The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1847: Ranma 1/2 part 5 #5, 1996

I had meant to mention something about the comic yesterday, but it shares this particular aspect with today's comic, so I'll address it today. The English translation of this issue was done by comics writer Gerard Jones. He's well-known for a run on Green Lantern in the 80s, and wrote a few books, not all of which were well-reviewed, on the history of comics.

He also, a few years back, was busted on child pornography charges.

I have this dilemma that I wrestle with on a frequent basis. Mostly it's with regard to H.P. Lovecraft, whose writing and creations I absolutely adore, but whose virulent racism is tough to take. (If you're not convinced, consider that so many of his stories are about white families who mix with non-white families and start to devolve.) I've come to the idea that with Lovecraft, recognizing that racism actually makes the stories even more horrific - he's achieving an effect in a way that I'm not sure he'd be completely okay with.

I don't know if I can do the same thing with Jones' work. This is definitely a series that is dealing with younger people and is playing with questions of gender, even if not in quite so deep a way as it might. But the underlying attitude that one inevitably will layer on Jones, that of sexual gratification with underage children, doesn't really add to the humorous intent of something like Ranma 1/2. Where we can take Lovecraft's attitude and actually use it to increase the intentional atmosphere of the stories, here the inflection of the intentional atmosphere (one of comedy) is detrimental, rather than in some ways helpful, to our enjoyment of the story.

That said, I have no fucking clue what was going on here. Way too deep into the story, way too little back story. Ranma turns into a girl, and then back into a boy, and then back into a girl, as people around them are consuming pills that make you fall in love with the first person of the opposite gender you see (systemic homophobia rears its ugly head!)

Back to Mr. Sable tomorrow. More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1846: The Return of Lum Part 4 #6, 1998

A couple days break from the intensity of Jon Sable, and this is about as different from Mr. Grell's series as I could possibly get. I've been slowly but surely discovering Rumiko Takahashi's work, though I definitely could jump right in given the proliferation and popularity of her Inu Yasha and Ranma 1/2. I'm preferring reading the less-well known series, especially her creepy Mermaid stories, so I can get an idea of what her writing is like without the pomp and circumstance of a popular comic. That said, coming in at what appears to be the very end of the Lum series of comics, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. There was a vampire, and a bat, and an alien lady in tiger print, and the ubiquitous hapless male lead who everyone loves for some reason, but who seems completely incapable of taking care of himself, or developing relationships.

Actually, something I'm finding about a lot of the manga and anime I'm consuming these days is that it's often the female-identifying characters who are the pursuers when it comes to romantic relationships, which is really very different from the primary motivating factors in a lot of North American media. I wonder why that is, given that the picture painted for us of the culture is one of demure women who don't pursue a man/partner. As I've noted in my other readings of Ms. Takahashi's work, my knowledge of the culture and the medium is very limited, so my readings really can only come from the comics to which I'm exposed. That said, my limited understanding aside, Ms. Takahashi's work is frickin' weird and I love it. She has a nice handle on taking similar weirdnesses (mostly supernatural ones) and applying very different atmospheres to them, so that the vampire in this comic is comedic relief, but the flesh-hungry characters in the Mermaid books are terrifying. All with very similar aesthetic choices with regard to the artwork.

More to follow.

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

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...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 720: Rumic World #2, 1990

You know what I like? A good, spooky manga. There's something gently terrifying about a well done Japanese ghost story, and today's comic is such a story. Apparently Rumiko Takahashi is best known for InuYasha, which I've heard of, but never read, but she's also known for her short story manga work. In the early 90s, Viz published two of her stories under the Rumic World title, though it appears to have not lasted very long. I read part of her longer creepy story Mermaid Saga a little while ago, and mentioned that it reminded me very much of MuShiShi, in that the ghosts and strangeness of the stories are accepted as being simply phenomena that happen, and that there are people whose job it is to handle such things. Even the more comedic Ghosttalker's Daydream graphic novels have this feel (though mixed in with a healthy dose of bondage and domination). It's an attitude toward the supernatural that we really only see in Western culture in our religions. Only there do we accept the spiritual as simply a fact of life. Ghosts and spirits, though, not so much.

I will be looking out for more of Ms. Takahashi's scary little stories. They really are excellent. And if you're interested, here's a link to the first part of an OVA that was made of this story.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 709: Mermaid's Dream #3, 1995

I think this is the first comic I've read from this quarter bin collection I picked up that has made me want to go and track down the rest of the series. It's got that lovely, dark sensibility that only the cute style of manga can achieve. It seems at once adorable and sinister, and puts me in mind of the fantastic Mushishi. The story appears to have to do with characters becoming immortal after eating a mermaid's heart. All I can picture in my head is a typical manga badass cleaving poor Ariel in twain and eating her liver. Which, all things considered, is a pretty comical image. Don't judge.

The artwork is stark, which nicely reflects the characters' internal landscapes. The immortals are trapped in a world that is at once familiar and foreign, and what we're obviously seeing is individuals coming to realize the ramifications of living forever. One imagines it would be lonely.

As I say, I'm intrigued by the series. This is the final issue of this particular adaptation, though the whole Mermaid Saga has been collected in traditional manga form. I may have to see about tracking it down. It also turns out that Ms. Takahashi is responsible for the very successful Inu Yasha, though I think Mermaid is slightly darker than that series. The art style is the same, however.

I feel like I just don't know enough about manga to give a decent reading of it. Is this good? Is it doing what manga does well, or doing what manga is capable of? It drew me in, even with relatively little dialogue or plot. In a purely aesthetic sense, it's quite spectacular. I guess I'll have to wait until I find the full story to say anything about the narrative. The hunt, as always, is on!

To be continued.