Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Slight Return

News
February 15, 2008

This week the theme is “stuff I liked the first time around,” as I review the second volumes of four series that I enjoyed in volume one. For those who came in late, the reviews of the first volumes are here and here.

Mu Shi Shi, Vol. 2
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $12.95

Mu Shi Shi is still a quiet, atmospheric comic that feels steeped in folklore, even if most of its stories are completely invented. Since the background was explained in Volume 1, this time around we get five separate, freestanding stories.

Ginko wanders through the countryside of a Japan neither in this century nor any other, finding various mushi – tiny, primitive creatures that come in a bewildering array of forms and which often parasitize or otherwise harm humans – and helping the nearby humans to live with them, or just to survive.

In this volume, he meets another mushishi, who had made himself master of a mountain’s mushi, but is about to be overthrown. Then there’s a young woman cursed with hereditary mushi that she controls by writing them on scrolls, and a younger girl who dies and comes back to life every day to heal her local villagers. Ginko also helps a man searching for a rainbow, and a family with a cuckoo-ish mushi child.

Some of the stories here are as powerful as in Volume 1, especially the first and last. But I do wonder how long this series can be just about Ginko wandering around, with each story being discrete and separate. I hope Urushibara is building up to something – several characters look like they’re being set up for a return in a later story – because Mu Shi Shi is quite good as a series of individual stories, but could be great if there’s something to tie it all together.

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Manga Friday: Something Old, Something New

News
February 8, 2008

Since last week was big swords, I’d hoped to do big guns this week – but I didn’t have enough books to make it work.

So, instead, we have two brand-new manga series (first volumes published at the end of November) and two older, pretty well-known series. (“Old” is a relative term here – one was first published in English in 2004 and the other in 2002…)

Aventura, Vol. 1
Shin Midorikawa
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $10.95

Our first new manga this week is an unabashed Harry Potter rip-off, set in the Gaius School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a flying magical school divided into two parts. On one side, the students study magic, and on the other, swordsmanship (which somehow also makes magic, or something like that). Lewin Randit is an orphan, a poor swordsmanship student, who has shows no magical aptitude so far. But, once he meets two elves (a boy and a girl) from the magic school, things start to look up for him.

Oh, and the back cover copy, unsubtly, mentions that he “could become the greatest of them all.” Of course he could…

The art is, to my eye, medium-high shojo, with big hair flying everywhere, large luminous eyes, and a fineness of drawing everywhere. I find it very hard to differentiate characters in a style like that, so I might not have gotten as much out of Aventura as I could. But let’s be honest: it’s pleasant but very derivative, for readers who are looking for yet another “magical school” story.

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‘The Wind in the Willows’ Review

News
February 5, 2008

Classic Illustrated Deluxe # 1: The Wind in the Willows
Novel by Kenneth Grahame; adapted by Michel Plessix
Papercutz, 2007, $13.95 (paperback) / $17.95 (hardcover)

I’ve wasted a lot of time not writing the review for this book, mostly because I suspected it would be one of the shortest in my career. (And both you and my ComicMix overlords deserve better than a super-short review.)

The problem is that there really isn’t much to say about Michel Plessix’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows: it’s lovely and sweet, one of the best adaptations of a novel into the comics form that I’ve ever seen. When a book does everything right, it can be hard to talk about it, and I can’t see anything that Plessix does wrong here.

Plessix’s linework is careful and assured, capturing complex scenes with ease and giving life and emotion to a wide variety of anthropomorphic animal characters. Even more than that, he’s mastered the tricky art of those animals: they’re human enough to have gestures and body language, but animal enough to be believable as talking frogs, badgers, rats, and so on. And then he draws humans in the mix as well, and makes the combination not just work for the space of a few pages, but feel natural and obvious.

On top of all that is a carefully-chosen palette of mostly light, pastel colors, trying it all together with the perfect touch. The art of The Wind in the Willows is simply exquisite, but you need to look at it closely; it doesn’t demand attention but instead serves and advances the story.

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Manga Fridays: Is That a Giant Sword in Your Pocket, Or…

News
February 1, 2008

This week: four manga series featuring protagonists who carry very large, sharp objects. Hmm… Overcompensate much? I’ll take them in size order, starting with the smallest and least impressive:

Togari, Vol. 1
Yoshinori Natsume
Viz Media, 2007, $9.99

In Togari, Tobei has been in hell for the last four hundred years (being tortured unceasingly, yadda yadda yadda). He’s still utterly unrepentant and completely focused on getting out, which may be why the upper-level functionary Lady Ema hands him a wooden sword and sends him back to earth.

His mission: to kill a hundred and eight Toga (sins), monstrous vaguely-anthropomorphic creatures that attach themselves to humans and cause those humans to commit evil, within a hundred and eight days. He has all sorts of restrictions, such as the fact that any harm he does to a human is immediately replicated on his body. Along for the ride is Osa, a young demon-dude who was his primary tormentor in Hell, and who doesn’t think much of the plan.

So, to sum up: Tobei’s a bloodthirsty doomed soul and Osa is a tight-ass minor demon. Together, they fight crime!

Tobei learns that there have been many wielders of the Togari (that wooden sword, which is more than it seems), and that none of them succeeded in their mission. But that’s okay, because he’s uniquely powerful and special.

Everything about Togari is generic: the set-up, the characters, the art. It’s the manga equivalent of the Superman of Earth-7895; some of the details might be slightly surprising, but the overall plot goes exactly as expected. On the other hand, Togari is solidly professional and entertaining; it’s not likely to surprise you, but the same goes for most Top 20 comics in any given month. Togari’s pleasures are just as derivative as a random issue of an X-comic, but they’re just as real.

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Graphic Classics: Mark Twain Review

News
January 28, 2008

This is the second of the “Graphic Classics” series I’ve reviewed for ComicMix, and Mark Twain has essentially the same strengths and weaknesses as Bram Stoker. It’s exceptionally wordy and takes a while to read, since it incorporates big swaths of the original Twain stories as narration or extensive dialogue. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to avoid this in an adaptation into comics form; anyone who spends that much time working on a particular story will be doing so, presumably, because he really likes that story, and so he’ll want to get as much of the text in as possible. But comics with lots of words per page read slowly and can come across as just heavily-illustrated fiction, so it’s a tough line to walk.

All of the pieces in Graphic Classics: Mark Twain are wordy, and not all of them are equally successful, but the general result is entertaining and not just educational – it’s not just a book to give to your young nephew who doesn’t like reading “real” books, but something to read and enjoy yourself. It’s edited, like the whole series, by Tom Pomplun, and, like the Stoker book I saw a few months ago, is a second edition of a book published earlier. The cover is by George Sellas, illustrating a scene from the leadoff story, an adaptation of Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad.

Yes, Tom Sawyer Abroad. It’s instructive to remember that our age isn’t the first one in which creators cranked out ever-less-exciting sequels to well-loved stories – we may have Live Free or Die Hard and Final Crisis, but the 19th century had not only Tom Sawyer Abroad but its even more anemic sequel, Tom Sawyer, Detective. Abroad is far below the level of Huckleberry Finn, or even the original Tom Sawyer, but it’s a decent 19th century boys’ story, if you ignore its pedigree. Editor Pomplun adapts it here into a typically wordy Graphic Classics script, and Sellas illustrates it with a cartoony style with very precise lines that look computer-drawn. The story is silly, and it’s odd that Graphic Classics chose such a minor Twain work to anchor their book, but it’s fine for what it is.

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Sex and Death, by Andrew Wheeler

News
January 25, 2008

This week: three manga series featuring sex and death in high school. (I don’t know about you folks, but if my high school was like some of the ones in manga series, I wouldn’t have bothered to graduate.)

Case in point: Sundome by Kazuto Okada, a story about a young woman who may just be the single biggest tease in the history of the human race. (By the way, the title is pronounced “sun-do-may” and is a Japanese term meaning “stopping just before.” And, yes, the general implication is pretty much what you think it is.) Her name is Kurumi Sahana, and, in time-tested manga fashion, she’s the transfer student who arrives at this high school on page two. Narrator Hideo Aiba falls for her immediately, and thus tries to resign from his “roman club” – a collection of three other exceptionally geeky young men dedicated to vague “romantic” ideals. One of the rules of the club is that members must remain virgins until graduation, and Hideo, being an honest young man, is hoping he can break that vow, and, being very Japanese about it, wants to quit first.

What follows is a very exaggerated but not completely unbelievable sex comedy. Hideo is a whiny little schlub – of course, he’s the hero of a sex comedy manga, so I’m repeating myself – and Kurumi knows exactly what he wants and refuses to give it to him. On the other hand, she’s more than willing to torment him, with a glimpse of this or a touch of that, to get him to do what she wants. One of the things she wants, though, is for Hideo to grow a spine and stop being such a wimpy little stereotype, so she doesn’t come across as a bitch. Manipulative, yes. More than a little cruel, clearly. Not someone to introduce to your mother, absolutely. But she’s honest, and not capricious, and she does follow through on what she says.

(Another girl – somewhat more conventional but also in her way tormenting Hideo and his fellow members of the Roman Club – shows up about halfway through the book.)

I feel I should apologize for liking Sundome, but I did enjoy it. It’s “sexy” in a completely sophomoric way, full of panty shots and nipples straining against fabric, but it’s authentically tawdry and juvenile. It’s probably not a book for women, or for men who have completely outgrown their own childishness (which I clearly haven’t), but if you’ve ever wished Superbad was a book, you are in luck.

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The Museum Vaults Review

News
January 17, 2008

The Museum Vaults is the second of four graphic novels created through an unlikely publishing partnership: noted American art-comics publisher NBM and France’s cultural powerhouse museum the Louvre. All four of the stories will be about the Louvre in some way; the first book, Nicholas De Crecy’s Glacial Period, was published early in 2007.

Museum Vaults’ author, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, has been a prolific French cartoonist for the past twenty years, though very little of his work has turned up on this side of the Atlantic. (I’ll admit I didn’t previously know his work myself.)

As Museum Vaults opens, a young expert, Monsieur Volumer, arrives at a museum whose original name has been forgotten. His job is to delve into the subbasements beneath this museum to study, evaluate, and index the collections – to fully understand the museum.

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Paris Review

News
January 14, 2008

Paris collects a four-issue mini-series set in that city in the early ‘50s, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Simon Gane. Watson is fairly well-known these days as the writer-artist of such relationship-oriented comics as Slow News Day and Love Fights, but I haven’t heard of Gane before. (From a quick perusal of his blog I think that’s because he’s mostly worked in the UK and for music magazines.) Gane has a very ornate, ornamented, even rococo style, which is a good artistic choice for a historical comic – it clearly distances the action, and keeps it from feeling contemporary.

The story of Paris is pretty straightforward, and focuses on two young women from elsewhere living in that city. Juliet is an American, studying at the Academie de Stael by day and painting society portraits by night to pay her rent. Deborah is an English aristocrat chaperoned by her hideous aunt Miss Chapman.

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Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

News
January 11, 2008

This is another complicated bit of backstory: in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto started a series of epic fantasy novels about a warrior-type named Guin who woke up amnesiac with a leopard mask permanently affixed to his face. There are at least a hundred and eighteen novels in the main series, plus some unspecified number of “side stories.” (I don’t know what makes them “side stories,” either.) One of those “side stories” was adapted into a manga series, and collected into three volumes. Now Vertical is in the middle of publishing the manga based on the side story based on the main story of the leopard-headed warrior named Guin. (Who lies in the house of Bedlam, Elizabeth Bishop would add.)

The first two volumes are out in English already; the third is scheduled to follow in March. And I read those first two volumes today (Thursday), to let you, the manga-starved hordes of ComicMix, know what they’re like.

And they’re OK.

Hm. You probably want more than that, right? All right. Guin is your standard post-Conan mightily-thewed barbarian type, with impossibly bulging muscles and a big sword he whips out and swings around phallicly at the appropriate moments. In the manga, his leopard “mask” looks just like a head – the jaw moves, the eyes move, and the whole thing is disconcertingly too small for his overmuscled body. Also in Conan fashion, he’s hacked his way to being king of a civilized nation, marrying the beautiful princess along the way. (Unlike Conan, though, the princess is not exceptionally enamored of her husband.)

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Manga Friday: Monkeying Around

News
January 4, 2008

I’m often most interested in the decadent phase of an artistic movement, the point when it starts turning on itself. Snarky parody, convoluted derivative plots, art that’s clearly a rip-off of someone else’s style – this and more amuses me. So I’m happy that I finally gave in to temptation and picked up Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga.

I found it on the “how to draw” shelf, which sort-of makes sense: it’s a parody of books about how to draw manga. But I tend to doubt it’ll find many readers over there; I expect the people looking for drawing guides are serious, devoted, dour young folks who won’t be in the mood for zany humor. (The fact that this book was published in 2002, and one lonely copy was still poking around on the shelf, tends to support that idea.)

But, if you do manage to find it, Monkey is quite funny. In it, fictionalized versions of the creators (Koji Aihara, 19 years old and Kentaro Takekuma, 22 years old, as they’re billed in the book) talk about how they’re going to conquer the world of manga, in a very funny overwrought style, full of full-face close-ups. (Which are also essentially the same in every single episode; there’s some very obvious humor and some sly hidden humor in this as well.) Takekuma, the older, seasoned manga pro, then proceeds to teach Aihara the lessons of manga – this book contains the first nineteen of them. (There’s a second volume promised at the end; I don’t know how much more material appeared in Japan.)

The lessons start with the very obvious and basic – drawing borders, facial expressions, and then figures. (Takekuma recommends copying from other artists to do that last one, gleefully insisting that everyone does it.) Then Takekuma moves on to explaining where ideas and stories come from – everyone else’s stories and ideas, of course. After that, there are a series of lessons about particular manga genres, which are in turn shows to be completely cliché-ridden and obvious.

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Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Slight Return

Manga Friday: Something Old, Something New

‘The Wind in the Willows’ Review

Manga Fridays: Is That a Giant Sword in Your Pocket, Or…

Graphic Classics: Mark Twain Review

Sex and Death, by Andrew Wheeler

The Museum Vaults Review

Paris Review

Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

Manga Friday: Monkeying Around

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