Category Archives: Manga

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.

Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

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deforge1 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.If you’re looking for good comics to read Pendleton Ward saved you some effort by collecting such a talented crew to work on Adventure Time. Guys like Andy Ristaino, Jesse Jacobs, Jesse Moynihan and most resoundingly, Michael DeForge, create their own work which surpasses the hit cartoon show in every qualitative way.

Exploring Michael DeForge’s imagination in comic book format is a real, actual adventure. It has a pervasive otherness to it that’d make Kazuo Umezu blush, but it can’t be drilled down to a single idea or formula. The more you read, the more sense you make of his visual abstractions, their exotic, sprawling vocabulary infecting your own imagination.

And he just keeps making the stuff. A lot of it, like Kid Mafia, Incinerator, and his Eisner-nominated Ant Comic, is freely available to read online without DRM or a kludgy Flash interface.

deforge2 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.Recently Koyama Press put out Very Casual, a 150-page book of DeForge comics. Very Casual collects work from different sources, some more recent than others, and it’s not so much a unified tome but a physical realization of the fact that people need to start collecting these DeForge comics in one place because they’re stunning, great to read, and have already had enormous influence on artists everywhere.

supermag Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

It seems a rule now that when Jim Rugg puts out a book it begs a dialogue that’s as much about its structure as it is about content. You can’t ignore that Supermag looks and feels like a magazine, that it’s very thoroughly and enthusiastically designed, but unlike his previous work on Afrodisiac and Notebook you probably won’t have an account for how it’s all supposed to come together and be one thing.

I think that was intentional. Reading Supermag is a double-barrelled shotgun blast of both pop art and comic art, and the hole it leaves in your wall will be in the shape of the guy who fired the gun. Supermag reflects Rugg’s personal obsessions with everything from comics history to styles of page numbering. It often begins a story with no end and freely dashes from one subject to the next, denying you any sense of continuity or closure.

Supermag exists to be thumbed through, to be picked up and put down multiple times, to sit on your desk as an agreeable object. And for people seduced by Rugg’s design-heavy approach to image making, it’s a must-see item.

Review copy of Supermag provided by AdHouse Books.

Baoh Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

I like how deliberately unattractive Hirohiko Araki designed the protagonist of his early 1984 manga Baoh. The hero has all the visual grace of a rotting corpse. Skin on his face is flaking off in big chunks, some fleshy matter hangs over one of his eyes pendulously, and his lips are dry and cracking. His mutant biology is totally coming undone, not exactly the character design you’d expect from an artist who’d go on to create the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure franchise of revolving dreamboat protagonists.

Similar to those early volumes of Battle Angel Alita, it’s insightful to look at the beginning career of a manga artist, when they’re established enough to be getting stuff published but they’re still discovering their own style. You can see the things that appear to be included by influence or reflex, tendencies that will be cast off in later work as the artist distills exactly what they want to do and what they want their manga to look like. For example, later in the Baoh story this stodgy old man appears:

baoh21 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

He’s a derivative example of the ojiisan character archetype found in manga from the sixties and seventies, not very congruous with the graceful figure drawing that would mark Araki’s later career. You could paste that ugly face into some old Go Nagai comic and it would be perfectly at home. In fact, speaking of Go Nagai…

baoh3 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

Hirohiko Araki essentially makes Violence Jack, the giant savage anti-hero from Go Nagai’s seventies manga, the final enemy in Baoh. Every detail, from his wild hair, pointy teeth, outrageous phsyique, and deep-set eyebrows stems from Go Nagai’s original character design.

Araki would have been age ten when Go Nagai’s first runaway success, the controversial erotic-themed Harenchi Gakuen was in the middle of being published in Weekly Shonen Jump. There’s no way he wouldn’t have been aware of his work, and as we see in Baoh, he took a great deal of early inspiration from it.

baohjjba Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

In a stray panel of Baoh (left) you can see Araki exert more effort than usual in rendering the Violence Jack lookalike character’s muscled arm. It’s the only time in the entire manga he really takes the time to do it, but it’s a hint of what’s to become a major Araki pre-occupation for his twenty-six-years-and-counting run on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: drawing musculature with an incredible attention to detail, emphasizing its rippling texture in ways that are convincing to the eye if not biologically realistic. He’s not the only mangaka to do it, but he’s certainly established a style entirely of his own creation, transcending those early influences we see in Baoh, and the Tetsuo Hara influence we see in early JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (right).

One of the pleasures of reading Hirohiko Araki’s manga is watching him artistically discover himself in the process of making it.

Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

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The King of Pigs Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

The opportunity to watch The King of Pigs interrupted my plans to watch some Japanese cartoon, as if to say sorry to break it to you anime: junior high school isn’t a quaint milieu for selling escapist fantasy to manchilds. It’s a prison sentence you try your best to survive. In South Korean cinematic fashion The King of Pigs slathers on tragic melodrama upon itself in painting its picture of three middle school students, two of which grow up into losers and reminisce about their time together.

The question isn’t “does it work?” The characters and scenarios are believable even if they’re over-wrought, and anyone with a heart will respond on some level to the trauma these kids experience, as their hope is whittled down by the negligent cultural forces surrounding them. It centrally works with a metaphor, with the idea some people are born dogs and some people are pigs, and the pigs exist only for the subservience to their hungry jackal masters. Class is the primary, resounding factor of this social hierarchy, and the movie hits on that point repeatedly.

Made for $150,000 and looking every bit as if that were the case, with stiff CG character models here and there to shave off expenses, there are visual deficiencies in The King of Pigs you’ll have to overlook to take in the sad, grisly currents flowing through it. I would relate the experience very much to the Ichi the Killer OAV. Remember that thing? Though a completely sincere, visceral story, it gives you every opportunity to relate to it in a ironic self-distancing kind of way by looking cheap and possessing an intensity that outweighs its complexity.

Expect The King of Pigs to hit UK DVD next month with more grammatically correct subtitles than it has now but if you’re feeling adventurous the SK version is intelligible. No idea if we’ll ever see this in Americaland.

buckaroo banzai group end credits Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

You know that twilight moment when you first hear about something you know very little about and optimistically augment your lack of information with the most positive attributes possible?

I know, in our current age of ceaseless pop culture consumption that sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but I remember seeing the very beginning of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch and expecting it to be a better kind of science fiction. Less hammy and trite, more ramped up strangeness. Not about people running around while they hold hands, you know?

I was basically expecting it to be the 1984 movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. But I’m glad it wasn’t. Because instead I have The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Your favorite Doctor might be the Jelly Babies guy with the googly eyes or the latest one with no eyebrows. Mine is Peter Weller with jet black hair and a Pee-wee Herman outfit. Mine’s the lead vocalist for a rock band while also being a theoretical physicist who helps his friend, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit, perform brain surgery in his off time.

I don’t want to let that paragraph sit there. I hate when people do that sort of thing and let the words hang in the air as if they automatically equate to genuine value or insight or not-wasting-your-time. You know, when they say things like “it’s about ninjas and dinosaurs, enough said!” Shut up nerd, enough has not been said.

But I ain’t got the time to go into more detail, a thousand apologies, I play this thing fast and loose.

skull man Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

One of the few Tokyopop manga titles I’ve read to completion is Skull Man. Originally created by the “King of Manga” Shotaro Ishinomori to sell TV studios in the seventies, the concept was rejected for being too dark for kids and got scrapped in favor of Kamen Rider, that tokusatsu franchise that’s been running forever alongside Super Sentai (known as Power Rangers in the US).

Shortly before his 1998 death, Ishinomori met up with manga artist and Ishinomori superfan Kazuhiko Shimamoto and invited him to reinvent the story as he saw fit. The result is the seven-volume Skull Man, a story filled with mutant beasts, doomed heroes, and a macabre transcendence of death.

It was a terrible idea to release this manga without including the fifty-page Skull Man oneshot Shotaro Ishinomori first drew in 1970. I don’t know why Tokyopop would choose to do that other than to alienate and confuse the daring few who’d give this a go without knowing much of anything about it. It can be difficult to decipher what’s a flashback and what isn’t if you aren’t familiar with the pilot story, as the fanboys who were reading this in Japan undoubtedly were. But good news! In recent months the Ishinomori Skull Man oneshot became available digitally on the Comixology website.

With it’s darker subject matter and more cinematic presentation Skull Man contrasts with the kind of manga Kazuhiko Shimamoto is most known for. Shimamoto is the living embodiment of intensely hotblooded manga heroes from the sixties and the seventies, as he channels their ceaseless verve into a bunch of rad manga that has only thus far been scanlated into English. But you can see his aesthetic come to life in this nineties Gainax OVA the company pretends they never created, Blazing Transfer Student:

It’s Shimamoto all the way: big sideburns, passionate yelling, giant explosions, and fire. Lots of fire. The sort of thing people rush to label a parody/satire when it’s absolutely not. Shimamoto is having fun with this degree of stylized intensity, but he means every second of it. He’s meant it his whole career.

Like I said, in Skull Man Shimamoto restrains those tendencies to pay solemn tribute to his hero. The result is that the only manga Shimamoto has published in North America is the least Shimamoto-like one he’s ever made. The sample page up there has eleven panels in it, which is a lot for any standard page of manga, but especially for Shimamoto’s rapid-fire style. I think the overall effect puts a greater emphasis on mood and atmosphere, as you may get from the sixteen panels that make up these two pages:

skull man1 Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

It looks like a lot of effort, but if you read the comic panel by panel the slinky dark intrigue of this urban tokusatsu story works quite well, and you’re “awarded” with more than a few impressive splash pages along the way.

More on Skull Man later. Maybe.

Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

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1.  It’s great if you can get paid to write about whatever it is you write about online, but doing so gets overly romanticized by lots of bloggers.

Shortly before passing away after a heroic struggle with cancer, Roger Ebert wrote the ways in which he hoped to mobilize in spite of his worsening condition. Among plans which will never see fruition, he remarked:

What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

His fantasy is our reality.

2.  Sitting Target (1972) is hateful and empty, a dimestore pulp novel brought to life with performances by iconic chubby tough guy Oliver Reed and a charming Ian McShane. Reed’s sociopathy, a sparse yet effective soundtrack, and an automatic handgun deserving of co-star billing all combine into some kind of seventies ugly, let me tell you.

sitting target Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

While this film is lumped together with other British crime genera like Get Carter, it’s got no pretense of cool attached to it. Reed plays a snarling beast impossible to root for on any level, the sort of character that might be controversial today because he’s an asshole without a social message attached. And yet, when he lathers up in a tub for the first time in years a boyish grin spreads across his face, making him all the more disturbing.

Sitting Target was only just released on home video in North America a few months ago as a made-to-order DVD from the Warner Archive. It’s a puzzling release because European broadcasts on Turner Classic Movies would seem to indicate the movie was shot in 4:3 with a natural palette of organic browns and beiges, but the DVD has a bleach-bypassed widescreen presentation.

3.  Outrage Beyond (2012) is the best thing I’ve seen this year.

outragebeyond Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

Beat Takeshi came back to the yakuza crime genre with Outrage in 2010, a straightforward flick with less mood and artistic leanings than his most-acclaimed work from the nineties. Despite that, and some other problems I talked about when it first came out, the movie was a success and work on a sequel quickly began.

Outrage Beyond improves upon the original because every moment is vital. There’s no fat to trim, even though the film runs close to two hours and moves at a slow pace sure to lose viewers looking for something loud and overblown. In truth, there’s precious little violence in this film. But when it comes it feels real and it hurts.

4.  Outrage Beyond is more about interesting old faces and intense dialogue and immaculately tailored suits than it is about violence. Its appeal lies in the Japanese way it styles a restrained and formalized criminal element.

The scratchy voice and nervous tic in Takeshi’s performance sets him apart from the rest of the more slick cast of characters. He embodies an incongruous pebble in the Yakuza’s shoe. Never the coolest or smartest person in the room. Not good, honorable, or even an anti-hero. Just uncompromising and tired.

When will Outrage Beyond come out over here? 2014? 2015?  I didn’t feel like waiting, and the Japanese release contained English subtitles. It was so worth it.

5. Speaking of waiting, I got tired of waiting around for a not-oversized collection of Technopriests (I’m sure Humanoids will release one eventually), so instead I revisited their affordably-priced-when-it-came-out-but-who-knows-now The Metabarons collection and, yes, it’s still the most operatic space opera comic I ever read.

metabarons Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

I can’t think of anything else that comes close, though I must disclaim I’ve never actually watched an entire opera. All I can say is in this comic it’s routine for people to bang their relatives, mutilate themselves, kill babies, and cry out in poetic, furtive lyrics.

Who needs Star Wars when there’s The Metabarons, besides your eight year-old nephew?

6.  This is Yukito Kishiro riffing on Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son in the early pages of Battle Angel Alita.

battle angel Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.I was reading the old Viz release of Alita before tackling that Last Order super-omnibus they just put out. Early in the book Alita encounters the following brute. The way Yukito Kishiro draws him is free and loose compared to how his style tightens up over the course of Alita and becomes more of an established, defined thing.

Similar to how Hajime Isayama draws the giants of Attack on Titan, the idea here isn’t to achieve a high degree of consistency between illustrations, it’s to communicate emotion and intensity. Both artists succeed, but I like how Kishiro does it better:

battle angel 2 Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

Even though the drawings are too warped to be at all realistic, they’re still coherent and compelling with respect to the planar structures of a humanoid head. Whereas it often looks like Isayama sketches oval shapes and puts facial details on them like they were Mr. Potato Head pieces:

attackontitan Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.

7.  Attack on Titan continues to resonate in Japan and North America, and I can see why. There are interesting things going on you don’t see repeated ad infinitum in a bunch of other shonen manga. It’s macabre illustrations of giants can get in your head, they communicate an extreme wrongness that’s disturbing.

But when we aren’t looking at the giants, or strange architecture, or the inventive battling system the humans use to combat the giants, we see a world of wonky, generic anime faces belonging to human characters that are one-dimensional and boring. Attack on Titan is a story that’s imaginative and very nearly half well-written.

Seven Points: Let’s sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

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1.  When people refer to an actor’s show-stealing performance it’s most often an exaggeration, a way of saying you appreciate that individual’s charisma/expertise.

Jack Nicholson steals Easy Rider. The movie belongs to him: it gets interesting when he shows up, it makes sense when he’s around, it becomes a chore to watch once he leaves.

easyrider Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell. No offense to Dennis Hopper or Peter Fonda intended, I respect the hippie-era white guy listlessness they were channeling in their subdued performances. But, Nicholson. Man.

2.  If I ever tried to write about Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads: Alphabet to Infinity I’d start with the magic of its first four pages.

warheads1 Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

I’d try to find words to describe the feeling of both serenity and anticipation I got from reading them. The images are relaxed and multitudinous at the same time, laying out an expansive area that assuages the eyes with cartoon simplicity while still feeling vast.

They breathe, and they’re not overwhelmed with a bunch of bad coloring, which for my money is still one of the most offensive thing about mainstream American comics: all that horrible coloring.

warheads2 Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

The careful details in these pages are presented in creamy pastels so you can glide over them or inspect closely and either option feels completely natural. Reading Alphabet to Infinity is such an easy and lush experience, I’m going to stop trying to describe the magic of it before I embarrass myself.

3.  On Sundays I retreat to my room and get quiet and reflective. By the afternoon I’m flipping through comics I haven’t read in a while. Last Sunday was a Yukinobu Hoshino day.

2001nights1 Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

Yukinobu Hoshino writes science fiction manga, most often in short stories (probably the ideal format for science fiction, if we’re being honest.)

2001 Nights is a collection of stories that were published in the nineties by Viz Comics. You can get them in either 3 volumes or 10 issues. They deal with space exploration, some are serious and foreboding, some are lighthearted, some are just plain weird. They’re all pretty great.

Yukinobu Hoshino’s expertise is in putting ideas that make you think for a minute into easily digestible narrative chunks. A lot of what you’ll see in the manga isn’t especially well-drawn, though the way he puts his pages together, with huge swaths of black and lots of overt photo referencing, make this feel like a restrained, mature sf comic for adults belonging in some kind of science magazine where you get to read a chapter once every month, instead of all at once like I did on Sunday.

I think my favorite story is the one in which a planet named Lucifer is discovered at the edge of our solar system, and Hoshino puts together a convincing account of how the planet might live up to its namesake. It’s a little indulgent, fetishizing Judeo-Christian religions as obliquely as the West fetishizes Eastern mysticism, but it never strays far enough from Hoshino’s scientific leanings to become totally silly.

2001nights2 Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

4.  Anime season previews are horrible. For those of you not in the know, a big to-do in the anime blog-o-sphere is to talk at length about your impressions of the first episodes of anime when a new season begins in Japan. It generates a lot of discussion and traffic, so lots of people do it, even the Anime News Network.

The simple truth is that it’s comfortable and easy to muster up the willpower to watch a brand new show for twenty four minutes, get the slightest idea of what it’s about, and yammer on about it while everyone else does the same. There’s no implicit expectation of thoughtfulness or insight, people just match up their raw jabbering reaction with each other. And so much anime tv isn’t even a thing, but rather a collection of tropes that eventually might build to a thing, so you can watch 24 minutes and see absolutely nothing new or even slightly challenging.

So this season it happened again and despite my best efforts I noticed it, and like every year the dialogue turned into a discussion of how wacky the ANN forums are, and how fandom sure is an endless hall of stupidity mirrors you can’t help looking down. Except I don’t really want to look down it anymore. It’s exhausting and there’s no reward, except feeling better about yourself if you’re insecure, I guess.

What’s my point, other than criticizing ANN and anime fans because I’m an out of touch (probably jealous) curmudgeon?

5.  My point is if anime is lazy and hackneyed (and it often is), the people writing about it are twice as lazy and hackneyed.

Or else why is so little written about Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond?

geniusparty Seven Points: Lets sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.

Studio 4°C put out these two anthologies of anime shorts 7-8 years ago. They’re made up of fully-formed 15-20 minute nuggets of anime, intensely director-fueled pieces of (dare someone say) art.

I guess ANN did review the first movie, and a couple of anime blogs did, too. But in every writeup I found in google, each short was reviewed with a meager word count in comparison to how long a single ANN episode preview typically runs.

So either people have more to say about a twenty-four minute first episode of pablum than eclectic, visually inventive anime shorts, or…

6.  Otaku don’t care about auteurship.

They don’t care, except in the most broad, simplistic circumstances, like Yoshiyuki “Kill ‘em all” Tomino (a brilliant nickname because he kills so many characters in his stories, you see), and Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell 2 was about his dog, lol!)

I could keep going on, listing otaku shorthand for various anime directors, but this is a depressing activity.

7.  If you think I’m straw-manning because Genius Party and its sequel weren’t licensed in North America, think again.

They both can be imported from Australia. And if people lacked the resources to import, they could always download it illegally, you know, like ANN does for anime season previews to things that haven’t been simulcast.

ANN didn’t write about Genius Party Beyond because they weren’t interested in conversating about it. Neither is most of the anime blog-o-sphere. But ANN is interested in telling you about the first episode of Date A Live five different times. And you’re interested in reading it.

Heavens to murgatroyd.