People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

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pepita People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

I wasn’t sure what expectations to bring to this art book, Pepita: Takehiko Inoue Meets Gaudi, and I’m glad I didn’t formulate any because it wouldn’t have met them.

As if to spite the cover art (a labored Takehiko Inoue drawing of a young blue-eyed Antoni Gaudi) and the subject matter (a trip Inoue took to Spain in order to study the work of this 19th century Catalan architect), Pepita isn’t much more than a playful travelogue, interspersed with far more photos than sketches, and more casual cultural musings than intense study.

This book is for those who can be both interested in Gaudi and Inoue. If you fall into only one camp there’s not enough material here to satisfy you. You’ll get a little of Inoue’s self-reflection about his philosophy of work, but not much. Similarly, you won’t feel sufficiently educated on the life and work of Gaudi, if indeed you knew about him in the first place. So this isn’t the publication I’d recommend to someone fresh off Vagabond or Slam Dunk and rearing to get inside the head of the guy who created them. It’s just a little too plain for that, too straightforwardly about a Japanese guy in Spain looking at weird architecture that resonates with him as he takes in a culture different from his own.

As someone already familiar with the Catalan region of Spain by way of my own heritage, I found Pepita achieved a golden ratio of disparate elements to keep me interested the whole way through. And I’m no stranger to the power of evocative architecture, though it isn’t something I’m very educated about. So being able to read this book was an opportunity to maybe learn a little, get to know Takehiko Inoue on a more personal level, and get out of my usual headspaces. Appreciated but I know it won’t be for everyone.

Review copy provided by Viz Media.

frontier People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

Frontier #1 was the debut publication of Ryan Sands’ Youth in Decline imprint, and though seeing Russian enigma Uno Moralez’ bitmap artwork collected in print for the first time is exciting, the mechanical details of its presentation ultimately work against it.

One doesn’t even have to finish the book before realizing something doesn’t feel quite right… here Moralez’ high contrast pixels appear too blurry to achieve full effect, given the gray tone of the paper as well as the softness of the risograph printing process. The result is subdued impact of evocative images originally designed to be witnessed on an LCD screen.

The book is still a praiseworthy artifact of an eclectic artist we all want to see more of, but it’s disappointing to report the labor-intensive way in which it was printed doesn’t end up serving Moralez’ digital style all that well.

marcelineandthescreamqueens People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

Yeah, I read the Adventure Time comics. And one of the things the Marceline and the Scream Queens trade does right is it includes the backup stories from the original issues, so you get to see cartoonists like Faith Erin Hicks and Polly Guo tackle the AT aesthetic with their own flair.

The Adventure Time comics all get a passing grade, I keep reading them and they’re filled with straight ahead antics as you’d expect, but they lack the enthusiasm for design and multiplicity of ideas that makes the television show such a phenomenon. I suppose on some level it’s inevitable, given the amount of people collaborating on the comics is considerably smaller than the amount working on the show. They just don’t have the sprawling feel of the cartoon proper.

moa 192b People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

Moa-192B

Pyramid Scheme and Moa-192B are publications from Decadence Comics, a two-person collective based in the UK. They had me thinking for days afterward about the role (and many disadvantages of) language in comics. These wonderful science fiction stories don’t need to be spoiled with literal explanation and they aren’t: they’re wordless symbolic runes with rusty, sandblasted detailing that grasp for evocation. Science fiction where literary meaning is of secondary importance is rapidly becoming my favorite kind. It’s also the hardest to talk about.

destinationx People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

Destination X by John Martz is a small, short hardback whose pulp-style cover art is unmatched by the workaday Sunday newspaper-like cartooning within. The story, a pleasant and painless one, concerns a simple man obsessed with exceeding the accomplishments of his discredited space-faring grandfather, thought to be insane for reporting the existence of a planet with intelligent alien life. As the story goes on it plays out as you would expect, there’s a surprisingly cruel moment, and it ends plainly. Destination X doesn’t go far enough in any one direction to be a memorable comic story.

Review copy provided by Nobrow Press.

requiemchevaliervampire People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

I thought screw it because Heavy Metal appears to be shifting their focus further and further away from presenting European comics to a NA audience and because who knows when the second new chapter will come out and be collected in the UK.

I imported Requiem Vampire Knight #11 from France. So now I have a bloody monster comic I unapologetically enjoy reading in a hardcover format whose printing quality exceeds the English language editions in every conceivable way. It’s how the comic should be read, not in easily-wrinkled glossy magazine pages or poor quality trades whose glue binding becomes undone when opened all the way.

Ledroit’s heavy metal album cover-like comic book paintings of a monster war in Hell continue to grow more and more ridiculous, undoubtedly filled with Pat Mill jokes and puns I can’t read because they’re in French (and I have to admit I don’t miss them all that much anyway.) It’s all about Ledroit’s imagination being let loose in this deranged atmosphere, the kind of fantasy that will never be incorporated into a video game or movie or 800 page novel so this is the only place where it can exist: in comics.

fukitor People who only read Japanese comics are dweebs.

This is number ten of a comic drawn, inked, colored, printed, assembled and shipped by some lone guy in Virginia. He doesn’t put his name or any biographical information anywhere in it. Not even a timestamp. The result is a single word of description: Fukitor. An ageless brand, a mark of madness no one dare take any credit for.

If Requiem is channeling the painted spectacle of a heavy metal album cover, Fukitor is channeling something closer to Gwar. It’s recklessly intentioned to entertain with the incorporation of as many perverse bodily fluids possible. Thoroughly cruel and pointless. I can’t stop reading it, and if you want more information, check out Jim Rugg’s interview with the creator, also filled with more perverse images than I dare post here.

What it is, REBUILD OF EVANGELION?

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eva What it is, REBUILD OF EVANGELION?

The Rebuild of Evangelion movies, of which 3 out of 4 have been released, are a Hideaki Anno-helmed remake of the landmark 1995 television anime, and they do financially well as theatrical releases in Japan, bringing in old fans as well as a new younger generation of people.

Shortly after being released on home video the third movie hit the Internet airways with lots of fanfare. As rapidly as it was pirated a storm of complaints arose concerning how terrible this one was. Here’s the truth about not just that, but the whole shebang.

The first two Rebuild movies are glorified reanimated compilation movies based on the TV show. Anime compilation movies are always terribly paced and never function well as movies, but otaku like to be sold the same thing over and over, so they always show up for them like lemmings, no matter how pointless or lackluster they are.

The third Rebuild movie is actually paced like a movie. It goes in its own completely odd direction, sure, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, fine, but this time they finally made a real movie and not just a ninety-minute commingling of television episodes. It doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine them wrapping the story up with one final installment. It doesn’t matter if Anno is trying to bishonen the series up with the silver haired kid. They actually did something halfway interesting this time.

All three of the Rebuild movies are disappointments. You know, for all the brilliant characterization people like to credit the original series for having, in these flicks Shinji Akari doesn’t evolve or change from one movie to the next. In each one he vacillates from being afraid of everything to being a take-charge protagonist, until it blows up in his face, then he goes back to being afraid of everything. I’m not sure how people don’t get tired of that same arc being used over and over again for the same protagonist in the same series of movies without any growth or understanding implied.

These Rebuild of Evangelion movies don’t have a lot going for them outside of their lush visuals.

HIMIZU

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1 HIMIZU

Himizu is a Japanese movie directed by Sion Sono in 2011 from my “good luck waiting for this to come out in North America” pile of foreign flicks. You can get it on BD from the UK but I can’t say I’d recommend it.

Himizu is supposedly based upon a manga of the same name, a manga so utterly different from this movie I intend to talk about it separately.

The movie isn’t really based on anything but the director’s interest in melding a few contemporary issues into one long, drawn out morality play encouraging the youth of Japan to preserve their hope and integrity, even as corrupt social institutions doom them to failure.

Shota Sometani plays a disillusioned student with no aspirations. He wishes to inherit the family business, a decrepit boat rental shop, and live out his life by a simple principle: he won’t bother anyone else, and no one should bother him.  He shrugs off the “you’re a unique flower who can do anything” existential encouragement of his public schooling, rebuffing these notions with curt aphorisms that a quiet girl in class, played by Fumi Nikaido, transcribes and puts on her wall at home.

2 HIMIZU

Eventually Nikaido’s character works up the confidence to walk Sometani home, and as she struggles to get to know him better the frail structure in his life is demolished by outside, uncaring forces. He collapses under the pressures of parental abandonment and an inherited yakuza debt. There’s only so far you can push a character like this, invested in civil society to the bare minimum, before they lash out in unpredictable ways. The rest of the movie is about Sometani alternately cry-screaming in the rain and becoming cold and unfeeling.

Both actors are talented at portraying intense mad teenagers, elevating their repetitive, melodramatic characterization into something that isn’t unbearable to watch onscreen. But the problem with this movie is that the last forty-five minutes play exactly like the first ninety. The characters don’t grow or develop, they mostly continue to be miserable, in the same ways and for the same reasons.

One last thing: this movie was released the same year as the historic 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and director Sion Sono hastily rewrote the screenplay to incorporate the aftermath into it. The result is a crass tableau of decay that doesn’t impact the story in a direct way, kind of like how Spike Lee decided maybe fifteen minutes of 25th Hour had something to do with a post-9/11 New York City, maybe.

3 HIMIZU

Himizu is entirely lacking in strong ideas to compare to its strong emotions, and while there’s enough meat to make watching the entire thing not an entirely fruitless experience, I can’t recommend it to anyone. I was going to say “maybe a younger audience more accustomed to navigating the peaks and valleys of adolescence will find more power in it,” but that’s just a polite way of saying this movie is too dumb for me.

I’m going to talk about movies again.

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Before Sunrise 001 Im going to talk about movies again.

I’m looking forward to Before Midnight, Richard Linklater’s latest in a trilogy of films about a man and woman who forge a really contrived intimacy with one another solely on the basis of chance meet-ups that occur every nine years. The first film Before Sunrise is meandering and loose, the characters spilling their guts to each other about life and death and everything in between with the unpracticed tedium of a couple Freshman Seminar students.

The next film, Before Sunset, revisits the original concept with refinement, the characters just as oddly talky but more complicated, an added layer of adult “maturity” disguising the urgency that wills their encounters on. Their lived-in melancholy has aged like wine and the movie ends on an unforgettably ambiguous note.

And now Before Midnight has popped up nine years later still, debuting the same week as motherfucking Fast and Furious 6.

fast6 Im going to talk about movies again.

With Fast Five (2011) the series surrendered to the fact underground street racing isn’t interesting to people who intellectually outgrew their provisional driving license, instead developing into a steroid-infused action flick where people punch each other and things joyously explode without the willed stupidity (read that as charitably or negatively as you’d prefer) of filmmakers like Michael Bay and Neveldine/Taylor.

Fast Five isn’t a throwback to nineties-era action movies, but it has their pure, entertaining simplicity. And I’m sure Fast and Furious 6 isn’t a condemnation of modern bombastic excess, but it wasn’t shot in 3D nor was it post-converted to such, and that alone should indicate something.

nausicaa Im going to talk about movies again.

For good or bad the advent of high definition Blu-ray technology has become the lens with which I come to an adult appraisal of movies from my past. They become less pieces of video entertainment and more a coordinated menagerie of crisp, clear images to actively process. I don’t use movies as background entertainment or flip through them on the teevee or watch them while I surf Facebook. I make my selections based upon a careful balance of mood and whimsy, bearing witness in a dark room with as much attention as I can afford.

I find myself reading comics and watching anime in much a similar manner. Of course the syntax is different, but this self-appointed duty of being a more thinking and feeling viewer has only increased the enjoyment I get out of these things. It’s steered me in my own eclectic directions. It’s saved me from opinions by way of social cliques.

Im going to talk about movies again.

So, when I watch Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind with these eyes it seems equally exemplative of high quality eighties anime moviemaking and the European animation tradition. Most visually interesting are the Ohmu, these giant shelled bugs with carefully painted layers that shamble against each other like they were cutout pieces in René Laloux’ Fantastic Planet.

What really got to me this time around, however, is how damn effective this Nausicaa anime is. If you’re watching an animated movie with environmental themes made by someone who made a lot of those and you already saw it before so you know everything that’s going to happen, it shouldn’t resonate so deeply, but this one did.

Seven Points: One of these weeks I’ll write a good one.

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lightbulb Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

The lightbulb in my room burnt out last week and because I’ve been too lazy to buy a new one I haven’t been reading comics as much. Instead I’ve focused on the tons of digital manga on my computer. When you’re the kind of person who easily falls into routines, the teensiest push can be enough to set you off in a refreshing direction. I’ve learned to be more welcoming of everyday inconveniences as a result.

homunculus Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

This would be more than an everyday inconvenience. Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling holes into the human skull for medical purposes, is the taking off point in Hideo Yamamoto’s Homunculus. It’s a manga title I avoided for a long time because I knew it as semi-plausible supernatural seinen, and semi-plausible supernatural seinen are very often terrible.

Rather than get into all the fine, concrete details of what this story is about, I want to say up front it’s demonstrable in terms of showing you what kind of things mainstream Japan does with the medium that no other country dares. Homunculus is a comic about the unconscious mind, but it’s not about it in a removed intellectual fashion. It deals with the unconscious mind by combining passionate drama with lots of symbolism.

homunculus2 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

After the protagonist undergoes trepanation treatment he begins to see people differently. Homunculi, the self-images of people projected by their unconscious minds, are visible in the physical world, reacting to the stimuli around them. The main character essentially engages with people while reading these homunculi and using their behavior to learn more about his “opponents” in real time.

As you might expect, very quickly he learns that not only are homunculi difficult to interpret, but his own biases and unconscious thoughts are shaping the way he perceives them, ie he is both having these symbols presented to him while unconsciously imprinting upon them. Someone else’s face, for example, might shift to resemble a friend from his past, even if the two people don’t know each other. This, combined with the fact homunculi may be figments of his imagination in the first place, works to maintain an almost maddening tone of uncertainty throughout the story and where it’s headed.

homunculus31 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I guess it’s a psychological thriller? A really unique, thrilling one, brimming with sexual impulse and competing theories about the psychic apparatus.

shigurui Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I like Tumblr because it often gives me positive feelings without the use of a single word. For example, this random post reminded me how utterly perfect Shigurui: Death Frenzy is, and how glad I am it exists.

Shigurui was a 2007 anime put out by Madhouse Studios when they were still at the top of their game, creating television shows that struck out unique, adult areas of interest, often adapting noteworthy manga with a budget conscious yet keen visual sense.

There aren’t any places on the web that consistently talk about truly exemplative anime, and so much is focused on what’s happening right this very second, making it easy to forget about the great stuff. Using Tumblr I’ve curated a revolving door of anime awe and wonder, without getting tangled up in any of the silliness the social networking site is most often derided for. And let’s be honest, most of that deriding is done by dudebros afraid of digital spaces where females exert just as much influence as males, if not more.

Maybe it clubs you over the head with its imagery, but I like this Nick Cross cartoon short enough to loop it every once in a while. Cross is a talented animator working on his own feature length movie, but he saw fit to release this little bit of somber emptiness in between that long term project and whatever else he has going on.

damon lindelof horizontal Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

If you’re watching something Star Trek-related and it isn’t named Wrath of Khan why are you even bothering?

Wrath of Khan is the only Star Trek thing anyone should subject themselves to, and the new movies know that, so they naively try to ape it with young actors. So just watch Wrath of Khan on Blu-ray, and watch the new movies if you want big dumb emotive spectacle where the villain is a terrorist analogue. (Because that’s all American big budget action movies are anymore: escapist terrorist analogues. Especially the superhero ones.)

I speak as someone who spent their whole childhood watching Next Generation and Voyager. Trust me, I’m not a better person for it.

But hey, at least I always knew Stargate sucked.