei’s brother Apep, who mysteriously sprouts a pair of wings. The dialogue is pure Mystery Science Theater fodder, with characters frequently explaining things to one another that, presumably, they already know. Utatane seems more interested in drawing buxom girls and explosions than actually moving the plot along; though characters yell and grab each other by the arm on almost every page, the story is dead in the water long before the end of volume one. Anyone who finds the cover art sexy will find the actual story an even bigger let-down, as it’s much tamer than all those leather bustiers and riding crops might suggest.

innocentw2. INNOCENT W

KEI KUSONOKE • TOKYOPOP • 4 VOLUMES

I can’t decide if Kei Kusonoke is exceptionally efficient or just plain disgusting. To wit: on the very first pages of this three-volume series, she treats us to a panty shot of a girl with a gruesome injury. (Talk about two-fers.) Things don’t improve much from there, as the story quickly devolves into a Wiccan Battle Royale, pitting a group of young witches against an assortment of sadistic weirdos in a remote, wooded area. The hunters rape, torture, and mutilate the young women for sport, leaving a trail of dismembered corpses in the forest before the survivors gain the upper hand. Perhaps more disturbing than the actual story is the artwork: Kusonoke lavishes considerable attention on the characters’ costumes and hairstyles, but can’t be bothered to endow their faces with any expression; it’s as if the entire cast consumed large amounts of valium right before the mayhem began. They look bored. Funny, I was too…

colorofrage11. COLOR OF RAGE

STORY BY KAZUO KOIKE, ART BY SEISAKE KANO • DARK HORSE • 1 VOLUME

First published in 1973, this historical drama plays like a mash-up of The Last Samurai, Rush Hour, and Mandingo. The story begins in 1783, when a whaling ship goes down off the coast of Japan. Two men — George, who’s Japanese, and King, who’s African-American — wash ashore, cut off their shackles, and head inland, only to discover a landscape populated by unscrupulous samurai and feudal lords who hold the peasants in thrall. For such a far-fetched premise to work, its principal characters’ thoughts, words, and actions need to make sense in historical context. Yet George and King behave like two modern action heroes deposited in feudal Japan, not two products of the eighteenth century; it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine John Cho and Will Smith slashing and wise-cracking their way through a big-screen adaptation. Making things worse are several scenes of brutal misogyny — what the editors euphemistically call “pulpy sexiness” — that are made all the more cringe-worthy by the unexamined racial stereotypes on parade. Kazuo Koike is always pushing the boundaries of good taste — that’s part of what makes Crying Freeman and Lady Snowblood so much fun — but Color of Rage sails way over the line and keeps on going.  (Review originally posted at PopCultureShock, 5/18/08)

* * * * *

I’ll be the first to admit that this list reflects my own biases. I don’t have much patience for fanservice, sadism, or gore for gore’s sake; if I’m going to be treated to dismembered bodies and panty shots, there needs to be a story and some memorable characters for me to be on board with it. I realize that some folks don’t feel the same way as I do, and that’s OK. There’s plenty of room for all of us under the manga-loving tent, even if we can’t agree on whether Arm of Kannon is awesome or awful. (In other words: hate the manga, not the critic.)

So what manga belong on your all-time worst list and why? Inquiring minds want to know!

POSTSCRIPT, 9/28/09: Over at Okazu, Erica Friedman posts her Yuri Manga Hall of Shame, five blisteringly funny critiques of books like Suzunari and Alice on Deadlines. Go, read, and be glad you dodged a 4-koma manga about cat clone twincest.