As we hinted earlier today, Speed Racer is returning to comics, with new stories by Len Wein (Human Target, Swamp Thing, X-Men, Wolverine), Tommy Yune, Robby Musso, Lee Kohse, and James Rochelle.
[[[Speed Racer]]] is an English adaptation name of the Japanese manga and anime, Mach Go Go Go, but is best known in the US from the 60s television series translation and the 2008 film. Selected chapters of the manga were released by NOW Comics in the 1990s under the title Speed Racer Classics, later released by the DC Comics division, Wildstorm Productions under the title Speed Racer: The Original Manga, then collected by IDW.
The release date of the new series has yet to be announced. Maybe in this new series, the Mach 5 will actually have a trunk lock? Or is that too much to hope for?
One of the great symbols of Japan to a Western audience – equal to pagodas, kimonos, and that exaggerated white makeup – is the katana. (Well, any vaguely Japanese sword, to be honest – it doesn’t have to be precisely a katana as long as the profile is right and it’s declared to be incredibly sharp.) I suspect it’s the same for the Japanese themselves – that their traditional swords are one of their internal cultural markers, and part of the standard mental furniture that makes up “Japanese-ness” – since there’s a blizzard of the things in their comics stories. For example…
Crimson-Shell By Jun Mochizuki Yen Press, November 2009, $10.99
Surprisingly, this is a single-volume story, not the first volume of anything longer. But it’s paced like the first volume of a longer work, and the ending certainly leaves lots of room for a continuation. (I actually went back to the cover and copyright page after finishing the book, to make sure that it wasn’t “volume one.”) I would not be at all surprised if this was meant as a try-out for something longer, though I have no idea if any more will ever appear.
But, in this book, there’s a young woman, Claudia (also called the Rose Witch), who is the mascot/powerhouse of the secret organization Red Rose – she’s part of its Crimson-Shell division, which I gather is the field operation. The usual mad scientist discovered something called a black rose, which has infected lots of people to different effect: some turn into thorn-tentacled monsters almost immediately, while others keep their intelligence and human appearance for much longer, the better to infiltrate and destroy organizations like the Red Rose – which, as you might have guessed, has a mission to stop the Black Roses at all costs. Claudia is the requisite one person infected with the Black Rose who didn’t turn infected and evil; she instead has unspecified and varying powers over Black Roses.
The guy with the sword is her mentor/friend/savior, Xeno, who is the usual laconic master of violence (with artfully disarranged duster, long hair, and facial scruff to signpost that’s what he is), and he’s accused of being a Black Rose early on in the book. There is also a bewildering array of other characters, many of whom either are or are accused of being Black Rose agents, and that adds to the confusion (as well as the feeling that this is only the beginning of a longer story).
Claudia muddles through the plot without doing much – she’s one of those standard teenage-girl manga heroines, who can’t be too assertive without seeming unfeminine to the audience – and then there’s an ending that leaves a number of major questions. Crimson-Shell would have been an intriguing, if confusing, first volume of a longer series – the reader could assume that all of the unclear details would be explained further along – but it doesn’t work well at all as a single volume.
Most of us, it’s safe to say, will never be told that our sin is our very being. (Unless we were brought up in the Deep South, in which case we’ve heard it twice a day and five times on Sunday.) We’re also not going to learn that the odd new girl in our high school is actually an android. Nor will we find that we’re trying to stop the extinction of mankind, along with our brother, with only our innate psychic powers to guide and aid us. That’s what manga is for – in a manga, those things are only to be expected, and it would be a bland story without something like that happening by page five.
Oz Vessalius, scion of one of the four great dukedoms, has arrived at the mansion that his family uses only for coming-of-age ceremonies to be officially proclaimed heir to his non-present father, along with a large semi-feudal entourage. (Though this book is set, as best I can tell from the floppy, ornate manga clothes and the background details, no earlier than the late Victorian.) It seems like an awfully big place to only use for a few days every generation, but I’ve learned not to let logic get in the way of my enjoyment of a manga story.)
However, all does not go smoothly – there are signs, portents, and other weird events that don’t make a whole lot of sense – and the ceremony is interrupted by a group of knife- and chain-wielding hooded figures, who seem to be about to kill Oz for the sin of existence. But he’s saved, sort-of, by a girl named Alice, who is also a giant black rabbit, and both of them are cast into the Abyss, a punishment dimension from which no one ever escapes.
Pandora Hearts skitters about like a bean on a griddle, so it doesn’t then do anything as predicable as settling down to tell the story of how Alice and Oz travel across the Abyss for a few dozen volumes and come to trust and confide in each other. No, they get out of the inescapable Abyss in time for afternoon tea – with Oz still very suspicious of Alice’s intentions and power (and rightfully so) to meet and confront the hooded folks, who are some manner of secret police.
This is a confusing book, with explanations shouted during battles and other confrontations that don’t actually explain much, and are often written in manga shorthand that substitutes Ominous Capitals for clarity. The Alice in Wonderland parallels so far seem limited to Alice’s name and other form, and there’s no particular significance here to Oz’s name, either. Pandora Hearts is messy and loud and disheveled, like a sorority girl at 3 AM on a Friday, but it – like that sorority girl – remains oddly attractive even then. It’s not a great story, but I have hopes that it will make sense, one day.
Manga-format comics have a tropism
for high school even stronger than that of sunflowers for the sun – it is possible to find manga without a hint of high-schoolery in
them, but serious digging is required. But you couldn’t loose an arrow in a
manga warehouse without hitting at least one book about girls in sailor outfits.
(Hm. Did I just inadvertently explain the appeal?) So we reviewers have to
specialize even further. This week I have three a) second volumes in series b)
set in high schools c) with female lead characters who d) have amazing and
unexpected powers.
Even there, I’m sure a devoted
reader could name a dozen or more series that fit qualifications b) through d)!
Ohtaka’s comedic piss-take on the
“martial arts high school” genre here veers more towards the overwrought drama
and fighting technique minutia of its targets than the tight, original satire
of the first volume, which is disappointing – there’s a center of gravity of
standard manga traditions that has the force of a black hole in Japanese
comics, dragging every outlier to be closer to the generic standard. And so the
supposed main character of Sumomomo, Momomo – Koushi Inuzuka, scion to a great family of karate
champions, who only wants to be left alone to study and become a great
prosecutor – is either pushed aside entirely or relegated to running and
cowering, like any other weak young man in a manga. (If this is opaque to you,
perhaps you need to drop back to my review of the first volume.)
Oh, it’s still funny – very funny
at points, particularly when it’s picking on the ex-Olympic gymnast gym
teacher, Daigoro, who is a fine self-satisfied gym rat caricature and gets shown
up repeatedly by a cute little girl. And the new enemies this volume are fun as
well: teenage Yakuza hit-girl Iroha Miyamoto and her overly emotional sidekick
Hanzou. But Iroha falls in love with Koushi nearly the moment she shows up, and
is under the impression that Koushi is in love with her. And so Sumomomo, Momomo comes one step closer to being yet another harem manga.
I hope I’m wrong, and that
the next volume sees more of Koushi being a budding lawyer and talking his way
out of problems, and less karate and pretty girls throwing themselves at him.
But I know which way to bet when it comes to manga!
Red Snow By Susumu Katsumata Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95
From a Western perspective, it
would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics
stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since
the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to
be set in the modern world, that gekiga
is a literature of urban ennui and the
dislocations of modern capitalism.
But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its
masters, and his collection Red Snow is
filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with
bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building
of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these
are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull
and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.
A few of these stories have
supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the
role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as
being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet
another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to
have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he
has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.”
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 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. (more…)
All young comics protagonists are
special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that
they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable
from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest
way. But it doesn’t matter what they say;
we see that they’re all uniquely wonderful — maybe special snowflakes, maybe
purple children. Maybe wizards! Maybe mutants! Maybe the feudal lord! Maybe the
rightful ruler of the entire world, and the dashing fated love of that gorgeous
other character, and, and, and EVERYTHING!
This week, I have three books like
that, with young people who are deeply, utterly special.
X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1 Story by Raina Telgemeier and
Dave Roman; art by Anzu Del Rey Manga, August 2009,
$12.99
Telgemeier and Roman take the
standard X-Men set-up – which is
already, in its full Claremontian flowering, completely full of adolescent
longing, fear, and obsession – and twist it about 90 degrees into the world of shojo. The characters come from all over the X-men universe,
with a plot germ from mid-Claremont Era: Kitty Pryde, young and conflicted
about her powers, is given a scholarship to Professor Xavier’s Academy for
Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.
And she finds herself the only
female student there. (Even the female professors are absent for most of this
volume, to intensify the reverse-harem feeling.) The other X-Men characters are
all familiar names, though they’re arbitrarily divided into teachers (Colossus,
Magneto, Storm, Marvel Girl, Beast) and oh-so-pretty boys (Iceman, Angel,
Forge, Havok, Cyclops, and so on). There’s the usual clique of privileged kids,
who are allowed to do what they want and essentially run the school, and of
course they are the prettiest boys and of course they are called The Hellfire
Club. (And of course Magneto is their mentor; Telgemeier and Roman are hitting
all of the X-Men/shojo parallels they can as hard as they can.)
Kitty is torn between the fast
heartless boys and the outcasts – in particular between Pyro (who becomes her
boyfriend) and Iceman (who is unfailingly cold to her, natch). Does she make a
big choice at the end of this book? Does she learn what really matters in life?
Is the Pope Catholic?
X-Men: Misfits is a solid reverse-harem shojo story, but I can’t help but believe that
it’s true audience is men and women of around my age – comics readers of
long-standing who know enough of the X-Men mythology (and I barely do) to
appreciate the changes that are being made to it. Anzu’s art is exactly what
you’d expect for this kind of story, though she does differentiate a large cast
(of mainly pretty, pretty boys – all the same kind of prettiness, too) clearly
and easily, which is not simple.
Like its older competitors Shonen Jump and (the sadly just-deceased) Shojo Beat, Yen Press’s Yen+ magazine has launched a number of series into actual paperback books – and, this week, I read four of ‘em. (All of which stories I also covered, several months back, as they appeared in the first few issues of Yen+.)
Ko is the artist on Yen’s Croquis Pop, but here he’s taking over the whole shebang. And, as often happens when artists start writing their own stories, he works to his strengths – sailor-suited girls with wide eyes and panties in view far more than you’d expect, detailed backgrounds of buildings and rooms, and, of course and mostly, lots and lots of ultra-violence. (I should probably also note that this comes from Korea, so it reads left-to-right.)
Noh-A is a teenage girl who finds herself in a new high school without remembering how she got there. But that’s the least of her worries, since her head is almost immediately severed from her body during a hyper-kinetic fight between a guy who proclaims his name is “Hansen, Head Guidance Counselor!” and the title character, whom Noh-A dubs Nasty Smile. Luckily, Noh-A is now in a world between life and death – called Amityville, probably because Koreans watch old American horror movies like some Americans watch old Asian monster movies – and so her decapitation is reversible.
To make a long story short – though that long story is mostly made up of scenes of Jack cutting up various people with the implausibly long and pointy blades that pop out from his wrists – Noh-A is heartbroken to learn that she can never leave this world, that there are just a handful of people living there (and that they all are completely insane in their own ways), and that her powers extend only to not being able to die and having health-restoring blood. (Setting up many scenes of Noh-A’s blood being tapped for its healing powers later in the series, I’m sure.)
Jack Frost looks sleek and moves quickly, and it has some very stylish violence. It’s also not nearly as far over the top as Fist of the North Star (for example). But I’m hard-pressed to say many more nice things about it than that; it’s very obviously pandering to a specific and very sophomoric audience.
Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of Asian comics – you can read right-to-left without blinking, speak of shojo and shonen with ease and have even been known to bring up seinen in casual conversation – you get caught up short with the realization that Japan is not the entirety of Asia. There are other countries with their own comics traditions, and you (well, me) suddenly realize that you (no, it’s still me) don’t know all that much about them. But there will always be more books you haven’t read than those you have, so the only thing to do is dive right in….
Mijeong By Byun Byung-Jun NBM ComicsLit, July 2009, $19.99
If Bret Easton Ellis was a Korean cartoonist – and about twenty years younger – he might have produced a short-story collection like Mijeong; Byung-Jun’s characters are mostly urban young people, disaffected more often than not. There are seven stories here, in a wide variety of art styles – some painted, some drawn, and all absolutely stunning in their virtuosity – but they’re all quite bleak.
Byung-Jun’s stories traffic in rape and abduction, murder and suicide, but his viewpoint is distanced and quiet, as if to say that this is just life, and none of it can be helped. Some of the stories end on a relatively upbeat note and some the other way, but it doesn’t really matter – they all have that quiet, detached tone.
Byung-Jun’s art is amazing in its textures and environment, though his people, deliberately, have mask-like faces that show little emotion most of the time. It’s harder to judge his writing – there are passages like “For weary lovers, love seems distant. But they’ll endure it all. Overwhelmed, they endure. But, in the end, they’ll manage.” that clunk around like a tire with a bald spot, but it’s impossible to say if that was clunky in the original Korean, or if the translation (by Joe Johnson) is responsible. In either case, the writing aims towards sublimity but doesn’t always make it.
Mijeong is an Asian comic for people who usually like European comics – it’s nuanced and subtle, quiet and vaguely depressive, with gorgeous art and a deeply jaundiced view of the world. Perhaps the fact that it reads left-to-right – since it’s Korean, and that’s the way their books run – will help it find that audience.
Life’s tough when you’re a teenage girl – sometimes, it’s even almost as tough as those teenage girls think it is. This week, three “normal girls” with gigantic eyes try to get through their massive problems…most of which, as you might have guessed, have to do with boys.
Orange Planet
, Vol. 1 By Haruka Fukushima Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $10.99
People in manga quite often have very odd living arrangements. Let’s take Rui, the heroine of Orange Planet, as an example: her parents died six years ago, so she moved in with her aunt then. But now – at the age of maybe fourteen – that aunt has gotten married, so Rui lives all by herself in an apartment and has an early-morning paper route…to pay her rent? for spending money? just because? And, after that paper route, she has the habit of climbing into bed (purely for warmth) with the “adorable boy next door,” Taro, who also seems to be her ex-boyfriend. And then, just a few pages into this book, a strange older man – whose name we and Rui don’t learn for a while – moves in with her because his crazy ex-girlfriend (one of many) burned his house down. And then, of course, he turns out to be the new teaching intern, Eisuke.
Luckily, Kaoru, the boy that Rui’s interested in – she’s writes her first love note ever to him on page eleven – doesn’t live next to her. But, of course, the old-friend-who’s-known-her-since-childhood, Taro, has discovered that he’s in love with her, but he can’t tell her, or the story would end suddenly. So we’ve got the usual shojo love triangle (with a girl at the vertex), with the optional advisor living (semi-secretly) with the girl – call it Shojo Plot # 7B.
Fukushima tells that story in a clean, modern shojo style – yes, everyone has gigantic eyes and no noses to speak of, but the backgrounds and page layouts aren’t cluttered and flowery like the height of ‘80s shojo frippery, and her thin, elongated bodies are exaggerated but clearly reminiscent of the real coltishness of fast-growing early teens. Orange Planet is a standard story done professionally and with a real love for the material, which goes pretty far. But I still don’t have any clue what the title means.
Manga-format comics have a tropism
