Maybe someday I'll be the first result for Google searches for "You shitbug."

When Shuzo Oshimi introduces high-schooler Nakamura, the weirdest, wickedest point of the character triangle in Flowers of Evil, he does so by having her tell her teacher, "Shut up, you shitbug."

"Shitbug" is an insult she employs over and over, and is such a particular, peculiar insult—I've never heard it before reading this, and the closest I can think of is the American "shitbird," which I also find kind of hilarious in it's weird-ness—and one of the things I found amusing about the character.

In the last volume I read, Vol. 3, one of Oshimi's between-chapters notes about the work on the series was about a proposed cover for the first volume, above. As you can see from the sketch above, rather than having the title of the book in a dialogue bubble, Oshimi had Nakamura calling the reader a shitbug (Publisher Vertical vetoed this idea).

Too bad; they could have had her screaming this at the reader on the cover of a future volume:

"Sometimes I love you so much, comics"

That's the thought that occurred to me when I hit this four-panel sequence from volume three of Shuzo Oshimi's Flowers of Evil last week. Saeki, the long-haired female character on the right, and Takao, the male character, are entering their classroom together at the beginning of the school day; the night before, Takao had horribly vandalized it and used wrote a startling confession on the chalkboard which would, when discovered, irrevocably change his relationship with Saeki and the way his entire school would think of him forever.

It's a pretty dramatic moment for him, obviously.

The way this page is laid out just...excited me, for a lack of a better word. Flowers is printed right-to-left, remember, so the first two panels are the tall, vertical one featuring Saeki and profil and the one of a flushed, wide-eyed and terrified Takao.

The way the dialogue bubble is placed in those panels, Oshimi shows the reader two different people from two completely different angles at the exact same time; that's what Saeki looks like while she's saying "What is this..." and that's what Takao looks like while Saeki, standing next to him, says "What is this..."

It's basic stuff, of course, using the grid of the panels to show the same moment from different perspectives; Comics 101, really. But it's so elegantly handled and, I don't know, maybe I just read too many comics, but when I hit that transition, with the dialogue co-existing in two moments like that? It just really struck me how well comics can do the things that only comics can really do.

Maybe I just read so many bad ones, that when I encounter one that works, it's able to impress me that much more strongly...?

Four short-ish reviews of four books I haven't much to say about:

The Flowers of Evil Vol. 2 (Vertical; 2012) The first volume of Shuzo Oshimi's intense high-school humiliation psycho dramedy ended with a pretty potent cliffhanger—Nakamura blackmails Kausga into wearing Saeki's stolen gym clothes underneath his own clothes while on a date with Saeki—so I was pretty excited to see where it went next. And I wasn't disappointed, although I was more than a little surprised to see that Oshimi was able to to continually amp up the level of anxiety and wring more and more suspense out of this truly bizarre triangle of characters—often in very unexpected ways (I laughed aloud when I saw how Nakamura handled Kasuga confessing his feelings for Saeki at the end of their date).

The solution to Kausga's problems seems fairly simple to me—forget your dream girl and go for the crazy, perverted girl who is obviously obsessed with you—but then, the characters in manga never seem to pursue the most simple solutions that seem so obvious to us readers. Particularly where love and romance are concerned (And, of course, Nakamura does seem crazy in a scary, sometimes emotionally sadistic way).

One of the many things Oshimi does extremely well in these comics is capture and convey the operatic intensity that accompanies hormone-fueled experience of any kind with the opposite sex.

Take, for example, this scene where Kasuga notices he can see the tiniest corner of Saeki's bra, and reacts by...totally freaking the fuck out.

This volume actually has a cliffhanger the equal of that at the conclusion of the first volume, climaxing in a beautifully-drawn, epic act of vandalism that leaves two of the characters panting and spent. What's the morning after that going to be like? I can't wait to find out.

Also! More talk of shitbugs!

I kind of love when Nakamura yells at Kasuga, in large part because of how weird the things she shouts at him sound, perhaps because of their translation from Japanese to English, and perhaps simply because she's a teenager and teenagers say dumb shit sometimes, or perhaps just because Oshimi is awesome, and writes awesomely weird insults.

(Note: Though they may look it, those two panels above aren't consecutive ones; they're just the two panels in the whole book where Nakamura insults Kasuga in the funniest ways)

Foiled (First Second; 2010) If I've counted correctly, I believe Jane Yolen has written somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion prose fiction books, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before she wrote a graphic novel. This is the graphic novel she wrote, which is drawn by the extremely talented Mike Cavallaro.

It's about a slightly alienated and normally angsty teenage girl highly devoted to the sport of fencing and to playing role-playing games with her cousin, a teenage girl whose life gets a little more dramatic and then a lot more dramatic when two new things enter her life: A new practice foil with a fake-looking gem-stone at the bottom of the hilt, and a very handsome but slightly off new boy at her school.

Yolen's story and characters are very YA, and the set-up and pay-off fairly obvious, but the structure is unique and fairly clever (each chapter reflects a part of a fencing match), and while she hammers various fencing-to-life metaphors, the blows all land.

Cavallaro gets an "illustrated by" credit instead of...something else, so it's difficult to tell just how much he did when it came to putting the book together, but I suspect an awful lot: This doesn't read like an experienced prose writer toying with a comics-format, it just reads like a very professional graphic novel put together by people who know exactly what they're doing (Of course, First Second isn't exactly known for poor comics or anything).

While our heroine narrates, there are several passages that are extremely effective comics-only ones (that is, one doesn't need the narrator around to walk us through what's going on—and Yolen and Cavallaro do a pretty swell job of making this story into one that would only work in comics, the mark of any really excellent comic book.

Wizard of Oz-like, the "real" world is black-and-white (the protagonist is colorblind), but the visitors from another plane to our world, fantasy creatures of the sorts that populate the RPGs played in the comic, are in brilliant primary colors.

The book ends rather—I'd even say very, maybe even extremely—abruptly, but that's likely because it's meant to continue into future volumes. And, a quick peek at Amazon reveals Curses! Foiled Again was released in January. I oughta look for that. You oughta look for this, if you haven't already.

Our Valued Customers: Conversations from the Comic Book Store (Perigree Trade; 2012) Rather than listening to me try to explain it over the course of the next paragraph, you could always click to cartoonist Tim Chamberlin's ourvaluedcustomers.net and simply take a look at his work for yourself. If you're reluctant to go all that way out of your way and, like, push a button, I'll give it a shot.

Our Valued Customers is basically just an overheard in the comics shop feature, with Chamberlin finding a funny quote someone said, sticking it in a dialogue bubble, drawing that bubble over a caricature and sticking that caricature in a panel, with a short, punchy narration box setting up the gag.

Each is pretty similar. The box will read something like "Regarding a Thor Poster..." or "To His Mom..." or "Before Paying For a Spider-Man Comic..." The characters Chamberlin draws are all big-headed, pointy-fingered and rarely appealing. They generally have overbites, big, wide mouths—presumably because that's where they breathe out of—and flecks of spittle. Certain signifiers regarding age and style will be drawn around them. None of them look like poster men, women or children advertising the attractiveness of people who read comic books.

What's interesting about the comics, to me anyway, is how beautifully they stand alone, and the wide variety of points-of-view. Sometimes they say something really stupid, yes; often times about comics or some related form of nerd pop culture, other times something stupid that has nothing to do with comics or the comics shop (although the fact that they are comics-readers saying it in a comics shop does reflect back on the medium, industry, market and its participants in some ways, even if only faintly). And sometimes they say things that are genuinely clever and funny.

Like the above, maybe my favorite of the half-dozen or so strips in this book collection that I really liked. That one stuck with me, and whenever I think about it, I start to giggle a little, imagining teenage Bruce Wayne inventing this elaborate cover story and that becoming so committed to his lie that he finds himself backed into a corner and he basically has to become Batman. And...well, never mind all that.

Tone is hard to read into some of these, particularly the funnier ones. That is, it' shard to tell if the person was joking when they said something or if they were serious, as Chamberlin's artwork generally makes the speakers look like the sort of folks that couldn't be ironic or sarcastic when saying some of the dumb things they say. Not that it ultimately matters, of course.

Regardless of how you might feel about the presentation, the artwork or the cumulative effect, if you've spent any amount of time in a comics shop, you will enjoy some of Chamberlin's comics. You'll laugh, as many are amusing in the "it's funny because it's true" kind of way. And hell, maybe you'll then weep, as many are depressing in the "it's sad because it's true" kind of way, too.

Spider-Man: Spider Island (Marvel; 2012) When Marvel first started soliciting this Amazing Spider-Man story arc, I was intrigued by the simple but clever premise (everyone in New York gets Spider-Man's powers) and the timely delivery mechanism for those powers (bed-bugs). I was confident in the skills of the creative team of writer Dan Slott and artist Humberto Ramos, two creators whose particular talents are ideally suited to Marvel's wise-cracking adventure hero.

But I was also intimidated by the indeterminate size and scope of the storyline, and pretty alienated by the "One More Day" Spider-Man continuity reboot that shook up everything I thought I knew about Spider-Man and made it different, just because.

Well, it turns out I pre-judged it pretty well.

The storyline is gargantuan, being collected into two 400-ish page hardcovers (the above-mentioned one, featuring material from the Slott/Ramos/Other Artists issues of ASM and tie-in issues of Venom and some ASM-branded tie-in material, and Spider-Man: Spider-Island Companion, containing all of the tie-in material from miniseries, one-shots and other monthlies). It's a very thorough collection, but the reading experience involved a lot of stopping and starting (the book begins with short, several-page prequel stories that apparently ran in the back of previous issues of ASM...?) and, particularly when the Rick Remender/Tom Fowler Venom issues appeared, ground would be retreated over and re-covered, as the different creative teams would tackle major plot points from different perspectives. The inclusion of the specials also meant narrative hallways, dead-ends and cul de sacs were carved out.

It was a weird reading experience, but not necessarily a bad one. The plot is just the one I described above, with a major Spider-Man villain from the past originally cast as the bad guy, before it's revealed he's actually a sub-ordinate to another villain (whom I had never heard of). Their plan is to turn everyone in New York City into giant spider-monsters they can control, and our hero has to try to stop them with the help of Marvel's other heroes (and, behind the scenes, the new Flash Thompson-possessed, gun-toting, black-ops version of Venom) while dealing with all the chaos that naturally ensues when everyone in Manhattan gets spider-powers.

It was pretty surprisingly laden with continuity (the reboot from a few years back didn't clear the cobwebs off of Spidey's 50-year-long story, just reorganized random elements), with heroes and villains and supporting characters appearing from old, relatively minor stories of ancient Spider-Man past, the much-maligned "Clone Saga" storyline and, of course, the then-current ASM status quo.

I like looking at Ramos drawings of stuff, and there's a lot of stuff for him to draw in here. I was lost on a lot of plot-points that seemed like they would have been bigger deals if I had read all the same comics that Dan Slott had read, but, at the same time, it was kind of fun experiencing reveals as random occurrences. It was a very old-school comics-reading feeling, like buying a continuity-heavy "universe" superhero comic off a drug store rack and joining a story in-progress. Remember that? Not having any idea what the hell was going on, exactly, but still kind of digging it?

I think Marvel sacrificed coherency and aesthetic unity for completion with this particular packaging job. In short, none of the artists draw much of anything like one another; Ramos draws most of the important parts, but Stefano Caselli comes in for much of the climax, and the Venom pieces and many of the digressive stories are all by different artists.

Review: The Flowers of Evil Vol. 1

Shuzo Oshimi's manga series, recently translated and published for U.S. audiences by Veritical, takes its name from 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire's single volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal.

Baudelair'es book was quite controversial upon it's 1857 publication, and re-read today, in decadent old 2012, it still seems remarkably blunt in its discussion of sex and the female body, and boasts a sort of rebellious, teenager-trying-to-piss-of-the-parents interest in demonology. It's not hard to imagine it outraging or embarrassing readers in, say, the Greatest Generation's generation, so it's easy to see how it could scandalize the mid-19th century.

Oshimi explains in his author's notes that he read it in middle school—this series is heavily influenced by his own school experiences, apparently—and he "didn't understand much of it, but the book's feel, suspicious, indecent, yet nastily noble" made him think, "I'm so cool for reading it."

His protagonist is Takaso Kasuga, an average Japanese high-schooler separated from most of his classmates by his devastating crush on the sweet, pure and innocent Nanako Saeki, a long-haired beauty in his class. That, and his fascination with books, chief among them being Baudelaire's book, which Oshimi designs a neat cover for:

He based it on Odilon Redon's cover...

...but made it his own (and made it creepier), returning to that imagery repeatedly throughout the book at important points.

One day Kasuga is alone in the classroom after school and notices that Saeki forgot her gym bag. On a strange whim, one he struggles with for a panel, he takes her dirty gym clothes home with him.

Unfortunately for him, not only was the incident noticed, with the whole school abuzz over what kind of pervert might have stolen a school girls dirty gym clothes, but his act was witnessed by Nakamura, whom the back cover copy calls "the weirdest girl in class."

She's very pretty, probably prettier than Saeki, and given how aggressively she wants to spend time with Kasuga,and how does things like strip him, ask him to smell her masturbating hand and smells his, well, one wonders why he doesn't just go for her instead of the more unattainable seeming Saeki.

It may be because Nakamura seems insane, as well as evil. When we first meet her, her teacher scolds her, and she responds:

When the teacher raises his hand to slap her for calling him a "shitbug," she stops him with this look alone:

Soon Kasuga is under her thumb, and she blackmails him into forming "a contract" with her. Her goal is to take something precious from him, to strip him away and reveal to him that he's just a pervert at heart, that the whole world is full of perverts and "shitbugs" or something.

This includes threatening him, slapping him, stripping him naked and forcing him to wear Saeki's gym clothes and, at the climax, well, I don't want to spoil it, but suffice it to say that once Kasuga starts trying to be his self around Saeki, and takes an interest in her, she notices that he seems like a decent guy as well, and they plan a date, while Nakamura hovers in the background, able to destroy him at any moment with her knowledge of the one, weird, perverted thing he did, a prod she uses to get him to do more and more.

The tone of the book, I should note, is not a comic one, although it is often darkly funny, with Oshimi delivering what would be "jokes" in other manga with a straightforward sincerity that may or may not be deadpan. It's an uncomfortable funny, akin to the funny parts in, say, David Lynch movies—you laugh at how weird it is, but you're not entirely sure if you're supposed to be laughing, or if Lynch wants you to laugh at that point, or, if he does, what about it he wants you to laugh at, if that makes any sense. (I'm pretty sure a Japanese schoolboy with a framed picture of Baudelaire in his bedroom staring at it and saying, "Baudelaire....give me strength!" is supposed to be funny, though).

Another thing the book shares in common with the book that inspires it, beyond the title and interest in the intersection of the erotic and the dark, is that it is, of course, the work of a different culture, written in a different language. Just as any American who can only speak English (like me!) can't really read Baudelaire's original poetry, only English translations of it, so too can that same American only read Oshimi's manga as it's been translated into English.

Now, comics, unlike poetry, has a component beyond the verbal, one that needs no translation to convey it's meaning. That is, you don't have to speak fluent Japanese to understand what Oshimi is trying to communicate about the way that Kasuga feels in this panel:

Still, I found myself wondering how much has been changed in the translation, and if the original was at all softened, or if that "softness," for a lack of a better word, comes from the naivete of the young characters just learning to become adults. For a book about perversion, a book whose central act involves the theft of a teenage girls gym clothes, the sexual content is remarkably tame.

For example, when Kasga opens the bag he remarks upon the smell, but somewhat unconvincingly adds "...of shampoo..."

During the hand-smelling scene, Nakamura coyly says, "My hand smells really good these days. Wanna sniff it?" He demurs, and later she grabs his right hand, smells it, then looks at him and says, "So, you've been using this hand to stroke and rub...Saeki's gym clothes all over yourself?

Perhaps the most explicit it gets is when Nakamura forces him into the stolen gym clothes—which happens so fast we don't see him naked—and proclaims:

Kasuga, listen. I've felt antsy for a while now. It feels so hazy inside of it down there that I could scream. I'd like this whole world to just turn into shitbugs in that haze

It's very funny, it's very weird, and it's remarkably suspenseful. I've already broken out my Lynch metaphor, so I really shouldn't return to it in the conclusion here, but Flowers of Evil shares that same tension between the normal, happy, everyday world and the darker world of lust and gratification that is at the center of so much of Lynch's best, most Lynchian work. I suspect Kasuga, like I suspect Oshimi already has, will come to the conclusion that those worlds are really one in the same, and everyone has a private pervert in them somewhere. I'm enjoying watching the unpredictable Nakamura threaten to out him as one though, and use the word "shitbug" over and over again, as I have no idea what it means and have never heard it. Shitburd, yes. But shitbug? And how does the haze of a vagina transform the people of the world into shitbugs? Perhaps Volume 2 will have the answers.

********************

By the way, I really like the cover. Oshimi's name is in a hot pink, and, on the spine, where the picture of Nakamura continues, the title, volume number and Oshimi's credit are all in the same pink.