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The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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International Geographic - 1.15 Blue Flow Greetings and welcome to the fifteenth installment of Comic Book Galaxy’s more weekly than usual column on manga, International Geographic. I’m your host, Rob Vollmar and this week, we’re back to the business of manga with reviews of manga from Kazuo Koike, Gekiga pioneer, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Moyoco Anno as well as the manga adaptation of Kyoichi Katayama’s SOCRATES IN LOVE.
Persons interested in learning more about the mysteries and majesties of Japanese pop music are invited to check out Protoculture Addicts #85 (the most recent issue at the time of this writing) for an excellent overview on the topic. FIRST HITS
My response thus far to manga written by Kazuo Koike that are not LONE WOLF & CUB has been muted at best. Series like THE CHOSEN and WOUNDED MAN, lacking LONE WOLF’s focus, degenerate too quickly into mindless romps of visual deviance to sustain any kind of meaningful narrative. It is distinctly possible (probable even) that meaningful narrative was nowhere on Koike-sensei’s list of priorities while making those manga but the experience of reading them, especially in contrast to LONE WOLF, felt joyless and a little icky. I had higher hopes for LADY SNOWBLOOD, though, as it is a very early work from Koike, launched, one assumes, in the wake of LONE WOLF’s popularity. Structurally, the two series share similarities. Lady Snowblood, like Ogami and Daigoro, has become an assassin in order to gain revenge, though in her case, she has inherited this vendetta from her mother who died in prison. Though both series are period pieces, LS is set just one hundred years and some change in the past so, for some readers, the cultural and temporal barrier may not seem quite so fierce. As with LONE WOLF, Koike uses his wandering narrative to intimately explore the lives of both his main character and the society around her. Whereas LONE WOLF is mainly focused on men and their place in the Universe as expressed through bushi, LADY SNOWBLOOD turns our attention on the plights of women towards the end of the Meiji period. It is rarely a pleasant scene but Koike, frank as he is, keeps this aspect of the story rooted in believable expressions of human sexuality, if occasionally in extremity. Collaborator Kazuo Kamimura is an able facilitator of Koike’s mad vision. His style is much more polished looking than the sketchy genius of LONE WOLF artist, Goseki Kojima but is never slick to the point of taking one out of the story. It is also interesting that neither artist has time to imbed fan service into the visuals as they are too busy drawing actual sex rather than just the threat of it. The result, in both cases, is visual storytelling that comes across as very honest and capable. In Kamimura’s case, there is a rounded, cartoon-y quality that haunts the edge of his line work that seems almost in opposition to the hard-edged quality of the narrative. That may be one of the factors working in LADY SNOWBLOOD’s favor as it balances out the often-harsh tone of the narrative with an almost dispassionate delivery of the visuals. Intriguing enough to buy the next volume and closer to what I’m interested in about Koike’s writing than nearly everything else of his I’ve read with the exception of YOU KNOW & WHAT.
Gekiga is one of the great lingering mysteries remaining to Western readers of Japanese manga. Gekiga, according to volume editor Adrian Tomine is a a term coined by PUSH MAN author, Yoshihiro Tatsumi in 1957 to differentiate the “gritty, naturalistic style of cartooning that he helped pioneer from that of the more commercial, youth-oriented manga.” While Tatsumi himself laments in a recent interview in Giant Robot magazine that this choice often made it difficult to make a consistent living, it is, nonetheless, a tradition that spawned great successes that emanates from his pen. Tatsumi’s strengths are manifold and on ready display throughout this taut collection of short stories. His characters, while rarely cutesy, have a cartoonish amiability about them and, on occasion, reoccur as archetypes from story to story. Tatsumi invests the world they live in with bursts of startling detail, often to heighten the sense of bleakness imported from the narrative. This sense of unity between the verbal and visual goals of the artist, both which fall outside of the mainstream of the form, brings an insidious but undeniable strength to Tatsumi’s nihilist vignettes that transcends the sum of their parts. And dark it is, indeed; a cycle of desperate repetitions on themes almost too vile to utter but delivered so unglamorously that one could hardly consider Tatsumi responsible for glorifying the excesses he records. Murder, rape, abortion, and sexual depravity reoccur in nearly every story, committed by troubled if mundane cyphers that defy interpretation almost as vigorously as they do characterization. Rendered by just any artist, these narratives might prove to vicious to take in a visual form but balanced in tone by Tatsumi’s eerily calm style, the themes are able to resonate more freely than they might otherwise. This is a nice looking volume with fantastic production values, excellent additional content to help provide context for appreciating the material itself, and a left-to-right reading orientation for those who are threatened by the Back to Japan movement in manga formatting. It is also manga that will appeal more to open-minded fans of alternative and underground comics than your average INU YASHA fan. If any of that sounds appealing, you’d be hard pressed to find a better way to spend $20, short of feeding the homeless.
I saw this solicited in Previews as an all-ages title but my brain just couldn’t wrap around the idea of HAPPY MANIA creator, Moyoco Anno creating manga aimed at a younger audience. Now that I’ve experienced it for myself, I not only like this but SUGAR SUGAR RUNE may be my favorite Anno title yet. the magical girl genre quite literally, Anno’s story here is of two young witches who travel from their home in Magic World to Earth where they are commissioned to steal as many hearts as they can in a competition to see who will become Queen. The first shocker is seeing Anno’s style transformed from its sketchy, punked-out incarnation in HAPPY MANIA into the elaborately decorated one on display here. At least once per segment, I was knocked about by a decadence of detail more commonly associated with 1970s shoujo manga. Her layout strategies here are similar to earlier efforts but every once and a while, one of those wacky flower explosions will go off in the background, bringing a sense of participating in a tradition lacking in her earlier work. The character design and story are just about charming as they can be. While there are two lil’ witches, only one of them behaves like a traditional shoujo lead (Vanilla Mieux). The other, Chocolat Meillures is more reminiscent of earlier Anno protagonists, like HAPPY MANIA’s Kayoko Shigeta; abrasive, outspoken, domineering, and, abruptly, vulnerable. Though more attention is paid to Chocolat, this duo is a splendid way for Anno’s trademark wit and worldview to have a place in an otherwise traditional shoujo manga. Anything less would have made SUGAR SUGAR RUNE, as a Moyoco Anno work, seem false and forced. Instead, it demonstrates her considerable flexibility and ambition as a creator and contributes to the strength of her body of work, rather than contradicting it. I’m sure glad that she had more faith in her ability to pull this off than I did because it rarely feels this good to be so wrong.
This manga adaptation of SOCRATES IN LOVE was released side-by-side with the prose version of the story by parent company Viz Media. Since I have yet to read the book, it is tough to judge Kazui’s manga adaptation by merits other than those presented by the work itself. Since the plot and characters were provided from an external source, that leaves illustration quality and effectiveness of the adaptation by which to judge Kazui herself. There is nothing remarkable about the art of SOCRATES but rarely is it ever deficient either. The first half of the book is about as typical a teen romance manga as one is likely to find and, in a sense, that element works against Kazui’s ability to make the characters do much more than exactly what we would expect them to. There are brief moments of gravity, well-paced and envisioned, but for the most part, it seems like pretty forgettable stuff. The second half gets considerably grittier and brings a more potent range of images and scenarios within the grasp of Kazui’s able storytelling. By the end, the SOCRATES manga transforms itself into something almost living up to the promotional effort put behind bringing the novel to American audiences. This leaves me with the suspicion that the novel may actually be pretty good and also that Kazui did an laudable job of adapting something complex into a relatively short, self-contained, (for lack of a better word) graphic novel. In fact, the relative brevity of SOCRATES IN LOVE works in its favor as a manga by not drawing out the more obligatory portions beyond what was absolutely necessary to establish the characters and their stake in the consequences that unfold. In this sense, it serves its function as the suggestion of great promise, while promoting the source material as the fulfillment. Personally, I think this could easily play in a 13 and up audience but some parental discretion is advised. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Thanks again for tuning in and 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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Before we get started on the manga, though, I want to
add a brief addendum to last week’s column on anime
soundtracks. I was recently fortunate enough to come
across a copy of LOVE 4 NANA, a J-Pop/Rock tribute to
the Ai Yazawa manga, NANA that is currently being
serialized in English in Shojo Beat. From Beat 7’s
opening theme for an imaginary anime, nearly all of
the tracks on LOVE 4 NANA set a high standard of
musicality while managing to sound young and
invigorated. Highlights for me include Twinkle by
Kaela Kimura, which along with Holly Coock’s
collaboration with UK punk veteran Glen Matlock,
“Sleepwalk” eerily echoes The Go-Go’s back at us
across both the decades and an ocean. The rockers in
the audience should be more than a little impressed at
the conviction with which bands like SEXMACHINEGUN can
deliver a song in tribute to this shoujo manga and
still manage to sound like old school Judas Priest.
This CD was technically a present for my wife but now
that it has migrated to the iPod, it’s likely to join
the JAPAN FOR SALE J-Rock sampler in heavy rotation.
LADY SNOWBLOOD VOL 1
THE PUSH MAN AND OTHER STORIES (1969) HC
SUGAR SUGAR RUNE Vol 1
SOCRATES IN LOVE