Fri Mar 28, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: A Random Walk

Books with nothing in common!

 This week finds me in near Old-Mother-Hubbard mode, with just a few random old things. But let’s run through them, just because they’re here, and maybe the Manga Gods will smile on us for next week…

Priest, Vol. 1
Min-Woo Hyung
Tokyopop, 2003, $9.99

From the evidence – the creator’s name, and the fact that this reads left-to-right – I deduce that this series is manwha rather than manga, and comes from Korea. (If I’m wrong, someone will let me know.)

In a time and place that’s supposed to be the late 19th century American West – but contains guns from at least fifty years later – the half-doomed ex-priest Ivan Isaacs battles the undead servants of the fallen Archangel Temozarela, with the fate of the whole world at stake.

(Yes, Temozarela. He must be in one of the footnotes to the Bible, since he’s not one of the “Big Three” Archangels. Question for discussion: Is what Eastern comics creators have done to Christianity in their stories equal to, less than, or greater than what Westerners have done to Buddhism and Shintoism? And does the Western infestation of ninjas have any part in this discussion?)

Oh, and our priest hero does this, in this first volume at least, on a train. Badass only begins to cover it. Ivan sold half of his soul to Belial for the power to battle Temozarela’s forces – there might be some political war in hell going on in the background, but that’s not explained in this volume.

What Ivan does is 1) to pump several metric tons of silver bullets into marauding hordes of zombie-like creatures, though, sadly, usually not until they’ve already killed most of the other people in the vicinity and 2) to bemoan his fate and to proclaim loudly that he is still alive and so Belial hasn’t captured him yet.

The odd thing about Priest is that, with its scratchy, blocky art style, overarching gloom, and marauding undead, it feels and looks very much like an independent comic of the mid-'90s; Hyung’s style only looks manga now and then, generally with his female characters. Sure, the big sound effects in Korean characters are a tip-off, but otherwise this looks a lot like a book Slave Labor would have at least thought about publishing in 1996.

Sugar Sugar Rune, Vol. 1
Moyoco Anno
Del Rey Manga, 2005, $10.95

And then this is utterly different; it’s a story for 'tween girls about two young witches (about ten years old) named Chocolat and Vanilla who come from their world to our world (Japan, to be precise) to capture the “hearts” of boys in a competition to see who will be the next Queen of the Magic World.

Hearts appear to be made of crystal, they’re generated by emotion and come in different colors (representing those emotions) of different values – the hearts are also the currency of the magical world. The hearts are only visible to magical people, not to humans, and there’s the usual “if you lose your heart to a human, the penalties will be extreme” warning. Oh, and, once a witch captures a heart, the boy she took it from forgets entirely about that emotion.

So what these two girls are supposed to be doing – though they’re a bit too young and naïve to realize it – is to be getting as many boys to fall helplessly in love with them as possible, stealing that love away, and then doing it all over again. And, again, this is a contest between them – a contest that their mothers did in their turn.

There’s at least one academic treatise to be written – or possibly already written, for all I know – about the embedded metaphor there, especially once you see how ecstatic the boys look as the hearts float free of their chests, to be captured by the girls.

For a refreshing change, the two girls are friends and not at all competitive – they are, of course, completely different types (Chocolat brassy and dominating, Vanilla shy and quiet), but they’re honestly best friends, and want to stay that way. But will the boys they meet allow that? And what of the possibility of a secret male competitor in their battle – a boy who may be trying to destroy their chances, and their own hearts?

Sugar Sugar Rune, as befits a book with the word “sugar” in the title twice, is very sappy, with an exceptionally girly art-style (complete with huge eyes and gorgeous boys with earrings). I can’t see it selling through comic shops at all, but I bet there’s a big potential market for it out there, among dramatic middle-school girls.

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Vol. 1
Art by Masatsusu Iwase; Original Story by Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino
Del Rey Manga, 2005, $10.95

And then we come to some meat-and-potatoes manga, a giant-robots-fighting story based on a TV show that’s the latest iteration of a series nearly 30 years old. The “Gundam” saga has been running so long, in so many media, that it has a number of completely separate, and mutually incompatible, histories – this one, I believe, is related to the mid-'90s Gundam Wing incarnation.

It’s the 22nd century or so, and the orbital colonies inhabited by genetically manipulated “coordinators” have recently gone to war with the “naturals” of Earth and its few orbital allies. Our hero is Kira Yamato, a 16-year-old boy who finds himself in a “G-Unit”  giant mecha when a coordinator force attacks the neutral colony he’s living in.

He has amazing piloting abilities – well, he’d have to, or else it would be a very short story, wouldn’t it? – and, after the first battle, quickly admits to being the first-generation coordinator son of natural parents. He’s shy and doesn’t believe in his own abilities, but we’ve seen that before, and he kicks quite a bit of enemy tail before this volume is over.

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