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 #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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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3. Franco-British Comics from Hell: REQUIEM by Olivier Ledroit and Pat Mills

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Similar to Shane Carruth’s debut film Primer (2004), much too much of a deal has been made about the alleged impenetrable complexities of his second effort, Upstream Color, which debuted at Sundance in January and lucky for us has already been released on home video this week, less than four full months later.

I remember when Primer first came out it was pitched to me as a really interesting no-budget time travelling movie written, directed by and starring a mathematician. And understood as such it’s fucking great. But very quickly the dialogue shifted to how mind-shatteringly complicated it was, with people going so far as to pass around a diagram someone needlessly created for the movie’s wikipedia page as a kind of decoder ring. This was a movie that made people’s brains hurt. Or something.

It isn’t that you have to be smart to get Primer, it’s that “how does it all work, man… let’s focus on pedantry more than the actual movie” is one of those probably not-at-all constructive but commonly accepted social paradigms for talking about film. Now if you Google Image Search Primer you mostly get stupid nerd charts. Watching the superficial buzz expand and collapse into itself was similar to how in high school my fellow teenagers went apeshit over Donnie Darko for like two weeks. Bleh.

Upstream Color is a beautiful film to watch. At over 50,000 times the budget of Primer and still less than half a million dollars, it inevitably shames Your Favorite 2013 Summer Blockbuster on a technical level, with a soft, pleasing cinematography and brief authentic moments of horror.

The most joy is to be had in it’s extremely kinetic first thirty minutes, where Carruth surrenders every bit of technical jargon that might have been running through his head (and virtually all dialogue, in fact) to instead present us with a puzzling-and-then-horrifying series of events. Those first thirty minutes, man. They don’t talk down or up to the audience, they’re just absorbing on every level.

Eventually the movie adjusts its pace, and as all the technical details start to come into focus, we watch a relationship develop between two similarly damaged lovers. Now, instead of expressing the how’s and why’s overtly, the movie falls in love with its own inward focused, fable-like conceits. I wasn’t confused by this shift, and I remained interested for the vast majority of it, but maybe the film got too storybooky, maybe the relationship between the two main characters, a mostly opaque Shane Carruth and utterly magnetic Amy Seimetz, became too prototypical, with the trappings I guess lots of independent movies about alienated lovers tend to present us with.

But fuck, the alienation in this story stems from an immortal parasitic science fiction organism, and that does count for something. Watching the characters grapple with their broken nature, which isn’t from psychological trauma or personal history but an even more imperceptible force existing outside of their understanding and control, is a total mind trip to anyone with an introspective nature. It’s genuinely unsettling to watch the characters alternately erode the connection they’ve established with one another and be brought closer through their incongruity with the real world.

So Upstream Color is a unique movie to be enjoyed and celebrated. I can’t wait to see what Shane Carruth does next. He’s making movies the way few others seem to: earnestly focused on plot and narrative, but also brimming with complex, creative ideas expressed in a mostly elliptical fashion.

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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.

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.

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.

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:

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…

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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:

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.

Related posts:

1. Seven Points: Let’s sample a little bit of heaven before descending into hell.
2. Seven Points: Ugly is more interesting.
3. Seven Points: Robots, Ukiyo-e, Alien Penises, JManga, and more!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

Related posts:

1. Outrage: not as much outrage as I was expecting.
2. Some of 2012’s anime and manga turds.
3. Seven Points: Robots, Ukiyo-e, Alien Penises, JManga, and more!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Related posts:

1. Seven Points: The true meaning of Easter, revisiting Akira, and what people always forget about manga!
2. Seven Points: Robots, Ukiyo-e, Alien Penises, JManga, and more!
3. Franco-British Comics from Hell: REQUIEM by Olivier Ledroit and Pat Mills

The way its shapes are lined, presumably using some kind of “simplify path” tool in Adobe Flash, is reminiscent of what amateur Flash animation looked like in the late 90s, except back then line simplification was less intended as a style decision and more to reduce the amount of precious bandwidth your cartoons took to stream on a world wide web dominated by 56k modems.

Amateur Flash animation in that period was rarely so fast and effective, though. Even with a scarcity of bandwidth, animators never delivered jokes in such a snappy fashion, or stuffed so many movements into a scene at once. This type of rapid comedic animation, which can almost entirely be attributed to the rise of YouTube and jumpcut-style video editing, is a contemporary phenomenon.

You add in the creative yet familiar depiction of a futuristic, distraction-addled populace and you’ve got a concise cartoon representation of what I imagine using Facebook is like. A YouTube commenter sagely whispered “this isn’t the future. its the present.”

I can’t think of a better way to begin this hodgepodge-ass post.

2.  I wrote about the year 1984 in anime television over at The Golden Ani-Versary of Anime, you should go read it, I didn’t make any George Orwell jokes, I promise. Golden Ani-Versary is an ambitious blog organized by a Mr. Geoff Tebbets which seeks to cover every year of anime beginning with 1963.

3.  I’m not sure I’m supposed to be reading Michael Fiffe’s Copra.

On the one hand, I love nearly everything about it: Fiffe’s delicate framing of varying line qualities, the high-quality way in which the book is printed, its cream-colored pages. I even enjoy his unique style of hand-lettering which gets a lot of words into a small geographical area without becoming difficult to read.

On the other hand, I’m out of the loop when it comes to all of the superhero comics evocations he’s performing. I wonder at times how closely these characters hem to Marvel/DC analogues, and how much I’m supposed to assume they do. To what degree is Copra superhero dojinshi, to what degree is it its own thing? I don’t properly know, and I didn’t feel stumped like this when I was reading Zegas.

4.  Katsuya Terada has an artbook coming out in Japan next week, based on an exhibition of his work. For my money he’s probably the finest Japanese illustrator no one really talks about over here, so I was going to import the book while snidely inquiring if I was better off waiting for the “inevitable” English-language edition.

But then Dark Horse announced that they were releasing The Art of Katsuya Terada early next year. The title doesn’t seem to correspond directly to any of the Terada art books I’m aware of, so I don’t know if it’s going to be a straight up translation of his latest, or something else. Still very much surprised to hear about it.

Good ol’ Dark Horse, you release things like that and Monkey King and I’m left to just hope there are other people out there enjoying them.

5.  Speaking of which, Deva Zan.

From what I can piece together from some buried press and YouTube video, Deva Zan appears to be an abandoned film/multimedia project by Yoshitaka Amano, a Japanese illustrator people DO know and appreciate over here, because of his unmistakable work on things like Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D.

But Deva Zan is Amano’s own thing. His own concepts, his own characters, his own story. And I think this book Dark Horse put out for it, though it contains artwork and narration on alternate pages, is less a finished product and more a collection of concept art, character designs, and other production with some wispy narration thrown in to hold it all together and give the illusion of being a final product.

Thing is, even a speedy sketch becomes a beautiful vortex of striking colors and whimsical pencil marks when rendered by Amano’s hand. In reading the story the words and pictures do not coalesce into anything particularly striking or original, though the pictures on their own easily succeed at forming a compelling vision of the fantastic, as you would expect.

(I strongly suspect) this is the “making of” book to a thing that was never made, luxuriously presented in a 9×12 hardcover format so you can closely inspect the more astounding pages of art, of which there are many. Dark Horse, it took real balls to release this the week after your big Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia art book/encyclopedia, and even though one of these items currently has 842 Amazon.com reviews and the other has 2 (guess which is which), I’m still happy to have the beautiful thing from the mind of Yoshitaka Amano.

6.  My post about Gundam: The Origin is less a critique of the manga and more a critique of the realities oriented around it, but it made the rounds on Tumblr and, wow, Gundam people on Tumblr are far more sane than the ones I ran into The Year I Surfed 4chan, a dark part of my life I refer to with capital letters because it was really that much of a strange, traumatizing phase of existence.

7.  And finally, a comic book anime of consequence.

That Marvel Anime Rise of the Technovore cartoon is coming out soon, and even though Marvel Anime has sucked like a vacuum cleaner, it has me thinking about an earlier, aborted attempt to produce a comic book anime by Madhouse Studios: Satanika.

NSFW warning because I know some of you are silly.

To a half-focused eye, Satanika might look like some kind of Darkstalkers OVA gone demonically sexual and insane. But knowing this is based on a comic from Verotik, Glenn Danzig’s vanity imprint from the nineties, I can only see it as not-so-original fanfiction for Devilman Lady, Go Nagai’s genderswapping sequel to his magnum opus, Devilman.

This preview trailer will probably make your eyes roll, and maybe it should, but man, it’s at least daring/visually stunning on some level. I didn’t forget about it five minutes after I saw it at least.

Related posts:

1. The best comic book movie of 2012 had no superheroes in it: DREDD.
2. How to Fight the Winter Anime Season
3. Crudely Animated Cartoons About Washing Your Balls: Thermae Romae

People say Gundam is the Japanese equivalent to both Star Wars and Star Trek, and they’re right: it’s a bloated intellectual property whose artistic relevance was sucked dry a billion rehashes ago, enduring to this day solely for the purpose of making money through too many bad television shows and the selling of flimsy plastic toys you have to build yourself (suckers.)

But! One day in 1979 there was a tv show called Mobile Suit Gundam and it was the first of its kind. It strained to be more adult-minded and outgrow the trappings of traditional children’s mecha anime as its creative staff contended with adversity on nearly all fronts: popular, financial and managerial. The result was an impactful if incredibly uneven show, with wild swings in tone, animation quality, and inventiveness.

Back then Gundam was a little engine that could, and one of the guys shoveling coal was Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, an excellent artist who designed its characters and outlined the look of its futuristic SF universe. In 2001 a 54-year-old Yasuhiko began drawing his own definitive manga take of that original story. It’s called Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin.

So now it isn’t a toy commercial anymore. Yasuhiko has expertly tooled the original story into a manga possessing everything good about Mobile Suit Gundam with none of the bad. Or so you’d hope.

Still, there’s no escaping the stain of what a monolithic entity Gundam is, or its rehashing of the same series tropes again and again to create more model kits and money. This manga, creating a mature and nuanced formulation of the original mythology to appeal to an older demographic, does itself become yet another permutation of what is inarguably a wrung out concept.

To make matters even worse, there’s going to be an anime adaptation of Origin aired next year! That’s right: a Gundam anime based on a Gundam manga based on a Gundam anime. The franchise is nothing if not exhaustively self-referential.

All this criticism, and yet I don’t want a shred of it to take away from the praise due to Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s abilities as a visual storyteller. I feel like the only person on the Internet who bought this book because I was interested in reading it. My decision wasn’t intended as some ephemeral show of support where consumerism becomes a badge of slimy fandom pride, or even worse, a duty. I wasn’t mobilized by virtue of being a “Gundam fan,” or by the prospect of voting with my wallet. My only motivation was good comics.

Yasuhiko is a fucking pro, and this is easily the best 2013 North American release of an action manga money can buy, at least until Vinland Saga drops later this year. There’s an effortless flair to Yasuhiko’s deceivingly simple lines, which render mechanical objects, an iconic cast of human characters, and explosive action with equal intelligibility and clarity.

Plus the manga goes at an exciting, ceaseless pace that no serialized television show could achieve, and it never feels clumsy like those Mobile Suit Gundam compilation movies. (Compilation movies are bad, don’t bother with compilation movies.)

This comic is for two audiences: fanboys that are going to buy it unquestioningly, and people willing to look for exemplary sf action manga in unexpected places.

If you’re a newcomer, know this: you may understand Mobile Suit Gundam as a narrative if you read the Origin manga, but you still will not understand Gundam as a phenomenon: the stupid memes, the many different tv series/reboots, the obsessiveness with which people catalog its every detail, and so on. Also be aware it’s going to take eleven volumes or so to get through the whole story, which publisher Vertical, Inc. may or may not release in its entirety, depending on sales.

No related posts.

Kenshiro Den is one of five FotNS movies released for the 25th anniversary of the manga, back in 2006-2008. The series is appropriately titled The Legends of the True Savior. While one of their goals is to present Fist of the North Star to a new generation, they more clearly function as a set of non-canonical gospels, outlining important moments in Kenshiro’s life from new perspectives and in the case of Kenshiro Den, covering a time period skipped altogether in the original manga.

Kenshiro Den shows us what Kenshiro did from the moment he first woke up from Shin’s near-fatal attack, the one that left him with the seven stigmata in the shape of the big dipper across his chest. It is during this time that he comes to accept the responsibility of being the lone successor of the martial art Hokuto Shinken. In accepting this burden he becomes a god of death.

In many ways this is a resurrection story, where Kenshiro is reborn into his new identity given to him by his father, as the heavens willed. But as a god of death Kenshiro is most frequently left to mourn rather than to be mourned, as this image, reminiscent of the Pietà, makes clear.

2.  After checking out Genga, this giant sexy Katsuhiro Otomo artbook, I revisited those Akira volumes Kodansha put out a couple of years ago and I came to a few new conclusions:

Akira is so beautiful and inventive, especially in the beginning. Akira’s easily the most internationally-influential manga of the 80s, though it feels no less contemporary by modern standards. If it comes across as derivative to newcomers that’s only because its inspired a tremendous amount of material since it began. Comic artists have ripped off Otomo’s drawing style wholesale, while others have been inspired to grapple with similar motifs. I don’t think I truly appreciated how groundbreaking Akira was the first time I read it, because I hadn’t been through as much manga then as I have now.

Akira is a lot of things but “complex” isn’t one of them. Unless you’re talking about the art, much of which was drafted with the help of assistants, there isn’t a whole lot going on at once in these books. The plot is straightforward and simple, as are the characters. I don’t intend this is a criticism or slight, complexity just isn’t something I’d laud the comic for possessing. Then again I don’t write pull quote reviews…

It’s amazing how little can happen in 350 pages of comics but how enjoyable those pages can still be. Otomo’s story reveals its tiny, predictable mysteries ever-so-gradually, all the while exploding with kinetic action as people race around and things explode, so much so I’d say the action is its dominating force. The book is more about the expert execution of action rhythms than it is about anyone or any one theme.

Comics people can get overly precious about Akira. Don’t get me wrong, as a comic Akira is exemplary drafting, excellent technique. Still, its valuation is inflated by nostalgia for the degree of mainstream exposure it first received two decades ago. It’s not ubiquitous in comics circles solely on merit, but also by fortune, which I guess is true a lot of the time. The gulf between some people’s esteem for it and contemporary manga fans’ relative disinterest makes it particularly obvious to me in this case.

3.  Hold the phone, I just realized where I recognized Lord Tywin Lannister from!

He was in Last Action Hero!

This movie is overlooked in the pantheon of Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks, but I thought it was a smart parody of his life’s work.

4.  Jin-Roh is anime movie directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, based upon an Mamoru Oshii script, based upon an Oshii comic. It was put out by Production IG in 1999, and along the lines of the studio’s work on Ghost in the Shell it’s a gorgeous piece of cinematic cel animation prioritizing atmosphere and animation proficiency above action.

I only recently saw it on Blu-ray and boy was it nice to look at in that format. Bandai Visual put out a deluxe BD in such limited quantities that precious few of the people who pre-ordered the thing ever received it. This all happened years before I even had a Blu-ray player. You can import it from Japan with English subtitles, though.

That opening protest scene, with the mounting tension and melancholic background music, is so totally absorbing. Overall it’s a subdued movie that screams into action at unpredictable (and appreciated) moments, though it never quite matches that degree of quality presented at its outset.

One thing about Jin Roh, though: it beats this Little Red Riding Hood metaphor into the fucking ground. The main character is like a wolf, we get it! In the end I accepted the overtness of the central theme, treating it as a kind of lyrical component to the movie’s visual poetry, because Jin-Roh is ultimately a feat of animation, both sublime and vicious.

5.  I saw Metal Hurlant Chronicles, the French television show based upon Metal Hurlant, the French comics magazine. Or more specifically, based upon its short-lived relaunch in 2002.

It was a piece of shit.

6.  Here’s one thing people always forget about manga:

What gets licensed in North America doesn’t represent the true variety of Japanese comics.

It’s not even close.

These days, publishing decisions are made by a tiny handful of people. Long-running series with adult audiences are basically ignored, as securing rights to shorter series and releasing them as omnibuses is less risky financially. And the manga-buying audience is nowhere near as diverse as the manga-pirating audience.

7.  Here’s another thing:

Most commercial manga is a collaboration between at least one primary artist, their assistants, and their editor.

Comics as an assembly line production doesn’t mesh with how we like to think about the medium, but there’s a reason mangaka almost always make their deadlines. They have help. Sometimes lots of help.

In additions editors can wield enormous influence over a manga. They may suggest the central concept in the first place, or control how the series is written to better appease its demographic.

Related posts:

1. Legends of the True Savior… dubbed!
2. Happy Easter: The Gospel According to Toki
3. BREAKING: Leonardo DiCaprio Passes Bowel Movement Resembling Akira Movie

My behavior here and in various social networks in the past year can be considered a sort of retreat. Not a retreat from blogging (you wish… I hope this post makes it clear this isn’t happening), but a retreat from my own ill-formed conception of what it is to be a blogger, a self-appointed aesthete, a whatever I am, etc. The word fan used to be one of those labels I applied to myself, and to it I considered implicit certain obligations, including paying attention to boring things and sad people.

I am now liberated! In the spirit of freedom, this was my week:

2. I’ve got a good art book about ukiyo-e.

I’ve been seeking to level up on my education of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, most specifically the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, one of the last and most famed traditional artists to work in the medium. Unfortunately, informative well-illustrated books on the subject are rare.

Of Brigands and Bravery: Kuniyoshi’s Heroes of the Suikoden, commonly accepted as perhaps the best publication in this area, is out of print and fetches absurd prices upwards of $500. Since resigning myself to the impossibility of ever reading that one, I’ve been on the hunt for quality alternatives. Most have been disappointments, either printing low quality images, or printing at sizes that are too small, but I’ve finally found a book I can comfortably recommend.

Samurai: Stars of the Stage and Beautiful Women concerns the work of Kuniyoshi as well as Utagawa Kunisada, another titan in the field of ukiyo-e woodblocks. I’ve been tracking this book’s sliding publication date for well over a year now, but now that it’s out I’m happy to say it delivers striking, high resolution reproductions of woodblock prints as well as essays about not only the art, but on Japanese popular culture in the 19th century in general.

Ukiyo-e woodblock prints are most recognizable in a contemporary context for inspiring lots of tattoo art, and woodblock prints’ original appeal was similarly populist, the low cost of reproduction allowing middle-class people to bring art into their own homes, if not necessarily all over their own bodies. Soon the ukiyo-e style, which began as an expression of everyday metropolitan life, exploded to encompass all sorts of subject matter.

That’s when it gets interesting to me. Giant animals, shambling skeletons, bloody samurai, boobies… I’ll take crass “mass-entertainment” over wealthy people mutely admiring their own way of life any day of the week. EVERY day of the week in fact.

Samurai: Stars of the Stage doesn’t go full tilt in its presentation of that sort of content, in fact it catalogs a collection of prints housed at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, an art museum in Germany. The accompanying essays however are sprawling with a diverse selection of content, not solely focusing on craft or the visual qualities of the artwork, but also thoroughly examining the circumstances that birthed them.

3. Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie is ugly and cheap and enjoyable.

The 2010 Ultramarines animated movie, released on Blu-ray for the first time this month, was never given much of a budget, and that makes it a doomed project from its outset: the Warhammer 40K franchise, though it befuddles me now as much as it did when as when I saw it envelop the majority of my friends’ lives as a teenager, is one of premium associations.

Fans pay exorbitant sums for tiny, careful lumps of molded plastic and die-cast metal, painstakingly assembling and painting them into figures which are then placed on flocked tables where soul-crushingly complex battle campaigns take place, campaigns which are rarely seen to their end as a dwindling supply of pizza and soda set the pace for the game more than anything else. I appreciated the fun inherent to the fascist, grotesque and insane sci-fi universe, but never got the appeal of playing its tabletop namesake.

The storytelling of the Ultramarines movie is as lean as its look. A small squad of space warriors are dispatched to a routine distress beacon. The movie follows the squad claustrophobically on a slow and deliberate investigation which delivers them directly into the hands of powerful demonic forces of Chaos.

As sprawling as the Warhammer 40K mythology is, this movie pulls into a very tiny part of it, and the result is a subdued experience that is far more Ridley Scott’s Alien than it is James Cameron’s Aliens. While the movie is well-conceived and well-acted, its CG animation dates it more harshly than its actual age. I can’t imagine it working for the majority of the videogame-addled public, but it worked for me.

4. Forming is the finest cartooning I’ve read this month.

It’s also a pretty pink book.

Forming‘s combination of puerile adolescent energy and ambitious alien creation myth is the sort of thing you imagine going all loosy goosy, camouflaging itself in either heightened self-importance or overly-deprecating senselessness.

Instead, Forming is a complex story spanning millions of years, handling multiple plot points as expertly as it handles its madcap imagery, laid out in the language of a funny children’s book but filled with too much genitalia and fuck jokes to be for anyone except the child-at-heart.

I enjoyed Forming as a hardcover collection of short chapter installments though you can also read it as a webcomic. It didn’t click for me until I read it in print, as is often the case with serialized webcomics.

5. JManga is as dead as my interest in bloviating about it.

Is it possible to not be enthusiastic about how JManga was structured as a digital manga service, while also not indulging the sanctimonious righteousness with which people critiqued it? I want to disapprove of the greatest percentage of things possible, you see.

Part of the reason why piracy and piracy “solution” conversations are so tired, boring, played out, and unproductive is because at the end of the day, people are just going to DO what they want to do. So are businesses. The explanations always come afterward and are seldom 100% honest.

I don’t want to yammer on to you about why having a culture where manga creators are compensated for their work is a good thing. The reasons are pretty obvious. The reasons also wouldn’t have mattered to me when I didn’t have a dollar to my name.

In conclusion, PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE…

6. Shin Getter Robo vs Neo Getter  Robo has a long confusing title, but it’s short and to the point, and the point is “AWESOME.”

Cast off your preconceived notions of what mecha anime is all about: selling toys to children, thinly-veiled military fetishism, dumb Gundam references only virgins understand, robots, etc.

This shiz is based upon Ken Ishikawa’s Getter Robo manga, and as I’ve said before, that stuff is about human action. And sociopathy. Lovecraftian monsters. Dinosaurs. Punching God in the face. Interesting things.

(And it all happened long before Gainax wrapped it in a bow and called it Gurenn Lagann, without even taking the time to reinvent it in some way.)

Even with Discotek’s enormously unpredictable track record of anime releases, I wouldn’t have expected to see this OAV available in North America. I’m very happy to have been proven wrong.

7. I’ll probably do this next week.

This method of posting content isn’t exactly SEO-friendly, but who cares? I haven’t looked at this blog’s web traffic stats in at least six months and I’m not going to start now.

Related posts:

1. My Pop Culture Manifesto: How to Become a Curmudgeon in 3 Easy Steps!
2. 7 things I’d rather spend $60 on instead of a new video game
3. The JManga.com Takao Saito Sampler: Doll the Hotel Detective

Tatsumi, the animated movie based upon the life of gekiga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi, communicates his vitality as a comics creator better than that incredibly lauded phonebook autobio comic he wrote: A Drifting Life.

This may be an odd way to begin a post, to decry a comic prior to discussing a movie based upon it, a movie I went out of my way to import because it’s not yet been released in North America, but my heart is in the right place. I’m a big admirer of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I enjoy his biting pulp stories, often told in the harsh working class milieu of post-WWII Japan. I respect the dissatisfaction they communicate, their desperation turned to savagery.

The problem I have with A Drifting Life is its superficiality. I get the feeling reading it that Tatsumi is withholding the more emotive dimensions of his own life, that he’s presenting the details too plainly to be doing much more than laying out a sequence of dispassionate events. He has too featureless a personality, his manga with such grisly content as dead babies floating through gutters and the like seems to emanate from nothingness, belying what must have been a thoroughly lived life.

By dividing the running time of Tatsumi in half, alternately adapting excerpts of A Drifting Life and presenting a “greatest hits” collection of Yoshihiro short stories, you’re reminded why his oeuvre is of sufficient historical importance to beg the autobiographical question in the first place. That’s something A Drifting Life was never able to accomplish. Sure, I could have approximated the effect by thumbing through his other comics in between reading it, but Tatsumi gets it right intrinsically.

The part of Tatsumi I found most ripe with passionate raw emotion about creating manga is a fictitious one, but with enough biographical elements that I desperately wish all of it were true. You may remember it as Occupied, from the Abandon the Old in Tokyo collection Drawn and Quarterly put out.

In this story a struggling mangaka whose preference for drawing realistic content is being stifled by an editor forcing him to make his material more child-friendly, his dissatisfaction driving him to sickness. At one point the sight of two fat kids laughing seizes him with an anger so intense it makes him vomit, and during his visit to the stall he takes delight in the sight of crude, sexually charged scribbles on the wall. He returns to the stall the next day, seeing new drawings in place of the washed off old ones. They excite him, far more fascinating than the manga he’s churning out to make a living for himself. One day the desperate mangaka works up the courage to draw a naked woman in the bathroom, but he gets caught by a cleaning lady. His marker falls into the toilet and bobs there silently as he’s arrested.

This story distills the allure of a darker side that compelled Tatsumi to lay out a manifesto for a new kind of manga in the first place, a manifesto summed up by the word he coined for it: gekiga.

So this movie gives you both the airy, perfunctory tone of A Drifting Life and the grittier feel of Tatsumi’s actual gekiga fiction, and I’m obviously partial to the latter. It’s in the final moments of the film, when it temporarily switches to live action and we see a real, tired, seventy-three year-old Tatsumi laboring over pages of manga, that the autobiographical stuff becomes weighed with a sense of reality. This is a person, not a cartoon character. In place of the aloof expressions of his animated namesake we see wrinkles, beady eyes, and a hint of playfulness without any trace of a smile.

With triple the framerate and less offbeat subject matter, this animated film might have went down in history. As it is, I find it to be a mostly fitting tribute to a working manga artist wholly deserving of his newfound swell of international recognition.

Related posts:

1. Crudely Animated Cartoons About Washing Your Balls: Thermae Romae
2. BLACK DYNAMITE: representing for anime better than Toonami.
3. HELLS: if I wanted to be edgy I’d call it “overly ambitious.”

I have a weakness for eclectic out-of-print comics anthologies, largely because I can’t get any satisfaction from the contemporary options. I’ve added stuff to my library like Epic Illustrated, Raijin Comics and Cheval Noir, and for a time these were good. But lately I’ve been going a bit older and ambitious…

I’ve been going Heavy Metal.

What’s it like to read the complete 1978 run of Heavy Metal issues consecutively, breathlessly, perspiration dotting your forehead as you’re assailed by a weighty volume of awesome drawings, terrible drawings, hilarious drawings, and unbridled enthusiasm for the idealized female form?

It’s hard to describe, let me tell you. On the one hand there’s a charming familiarity to it. Enough of this content I’ve read one way or another in less improvised formats, like JPEG images or trade collections. In reading Heavy Metal Magazine I find my eyes lingering on superficial things like ads and editorial content. After all, I’m reading pop culture objects stapled together before I was born, so there’s a self-indulgent, archaeological component to what I’m doing.

But there’s also something lost, an appreciation for the serialized structure belonging to many of these stories that I can’t genuinely grasp. What would it have been like to really read Heavy Metal in its proper time and place, to read only twelve issues a year in the seventies and eighties? That’s something I’ll never know, because I lack the self control to even remotely approximate the month-long gaps between its original publication.

After Moebius’ death I revisited The Airtight Garage in something like nine days, even then trying my hardest to make it a deliberately savory experience. I can’t imagine reading it over the course of years in the pages of HM. What would happen, would the story live within me more deeply, its quirky cast of characters and unpredictable scenarios getting stuck in the back of my mind with the practiced ritual of being fed a few meager pages every month, the indecipherability slowly having its way with my subconscious?

I can’t say for certain. Knowing Garage as a winding but complete standalone comic story has so shaped my view of it that I can’t authentically appraise it as a serialized entity. Voraciously reading chunks of it in the pages of HM hasn’t really changed that.

It all goes back to my original point, to why I’m getting these back issues in the first place. I haven’t had any prolonged, enjoyable experiences with serialized comic anthologies as they’ve been published, and that may be a limitation of my own history I’m bringing to my comics reading. It certainly enflames the earnestness with which I devour these older publications, but to what degree does that legitimately lead one to new insights? I can’t really say, I can only tell you I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

Related posts:

1. Franco-British Comics from Hell: REQUIEM by Olivier Ledroit and Pat Mills
2. Rubenesque Italian tokusatsu gobsmacking comics: Detrocboi
3. North American Fantasy Comics That Will Rock Your World: Orc Stain

Part of the reason Saruwatari isn’t well-known in these parts may be due to the lackluster nature of the anime based upon his work. Sure, there’s the live action Riki-Oh (Story of Ricky) movie, appreciated for its camp appeal more than anything else, but have you seen the anime version? It’s dreadfully boring and bloodless. Another anime adaptation that actually came out in this country albeit exclusively in VHS form was Dog Soldier. I could relate to you it’s funnier, more absurd moments, but I rewatched it solely for the purpose of this post because I could barely remember it the first time. So let’s just say it’s largely forgettable. Finally, Shootfighter Tekken, a 3-part OVA which is actually a terrific adaptation of early Tough stories, has a baffling English title that almost universally confuses people. Why is the word “Tekken” in the title, does it tie into the video game? What does “shootfighter” even mean? Why would I watch this if it confuses me from the get-go?

I bring this up to tell you about a Tetsuya Saruwatari anime DVD I deeply yearned for as a college lad. A DVD I now own. It’s called The Hard. Let’s discuss it.

The Hard is a French import because after Japan, no other country appreciates Saruwatari as much as the French do. Maybe manga scratches an itch for violent pathos that our own country tries to extinguish with superhero stuff, I don’t know. There has to be a reason France has published both Saruwatari’s Tough and Keisuke Itagaki’s Grappler Baki, two hugely long manga about people punching each other in the face. It can’t be a coincidence.

The Hard is a crime story taking place in the Bronx, maybe South Bronx, if my understanding of Engrish is up to snuff. See, I can’t actually relate to you the concrete plot details of this fifty-minute OVA because I don’s speak Japanese or French, the only two languages on the DVD.

Our hero is a burly bounty hunter wearing a big trenchcoat, a massive scar across one of his eyes. He resembles most every Saruwatari protagonist, black mullet and all.

In the first five minutes of The Hard a dead body is found floating in the ocean, the bounty hunter enters a strip club to apprehend a suspect, the suspect attempts to flee by dressing in bad drag, he’s struck by a car by another detective, gets his face kicked in a few times, and is carried off. This is anime that gets straight to the point. Welcome to NYC.

My favorite moment in the OVA is when a giant man with a gatling gun gets stabbed in the eye by a burning crucifix. It’s a kind of poetic justice because only moments before he murdered the priest to which this church belongs.

I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, though, the priest was also a surgeon who was harvesting human organs. The bounty hunter finds himself in the middle of this gory urban conflict, but as you can see, it largely resolves itself, the insanity of New York City resembling a snake perpetually eating its own tail.

The Hard is a nineties anime OVA with the soul of an eighties action flick. It has action beats more informed by American movies than by rigorous research or location scouting, presenting New York as a chaotic gross mess of sociopathy, the best conception of NYC as far as storytelling is concerned. Ultimately The Hard is a cool little curiosity, one I’d love to see subtitled, but I can understand why it’s not. It’s just a little too pedestrian, a little too sanitized from the manga it’s based upon, so it doesn’t stand out terrifically well from other nineties OVAs.

Why are Tetsuya Saruwatari anime so superfluous when Tetsuya Saruwatari manga is so outstanding?

I think it’s largely a matter of audience.

Tetsuya Saruwatari writes stories for men, most of them having been serialized in the Business Jump manga anthology. They’re chompy commute reading, aiming for a mainstream, non-otaku audience, so while successful in their own right, they don’t demand the exuberant youth-oriented merchandising other titles do, nor do they appeal to anyone on nostalgic grounds.

If NEETs were to read Saruwatari we’d probably see more anime adaptations with higher budgets, but as things are, these are comics with a strict demographic and little crossover. So while successful, they have yet to become breakaway multimedia hits. Just good, punchy reading.

Related posts:

1. MMA Manga Top Contenders: Tough
2. I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do is fall in love with women who die prematurely.

After the smashing success of their live-action ode to anime blood, Adam Chaplin, Italian production company Necrostorm debuted their second film in September last year.

Much like their previous effort, Taeter City is a movie accomplishing savage violence through the use of digital and practical effects on a shoestring budget. As before, Necrostorm reaches their goal admirably, creating a cogent if dizzying movie experience deserving of universal acclaim, even if the only thing we can mutually agree upon is how thoroughly it shames mediocrity.

Necrostorm is a courageous outfit. The total amount of people on the core team is cryptically small, though if I had to guess it wouldn’t exceed five or six. They smartly use prosthetic devices and masks to create the illusion of normal-sized casts in their movies, and they handle their own sales distribution, website programming  and promotion. However big the company is, Giulio de Santi stands in the center as writer, director and executive producer of Taeter City, as well as the CEO of Necrostorm.

Let me get it out of the way right now: these films are beyond direct-to-video. They’re not backed by major distributors. Hell, they don’t have UPC codes. Spunk and enthusiasm is what holds them together. The sales page for Taeter City proudly proclaims “over 4,000 copies sold in only thirty days!”

I ordered the collector edition. It came with a baseball cap, signed movie poster, fake Taeter Burger coupons, and biker ID badges I can use to pretend to be one of the movie’s protagonists.

It was all so charming I didn’t mind they forgot to include a copy of the actual movie in the DVD case, which required an additional month of wait time to import. To their credit Necrostorm customer service moved to resolve the issue as soon as I reported it to them by email.

So what’s this movie about?

In a future world ravaged by chaos, one city has discovered a way to quell the barbarism inherent in man. The Authority, a monolithic governing body/corporation, has implemented the Zeed System, a technology that reads people’s brainwaves to detect criminal intent. When someone expresses violent urges, or even thinks them, the Zeed System creates a feedback loop that internalizes those urges. The would-be criminal uncontrollably mutilates himself until found by a biker officer and humanely put out of his misery.

Criminal bodies are then collected and pulped into fast food for the law-abiding citizens of Taeter City. Taeter Burger is the chain where these delectables are sold, the cannibalism far from a trade secret. “Fried fingers, crispy, tasty, and hot” one of the brightly-animated commercials for Taeter Burger goes. “what are you waiting for?!”

A sociopathic killer who’s immune to the Zeed System escapes from custody and the Authority dispatches a set of biker enforcers to take him out. Taeter City, unlike Adam Chaplin which tried to work along a more traditional three-act movie structure, is composed of slick vignettes telling different parts of the story out of order, intercutting them with lighthearted but brutal commercials.

The collective effect of all this compounded gristle goes beyond what’s often termed “body horror,” maybe even being some new genre territory Necrostorm has established for itself. By focusing solely upon the gory, exaggerated ramifications of being a living thing made out of meat, this movie becomes a focused exercise, a preposterous one for sure, but also disarming and uncomfortable. Taeter City masters that fine line of being a totally absurd creation without pomposity or insincerity. Its existence is a victory.

We live in an age where people probably dabble too damn much, the sheer amount of possibilities in expressing oneself becoming an overwhelming distraction that prevents us from accomplishing any of those possibilities. So you have people who play with the idea of writing a novel for decades of their life, animators who use their YouTube fame to focus on easier things like Let’s Play videos, or budding filmmakers who lack the discipline to commit to videos longer than five minutes.

It’s inspiring when someone with a vision sees it through with gusto, without the approval or encouragement we tend to weakly rely on. Think about it. Necrostorm delivered two feature length movies in three years to a growing international fanbase. They created their own DVDs and shipped them across the world without anyone’s permission, without even being Kickstarter-ed for goodness’ sake!

This rugged DIY attitude rarely generates the viral recognition it deserves. Then again, how many good things do?

Related posts:

1. Adam Chaplin: are the 80s and 90s back?
2. Webcomics are better when they’re printed out: OLD CITY BLUES.
3. Tekken: Blood Vengeance wasn’t complete horseshit.

Here’s the longer answer…

As many of you know, Fist of the North Star is an animated television show that ran in 1984 for 152 episodes.

A piece of advice for anime watchers: if you go around recommending a 26+ episode anime TV series for actual real human beings to watch, it better be more than acceptable, well-executed, decent, enjoyable enough, or a hundred other phrases mealy-mouthed people use when passing off half-assed recommendations.

It better be fucking amazing.

I’ve developed this perspective after years of doing it wrong, after spending my entire college career watching… who knows? Dozens? Hundreds of hours of anime? I did so partly out of obligation, partly for some semblance of satisfaction, and partly to fill out time I wasn’t spending getting drunk or laid.

In retrospect, I could have spent that time far better. I could have spent it focusing on high quality stuff, appreciating and considering rich visuals and ideas, instead of marathoning so much barely-adequate nonsense. And hey, going that route I might have had time left over for at least a little bit of drinking and getting laid!

That said, Fist of the North Star would have made the cut, though I may not have watched it so quickly. And I might have skipped around once I got to part two… I’m getting distracted! Back on point!

The people who should watch Fist of the North Star, the grown adults who should check out a kids’ cartoon from the eighties, are of a certain stock.

A stock that doesn’t ask for permission. The urge to do so will come from encountering the material itself. Little to no persuasion will be necessary.

Is it really so surprising? You’ve got to have a strong internal inclination if you’re going to watch a 75-hour thing. And I don’t say that to erect some kind of hip, artificial barrier to entry for newcomers.

The barrier is already there. On top of the series’ long length, things get even less accessible.

The first twenty-ish episodes of Fist of the North Star are a meat grinder, an episodic foray into disposable content not found in the serialized manga. Some people call it “filler.”

Many would-be viewers never make it past this dead zone, their bodies littered across a desert of mediocrity, their own destinies as ill-fated as Manga Video’s original attempt to release the series. People familiar with the manga, or had seen past those initial episodes, knew how much better things got. That there was a master plan of a story waiting to burst out, filled with pathos and drama and great action, if still constrained by the format of a weekly cartoon show and the budget of television anime.

Through these knowing people’s hard efforts we got fansubs making the show’s escalation in quality more known to the English-speaking world. And then, legal online streams of the episodes. And eventually official DVD releases. But it was a long time coming, man.

So should you watch the Fist of the North Star? The answer is “no.” The answer is also “of course! Why’d you even ask?” It depends on if you really have to ask or not.

Coming soon: maybe it’s time this blog started to talk about the manga it’s named after…?

Related posts:

1. Fist of the North Star: The TV Series Vol 3 Cover Art Revealed
2. This Tuesday: Fist of the North Star: The TV Series Vol 2
3. Fist of the North Star, The Complete Series Collection, Volume 1 Review

There’s something about this story that speaks well beyond its original audience, granting it a place of respect that elevates it higher than similar Shonen Jump fare. Sure, it doesn’t generate the mass merchandise, all-ages appeal of franchises like One Piece or Dragonball Z (in part because Tetsuo Hara and Buronson took the property with them in Nobuhiko Horie’s unceremonious split with Shueisha Publishing), but it seems more well-remembered, even if by a smaller audience.

I believe the reason for that is simple. The reason is violence.

Hokuto no Ken is a story that recollects the dusty setting of unforgiving spaghetti westerns as much as it does eighties fare like Mad Max, bringing to life a martial arts story owing equal inspiration to East and West. In such a world, acts resembling justice are rare, though compassionate warriors like Kenshiro are out to set things right in a largely personal way.

Sure, it can read silly to an adult eye. And for some people the idea of giant men who cry, punch, and bleed all over each other is too absurd to invest in on any level.

For the rest of us, it is a singular, unmatched reading experience. Don’t get me wrong, there was thrilling, violent manga before FotNS and there certainly was afterwards, but has one ever stood so independently from everything that came before it? Has there ever been one as widely read? Has one ever been scrawled so characteristically?

We’ll be getting into the spirit of Hokuto no Ken‘s 30th anniversary over the next few months here at Blog of the North Star. Expect more critical reflection on the various facets of this blog’s namesake.

Related posts:

1. Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage Demo Now Available!
2. NEW FIST OF THE NORTH STAR back on DVD next February. Here’s why you should care.
3. Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 2 Teaser, First Look at Kaioh

2012 was the 40th-year anniversary of the creation of Devilman and Mazinger Z, and it saw the release of an excellent Blu-ray for each. The first set pictured above collects the Devilman OVAs produced in the late eighties. The second collects Mazinger-related team-up movies from the seventies.

Watching these Blu-rays is kindling to my aesthete soul. I’ve said before the reason this blog’s anime coverage has no signs of slowing down after three years has nothing to do with fandom or the con scene or silliness like that. It’s because of the visceral, positive reaction I continue to get from watching good anime. And this anime is good.

Mazinger Z: The technique and overall gusto of seventies anime rarely appears as vibrant as it should, all too often poorly represented with jaundiced tape masters or pixelated videos. These movies were originally released in theaters, and it appears they’ve been mastered from theater-quality film stock. Their colorful robot and monster designs are as much a joy to behold as ever, as are the sound effects and action moves of the time period.

Think of them as the perfect highlight reel, giving someone like me a more satisfying alternative to watching through every episode of seventies classics Mazinger Z and Getter Robo, for example. Give me a gnarly team-up movie, and there’s a Doublemint Gum-like increase in pleasure and fun, achieved in a fraction of the time.

The seven team-up movies span two discs and each run less than an hour long. There’s also a DVD that contains a shitload of special features, not much of which I’m capable of understanding or appreciating. Toei Animation really pulled their fingers out for this one.

Devilman: An unusually well-executed set of apocryphal OVAs with a sort of Miyazakian sheen to their presentation for reasons explored in this well-researched writeup, these were produced in the eighties and intended to tell the same deranged story as Go Nagai’s original manga, though the series ended prematurely after only two installments.

Something is better than nothing, especially in this case.  I’m not used to my Go Nagai anime being doled out in such a mature yet faithful way. Sure, there’s crap like 2006’s Demon Prince Enma, which has about as much to do with the style and spirit of Uncle Go as a migraine headache and is somehow worse than one, but this stuff is legit.

These OVAs take probably the greatest story Nagai ever put on paper and present it seriously, with dramatic conviction. They’re some of the best direct-to-video anime ever created.

Postscript: If four years ago you told me I’d be watching Japanese Blu-rays of untranslated anime on a big TV screen, I’d have laughed. Every part of the sentence would be preposterous to 2009 Milo. My reluctance toward Blu-rays, lack of funds, crappy computer monitor… the rapid shift in priority, interest, and access would make no sense. Yet here I am.

In the case of HD celluloid animation (that isn’t totally blurred to hell or made from a standard-definition source), not only is the illusion of motion perfectly achieved, but the workmanship behind it is also made abundantly clear: the paint, the ink, the layers, the film stock, etc. The view is more objective, the handmade-ness more obvious. I’d liken it to the difference between looking up a lossy jpeg of a painting and being able to appreciate the topography of its brushstrokes in person. Except cartoons of robots punching each other are cooler than fine art.

Watching anime “in the raw” is also a recent phenomenon for me. Sure, I’ve seen some untranslated thing every now and again, but I didn’t start to conscientiously do it until REDLINE in 2011, when the Japanese release came out. After seeing the movie once I had to see it again without subtitles. The gist, after all, was easy enough to follow, and darting my eyes to and from the bottom fifth of the screen was distracting from the lush visual experience the director intended to assail my eyeballs with.

What I guess I’m saying is that rewatching anime untranslated seems to work for me, and I find that it works somewhat surprising. It might work for you, too. And if the anime you’re watching isn’t of sufficient visual interest as to be enjoyable without its subtitles turned on, it may not be worth watching. I’m just saying.

Postscript 2: 2012 also saw the Japanese Blu-ray release of 2001′s traditionally-animated Mazinkaiser.

Related posts:

1. The anime industry gets into the spirit of Go Nagai month: MAZINGER Z, CUTEY HONEY, GAIKING.
2. The Kodansha Bilingual Comics edition of DEVILMAN.
3. October is Go Nagai Month at Blog of the North Star. Join in the fun!

Here’s the complication: the majority of good anime TV is good because it’s based upon an undeniably better manga source, often unavailable in English.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure doesn’t hold a candle to Hirohiko Araki’s artistic sensibilities with a pen and paper, and fails to convey the interesting evolution in his style that occurred in the first two parts of the long-running manga of the same name. The television series is an often-colorful but lumpy, cheap romp through Araki’s imagination. It’s JJBA with beer goggles, all blurry and wrong. Don’t let the promising key art fool you.

Thermae Romae does something interesting with its almost non-existent animation budget: it gives up on any pretense of representing the manga version and simply presses the accelerator all the way down on “crude,” resulting in an abbreviated yet satisfying cartoon that could stand entirely on its own, if you’re able to forget the bestselling manga conceptually attached to it, harder to do now because it’s being released in deluxe English editions. Unlike the similarly-produced Lychee Light Club anime, this adaptation doesn’t create a gulf between its manga incarnation so wide as to stupefy.

Space Brothers is a manga that needs to be licensed. There’s no other way to put it. Sure, it probably won’t be, and sure, the anime is an acceptable, if slow-winding, alternative. More often than not, the anime nails its comedic and dramatic timing, succeeding in being so damn emphatically likeable. But maybe it’s too much…?

In all it’s positivity and cheerfulness, it might be possible that the weekly up and downs of a serialized dramedy end up evening out more than they should, the positive outlook being unintentionally reinforced by unflappable opening and ending theme songs. Am I now saying the anime version might be just a little bit too happy? Yes, I think I am. I’ve read enough of the manga to compare.

So at last, we have a list article listing only one genuine entry, which has to be Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. No, it’s not an accurate depiction of the Lupin III manga. Nor does it hem closely to any of the best-known animated installments, for example Miyazaki’s downright chaste Castle of Cogliostro. Initially, I struggled with this anime’s intentions. What was it trying to do, and for whom? Was it crassly attempting to appeal to my lower centers? Was it trying (and failing) to be a brilliant character study? Only later I recognized the truth.

Mine‘s a sexy, absorbing triumph of television animation that succeeds at every 13-episode anime’s attempt to balance episodic adventures with a wider, sinister conspiracy, ultimately confronting the viewer with a conclusion some people have referred to as ruinous. By some people I mean nincompoops. The only ruinous thing about Fujiko Mine is that there isn’t any other 2012 television anime goes down this fucking smooth, making whatever you’d put at the top of your list look like an endurance test by comparison.

Related posts:

1. The two firm, supple elephants in the room (a Fujiko Mine post.)
2. Some of 2012’s anime and manga turds.
3. 2012′s Can’t Miss Anime Releases

Dredd – let’s collectively agree to keep the 3D suffix out of the title, shall we? – is a sleek, whizzing engine of a movie. It’s whiskey without any sugary junk mixed in. Hell, not even an ice cube. So no hangovers the next morning, just good memories.

I’ve yet to see all the 2012 films I’d like to, partially because movie theaters are for chumps and partially because I’m developing into a deranged shut-in, but Dredd is easily the best I’ve encountered thus far.

You’ve no doubt some familiarity with Judge Dredd, the off-beat sci-fi cop created in British comics anthology 2000 AD, and later disserviced with a 1995 film starring Rob Schneider. Now we have a movie aiming to be more in line with the original character, but I say no one should really care about any of that. Is it a good film? That’s what matters.

The answer is a resounding HELL YES. Let me put it this way. Dredd is like a sleight-of-hand card trick expertly performed by a street magician. It’s soundly rousing in a subdued, guttural sort of way, but its very nature encourages you to overlook its value. The trick isn’t that you’re blown away by witnessing something impossible. People don’t watch magic tricks to see the impossible, magic just doesn’t have that primal affect on us anymore, nor does film.

The real trick is that you didn’t notice how easy it would have been for the street magician to mess up 1000 different times over the course of his two-minute performance. The trick is in the clean execution, flawless technique. And Dredd is as cleanly executed an action sci-fi flick as any I can think of. It does nearly everything right without ever stopping to congratulate itself. In a year comprised of overly-long, incompetent SF on the most basic of terms (Prometheus, Total Recall), Dredd‘s brevity of wit is itself a breathe of fresh air.

Dredd also subtly subverts its own fascist leanings. For the first hour of the movie, Judge Dredd appears to be an almost mythic personification of the justice his ilk impose upon the world, showing us why their absolute judgment works in a dystopian future riddled with gray stuff like poverty and drug addiction. It’s awesome, right? It’s like Batman with a gun, right?

Then Ma-Ma calls four Judges to her fortress and commands them to kill Dredd. Instantly the black-and-white reductive fantasy is destroyed.

All the authority behind being a Judge, or even looking like a Judge, vanishes. As plainly as Judge Lex asks Ma-Ma who his target is, the authoritarian high ground evaporates. There isn’t any loud soundtrack cue. There’s absolutely no fanfare at all. Poof. It’s just gone.

The leather outfits, the sharp helmet designs, they now indicate nothing. Even Lex’ strong jaw and cleft chin undercuts the power of Dredd, outdoing his macho presence as surely as his muscular build does.

Lex eventually shoots Dredd in the gut, immobilizing him. Dredd reacts fearlessly but with utter impotence, unable to do anything but grope for words and die–and he would have died if it wasn’t for the psychic timing of his training partner. The simple biology of his near-death experience shows us the frailty of his body, and he overcomes it without bashing your skull in with a conspicuous metaphor like Dark Knight Rises did. When Dredd gets back up, he simply dresses his wound, that much more intent on judging Ma-Ma.

In an age that’s overflowing with comic book movies preening to make the characters more realistic and relatable, throwing pleading, injoke winks at the camera as if the actors were blinking into the fucking sun, Dredd unapologetically erects a comic book hero inhumanly calculated and expert in a milieu relatable to us through its depiction of poverty and drug addiction. Maybe it’s not the trendy route to go, but it makes for better films, the less genial approach.

By Dredd’s singular, inevitably-flawed worldview (hinted at in this movie ever-so-carefully; it’s planned that sequels will elaborate on the idea if indeed they ever get made), he personifies the super part of the word superhero both by his abilities and by his tragic nature, without ever being a superhero character, shaming whatever cinematic billion dollar-grossing mess both nerds and people who watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians appear to equally enjoy (hint: the movie I’m talking about rhymes with who the hell was jack kirbvengers.)

There’s a ton left to say about Dredd. For example, why it’s better than The Raid, how it compares to Looper, it’s exemplary use of 3D, Lena Headey’s terrific performance and disarming function as an antagonist (and how under-appreciated an actress she is), and why we live in an age where action movies should almost always be ninety minutes long.

I just don’t have the time to get into it all right now… I wanted to post this the same day the movie comes out on Blu-ray, and I’m writing this without any compensation! I’m not going to stay up all night working like it was a college paper.

Related posts:

1. The first BERSERK movie totally sucked, and I want to see the next one like right now.

Gyo. Based on Junji Ito’s manga of the same name, the horror of Gyo is diluted with ecchi-flavored garbage that’s added to the story for no good reason. Some may say the original manga wasn’t all that substantive to begin with, but I’d say it wasn’t tripe appealing to the lowest common denominator, unlike this wasted opportunity of an OVA. Totally not worth importing from the UK.

Ghastly Prince Enma Burning Up. It was fun contrasting all the Twitter buzz prior to this unexpected NIS America release to the utter radio silence as people actually began watching it. Despite a memorable opening theme and top shelf animation, this Go Nagai adaptation isn’t very sexy or funny. In fact at times it’s kind of moe, grasping for a more modern audience that a.) knows where to better feed their degenerate appetites, and b.) is diametrically opposed to the crass sincerity of Nagai’s deviant side. These day, trashy pervy anime is always presented as misdirection, the actual fetishes being laid out in “code.” Enma is more straightforward and honest, making it an enemy of the natural otaku mindset. It doesn’t have a clear audience.

Starship Troopers: Invasion. Perhaps someday Shinji Aramaki will direct a memorable CG feature-length animation. Despite this so-generic-I-cannot-even-bring-myself-to-describe-it piece of crap I’m still looking forward to Aramaki’s upcoming Space Pirate Captain Harlock movie. Fool me four times, shame on me. Shame, shame, shame, shame.

Wolf. Maybe in a world where everyone’s easily able to read boxing manga classics like Ashita no Joe, in a world where surplus copies of Shamo are selling for pennies on Amazon, maybe, maybe Wolf could justifiably be published in North America. As things are, it’s a mediocrely written and drawn comic that like a lot of Gen Manga’s releases looks rushed and amateur, with occasional panels appearing as if they never developed past the rough pencils stage. Wolf doesn’t do the vastly under-represented genre of sports combat comics any favors by being so mundane.

Attack on Titan. The interesting premise of monstrous giants preying upon a mobilized city-state is ruined by the most inconsistent and sloppy visual sensibilities I’ve seen in a manga in recent memory. This title is a big hit in Japan so who knows, maybe it looks better as it goes on and the narrative tightens up enough to keep it exciting. I don’t feel like sticking around to find out. Weirdly enough, the currently in-development TV show looks a lot more gripping than anything I’ve read in the manga version.

Related posts:

1. 2012′s Can’t Miss Anime Releases
2. The Spring 2012 Anime Preview Guide – Part 1
3. The Key To Great Anime: Takeshi Koike (Prelude to a REDLINE review)

I’m talking about Lone Sloane, the story about a celestial wanderer imbued with mystical powers. This is the good kind of science fiction/fantasy that isn’t easily pegged into any one particular genre or aesthetic, it just sorta explodes with intensity every which way, more a warehouse for visual creativity than a linear narrative of any kind.

This book, copyright 1973, collects what eventually became the first two BDs of Lone Sloane in France. The first part, Les 6 voyages de Lone Sloane, consists of six eight-page stories that introduce the character and his initial wanderings. The second, Delirius, is a forty-eight page story about Sloane’s adventure on a debaucherous planetoid of the same name.

I was originally made familiar with the first half of the book by way of the old Cheval Noir anthology comic Dark Horse used to put out. No, I didn’t read it as it came out (I barely knew how to write my own name when those issues were being published) but I had a digital friend who used to scan old issues while I was in college. Little did I know I wasn’t actually getting the full and proper effect of these stories.

In the pages of Cheval Noir, Lone Sloane was presented in stark black and white, here they’re in full color. The color serves to enhance the undercurrent of horror in these early stories, and most importantly it allows the labored construction of each page to breathe a little. I can’t imagine settling for the black and white flats now. I can scarcely imagine how difficult it would be to make any sense of them in that format.

Druillet presents us with splashing, sprawling environments in these comics, his architecture precisely rendered with a calculated hand, his figure drawing courser, curlier. Many a page are filled with passionate throngs of humanoid activity bleeding all over. The structures built around these nameless characters are constricting, either containing their madness, or encouraging it through suffocation.

The contrast in Druillet’s approach to drawing architecture and drawing living creatures is reflected in the stories as well. Both in Six Voyages and Delirius rich, complex environments beat upon the protagonist and every other character, spurring their journeys into new, unpredictable directions. You can get halfway through a chapter without a clue where you’ll end up, the loopy visual journey being its own reward.

I bought this book for like twenty-five bucks sealed in its original plastic wrap. Saying it was worth every penny would be a massive understatement. This is a great thing to pore through, maybe the best I’ve encountered this year. ”Weird shit happening in space” is one of the most winningest comic formulas ever, and when you draw/think like Philippe Druillet… there’s an additional mythical, forbidden dimension to the proceedings.

Related posts:

1. Rubenesque Italian tokusatsu gobsmacking comics: Detrocboi
2. Books of Art: Olivier Ledroit
3. Spectacle comics to read before bed: THE EYES OF THE CAT.