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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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1.7 Left of Center Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome to the seventh installment of Comic Book Galaxy’s mostly weekly column on mostly manga, International Geographic. This week, we’ll be taking a look at manga that go beyond the normal mainstream fare whether in substance, technical prowess, or content. I’ll go ahead and blow the suspense for you all now by saying that this is material that I selected because I liked it a lot so I won’t be poking holes in anyone’s favorite balloon today. I promise to get back to that ASAP next week! FIRST HITS Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS adapted by Jun Asuga- Disney Enterprises, 170+ pgs, $8.99. Not Rated (All ages appropriate)
So, from this angle, I was not surprised to see that there had been a manga adaptation of it. What was interesting that Disney Press, who don’t even handle the publication of their own comics properties in the English market, saw enough profit potential in it to bring it to market. Whether that decision was made because it was a Burton property (in relation to the release of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and the upcoming CORPSE BRIDE) or because it was manga is anyone’s guess but I know what mine is. Oh yes, the book itself. Asuga does a great job of pacing this story so that it hits all of the high points of the movie briskly without losing all of the intricate method that is Burton’s madness. The layouts are pretty standard fare but, as one must assume that children were at least a portion of the intended market, it only makes sense that readability should win out of innovation. Rather than trying to narrate a flow chart distillation of the movie’s plot, this adaptation succeeds by recreating the atmosphere and environment of the original and having faith in the power of manga to tell a story just as well. The result is certainly no substitute for the movie but takes one-fourth of the time in reading to remind us why we enjoyed the original property to begin with. APOCALYPSE MEOW Vol 1 by Motofumi Kobayashi - ADV Manga, 130 pgs+, $9.99, Rated 16+
“I think it was around 1989, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when I got the idea for Apocalypse Meow. I was watching Tour of Duty on video, and I thought to myself, ‘I could tell the same kind of story about the Vietnam War using rabbits and it would be good.’” As manga, MEOW has both its strengths and weaknesses, though, in the end, I think the former mostly outweigh the latter. It seems fitting that the author was inspired to do this work based on watching a movie because that’s pretty much how this reads: like a distillation of second and third generation stories about the war in Vietnam. Kobayashi is obviously a military history buff, going into great detail about the day-to-day life of a soldier on the ground as well as carefully placing the right piece of hardware into the hands of the right combatant. But this scholarly approach falls just short of telling a great story that happens to be set during this period. The characters function, on a whole, better as archetypes than as fully realized individuals. The plot feels like a series of unrelated events that are more of a checklist of Vietnam War “Must-Do’s” than a unified course of action that illuminates some greater moral or lesson. In this sense, it’s almost more honest about the realities of war than the meaning we try to scrape together collectively once the last troops have been withdrawn. The device of using animals instead of people to tell the story is essentially value-neutral. It doesn’t get in the way of storytelling, though it may reveal more about the politics of the author than I have cultural context to perceive clearly. But, it also doesn’t really mute the violence nor add subtext to the message that might have been otherwise lost on a human cast. I enjoyed reading all three volumes that make up APOCALYPSE MEOW but, when I was done, I couldn’t escape the feeling of the story’s having missed something along the way. While there isn’t a wealth of contemporary comics or manga that take on the subject of modern war in a meaningful way, I can think of a few (like Garth Ennis’ WAR STORY) that do this just a little better. That doesn’t disqualify APOCALYPSE MEOW from being a good read but it does win it a secondary recommendation. On an almost completely unrelated side-note, I’m also more than a little curious as to why this translation reads left-to-right when it is typically more expensive to produce manga this way unless it had already been translated and flipped at some point in the past. THE TIMES OF BOTCHAN Vol 1 - by Natsuo Sekikawa and Jiro Taniguchi- Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 140 pgs+, $19.99, Not Rated
THE TIMES OF BOTCHAN is a collaborative work between artist Jiro Taniguchi (THE WALKING MAN) and writer Natsuo Sekikawa that takes a distinctly post-modern look at the rapidly transforming culture of Japan in the first years of the Twentieth Century. The central figure in BOTCHAN is based on and named after writer Soseki Natsume (a man described to me by one Japanese literature buff I know as “the most influential writer in Japanese of the 20th century”). But, BOTCHAN itself is adapted from a book (MEIJI KENKEN HIKYU ROKU) written by a contemporary of Natsume’s named Seigai Ota, whose name also bears a strong resemblance to a young student in the story named Chusaburo Ota. BOTCHAN continues to add self-referential layers as it focuses in on the creative process that Natsume goes through in order to write a novel about a man named BOTCHAN; a character, by his own admission, drawn mainly from his own experiences though he does admit that, “if I wrote about things just as they happened, I wouldn’t get any relief.” With only this first volume from which to judge, I don’t think the appreciation of BOTCHAN (the manga) comes from its function as a fictional record of the writing of this book, though history confirms for us that he did indeed finish it. Instead, the story uses every moment ostensibly set aside to watch the novel develop for digress into a seemingly unrelated vignettes that beautifully illustrate this period of the Japanese culture in transition. Natsume, the story suggests, is a unwilling vessel for the culture that pours into him from every haphazard encounter and random memory and, despite his best efforts to interject his own perspective, is shaped by that relationship to the degree that it dictates the outcome of his creativity. The cutting edge nature of this story is quite subtle, as its twisting narrative strategies are often hidden behind the almost stuffy formalism of Taniguchi’s immaculately precise line and workmanlike layouts. Considered in the context of what is considered saleable in the manga market, the sense of flattened affect that he brings to the page can safely be considered reactionary, a notion suggested in the Epilogue, written by manga critic, Fusanoke Natsume (who happens to be Natsume’s grandson). He describes Taniguchi as “no stranger to European readers of manga” and someone whose works, “have been translated in many countries, such as France, where comic novels have a considerable following.” Ponent Mon, in addition to publishing excellent Japanese manga from Taniguchi and others, has also introduced a number of volumes from the Manga Nouvelle tradition, a hybrid of manga and bande-desinee sensibilities, to the Anglophone audience. Taniguchi’s style represents that same tradition, though, given that he debuted as a mangaka in 1972, one is even tempted to believe that he may have inspired it through his influence. His work is less an aberration of the manga tradition than a tincture made of its lifeblood, a philter produced by exacting standards, like those of Natsume himself, that reject the valueless nature of endless novelty and seek to reconnect to something more universal. THE TIMES OF BOTCHAN is not a series that is going to appeal to everyone. This is one of those rare cases where I think fans of Western comics like PALOOKAVILLE and BERLIN are going to find more in common with the values of the story than your typical manga fan. However, I don’t want to scare anyone off this book because it represents that tip of the mountain finally pushed above water by the mountain of mainstream manga below it. I’m not foolish enough to say that this is one of the best manga ever produced, as so little of it is yet available in my native tongue, but it is certainly one of the more provocative I’ve read and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Japanese culture and history, post-modern fiction, or just narrative art at its finest. To the rest of you, I say, godspoden. BEYOND THE BACK COVER Usually with this feature I like to cover a series that is either wrapped up its serialization or published at least enough of its run to make some sort of conclusive critical statement about it as a substantive portion of the whole. This week’s look at BAREFOOT GEN only covers the first two volumes (which are in fact all I’ve been able to get so far) but, given the timely nature of its message, I opted for sooner rather than later. BAREFOOT GEN Vol 1 & 2 by Keiji Nakazawa- Last Gasp, 280 pgs+, $14.95/ea, Not Rated
BAREFOOT GEN was originally serialized in SHONEN JUMP beginning in 1972. Like its much younger American sibling, JUMP is a shonen manga magazine, with features (at least in theory) appealing to boys ideally between the ages of say, eight and fifteen, though one might reasonably assume that it finds some percentage in the audience above and below that range as well. Gen, the title character is a boy, as was Nakazawa when the events recounted took place, as was the audience for which GEN was originally written. It is important to make these distinctions because BAREFOOT GEN has, since its entry into the English language market in the late 1980s, been marketed as a graphic novel series for adults. The problem with this is, read in contextual relation to say, Art Spiegelman (who wrote a preface in support apparently so compelling that Last Gasp printed it in both the first and second volume), BAREFOOT GEN is a mess of saccharine sentimentalism, restricted narrative timbre, and wacky anatomy. To an adult mind, even one well versed in the occult art of reading graphic novels, Nakazawa’s startling recreation of the childlike worldview he inhabited at the time of the bombing will seem invariably odds with the gravity of his story. The polarizing nature of the content only adds to our cultural misperception of it. Most of book one is taken up setting the stage culturally and historically for what comes after. Its narrative focus alternates often between showing Gen’s family’s commitment to opposing the war and the often-humiliating repercussions of that belief often visited upon them by the members of their community. More remarkably, Nakazawa resists allowing his “hero” the comfort of wholeheartedly believe in any viewpoint of his own. His politics, such as they are, are shaped by an immediate reaction to the environmental stimulus he is receiving at that precise moment. When he is victimized for his father’s beliefs, he questions not their sentiment (which is beyond his grasp) but the obstacles that they represent towards his being able to interact meaningfully with those around him. As he comforted by the feeling of solidarity that he feels suffering alongside his family, it then becomes the violent tendencies of the society around them that becomes the enemy to him. But as volume one draws to a close with the awful inevitability of gravity pulling a bomb towards the Earth, the politics of BAREFOOT GEN dissolve into a dripping landscape composed of burnt human flesh, collapsing buildings, and endless fire. This horrifying montage of life at ground zero, t+1 is more than enough to convince most Western readers that a parent would be out of their mind to let a child read it. This scene, where Gen is ordered by his father to take his mother away from the fire and leave him and the other children to burn to death is hard enough to take with the dialogue stripped away from the unforgettable images.
NOKOAKA-SAN- Gen! Quick take your mother, hurry!
You’ve got to take care of your mother for me! But the story he tells is not for his contemporaries, the once-children, who, in many cases, who stood by helpless or unwilling in his time of greatest need. Grown from a short stand-alone piece called “I Saw It”, BAREFOOT GEN is a gift from Nakazawa to the children born after the fact. It is the truth in a language that they can understand even though the lesson is a hard one. A truth that hides the awesome power of its message from busy adults who have forgotten the subtleties of childhood discourse. Given the resonant impact that GEN has had upon my own perceptions of Hiroshima and WWII-era Japan, I’m tempted to fall back on “Better late than never” and suggest reading it to anyone who will listen. At its worst, it’s still an invaluable primary source depicting life in Japan towards the end of the War. Read to its full potential, BAREFOOT GEN is a chilling indictment of war as a human practice and a testament of the will to survive in the most inhospitable of environs as Nakazawa himself suggests expressively in the opening lines of the story. Wheat pushes its shoots up through the winter frost, only to be stepped on again and again. The trampled wheat sends strong roots into the earth. Endures frost, wind and snow. Grows straight and tall...and one day bears fruit. That’s all from me. I’ll see y’all in seven. -- ROB VOLLMAR Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-Nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and BLUESMAN, both with artist Pablo G. Callejo.
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For those of you out there who read Diamond’s PREVIEW
catalog with any frequency, every year there is this
SLEW of Nightmare Before Christmas (or NBX as it
sometimes referred to in said catalogs) merchandise
that comes available from Japan. The best I’ve been
able to figure it is that Tim Burton’s macabre but
loveable Christmas anti-classic has been somehow
elevated to canonical status in regards to Christmas
in Japan, resulting in a never-ending, ever-widening
pool of related paraphernalia being produced to
celebrate this now most unabashed of capitalist
holidays.
No description of APOCALYPSE MEOW could possibly be as
succinct as this one from Kobayashi in the afterward
to this volume.
First, a disclaimer. I’m pretty sure that Ponent Mon
is an imprint of Ediciones de Ponent that publishes my
book, BLUESMAN in Spanish. I didn’t like this any more
or less because the people who paid the people who
published this book also once paid me so that they
(the people who did the paying, not the people who got
paid) could publish mine. I promise.
August 6th of this year marked the 60th anniversary of
the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the US
military in a bid to bring World War II to its
conclusion. A recent USA Today poll found that 59% of
Americans today believe that this was the right (and
perhaps only thing) to do given the situation. 100% of
the people writing this review believe that entering
into a debate with history over the relative ethical
merits of one form of state-sponsored mass-murder over
another is not only well outside the purview of this
column, but something of a fool’s errand. While
enjoying the benefits this week of being especially
timely, a discussion of the first 600 page or so of
BAREFOOT GEN, Keiji Nakazawa’s thinly fictionalized
account of Hiroshima before and after that pivotal
moment of the 20th century, is inherently neither
irrelevant or fruitless.