The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1253: Bastard #2, 2001

More nuttiness ensues! After re-releasing Dark Schneider (apparently named after the lead singer of the band Accept), the evil wizard (the heroic one, not the one attacking Metallicana on the back of a Hydra) animates an enormous Stone Golem in the basement of the castle, presumably to use it to take over the kingdom. Instead he defends the kingdom from another evil wizard, and then has feelings for Yoko (who is still 15 years old), kisses her, and turns back into his 14 year old self.

This is some weird, weird shit. I've got half of the series, and if I can find them cheap, I'll pick up the rest, because I think I really need to see what's going to happen here. I do have a later volume, a tankoban, that's in the original Japanese, but I can tell absolutely nothing about the story from what's inside. Can't wait to get there though.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1252: Bastard #1, 2001

A while back, my son introduced me to one of the most insane animes I've ever seen, Kill La Kill. It moves with a hyper-kinetic aesthetic through the most ridiculous story of super-powered clothes, fashion design, and high school politics. It's one of the coolest things I've ever watched.

Bastard reminds me of this series. There is something huge and mad happening on just about every page, and the action doesn't slow down for very long before something else throws everything back into beyond high gear. Add to this a great love by creator Kazushi Hagiwara of old school heavy metal (the kingdom within which the series takes place is called "Metallicana," right next to the kingdom of Judas), and you've really got a very, very weird piece of comics. I remember being trepidatious when I first picked up the series (although they were only a dollar each at the local thrift shop), but there is something about it, the combination of really quite incredible art and self-aware mockery mixed with love, that just draws me to it.

The one thing that I will have to critique, and it's common to much manga or anime that I consume, is the fan service. The young lady on the cover, draped suggestively across the naked torso of Dark Schneider (a reincarnated evil wizard, and hero of the story, who can only be released from this prison [a fourteen year old boy] by the kiss of a pure virgin) is actually meant to be 15. I don't know if this is an acceptable age in Japan for there to be suggestive pictures of her in the comic, but it's not here, and it's uncomfortable. Though, perhaps, that's simply my puritanical societal upbringing - in some ways the reaction to something like this says as much about the reader as it does about the creator. As I've noted before with manga, it's virtually impossible for us to get the full story, or the full experience, if we're reading it in translation. And even if we weren't, there are so many culture-specific ideas that can't be translated from Japanese culture to Canadian culture that I'm sure I'm missing much of the subtext of the comic.

On the other hand, it might just be that Japanese culture reveres and sexualizes young women just as much as North American culture.

More to come...