Fri Oct 2, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Supernatural Teens

Reviewing Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary, Yokai Doctor, and Amefurashi

Where would comics be without the stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you want to – when you can have all of the moody, or conflicted, or ridiculously innocent teenagers with amazing abilities you ever thought of? Like the main characters of these three books, for example…

Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales, Volume 1: Sanctuary
Written by Melissa Marr; Art by Xian Nu Studio
Tokyopop/HarperCollins, May 2009, $12.99

Wicked Lovely is the name of a novel by Marr, and it also seems to be the umbrella title for her novels about teens and faeries (and teen faeries, and faerie teens) in the modern world. The novels seem to be about a girl named Aislinn – no self-respecting teen-novel heroine ever has a name like Doris or Mabel – and her travails in high school and the Faerie Courts. But this manga volume – it says on its back cover that it’s “manga,” if you don’t believe me, and never mind that it reads left-to-right and was written by an American – is set somewhere in the western desert, where once-mortal Rika lives quietly, trying to avoid both humans and the local faeries.

Rika was discovered and turned – not exactly “seduced and abandoned,” since she wasn’t able to give him what he wanted – many years ago by the Summer King, Keenan, who turns up early in this book to give an excuse for some backstory and to fail to get her to swear fealty to him. She refuses, of course – she’s solitary now, and happy that way. What does it matter if most of the solitary fay are nasty enough to make “mischievous” a very weak term to describe them?

But they’re just there for spice; this is a series for teenage girls, which means Rika has to see a cute boy – Jace, who paints, like she does – and save him from those nasty fay, who try to kill him for no good reason. He’s sweet and innocent enough to stare wide-eyed at her abilities – those nasty wild fay don’t give up, or there wouldn’t be a plot here other than “elf girl and artist boy meet cute and gaze into each other’s eyes,” – and the book is low-key enough that they’re just mildly kissing by the end. (Which seems awfully tame for a fairie who’s hundreds of years old.)

Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary has too many colons in its title and a thin plot, but I have to expect that it’s just the kind of thing teen girls will want: a bit of angst, a wish to be alone that doesn’t actually lead to loneliness, and a cute boy that the girl gets to protect and pursue. I’m just twenty years too old and the wrong gender to appreciate it properly.

Yokai Doctor, Vol. 1
By Yuki Sato
Del Rey Manga, May 2009, $10.99

“Yokai” is a Japanese word for spirits – or monsters, or demons, or whatever; your general troublemaking supernatural folk – and in your typical yokai manga, the heroes and heroines continually power up and learn new techniques to battle ever-more-fiendish yokai intend on stealing the precious bodily fluids of various innocents. But Yuki Sato, the manga-ka behind this book, must have gotten tired with that, because he twisted it around: yokai aren’t dangerous on their own (though they can be dangerous to humans, just as many animals can), and the problems they cause are generally because something’s wrong, and needs to be fixed.

Enter Kuro Gokokuji, who looks like a teenage boy – of the distracted, utterly socially inept, living-entirely-inside-his-own-head otaku type – but is actually from the spirit world himself, and whose mission is to find and heal sick yokai. His story starts twice, since Yokai Doctor was originally a short story (the first two sections collected here) and then, when it was successful, re-launched by telling basically the same story over again to begin the main sequence.

His sidekick/helper/Watson – who narrates the short story, though not the longer version – is Kotoko Kasuga, a girl from a long line of exorcists who intends to follow in the family business. She does have the ability to see yokai, which is rare, but she doesn’t get to test her other skills until much later in this book, and find that they’re not what she expected. (And, of course, she finds that Kuro isn’t another exorcist, as she thought, but pretty much the opposite.)

So the formula here – after the long and doubled set-up of explaining who these two characters are, what they can do, what yokai are, and why they’re not nearly as dangerous and nasty as most people think – is that there’s some problem caused by a yokai that looks purposeful and nasty, but turns out to be a side effect of something else, and so Kuro can make everything better. It’s certainly a more constructive formula than killing the monster of the week, so I have to approve.

Sato’s people are drawn crisply and tightly – they have manga-sized eyes, but generally keep the same proportions as the book goes on. His yokai are more heavily rendered and imaginative, which is all to the good; you can get a hint of the mix of styles from the cover. Yokai Doctor strikes me as a slightly dumbed-down version of the fine series Mu Shi Shi, but it’s smart enough for most purposes.

Amefurashi 1: The Rain Goddess
By Atsushi Suzumi
Del Rey Manga, June 2009, $10.99

In a desert landscape that might as well be post-apocalyptic – and maybe it is, actually – one small town lives on the sufferance of Amefurashi, the rain goddess who lives at the top of a gigantic nimbus tree just outside town. She provides rain as long as the town provides offerings to her, in the traditional relationship of deity and worshipper since time immemorial.

Our hero is a boy inventor with the unlikely name of Gimmy, who was given the job of making yet another doll for the next offering. He’s not very good at doll-making, though, and so we get Standard Manga Scene #736: Working Hard, Late Into the Night, on Something that Isn’t Working. Unfortunately, his twin kid brother and sister, Mel and Mil, decide to masquerade as the dolls and are presented on Amefurashi’s altar.

(Luckily, this isn’t the kind of book where the goddess is a nasty type who dismembers the dolls immediately or does something else equally unpleasant.)

Gimmy chases after the offering, and climbs the tree to save his siblings, thus meeting Amefurashi. She turns out to be a cute young girl – of course she is; every single person in manga who doesn’t absolutely have to be something else is a cute young girl – who knows very little about the outside world, but is adamant about keeping her “dollies.”

Towards the end of this volume, the Gimmy-Amefurashi tension apparently wasn’t enough, because Suzumi introduces another goddess, who attacks Amefurashi in an attempt to take over her tree. The tree is the source of a goddess’s powers, and Amefurashi is a very young, very inexperienced, very weak goddess. One presumes in the next volume she’ll need Gimmy’s help to save her position and life – which is also not an unknown plot complication for manga.

Amefurashi is a bit too generic and obvious at times – there’s a wise old man whose name is “wise old man,” for example – but it has a good heart, and Amefurashi never gets too nasty and heavy-handed in her superpowerful goddess-ness. (Though that might have made things more interesting; she doesn’t have a particularly distinctive character, being the spunky, sporty girl who doesn’t know much about anything.) Again, this is a book that will find a wide and appreciative audience of readers who have already read a dozen stories very much like this one. But anyone looking for originality should go elsewhere.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like to submit books for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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