Will it help to talk about it?: Processing our grief over the demise of PictureBox

I found that image at TCJ.com on one of the occasions upon which I've googled "King Kong" and "Tezuka," which I've done every so often since I learned that Osamu Tezuka made a King Kong manga of some sort. It was apparently posted by Ryan Holmberg. Relatively high on a list of things I love most in this world are King Kong and Tezuka's comics, so this is one of those dream comics of mine that I've wanted to be able to read, preferably translated into English, ever since I became aware of its existence. Perhaps it would ultimately prove disappointing, like Tezuka's Lost World (which Dark Horse published a few years back), but, worse comes to worst, it would still be a Tezuka comic with a giant gorilla in it.

The last time I heard mention of it was in the Ryan Holmberg translated and edited The Mysterious Underground Men, part of Holmberg's Ten Cent Manga series being published through PictureBox, the intent of which was to highlight western influence in post-war, mass-market Japanese comics. Only two volumes have been released; Tezuka's The Mysterious Underground Men, a breathless, digest-sized adventure comic I just covered at Robot 6 yesterday (click here, and scroll 4/5ths of the page down), and Shigeru Sugiura's crazy-ass, comedy cover version of Last of the Mohicans (reviewed here; second one down).

They were both great fun to read, and, like everything PictureBox published, great-looking books. I was really looking forward to future installments of Ten Cent Manga, and hoping that before long we'd see a King Kong entry into the series; after all, King Kong is a western film, and Tezuka's adaptation came out in 1947 (i.e. post-war), and Holmberg already included one Tezuka book, and, he seems to own a copy of it...or at least to have taken a picture of a copy of it to post on TCJ.com.

So when I read this the other day, fell to my knees, raised my balled fists to the heavens and screamed "Nooooooooo!", it was in part because my dream of a a Ten Cent Manga version of King Kong was evaporating (Which part? The sixth, seventh and eighth of the o's in "Nooooooooo!").

By the way, did you click on that last link? You should click on that last link. It will take you to The Comics Reporter, where you'll find Tom Spurgeon interviewing Dan Nadel about the demise of PictureBox. Good news? It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with lousy sales or the market place rejecting Nadel's business model or anything like that. Rather, it seems like Nadel is going to focus on things in his life that aren't PictureBox. Bad news? No more PictureBox. Silver lining? Hopefully many of the artists associated with the publisher have, by this point, established themselves to find other publishers willing to take on their future work (And hopefully someone picks up Holmberg's Ten Cent Manga line; King Kong adaptation or no, that seems like a wonderful line that shows a lot of promise).

Here are, I think, the three great things about PictureBox, and the three things I'll miss the most.

1.) They published great-looking books. I'm not talking about the interior art, although that tends to be pretty damn good, but the design of their books. PictureBox certainly seems to have taken the book-as-objet d'art approach to publishing, and nearly every publication of theirs that I've read is the kind that I like to hold and look at. The kind that doesn't just sit on a bookshelf or night stand or coffee table, but decorates it.

I have a bookshelf full of New 52 trades, and another bookshelf full of Marvel trades from a few years back. They all have uniform designs, and, spine out on a bookshelf, they look disgusting (Well, that's a strong word; they don't look pretty though). They certainly don't look as lovely as my bookshelves containing Drawn and Quarterly or Fantagraphics or AdHouse or Oni or First Second books. Or PictureBox books, obviously. If I were a set-designer or interior decorator and needed to have some comics books strewn about, I'd more than likely use PictureBox releases (And some D+Q books, probably).

Although, there is that goddam Lauren Weinstein Goddess of War comic, which has been a thorn in my side since I brought it into my home...four homes ago. Don't get me wrong, it's a great comic, and I loved reading it, but it is sooooo big (It's a floppy, but a floppy the size of a New York City efficiency apartment) I've never figured out where and how to store it. Originally, I slipped it back in the gigantic cardboard envelope it was shipped in, and hid it behind a bookshelf and the wall, as that was the only place it fit and wasn't in the way.

It is currently in my a closet at my mother's house, resting atop a stack of a little cardboard igloo of eight longboxes containing DC superhero comics, blanketed by framed original art from local Columbus artists that I no longer have the wall space to hang.

Anyways, Goddess of War is never far from my thoughts, whenever I think about different comics formats, and worry about moving my comics midden.

2.) They published the work of comics artists that other publishers probably wouldn't have. Are you familiar with the work of Yuichi Yokoyama? PictureBox just published his World Map Room, in which a bunch of mysterious figures with oddly shaped heads travel through a mysterious city for a mysterious purpose, and take a meeting. It's fucking nuts, but also kind of hypnotic, addictive and beautiful. A few years back, they published Yokoyama's Garden and Color Engineering. I didn't read that last one, but Garden? Holy shit. I've never read anything like it. (After some consideration, although World Map Room seems to have more story and to be funnier—thanks to the author's notes at the end—I think I prefer Garden as both the more fun of the two, and the better of the two).

It's hard for me to imagine another publisher publishing such work.

Not that PictureBox was the only publisher to publish avant garde work, of course, or that all of the artists they publish work from were so "out there" that no one else would touch them—I've already mentioned Tezuka, who is one of the most mainstream artists in the whole history of comics; PictureBox has also published a book by Brandon Graham (whose work has also been published by Tokyopop, Image, Oni and Alternative Comics), Renee French (who recently published a kids book with Toon Boooks), and books involving artistic folks better-known that most folks in the entire field of comics (The band Wilco, for example).

In fact, as Spurgeon's article makes clear, some other publisher's are at least interested in some of these folks' work continuing under their umbrellas.

Still, there are a lot of PictureBox books, like those of Yokoyama's, for example, or Brian Chippendale's If 'n Oof or French's H Day or CF's Powr Mastrs that I have a hard time imagining reading from another publisher (particularly upon the time of their release).

3.) I was on their press list, and thus got press copies of their books. There are few things more tragic than a source of free—and generally excellent!—comics drying up. Sigh...

As part of his article on the subject, Spurgeon listed what he called "a limited bibliography" of the publisher's publications. One thing I noticed while reading it is that their offerings seemed to get stronger year after year. I don't know if this was truly the case, or just a matter of perception—perhaps I read more of their more recent books than their older books, perhaps my tastes started to gradually align with those of Nadel's over the years—but 2013 seems like their strongest year ever; 2012 seemed stronger than 2009, and so on.

There is one more silver lining to PictureBox's going away. They're having a "massive" 50% off sale. I can personally recommend Gold Pollen and Other Stories (another Holmberg-edited manga collection), the aforementioned Mysterious Underground Men and Last of the Mohicans and Garden, Frank Santoro's excellent historical drama Pompeii and Anya Davidson's hilarious School Spirits (both reviewed in this post), Matthew Thurber's weird drama/adventure 1-800 Mice, Chippendale's If 'n Oof and, of course, Goddess of War, if you don't mind having to find a place to stick it in your apartment.  (I'd link to reviews of all of those, but some of 'em were for the now-defunct Blog@Newsarama, which I think recently threw all of its content into the sun, for some reason).

As for me, I'm going to try and get that Brandon Graham art book, if I can figure out how to buy stuff through the website, and maybe some Powr Mastrs (I never read past the first volume) and some more Yokoyama... (UPDATE: Actually, I ordered the Graham book, Brian Chippendale's Maggots and something called Caleb's Adventures in Wonderland, simply because I like the title; I struggled for a while over whether or not to get Negron too, but ultimately decided against it...and now I feel Sean T. Collins judging me from afar).

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

Today at Robot 6, I have this month's installment of "A Month of Wednesdays," in which I review weird-ass manga A Centaur's Life (eh), Detective Comics Vol. 3: Emperor Penguin (better than Dark Knight, not as good as Batman, Batman Inc and Batman and Robin), Justice League of America Vol. 1: World's Most Dangerous (a great argument for not waiting for the trade), The Mysterious Underground Men (awesome; see three panels of it above) and Sabertooth Swordsman (awesome, obviously).

Meanwhile...

At Good Comics For Kids I have reviews of Capstone's Superman Adventures: Men of Steel and Superman Adventures: Distant Thunder and Trina Robbins and Tyler Page's Chicagoland Detective Agency #5: The Bark In Space.

At Las Vegas Weekly, I have a few suggestions for Iron Man comics featuring The Mandarin for anyone who wants to compliment their viewing of Iron Man 3 with some comics (and here's LVW film critic Josh Bell's review of the movie).

And at Robot 6, I have short (for me, anyway) reviews of Letting It Go, Marble Season, Point of Impact, So Long, Silver Screen and Unico.

Some of my favorite parts from some of my favorite comics (that I read recently)

"What are you reading?" Niece #1 asked me the other day, in a tone of voice not unlike the one she might use to ask what I were wearing, were I wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat.

"Unico," I said, lowering the cover, which features a close-up on an adorable baby unicorn with a pink mane, from my face.

"What's it Unico about?" she asked.

"It's about an adorable baby unicorn who has magical powers he can use to grant the wishes of the people he loves, but only if those people truly love him," I said.

"Why are you reading about a baby unicorn?"

"Because it's awesome," I said, and left it at that, without going into who Osamu Tezuka was, exactly. But I wasn't lying. Unico is awesome.

The dimensions of the book—about digest-sized, but almost 400-pages thick—make getting a decent scan of any page in it all but impossible. The above panel is a poorly scanned one from the story "Rosario The Beautiful," one of the fairy tale-inspired stories in the book. Unico has just kicked the ass of a wicked courtier all over the place in a series of vicious flying headbutts, and the cad eventually draws his sword.

Unico replies by growing his horn out to sword length, and then fencing with the bad guy. Unico disarms him, repeatedly stabs him in the butt and then throws him out a window.

This same story features a dance sequence between the romantic leads and a scene where Unico, who has shrunk down to about the size of a My Little Pony doll, jumps into the hand of the male lead and grows his horn out super-long, and then the hero uses Unico as a sword to fight off a bunch of bad guys with swords.

Unico is totally bad-ass. Did you use to watch that not-very-good Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon in the '80s? (How about now?) Remember that lame-ass juvenile unicorn Uni? Well, Unico is the anti-Uni. The un-Uni, if you will.

Here's a panel of sorts from Miriam Katin's Letting It Go, in which she meets a dog, and comes up with a theory as to why the dog was so excited to meet her—obviously, the dog was a big fan of her work (I said "of sorts" because Katin's book uses implied panels, rather than boxes or borders).

Note how realistically the dog is drawn compared to Katin herself, particularly her face.

Finally, here's one of, like, my ten favorite pages from Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season featuring my new favorite comics character, Chavo.

Chavo is the younger brother of Huey, the protagonist of the book, and Chavo can't yet talk (I think his only line is a Little Lulu-esque "Baw!" in one scene where he cries). Because of this, he just sort of wanders around, behaving in sometimes strange, inscrutable ways for his own inscrutable little kid reasons.

On this page, an older boy is confiding in him, a secret he doesn't want any of the older kids to know.

Sometimes Chavo just stands in a scene, taking in the conversation, and making it funnier simply by the presence of a little, silent observer. Take, for example, this poorly-scanned page:

Chavo was there, staring over that wall for some reason, before anyone else got there. And Chavo is still there, staring over that wall for some reason, after they all left.

That's a rare example of Chavo being in the center of a panel; often times he's mimicking his brothers, or screwing around, or hiding behind a tree. In one scene, he walks around without his shirt on, discovers a dead baby bird, and looks for help.

I'm having a hard time explaining why, I guess, but I love Chavo. He cracks me up. So come for the new Gilbert Hernandez, but stay for the Chavo. This book should been called Marble Chavo, not Marble Season.

Viva el Chavo!

Expect full reviews of each of these (and a few other books) tomorrow-ish. This is all I got in the mean time.

Review: Princess Knight Vol. 1

Once upon a time in Heaven, when the not-yet-born babies were being assigned their genders through the color of hearts they were being given, a mischievous cherub gives a child both a boy’s blue heart and a girl’s red heart.

She is born as Princess Sapphire, a girl, but she’s raised by her royal parents as Prince Sapphire, as only a male child could inherit the throne, and if the truth got out that she was pretty much a girl, the throne would go instead to the inept son of the wicked Duke Bushybrows.

That’s the premise of Osamu Tezuka’s epic fairytale adventure, which is being published in two beautiful volumes by Vertical.

As if hiding one’s true gender from the world upon reaching adulthood weren’t difficult enough, Bushybrows and his henchman suspect Sapphire’s secret and plot to out her. And she falls for the prince of a neighboring kingdom, who loves her when she’s dressed as a girl, and hates her when she’s dressed as a boy, and has no idea that her boy and girl personas are really the same person.

The gender-swapping disguises, confused crushes and mistaken identities evoke Shakespeare, and the Christian-flavored fairy tale elements suggest Hans Christian Andersen, while still other elements—including friendly cartoon animals and a witch who turns into a big black dragon like Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent—suggest Walt Disney, as does Tezuka’s familiar and influential, yet still quite unique, big-eyed, American animation-inspired artwork.

The plot is downright breathless, as almost every chapter finds a new complication and a new status quo for the princess, as she hides her identity, tries switching back and forth between identities, is outted and put in prison, escapes only to end up in another prison, escapes again, is captured by a witch, is transformed into a swan, is abducted by pirates and so on.

Familiar Tezuka elements are present, like drawn gags and cameos, and distracting jokes, as when a pirate says “This scene must have been really hard to draw!” during a scene of a naval battle in which combatants swarm onto one another’s ships.

It’s a pretty breathless, and beautifully drawn, adventure story, with lots of swordplay, chases and monsters, and I suppose there are academic papers and articles by smarter people than I to be written about what this text might say about gender and gender roles in mid-twentieth century Japan.

To a certain extent, Tezuka’s story adhered to stereotype, as Sapphire’s strength and facility with a sword is based on her having a boy’s heart—when she temporarily loses it, for example, or thinks womanly thoughts, her strength and skill evaporate.

 But, on the other hand, it offers a rather enlightened view of a female character challenging and overcoming the constraints put on her by a male society, and seems to put forth the idea that while people can choose to live one way or another, deep down they were born one way, and they will only be happy when they’re allowed to live openly in that way.

I may be projecting—hell, I’m almost sure I am—but the narrative holds up such projections quite well.

I was also quite curious about the role of Christianity in the story, as God and his angels are treated not unlike Zeus or Olympians in Greek myth. Tink, the mischievous angel who gave Sapphire one heart too many, is condemned to Earth to live as a human until Sapphire’s situation can be straightened out, and he aids her against a demonic foe.

In once scene, he calls on God to help him fight the witch-turned-into-a-dragon, and God responds by sending lightning bolts and dropping a huge fist onto the beast. Later, he freezes time and appears to Tink as a star in the sky, not unlike the heavenly beings who appear as heavenly objects in It’s a Wonderful Life, and he offers a solution to Tink’s problem that would seemingly make Sapphire’s situation worse.

I’d highly recommend the first volume of Princess Knight, and am eagerly awaiting the second volume.

Lost Worlds

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)

Scientist no one quite believes: Professor George Edward Challenger
Location of the lost world: A plateau in the Amazon jungle
Primary explorers: Challenger, journalist Ed Mallone, professor of comparative anatomy Summerlee, sportsman Lord John Roxton
Species encountered: Iguanadons, pterodactyls, stegosaurus, three-eyed ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurs, Irish elk, toad-faced hopping carnivorous dinosaurs (probably allosaurus), anthropoid apes, diminutive native homo sapien "Indians"
Dinosaur brought back to civilization: Pterodactyl
Civilization: London


The Lost World directed by Harry O. Hoyt (1925)

Scientist no one quite believes: Professor Challenger
Location of the lost world: A plateau in the Amazon jungle
Primary explorers: Challenger, sportsman and adventurer Sir John Roxton, journalist Edward E. Mallone, Professor Summerlee, Paula White, monkey Jocko the Monkey
Species encountered: Pterodactyl, allosaurus, triceratops, trachodon, oviraptor, brontosaurus, ape men
Dinosaur brought back to civilization: An apparently carnivorous brontosaurus
Civilization: London


Lost World by Osamu Tezuka (1948-ish)

Scientist no one quite believes: nil
Location of the lost world: The planet Mamango, a small planet that broke off from Earth millions of years ago and the orbit of which brings it close to earth only once every five million years.
Primary explorers: Detective Shunsako “Mr. Mustachio” Bun, rabbit-with-a-human-brain Mimio, scientists Dr. Kenichi Shinkisama Dr. Makeru Butamo,butler Hanawa, reporter Acetylene Lamp, plant women Ayame and Momiji
Species encountered: Unidentified sauropods, a carnivorous stegosaurus, pterosaur, triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, a giant snake, some form of bipedal carnivorous pack dinosaur
Dinosaur brought back to civilization: nil
Civilization: Earth


The Lost World: Jurassic Park directed by Steven Spielberg (1997)

Scientist no one quite believes: Dr. Ian Malcom
Location of the lost world: Isla Sorna, a small island near Costa Rica
Primary explorers: Malcolm, Malcolm’s daughter, paleontologist Dr. Sarah Harding, photographer/environmental activist Nick Van Owen, technology expert Eddie Carr, hunter Roland Tembo, an small army of dinosaur fodder
Species encountered: Tyrannosaurus Rex, compsognathus, stegosaurus, triceratops, velociraptors, Parasaurolophus, Pachycephalosaurus, Gallimimus Mamenchisaurus
Dinosaur brought back to civilization: Tyrannosaurus Rex
Civilization: San Diego

Monthly(-ish) Manga Reviews

Cowa!
Viz

I mentioned this briefly the week I bought it, but I figured I might as well review it while I’m taking the time to mention the last few manga digests I read. It’s the work of Akira Toriyama, best known for a little creation of his called Dragon Ball, and it’s an easily digestible one-volume adventure about a half-vampire/half-werekoala kid named Paifu.

After a few shorter stories introducing us to Paifu and the other colorful characters who live in his little village of monsters—including his shape-changing best friend Jose Rodriguez, rival Arpon and a disgraced human sumo wrestler—the book shifts focus into a road-trip adventure. Much of the town has come down with a deadly monster flu, and its up to this quartet to journey far away, through the big city and a haunted woods and up a tall mountain to get the cure.

Whether because this was earlier in his career or because this was intended for a younger audience, Toiryama’s art is a lot more simplified than his later Dragon Ball output or even his Dr. Slump, although it’s clearly the work of the same man. The story reminded me quite a bit of the original, pre-tournament Dragon Ball stories, when Goku was still just a little kid and the book was more of a comedy adventure then it was a fight comic. Toriyama touches like anthropomorphic animals living among humans, weird-shaped houses, cute vehicle designs and well-choreographed, over-the-top action scenes abound; there’s even some character design resonance between some of Cowa’s stars and Dragon Ball characters.

I’d recommend checking out Matthew J. Brady’s review of it; he’s the one who alerted me to this book’s existence, and he has some scans of the art over there.

No, I don’t have any idea why this is called what it’s called.



Dororo Vols. 1-2
Vertical

In synopsis, this one sounds weird, even compared to that last book, which starred a half-vampire/half-werekoala. In feudal Japan, a wicked lord promises 48 pieces of his unborn son to a host of demons if they’ll grant him power. They comply, and his son is born as what looks a little like a large, fat worm with a skull on one end (that’s him as a baby in yellow on the cover to the right). He’s sent floating down the river in a basket, where a kindly old doctor finds him and cares for him, building him a mostly artificial body (with hidden swords for arms). Thanks to psychic senses and telepathy, the boy, who grows up to be Hyakkimaru, can function normally, despite a lack of body parts.

He goes on a quest to wander Japan, slaying demons, and each one he kills restores one of this body parts to him.

This is just part of the story. The title character is a sneaky, ill-tempered little orphan kid that befriends Hyakkimaru and joins him on his journey, which, by volume two, becomes more about Dororo’s heritage and a lost treasure than it has to do with Hyakkimaru’s search for his body parts.

This is the work of Osamu Tezuka, and while it’s not his best work, it’s still the work of Osamu Tezuka, which means it’s better than about 90% of the other stuff you’ll find in your local comic shop. The peculiarities of the particular premise aside, I found myself reminded of Rumiko Takeshi’s early Inu-Yasha volumes, in which the colorful heroes wandered feudal Japan getting into episodic battles with a variety of demons.

Tezuka’s demon designs are top-notch, and regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of the narrative, awesome monster abound.

This series is being packaged and published by Vertical, who have done a pretty stellar job with all of the Tezuaka work they’ve been putting out the past few years, and this is no exception. I love the collage-like covers and spines of these book s, which are nice enough to probably be well worth a purchase just to spruce up your book shelf, whether you read them or not. But you should read them. Because they’re about a guy with a prosthehic body and swords for arms wandering feudal Japan and fighting alien moth women and armies of ghost foxes to earn his body parts, and it’s by Tezuka.



Yotsuba&! Vol. 5
ADV Manga

I held off as long as I could. It was my understanding that this was going to be the last volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s darling and hilarious slice-of-life stories about a precocious little girl, her good-humored single father, and the neighbors they pester for the foreseeable future.

Having heard this repeatedly online, I held off on buying this volume, so that I would know that I still had at least one more volume of Youstuba to look forward to. My plan was to wait until a sixth volume was at least announced, but then I read Christopher Butcher’s recent-ish post about the manga market in 2009, and I finally caved. According to Buther, more Yotsuba is somewhat inevitable, but there’s no indication on when it might get here.

If you’ve read any of the first four volumes of this series, one of the most delightful comics I’ve ever read, then you know exactly what to expect from this particular volume. It’s just as good as the previous ones, and in the exact same ways. In fact, this might be a little bit better than the last few, in large part because the longer the amount of time you spend with Yotsuba, the better you get to know her, and thus the more endearing her antics become.

In this volume, she meets Cardbo the cardboard robot who isn’t really a robot but Shh! Don’t tell Yotsuba or you’ll break her heart, she meets a young friend of her father’s who becomes her mortal enemy, she goes star-gazing, runs errands and goes to the beach. Er, none of which might not sound like the plot of a particularly hilarious comic book, but Azuma’s characters are so sharply realized and their behavior so sharply communicated that day-to-day activities become thrilling comic adventures.

Monthly manga reviews

Apollo's Song
Vertical

Here's another 500-plus-page brick of Osamu Tezuka comics from Vertical, who have previously published the rather similarly formatted Ode To Kirihito and MW. It's one of Tezuka's lesser works, if one can put the words "Tezuka" and "lesser works" in the same sentence, given his lesser is greater than so many others' greatest.

The scope and scale of this story, like so many of Tezuka's, is so sweeping it seems as if literally anything can happen when you turn the pages. It begins with the act of human conception, with the sperm represented as millions of identical men in a frantic marathon to reach the single woman at the end, and then ends with a goddess (or perhaps the protagonist's mind's projection of a goddess) speaking to him of eternity, the repetition of a cycle we've seen several hundred pages of.

That protagonist is Shogo, a young man who was born to a whore, mistreated by her, and suffering from a deeply ingrained hatred of love; whenever he sees animals loving one another, he's overcome by an urge to destroy them, an urge he often gives in to. As a punishment, a goddess appears to him and tells him he is doomed to fall in love over and over again, and just when that love blossoms, the woman will be taken from him violently.

Although maybe he's not really seeing a real goddess, maybe that's all the manipulation of a doctor treating him, trying to cure him of his violent hatred of love before he's too far gone. Whichever is the case, we see Shogo's tale unfold in the real world, with several diversions into more standalone tragic love stories, which may only be occurring in his head. In one, he's a Nazi soldier guarding a train full of Jewish people on their way to the camps; one of whom he falls in love with. In another, he's a pilot for a female photographer, and they find themselves marooned on an island populated by wild animals that behave quite strangely. In another, he's a human terrorist in a future world where synthetic humans rule. In the real world, meanwhile, he escapes from his asylum and then starts training to be a marathon runner under the tutelage of a kind, beautiful woman.

Each of the other lives works as a pretty powerful story all on their own, although in most cases they are so over-the-top as to be cartoony. Of course, considering how cartoony Tezuka's art is, and his Disney-influenced aesthetic, that isn't really to be unexpected. The futurescape in which Shogo must teach the synthetic woman to love has a lot of the goofiness of the futures seen in Astro Boy or Phoenix, but the emotions are real and raw.

Perhaps ironically, the most unrealistic passage is the one that is supposed to be the most real; it's likely a product of Tezuka's culture at the time more than anything else, but the depiction of mental health problems and their treatments ring false, surprisingly so given Tezuka's skill at writing medical thrillers (Japan isn't as open and accepting of mental health issues as American culture is today; I imagine things were even worse on that front back in the day).

It's still essential reading, however, and Vertical and created another nicely designed package that is an appealing art object in and of itself. I'd recommend reading outside on a sunny day where birds are signing, as the subject matter makes it quite a downer.

There's a ten-page preview featuring the futuristic section here.



Gun Blaze West Vol. 1
Viz

Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki follows his popular samurai epic with another period piece, this one set on our own continent, during the late 19th century. It's always interesting to see European and (especially) Asian takes on the western genre, since its such a thoroughly American genre that watching others interpret our own national creation myths is often just as compelling and informative as watching our own modern deconstructions of it.

And for some reason the phrase "cowboy manga" just makes me smile.

Set in 1875 in Winston Town, Illinois, Gun Blaze West Vol. 1 introduces us to precocious little gunslinger wannabe Viu Bannes (a good, strong, American name, Viu Bannes). Viu's only nine-years-old and lives alone with his school marm sis Cissy, after their sheriff parents were killed. He's a pretty standard boy's manga hero—more heart than head, huge appetite, etc.—and gets his first real taste of his fantasy life when he meets Marcus the Underdog, a lazy-eyed Wild West washout Viu apprehends.

The pair become fast friends, and begin training together to reach the mythic land of Gun Blaze West, a place that's west of the west, where only the greatest gunslingers can go. Before they get there, they'll need to survive an attack on their town by the vicious Kenbrown Gang.

The story is so much fun that I was quite disappointed when it flashed forward five years, when the now young man Viu sets out to find Gun Blaze West, guided only by a mysterious map. He gets as far as St. Louis in this issue. What he finds there is pretty cool, including a hotheaded, gunfighter with the ridiculous name of "Target: Kevin" and a steely, stoic lariat master, but as cool as the action is, I preferred Viu's earlier iteration as Goku-as-Huck-Finn than the more familiar young-man-on-a-quest angle, which it will presumably remain in future volumes.

Little Viu is totally hardcore. There's one scene where he flying kicks a guy and catches a charging horse's hoof to the dome, and doesn't even lose consciousness, and there's a great two-page training montage showing Marcus and Viu’s long-distance running training, which includes running on their hands, eating doughnuts and coffee while running (and then throwing them up) and not stopping for anything—not even to pee or poop (shown in silhouette, thankfully).

For a more thorough review, I’d highly recommend Matt Brady, which includes a scan of that awesome hoof-to-face scene.



Mär Vol. 1
Viz

The morning after reading the first volume of Mär, I came to a realization: It seems to me that I find a lot more manga series that are pretty decent (as opposed to mediocre or just plain awfu) than Western comics. It’s not that I’ve never read a bad manga; there are certain series I’ve tried the first volume of and found them to be pretty bad comics (as opposed to ones that just aren’t for me because I’m not, say, and eight-year-old or whatever), but the overwhelming majority of the manga I try tends to be extremely decent. Like, maybe it’s not a great comic, maybe it’s not something I’d buy every new volume of as it comes out, but certainly I would be able to continue reading it indefinitely and find myself perfectly entertained.

I’m not sure why this is. I don’t know if that, in general, the manga studio system tends to produce better art and clearly storytelling than a lot of American comics (and I don’t mean the best American comics vs. manga in general; I mean mediocre American comics vs. mediocre manga, or awful American comics vs. the worst manga). (And I should probably point out that by “manga” here I mean comics produced in Japan and republished here; not OEL “manga,” because the more-of-this-stuff-seems-to-be-decent-than-I’d-expect-from-Western-comics phenomenon doesn’t carry through to a lot of that stuff).

Or is it that it is produced for a bigger mass audience than a lot of American comics, and is thus more likely to appeal to me, because it was designed to appeal to as many people as possible?

Or is simply a byproduct of the vetting process that naturally occurs when publishers like Viz import series previously published and popular in Japan? Because one has to assume they’re picking up only the most popular and successful properties to try selling to U.S. customers; in a sense, most of the manga we’re seeing in the U.S. today has already been as thoroughly focus-grouped as possible.

This is a long (probably too long), roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed the first volume of Mär, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing special about it, in terms of characters, character designs, conceit or execution. It’s just a run-of-the-mill manga series that is a lot of fun and I wouldn’t mind reading future volumes of one bit, though it’s not the sort of series I’d buy the newest installment of on a Wednesday at the shop or try pushing on other readers.

I honestly have no idea what the title means, or if that’s even the title; Viz’ website sometimes refers to it as MAR and I’ve seen it spelled M.A.R. elsewhere. It apparently stands for “Märchen Awakens Romance,” with “märchen” being German for “fairy tale.” However, there are these magical weapon things referred to as ärms that figure rather prominently in the story, so I wonder if this all makes more sense in Japanese…?

Our protagonist is Ginta Toramizu, a weak little 14-year-old with terrible eyesight, no athletic ability and the bad habit of falling asleep in class, only to act out and/or announce his dreams, all of which revolve around the same fantasy world.

Only his super-cute friend Koyuki seems at all interested in Ginta and his dreams, and she defends him from bullies, although these bullies all seem more like they’re just kidding around at Ginta’s expense than being terribly mean-spirited.

When Ginta finally gets sucked into the world he was dreaming of, he finds he suddenly has great strength, endurance and eyesight, and he’s so excited to be there that he’s like a kid in a candy store, rushing around screaming about how cool everything is.

In this world, there are these little magic rings and objects called ärms that can transform into either monsters which do battle for their owners or weapons of some kind.

A cute witch named Dorothy enlists the now super-strong Ginta to help her find a very rare ärm named “Babbo” that is a living arm, the weighted ball on the end of a chain connected to a warhammer. Only Ginta’s strong enough to use it, so she lets him keep it. Also, the weapon’s kind of annoying, as it has a very strong personality.

I really liked the design of Babbo, who has a long nose and expressive thick black metal facial hair surrounding big eyes and a long thin nose. Babbo prides himself on being a heroic gentleman, and looks and acts something like a foolish Three Musketeers parody. Only he’s a metal ball chained to a magic hammer.

Babbo and Ginta kind of quest aimlessly throughout this first volume, with their first major conflict involving saving a vegetable patch from a pair of vegetarian werewolves. (There’s a great line where one of them says, “Guess there’s nothing we can do except…settle it werewolf-style!!” I would assume everything werewolves do is done werewolf-style).

By volume’s end, they pick up a traveling companion, and a magician by the name of Peta (who works with vegetarian werewolves; is that a coincidence?) rallies bandits from all over to hunt down our heroes.

I’m coming to this series very, very, very late, as this volume was published in 2005, and from what I can tell, it ended last year with the fifteenth volume. Based on this first volume, I’m definitely interested in reading the second, even if it’s not on the top half of my to-read list.



Speed Racer: Mach Go Go Go Vol. 1
Digital Manga Publishing

I was honestly shocked with how much I enjoyed this, the first half of DMP’s beautifully designed and packaged reprinting of Speed creator Tatsuo Yoshida’s original manga.

I enjoyed the original cartoons when they were showing them on late night MTV in the ‘90s, and I enjoyed the summer live action movie about 1000% more than most other film critics, but my relationship with the franchise has been more or less arms-length. I couldn’t possibly defend that original Speed Racer cartoon as being any good at all, and there’s not much to the characters to recommend them as unique or inspired either; it was just like playing with toy cars as a little kid, only instead of making up the voices of the drivers in your own little kid-head, stiff, fast-talking voice over actors handled that. And occasionally a child with a piercing voice and a chimpanzee that I thought might have just been that kid’s hallucination would be involved. Hallucinatory chimpanzees dressed like toddlers was never a part of my childhood car-playing-with.

So Yoshida’s original comics? Great stuff. Many of the plots were ones I was familiar with from the cartoons (I guess even back in the 1960s anime adaptations of manga tended to follow them pretty exactly?), but the pacing of the manga was infinitely more engaging than that of the anime (something not necessarily unique to this property of course; those interminable episodes of Dragon Ball Z that seem to be 80% powering up and reacting to others powering up, for example, are actually really fun to read in comics form).

The art is somewhat scratchy and more roughly delineated and, for lack of a better word, more primitive than most of manga you see on the shelves these days. The visual language and shortcuts and cues that are secondhand in modern manga are largely absent here, making this read a bit more like a Western comic than, say, one of Tezuka’s works. There are also a lot more panels per page, which likely contributes to the more Western aesthetic.

Another surprise, however, was how similar this feels to a lot of today’s competition manga. Whether its fighting, card game-playing, magic, cooking, hair-styling, or bread-baking, the character types and story structures are often the same, and this definitely seems to be in that ball park.

There are four stories in this volume, adding up to almost 300 pages of racecar driving and fistfights. There’s the story of Pops’ secret engine design and some evil businessmen’s attempts to steal them, using bikers; there’s the story of the Alpine Race in which Speed teams up with Racer X and we meet The Car Acrobatic Team (I love that phrase) and their mad, cape-wearing, speech-making evil leader; there’s a story involving a killer remote control car; and then there’s the most insane story of the volume, which involves a race through the base of a volcano, a demonic hero racer that protects a lost civilization from exploitation, and some kind of giant prehistoric walrus monster.

Although I borrowed this from the library, it’s a book that’s so well designed I’d kinda like to get one for my bookshelf at some point; it just an all-around great looking package. It’s about nine inches-by-six inches, and about two-inches thick, making for a big, fat square. The spine and covers are all bright primary colors, with a black and white close-up of an anxious looking Speed running off the cover, and red-and-yellow racing checkers on the flaps.

After watching the new film, I found myself wanting to experience more Speed Racer and, naturally, turned to the comics. The first series I tried was frankly awful bordering on incompetent (Speed Racer: Chronicles of The Racer), but this sure hit the spot. I’ve still got the second volume, and the Speed Racer and Racer X: The Origins trade by Tommy Yune and Jo Chen to get to.

Monthly manga reviews

It’s that time of the month again (Wait, that didn’t sound right). March has become April, and so here’s a roundup of all of the manga I’ve encountered in the past 30 days or so.

A couple of quick notes, first. Loyal Las Vegas Weekly readers will recognize the first two as longer versions of reviews that ran in my comics column there (so feel free to skip ‘em if you’ve already read ‘em).

And yes, I know Phoenix is super old, but I got it for a birthday present earlier in the month, so I’ve included a review here, although something tells me that anyone who’s interested in manga and the work of Osamu Tezuka has probably already read it.



Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs Vol. 1
Viz Media

Almost as if to prove there's a manga series covering every conceivable topic of interest comes Inubaka, a rom-com set in a Tokyo pet store, grafting details of dog-raising onto a story we’ve seen over and over to make it seem fresh.

I think the title literally translates into "dog-stupid," but the subtitle and references within the book make it sound more like "dog-crazy." But then, the only Japanese I know is what I've gleaned from manga and anime, so I’m hardly an expert on the subject.

Whether it's stupid or crazy, though, it would seem to apply to our 18-year-old protagonist Suguri.

She and her mutt Lupin are on their way to Tokyo when they meet handsome 26-year-old Teppei and his purebred dog at a highway rest stop. The two dogs hit it off with one another embarrassingly well, on account of their both being in heat and neither of them being fixed or spayed (Teppei was actually on his way to breed his dog with another, equally purebred one).

With their dog-driven meet-cute out of the way, Suguri ends up living at Teppei's place and working in his pet store Woofles, caring for the puppies there.

Artist Yukiya Sakuragi's storytelling is pretty standard—although there are more dog pee and dog poop jokes than most other manga, for obvious reasons—but the art is well worth a look.

Sakuragi's human characters are all abstracted and stripped down in their designs, but the dogs themselves are rendered photo-realistically, so that the cuteness of the various puppies is that of real puppies, rather than the exaggerated cartooniness usually associated with Japanese pop art.




King City Vol. 1
Tokyopop


Joe is a young spy who has just returned to King City after training to become a “Cat Master.” His partner in crime is Earthling J.J. Catingsworth III, or "Cat" for short, a very special feline that can do or become just about anything, so long as Joe gives him the right injection from the right syringe first.

Cat can gobble up a key and cough up an exact duplicate (the "copy cat" function); he can function as a periscope (though the eye-hole leaves something to be desired); or he can become a parachute, gun or stealth skateboard. He even performs autopsies (complete with written reports) and can do two crossword puzzles at the same time (his tail is, naturally, prehensile).

They're the heroes of artist Brandon Graham's magnum opus named after the city they operate in.

Joe's spy pal is Pete, who wears a Dumb Donald-like hat/mask at all times and does dirty jobs for a crime syndicate involved in the sketchy alien porn business.

Joe's ex-girlfriend is Anna, who's fond of puns and vandalism, and her current boyfriend is Max, a veteran of the Korean zombie wars who's addicted to deadly new drug chalk.

There's a story tying them all together, one which involves cannibal businessmen, ninja street gang the Owls and one seriously tough old man, but as enjoyable as all that it is, it's the little things that make Graham's urban action series so much fun.

Graham's art is of a world fusion style, drawing on manga, European sci-fi comics and graffiti art to end up as something that looks like a mix of America's Paul Pope and Britain's Jamie Hewlett. And like both of those artists, Graham is just as much a designer and dreamer as he is a comic book artist, leading to a fully realized world with inventive clothes, technology, drinks, restaurant dishes, weapons and vending machines.

Graham's city isn't a terribly realistic one. It feels exactly like a city invented by a single artist bursting with cool ideas—a secret hostel for spy gangs here, a yeti working a counter there—but there's nothing at all wrong with that. King City is a hell of a place to visit. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone who enjoys Scott Pilgrim, Sharknife, Peng or awesomeness in general.





Pantheon High Vol. 1: Demigods & Debutantes
Tokyopop

I wish I could say that this book is like Clash of the Titans meets Mean Girls. Not simply because that sounds like the kind of pithy declaration that’s likely to get a critic blurbed on the back of an upcoming volume, but also because I’d really like to read a long-form comic story that’s like Clash of the Titans meets Mean Girls.

Despite the promising premise—the children of gods and goddesses attending high school together—this isn’t really that book. Not that it isn’t and enjoyable read in its own right.

Of course, I’m pretty much the target audience of this book. I like comic books. I like manga-style comic art. I like mythology. And I like stupid teen comedy movies and high school TV dramas.

So writer Paul Benjamin’s and artists Steven and Megumi Cummings are certainly speaking my language here. Pantheon High, home of the Fighting Chimeras, is the school where the kids of Greek, Norse, Egyptian and Japanese gods and goddesses go to get educated in subjects like combat and “mythstory.”

Our lead characters fall rather neatly in line to Breakfast Club like types. There’s Grace, the overachieving nerdy daughter of Tyr; Aziza, the super-popular alpha female dauther of Ra; Yukio, the popular son of Japanese luck goddess Benten; and Griffin, the dark, brooding son of Hades.

Each has a power or skill of some sort inherited from their parents, as do the rest of the student body, several of which have embarked on an evil plan to steal all of the kids’ souls and add their powers to their own to become full-ichored gods or some such.

After a chapter or two introducing us to the players, the rest of the volume is devoted to the good godlings fighting the bad godlings and trying to foil their plot, which comes to involve spiked ambrosia, the school’s mascot chimera and the giant world serpent Jormungandr.

Keeping all the characters, their bloodlines, powers and alliances can be a bit tricky (I didn’t notice until too late that there are very helpful footnotes at the end), and the various character designs seem more like a Western pastiche of manga tropes than actual manga (Pantheon High is one of Tokyopop’s not-really-manga manga books).

One drawback manga-like American comics have that actual manga doesn’t is that the reader can become much less forgiving with it. For example, when I read a limp joke or tired pop culture reference in a real manga, I can usually just excuse it as something that got lost in translation; here, there’s no excuse. Same with “fan service.” Seeing Supergirl’s panties in a DC Comic always irritates me, but when I see even more uneccessarry panty shots in a manga, it never bothers me much; I just assume it’s a Japanese thing. Again, in an American manga-style comic book, it seems more exploitive simply because I can’t blame cultural differences.



(Above: A gratuitous panty shot from Pantheon High. Click on it to see a bigger version, pervert.)

This drawback seemed less and less of a drawback as I read on though, and I gradually got wrapped up in the plot and the characters, enough so that I’ll probably check Vol. 2 out.



(Above: The World Serpent is pretty bad-ass. The Cummings sure can draw giant snake monsters. Again, just click to see it in a size more befitting its girth)





Phoenix Vol. 2: A Tale of the Future
Viz Media


I always figured that Osamu Tezuka’s “god of manga” nickname was more a show of respect for his influence on his country’s comics and cartoon output and not, you know, literal. And then I read something of his, and it becomes apparent at some point that there’s nothing figurative about the title at all—Tezuka is quite literally a god.

Case in point, Phoenix, Tezuka’s late ‘60s series with a scope as as big as the universe itself. This volume alone, which is only 1/12th of the story (each volume can be read alone, but combine to tell a greater story), spans billions of years and takes as its setting the smallest parts of atoms, the cosmos itself, the human mind, an alien planet and just about everywhere in between, with the mythical phoenix our tour guide.

We open in the year 3404 A.D., a rather traditional looking vision of the future, with crowded, underground metropolises, ray guns, space colonization, flying cars and so forth. Most of life on earth has become extinct on account of nuclear wars, and the few million human beings who remain have retreated into one of five giant cities, each ruled by a computer.

When the computers lead to one more war, the fate of life on earth falls into the hands of our troubled hero Masato, who, over the millennia takes on a more familiar name. In the last third of the book or so, the story seems less like an apocalyptic cautionary tale and more like a work of staggering ambition and downright shocking subject matter. To say much more would be to risk stealing some of the power from the work.

Tezuka tends to recycle his character designs, and Masato and his rival Roc fall fairly squarely into his standard dashing young man design, and there’s also a fairly standard looking Tezuka girl and big-nosed scientist.

But even if a few of the faces look familiar—as does the general vision of the 35th Century—Tezuka proves once again that he can draw anything, first in a scene that involves a sort of futuristic Noah’s Arc of test tube-grown animals and, later, in a long sequence depicting the entire history of evolution on Earth, including a tangent into an alternate cycle of evolution involving slugs as the dominate species on earth.

And the title character, the phoenix itself, is a pretty brilliant creation, one that easily slides from an avian to a human form from panel to panel.

And then there’s this bravura sequence, which looks up at a meeting of pissed-off city officials, slowly circling around their meeting table and showing them all in low angle for several pages, until Roc is called away to the phone on this page:

(Click on the images from Phoenix for bigger versions). For several pages we’ve seen panels exactly like the first one on this page, and, as we follow Roc out of the meeting, Tezuka gradually rights the perspective, while leading readers’ eyes in a gentle spiral. Wow.



Or how about this one, showing animals abandoning the sea for dry land, with each level of panel representing a stage of evolution:






Even simpler panel arrangements contain innovatively staged images, like the top panel on this page, depicting a dinosaur. Tezuka shows us it’s incredible bulk, but he does so using only one panel, and in a rather unexpected way…






And, finally, there’s this page, showing several different animals species. The panel that really amazed me was the second panel of birds. Man, that is a lot of birds to individually draw.

Monthly Manga Review

Ode To Kirihito
Vertical

Wow, it looks like a whole month managed to pass in which I’ve only read one manga collection. But what a manga collection it was. I picked up Vertical’s massive, 832-page, brick of a collection of Osamu Tezuka’s Ode To Kirihito from my library on a whim, and left it sitting on my coffee table for a week before I finally cracked the cover.

I ended up devouring it all in one sitting, physically unable to put it down as I raced through it (so that’s what they mean when they say, “It was so good I couldn’t put it down.”).

The Kirihito of the title is a young Japanese doctor by the name of Kirihito Osanai. He, his colleague Dr. Urabe and their mentor Dr. Tatsugaura’s are all studying a mysterious disease known as Monmow. Those suffering from it find their limbs and faces slowly deforming until they resemble a dog or a badger, they suffer from strange migraines and an overwhelming desire for raw meat and they ultimately die of respritory failure.

The cases they study all come from a single isolated village in Japan, and Osanai travels there to study it more closely, ultimately becoming infected with it himself, and his search for it’s cause and cure become all the more urgent; he’s able to arrest it, but not before he’s transformed into a man with a dog-like face.

The story that follows is by far one of the more epic I’ve read in a comic book. The story recalls favorite themes and subjects of Tezuka’s, specifically the two-fisted adventure medicine and medical thrillers of his Blackjack series, as Osanai finds himself thrust along a nightmarish, globe-trotting path back to Japan and vengeance, and Urabe and Tatsugaura follow different theories on the cause of Monmow, which becomes highly politicized as the leader seeks to sew up election to the directorship of the Japanese Medical Association.

Tezuka’s storyline is positively dripping with adrenal suspense, and his characters are all as well-developed as they are peculiar (I’d give examples, but they all go through so many transformations, I’d hate to spoil any surprises). They feel like real people; even the most hideous villains and unsympathetic characters are fleshed out.

And there are certainly villains and unsympathetic characters in this book. It showed me some of the most depraved things I’ve ever seen in a manga (none of which are shown in an exploitive manner), although, again, I can’t give examples without downplaying the shock. Suffice it to say atavism is a major theme, with human beings that resemble beasts on the outside interacting with others who look perfectly human, but are bestial within.

With an artist with a reputation like Tezuka (Scott McCloud once said during an interview that Tezuka is the trunk of the tree that is Japanese comics, with everything since branching off from his work in some way or another), the fact that the visual storytelling and design are all top-notch should go without saying.

It is worth mentioning how incredibly experimental Tezuka gets in many sequences, however, as he uses drawings to replicate within the reading experience what a fever feels like, or a schizophrenia, or a nightmare, or the delivery of life-shattering news. I haven’t personally experienced all these things, but reading the sequences where they occur to the characters, I felt as if I had.

When the Monmow begins to affect Osanai, for example, the two to eight panel pages give way to a 24-panel page, all extreme close-ups on his writhing head; Tezuka leads into it with a splash page of a primitive, upside down face, composed completely of swollen, humanoid bodies (I’d scan some sequences, but the format of the book makes it impossible to stick on a scanner).

I don’t think the word “masterpiece” is too strong a word to describe Ode To Kirihito at all.

And if that’s not a strong enough recommendation, I should point out that it’s only $24.95. That may just be the greatest value in the history of comics.