The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1626: Mai, The Psychic Girl #17, January 1988

I have this role-playing game called Feng Shui. From the ever creative mind of Robin D. Laws, it's a Hong Kong action movie RPG. In my limited knowledge of the genre, I think that means it's a little bit like Big Trouble in Little China. I really have no idea. But one of the gaps in my cultural lexicon.

But after today's issue, I realized that I have a parallel in Japanese comics. Though decidedly different media and nation, there's an over-the-topness to the violence, even though it still looks realistic sometimes, and a drama to the destructive powers that humans have harnessed. Hardly surprising from a nation that has better firsthand knowledge of those powers than most. But there's also the same over-the-topness afforded moments of drama or comedy. Like the writers, be they film or manga artists, are interested in slowing down everything so that we can scrutinize each moment more clearly.

The second half of a car chase today, lots of explosions and crunching glass. I've decided that Kenmochi, one of the "henchfolk," as Olaf so plainly put it, is one of my favourite characters. He's morally ambiguous in his employment for Mr. Kaieda, but the dude stops at nothing to get the mission done, and seems to have a heart. The development of the characters through this very bizarre narrative has been handled subtly, but well.

And though I may have cause to say or think it again over the next couple of weeks, Turm Garten is a stone cold psychopath.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1625: Mai, The Psychic Girl #16, January 1988

Sorry it's been a bit. Things have been heavy here.

I am absolutely loving this series. The art, the story, everything is just great. Turm Garten is a terrifying character. The attention to character development in the series is really great. Ostensible foe Kaieda is revealed as a multi-faceted individual, as are Mai, her dad, her protectors and friends, and even some of the henchfolk (just finished A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix. Henchfolk.). The immersion into the setting that this accomplishes is utterly brilliant, giving us the sense of a world that is far less black and white than the usual super-powered narratives of North American comics. Though Turm is evil as fuck, no two ways about it.

I was mentioning to Tara the other day the amazing amount of visual background detail in the series, as compared to the relatively-stylized depictions of the characters. McCloud's iconic abstraction, and other theorizations of that, hold up here. We identify with a detailed and realistic setting, since that's literally what we live in. And although the characters are all visually distinct, they're not drawn photorealistically like the backgrounds, so we are more able to layer ourselves over top of them.

I find myself in a situation that has happened a couple of times during the project where I'll finish reading an issue and I know I have the whole series in the collection, so I just want to devour it because it's so compelling. The fact that I haven't is really a testament to my newfound powers of patience. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. But if you want to read an excellent tale of psychic young women and the men who fool themselves into thinking they have control, check out this story. Not sure if it's been collected, but it was pretty easy, and cheap, to find all 28 issues.

"If you obey me, we will surely become good friends!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1617: Mai, The Psychic Girl #8, September 1987

I'm starting to see why numerous directors have thought about bringing this story to a movie screen. It's not your run-of-the-mill kid with superpowers story. Mai makes some huge mistakes, and suffers some very real tragedy, all in the space of a few days. There's a wonderful sense of the deep history of the government's use of psychics, even if we haven't been told virtually any of it. There's some expert world-building, on par with John Wick, that is going on here. The hyper-kinetic style of the series would also lend itself to condensing these 28 issues into a 2-hour film. I think it would get going and then just never let you settle down, much like the latest Mad Max film. 2 straight hours of adrenaline.

Though for me it's going to be 28 20-minute increments of adrenaline. Which I think it probably better for me in the long run.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1611: Mai, The Psychic Girl #2, June 1987

I feel like I missed something. All of a sudden Mai and her Dad are on the run from The Wisdom Alliance, whose name I don't recall from the first issue, but it's in the "The Story Up to Now" section, so I guess I'll just go with it. I find that, sometimes, this is a problem in manga - it's a problem in translation in general, really. You're just not always going to get all of the information because some of it is simply culturally bound.

Not a bad issue, though the thing about manga is that there's not always a lot of action in each chapter. Mai hangs out in hiding while her father does some...stuff. There's a beautiful sequence in which Mai uses her powers to manipulate cherry blossom petals, and it's something I would absolutely love to see as live action. A quick check shows that such people as Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola have been interested in adapting the story, but nothing has managed to get off the ground.

We do get to meet some interesting antagonists in this issue, and Mai's father is revealed to be some kind of amazing martial arts expert. I'm sure it'll all be explained. Maybe.

"I haven't talked to you since those weirdos followed us from school yesterday."

Other Things You Might Like Reading

More manga reviewed in the 40 Years project: https://giantboxofcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/manga

Comics from places other than North America: https://giantboxofcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/non-North%20American%20comics

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1610: Mai, The Psychic Girl #1, May 1987

I grabbed up a large portion of this series for about 6 cents each last year, and managed to track down the balance of it not too long afterward. So it's time to actually read it and see if it was worth the few bucks it cost me. Spoiler alert: it definitely was.

Mai, along with the concurrently published Area 88, was one of the first manga series to be presented to North American audiences, albeit adapted to a format comics readers were used to. It would take a few more years before the right-to-left tankoban became the format of choice. When I picked it up to read, I wasn't sure what to expect, though given my experience with manga and anime, I should have known. Mai reads like many manga I've read, and many anime I've watched, in that it blends, not quite seamlessly, a serious conspiratorial story with light, slice-of-life vignettes. Mai, who appears to know she's got psychic powers, is also simply a 14-year old girl, who worries about what her friends think of her, about boys, and about school. She uses her powers to play silly pranks (like stopping a baseball as it flies toward home plate), but the darker aspects of the story reveal that she is actually one of the most powerful psychics on the planet. I don't think she knows that yet, though.

The art is gorgeous, as is much manga art. There's something to the simplicity of the characters and the complexity of the world they inhabit that is just beautiful. It's rare that I find manga art that I don't find immediately aesthetically gratifying. As for the story, it's been set-up so far. I'm sure once the dark and the light start to mix, we'll have a pretty satisfying action story. But I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.

"Why am I having this nightmare? It's sooo bizarre, so strange."

Other Things You Might Like Reading

A totally mad fantasy manga from Viz: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1252: Bastard #1, 2001

Fantastic Golden Age reprints from Eclipse: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1304: Mr. Monster's Super-Duper Special #5, January 1987