Tagged: Manga

Mark Crilley has been influenced by Japan before: his best-known work, the long all-ages Akiko series, is about a Japanese girl who has various adventures on alien worlds, and various elements of Japanese culture found their way into that book. But Akiko was still clearly a Western comic by a Western creator.

Miki Falls, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt at what’s called an "OEL Manga" – something that follows many of the conventions of Japanese comics but was written as an Original English Language work. Crilley doesn’t draw his book backwards – wisely, I think, since if it can be difficult for a reader to switch orientation, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a creator to do so – but it’s otherwise a very manga-influenced work. And so I’m looking at it this week as our "Manga Friday" feature.

Miki is just starting her senior year of high school in a fairly rural area of Japan. She’s determined to be really herself during this new year – not to go along with other people because it’s easier. (This seems to be a common desire for manga protagonists, possibly – he said, putting on his armchair group psychologist hat – because Japan is such a homogenous, conformist society.) But, since this is a manga story – and, to be less culturally specific, because it is a story about a teenage girl, and mostly written for other teenage girls – she meets a boy. A new boy in school. A mysterious, attractive, fascinating, keeps-to-himself boy. A boy named Hiro Sakurai.

Miki tells herself that she’s not falling in love with Hiro, but of course she is. And of course he’s utterly aloof, ignoring her – and everyone else in the school – at all times. Spring is the story of their meeting, and Miki’s budding love-hate relationship with Hiro (love him because he’s a dreamy boy, hate him because he won’t even look at her). At the end, we learn the secret, very manga-esque, reason why Hiro must hold himself aloof from all love…nay! from any normal human emotion! (Oops. I’m channeling Stan Lee there. That’s not a specific hint, but Miki and Hiro’s relationship does have aspects very familiar to Western comics readers, with a large helping of angst.)

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Since last week was steeped in girlyness, I thought it was only right to go entirely the other way this week. So, in honor of the weekend American men spend eating and watching football on TV, here are three manga about racing cars, slaughter, mayhem, flying blood, secret fighting techniques, and other topics of interest primarily to the male gender.

Now, I’ve never seen The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, but if anyone who has seen that movie wants to claim that it’s nothing but a rip-off of Initial D, I’d be ready to believe it. It’s set in a small provincial town, where about the only exciting thing for teen boys to do is to race cars down the local mountain. And so they do – and, even more so, they talk about racing, and cars, and the mountain, and racing techniques, and whose car is faster than whose, in interminable detail. There definitely is an audience for this, but I’m not it.

Our hero is one Tak Fujiwara, the typical semi-oblivious protagonist of a million contemporary manga. He’s developed excellent driving techniques without even realizing it – hey, this story seem to say, shamelessly, to its readers, maybe you have also learned some really cool skill and you don’t even know it! (And all the readers over the age of sixteen harrumph.)

On top of that, I found the art unpleasant – the cars and backgrounds are lovingly detailed, as you would expect, but the people stand stiffly and are drawn clumsily. Their mouths in particular draw attention for all of the wrong reasons. If you are absolutely nuts about cars, you might well enjoy Initial D. For the rest of us, though, it’s a bit too much of a muchness.

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