Category Archives: Review

Rubenesque Italian tokusatsu gobsmacking comics: Detrocboi

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Maybe this can become a thing… me writing about compelling weird shit coming out of Italy.

Detrocboi is a thirty-page self-published booklet from an Italian freelance illustrator who goes by the same name. Meant to serve as both a portfolio of his talents and a comic in its own right, Detrocboi is divided into three parts.

The first fifteen pages form two full-color short stories about a fantasy heroine named Peqotl. Then there’s a black and white six-page short story where the same person transforms into an Ultraman-like character to battle monsters resembling those in the famed tokusatsu series. (This story is available in its entirety on Detrocboi’s blog, as is a lot of other terrific drawings of monsters and crystals and crystal monsters.) The final eight pages of the booklet are comprised of full-bleed reproductions of Detrocboi art prints.

There’s a pervasive Japanese influence in his work, but it also stands independently on its own, with fantasy elements clearly culled from the deep realms of Detrocboi’s imagination. There isn’t much left for me to say other than this a weird book that’s cool to look at. I hope Detrocboi does more sequential artwork, though his prints are interesting enough to stand by themselves.

Detrocboi is available for online purchase here. You should bookmark Detrocboi’s blog and give his older posts a look, where he posts sketches and reviews other artists that have influenced him.

I Swear to Defend This Ground that Devours My Blood! (BOKKO Review)

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2300 years ago China was divided into seven battling kingdoms. A monastic order known as the Men of Bokk, self-declared enemies of war, come to the defense of besieged cities. Using their battle skills and tactical brilliance, these men are a formidable force feared across the seven kingdoms, sworn to defend the defenseless.

But when a dumpy, bald man of Bokk comes to the small city of Ryo to defend it against an army of thousands all by himself, a series of events are put into motion that will impact China for centuries to come.

Bokko is stunning historical fiction, winning the 1994 Shogakukan Manga Award (I love a lot of what makes that list). It’s a sweeping adventure with a meticulous attention to detail that never gets tedious or confusing, even to someone who possesses little familiarity with ancient Chinese history, like myself.

Bokko was originally published in Big Comic, a seinen anthology most distinguishable for serializing Golgo 13 all these years. It’s adapted from a Japanese novel by a capable artist named Hideki Mori. Mori never fails to omit the requisite dirt and grime necessary for the time period, and renders his characters in a style that is reminiscent of nineties Ryoichi Ikegami, though his lines are yet to be as sure of themselves. Mori grows as an artist over the eleven volumes making up this series, incorporating more elaborate hatching and dynamic compositions to his work. It’s a similar trajectory to what you will find in Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Historie, another historical fiction manga: the artist’s basic style remains the same, but it’s used to better effect with each passing volume.

I’ve been in a bit of a manga slump recently, reading titles here and there because they were officially licensed in English, and getting bored as a result. Bokko is exactly what I needed to remind myself of how gripping manga can be. Even with an exceptionally interesting anime season (I’m watching two different shows! Two!!), comics still remain a more accessible and vital medium for me. But you should be aware–Bokko is only available in English scanlated from the French edition (of course it was published in France… a recurring theme you’ll find in a lot of the manga I talk about).

So there we have it, Bokko: historical fiction at its best, with a heartfelt anti-war message at its core. I found it impossible not to love.

Review: Age of Reptiles

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This is Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles Omnibus Volume 1, published by Dark Horse early last year.

The Dark Horse Omnibus series handsomely collects comics in glossy, high-quality paperbacks, at about eighty percent of the original printing size. Looks great on a shelf, fits nicely in the hand. Overall a very classy product, clocking in at around 400 pages in this case.

The Age of Reptiles collection is interesting for a few reasons. One: it’s about dinosaurs. Two: there are no word balloons, nor is the book narrated in any way. Three: it’s resoundingly well-drawn and drafted, communicating a great deal of drama and action in its pages without the use of the written word.  Four: it collects three stories published over a sixteen year period, which allows one to observe the evolution Delgado’s drawing style, as well as changes in the coloring of western comics.

1. Tribal Warfare (1993)

In Tribal Warfare, Ricardo Delgado painstakingly renders his landscapes and dinosaurs with as much detail as possible, hatching and cross-hatching elaborate textures that emphasize the reptilian nature of these terrible lizards. It looks like a lot of work, but succeeds at breathing vicious life into the story he’s telling, which concerns an escalating vendetta between a pack of deinonychus and a tyrannosaurus rex.

The coloring is tacky and gauche, and I mean that positively. It looks terrific! Dinosaurs parade around in absurdly flat, bright and contrasting colors. I don’t know how much of the appeal is derived from the added visual interest this brings, and how much comes from the nostalgic resemblance to toys and other books depicting dinosaurs in the early nineties.

2. The Hunt (1997)

The Hunt is similar to its predecessor in all ways. Delgado’s drawing style works to depict lush landscapes and bumpy, scaly beasts. An allosaurus feuds with a pack of ceratosaurs and all sorts of wanton violence and destruction occurs.

The most interesting difference is the enhanced use of coloring. Now not only are the dinosaurs bright, but they also gleam, as the growing possibilities of digital coloring allow for highlights and dappled pigment which almost always serve to enhance the art because these effects conform closely to Delgado’s lines. In addition, there’s a part of the story which incorporates big splash panels of clouds, and it would have been nearly impossible to present in an interesting way without the enhancements made to comics coloring by this period of time.

Credit must go to colorist James Sinclair. There was a lot of awkwardly colored mess in this period of comics history, but Sinclair keeps his gradients at manageable levels, and pays close attention to the anatomy of the figures Delgado has laid out. The result isn’t flawless, but mostly works. In the above image, for example, you can see how the highlights on the red dinosaur call a little too much attention to themselves, and would have been better off reduced.

3. The Journey (2009)

We jump twelve years into the future, and see a radical change in Delgado’s style. His linework is softer and more whimsical. He’s totally abandoned the crosshatching technique, though he’ll occasionally invoke that focused attention to surface details which characterizes his earlier work for some of the close-up panels. His lines now have a rounded, topography-like look to them.

At the same time, the scale of his compositions has grown. Whereas in earlier work we might see thirty or so dinosaurs in a single page, now there are often over a hundred! It works well for the story, which deals with a massive migration of many dinosaur species and the resulting culture clashes.

The same way a brazen color palette is characteristic of nineties American comics, The Journey reflects the muted, earthy tones that often prevail these days. There’s no denying the story suffers for it. The dinosaurs blend into the parched milieu, and Delgado’s inspired landscapes are less vivid than they deserve to be. Overall the comic is still an impressive work of art, but comes across as a bit of a misstep in light of Delgado’s earlier pieces.

Don’t let my comments about the differences in the three stories fool you, this is a terrific collection of visual storytelling that I’m delighted to own. I’d highly recommend Age of Reptiles to anyone with even a passing interest in comics and dinosaurs.

The two firm, supple elephants in the room (a Fujiko Mine post.)

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Spring 2012 has been a remarkably interesting anime season, in that multiple shows are doing unique things (yes, the bar for “remarkably interesting” when it comes to anime gets lower every year.) One of those shows is Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. It had buzz long before it ever aired. Here are the reasons:

  1. It’s directed by Sayo Yamamoto (female anime directors are extremely rare), who previously directed Michiko to Hatchin.
  2. Takeshi Koike (of REDLINE fame) did the character designs on it.
  3. It looks amazing, incorporating that chalky line quality exemplified in 60s and 70s anime to great effect.
  4. A female supporting character, Fujiko Mine, is actually the main focus of the show, not Lupin himself.
  5. And…

We’re only three episodes in, but there’s a lot of frank Fujiko nudity and sexuality in this show. Frank nudity and sexuality occurs all the time in anime, especially in garbage shows I avoid because their facile titillation is so remarkably dumb/creepy/pedophilic it would kill whatever non-existent boner I’d theoretically be watching the anime for.

Fujiko Mine does it differently. The show is still trying to give me a boner (a task which, hotblooded male I may be, it fails at every week), but the quality of its eroticism is different. It’s more womanly and less childlike (read: less creepy). It approaches something you’d even dare to call eroticism in the first place.

The opening calls attention to the manner in which the creators of the show are setting out to do this: deliberately, up-front, and without detracting from the complexity of Fujiko Mine herself. The opening is also kind of brilliant, articulating the submissive/dominant parts of every person’s psyche that inevitably conflict as sexuality becomes one of the dominant forces in our lives.

However, I think the creators of this show are failing. Admirably, but still failing. Every time Fujiko expresses her sexuality to some end, the result is most often either abject failure or success despite herself. Yes, she is confident. Yes, she is brazen. But it seems mostly unwarranted and kind of humiliating. Like a broken superpower she’s too dumb to notice no longer works.

Honestly, the opening lyrics (surely intended to be Fujiko’s own inner monologue) are by far the most interesting thing about the entire show. We don’t really get any glimpse of who Fujiko might be outside of it. Three episodes in, and she would be entirely cardboard if it wasn’t for that opening. At the same time, the show is too smart for me to throw my hands in the air and write off its absurdities as par for the course.

So the profound inclusion of ecchi is the fifth interesting wheel on this anime. And I think there’s more room for it to be discussed. But not by me, because I find Fujiko Mine’s inclusion of nudity to be cloyingly deliberate and ineffective. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable, but it does seem to cheapen a stylish product. And however uncool it makes me to point that out, I’m perfectly fine with it, because these are my reasoned reactions to watching the show with my full attention, an activity I plan to continue for all thirteen episodes, because it’s otherwise just that goddamned interesting. Call it a compromise between my dominant and submissive responses to less-than-perfect entertainment, if you will.