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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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1.1 1.3 Column Without Honor or Humanity Greetings and welcome to the third installment of International Geographic. Looking ahead, there is a metric ton of manga due to be released in the States in the next couple of weeks just in time for San Diego Comic Con. In response, we’ll be covering a variety of titles this week that aren’t necessarily all that recent before diving head-first next week into the crush of newer titles.
FIRST HITS
NODAME CANTABILE can be thought of musician’s manga as the story told from the perspective Shinichi Chiaki, a young pianist and aspiring conductor as he chafes against the restraints endemic to classical pedagogy. Manga, having no literal aural component, would seem like a difficult medium in which to make this story work but Ninomiya makes excellent use of her characters’ interior narratives to share the musical component of the story with the audience. Her character design is markedly naturalist in comparison to most manga with less emphasis on glamour and more on capturing the feel of everyday people. There is a good deal of information about music and a variety of composers on display in here but NODAME CANTABILE is focused more on the players than the music itself. It’s listed on the back as being appropriate for Older Teens so it wouldn’t surprise me to see the sexual content become more prominent as the relationship between the principal male and female progresses. Winner of the Kodansha Manga of the Year Award and also of a reserved spot on my manga bookshelf.
The edgy drawing on the cover of DEAD END Volume One was reminiscent enough of Taiyo Matsumoto to entice me to open it up and see what was going on inside. Manabe’s angular and not-always flattering illustration style has a lot of energy to it and keeps the loopy urban sci-fi elements of the story from seeming too out of place. Manabe’s storytelling reminds me even more of Paul Pope than Matsumoto himself with a heavy emphasis on love with an idealized near stranger as the anti-hero’s saving grace. Given the occasionally non-sequitur twists of the plot and excessive, often random violence, DEAD END may be a better serial read than a finished story but I’m willing to give it a few volumes to exhaust the charm of Manabe’s line work and novel storytelling choices on display here in volume one.
This can be a very short review for some of you. If you are willing to stay up until 2 AM to watch Iron Chef Japan on the Food Network, then, run, don’t walk, to wherever manga is sold in your area and demand your copy of IRON WOK JAN because, friend, your life is incomplete until you do. For the remainder of you, IRON WOK JAN is the story of Jan Akiyama, grandson to the greatest living cook of Chinese food who must battle his way up the ranks of Tokyo’s finest chefs in order to reign supreme and defend his family’s legacy. Saiyo packs an extraordinary amount of information about cooking into the story, keeping it true to its function as manga about cooking, not cooks. If Jan himself was too likeable, a story about cooking might lack conflict to keep it moving along. Jan’s personality, in contrast, is tortured and maniacal to great comedic effect. He alternately curses and scowls his way through the preparation of his dishes and has nothing but contempt for nearly everyone he meets. It’s surprisingly endearing once we learn the difficulties of his upbringing and part of the series’ appeal beyond volume 1, I suspect, will involve Jan’s softening up to those around him and, in effect, to the audience. All in all, IRON WOK JAN is a hell of a lot of fun and, like IRON CHEF JAPAN, will make you crave foods you never even knew existed. Volume One of IRON WOK JAN was originally released in English by ComicsOne, who has since gone out of business, and will be handled from this point forward by a newer company, Dr Master.
Without intentionally trying to piss in anyone’s Post Toastie’s, I have seen very little American produced manga that represented anything beyond a superficial appreciation of Japanese character design and a misapprehension of the narrative goals of genuine manga. This comes as something of a disappointment to me considering the success of comparable movements like manga nouvelle in France but, given the relative novelty of manga to the US market in relation to that of the French, it is understandable. So, imagine my surprise when volume one of Felipe Smith’s MBQ met and then wildly exceeded any expectation I had for it as a domestically produced manga. Offering a fully-realized vision of urban life that reads like a collaboration between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarentino with all the storytelling excellence suggested in that meeting, MBQ ambitiously mixes autobiographical comix, shades of yakuza manga, and healthy swaths of hip hop culture to create something that is singular in its worldview and surprisingly accessible. Smith is an extremely gifted visual storyteller and is able to use the manga matrix from which he is working as a tool, rather than a blueprint for the stories he’s telling. There’s comedy, drama, sex, death, and everything else under the sun at work here, making MBQ seem enough like real life to draw valid comparisons between Smith’s work (who is of Jamaican-Argentinian descent) and LOVE & ROCKETS without fear of resorting to hyperbole. I honestly just picked this up to try and offer something outside of my normal reading habits for the International Geographic audience but, based on this first volume, I’m down for all fifteen rounds if Smith is. Highly recommended.
BEYOND THE BACK COVER
There have only been a few manga translated into English that might qualify as shoujo horror. A few years back, ComicsOne published BRIDE OF DEIMOS, a classic shoujo from the mid-1970s about a school-girl who has the unfortunate distinction of being the reincarnation of Lucifer’s sister and lover. Each installment consists of his revealing the sinful nature of everyone she knows (usually resulting in their death) until, theoretically, she will come to see her own flawed nature and, thus overcome her repulsion for him and his advances. BRIDE has a funky stylistic flair to it that was enough to catch my attention, but the premise of the story proves after a few volumes to be too narrow to allow for development beyond one-note samba status. However dated the storytelling in BRIDE OF DEIMOS seems now, its spirit and structure are echoed with more satisfying results in a contemporary shoujo horror series, Matsuri Akino’s PET SHOP OF HORRORS. PET SHOP’s central premise is a twist on a beloved piece of Americana. In the opening scene, we overhear the yet unintroduced main character discuss a transaction with a customer. “Please keep in mind...if you do not adhere to each point of the contract, then this store cannot be held responsible for the consequences.” “Yes, yes, I understand!” “Don’t take it into the light. Don’t expose it to water and no feeding it after midnight, right?” (PET SHOP, “Dream”) As that customer disappears into the night (presumably to star in the Direct to Video Gremlins 3), we are introduced the shop’s proprietor, an androgynous and slender man named Count D. He is abruptly accosted by a young woman bursting in after hours, demanding the rarest bird that he has in the shop. In the first of many such encounters, the Count matches her up with a strange creature that appears to others to be a beautiful animal (in this case a bird) but to her appears to be a young man that looks like a god. After following the Count’s directions carefully, the woman finds her life transformed by her new “pet” but mistakes his lovesong for her for a desire to mate with one of his own kind. At her insistence, the Count provides her with a mate to her pet, along with specific instructions on how to facilitate their mating. The story takes its final dark twist as the woman listens to her beloved P-Chan’s mating song for six days only to discover on the seventh that he has been devoured alive by his mate, as is customary for his species. The now impregnated mate is returned to the Count, allowing the cycle to continue. “Dream” establishes many of the story elements that are at play throughout the PET SHOP series. The central character, Count D, is something like the Crypt-Keeper, an enigmatic figure that merely frames the impending disaster in someone else’s life. The short story structure of most of the PET SHOP stories gives her little time to dwell on the minutiae of her characters’ interiors, painting their behavior in broader, more archetypal strokes in order to give the moral fables that inhabit these stories room to resonate. Akino’s artwork is florid and inventive from the first page, bringing an assuredness of focus to her storytelling not always found in shoujo. The elaborate costuming and bishonen character design are common enough to contemporary shoujo but Akino’s illustrations both rival and draw influence from the decadent detail-work of the 1970s shoujo manga-ka in a manner rarely seen on these shores. The second story, “Despair” introduces another major character to PET SHOP, Leon Orcot, a detective who becomes aware of a string of mysterious crimes with trails that lead straight to D’s pet shop. Orcot is something of the Klondike Kat of the piece, always suspecting D of some crime or another but never able to make anything stick. Their relationship serves as a subtle yaoi influence on the work that never really goes anywhere but keeps the subject of D’s androgyny close to the surface of the story. Midway through the series, Orcot also inherits a nephew that spends most of his time at the Pet Shop and, like D, can see all the animals that live their in the humanoid forms. As the story draws closer to its end, many of the questions surrounding D and the Pet Shop begin to take precedent over the episodic format. The exploration and resolution of the serial elements, while a deviation from the usual formula for success, make reaching the story’s end satisfying while leaving the reader hungry for the possibility of more PET SHOP stories someday. Many of the Japanese horror movies that have been recycled for American audiences in the last few years (THE RING, THE GRUDGE, DARK WATER) were successful in their own market because they were an answer to the question of how to make horror as a genre palatable to female audiences. By applying her illustrative genius to the blend of a delicate shoujo aesthetic with shocking moments of horror gore and suspense, Matsuri Akino’s PET SHOP OF HORRORS manages the same difficult task. While the result may fall just short of being profound, it is immensely entertaining and makes for a satisfying multi-volume read. -- ROB VOLLMAR Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-Nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and BLUESMAN, both with artist Pablo G. Callejo.
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NODAME CANTABILE Vol. 1
DEAD END Vol. 1
IRON WOK JAN Vol 1
MBQ
PET SHOP OF HORRORS Vol. 1-10