Reading Through 2021 97: Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

Asadora 1, by Naoki Urasawa and N Wood Studio

2019, English edition 2021

Some creators are just so polished and developed, that their work seems like a force of nature.

Urasawa is a fairly well-known creator in the West from series like 20th Century Boys, Monster, Pluto and others. He's prolific, and started a new series in 2018, Asadora. It's already five volumes in in Japan, and two with the English editions. What's this about? I have no idea, but book one reads like the tip of the iceberg. The book opens in 2020, with a beautiful scene of a kaiju attack. 

I wish there was more full-color manga than just the opening five pages

From there it goes to Showa era post-war Japan to focus on a latchkey young girl named Asa living in, I think, Nagoya. She quickly is given some character hooks: she is one of a dozen siblings and considers herself lost in the shuffle. Her siblings are said to have good names, but hers, Asa, is simply "morning," referring to when she was born. She is naturally a fast runner, and is taken with an English pop song she sometimes hears on the radio.

People confuse her for her siblings. Urasawa has a way of animating every character and keeping them perfectly on model

The last Urasawa book I read was Mujirushi, a story about a precocious young girl who never lets anything stop her, and almost immediately I was frustrated that this character is so similar, but Urasawa does it so damn well that notion falls to the wayside. This is a plot-based book, doused in character, so there is no time to dwell on what similarity one character has to another. 

Asa has a run in with a lowlife robbing a house, and instinctively calls for help. The burglar panics and ties her up, and already, stakes are established. 

The thief has a great character design; you know he's had a rough few years from his weathered face

But these are all people. Throughout the book, there are stock characters filling in minor roles, but any character that appears for more than a few pages becomes well-rounded. Asa has a later scene with the owner of a rice ball shop who similarly starts as a one-note character, but within a few pages begins to show her own nuances. 

The marvel of this book is that it is so successful in the main challenges of popular genre fiction: it has the vivid characters, it has the effective storytelling, and it has the stakes that matter to all characters. The themes are there too, about being who you want to be rather than what life might push you to be.

Halfway through volume one, an event occurs that sets up the second half of the book, organically allowing character development, and also laying the groundwork for the second volume and beyond.

A flashback reveals some of the loser burglar's back story, and an incredible transition of worthless race tickets falling into balloons rising

Urasawa has multiple characters that are distinguishable at a glance, all with animated expressions that can tell a story even without dialogue. What gets me about his art is that it is quite loose. I can see the hand in what he's drawn. These are not mechanical lines. Despite that, things have a consistency comparable to a Miyazaki movie. This is the hand of someone who's drawn countless hours.

The pacing of a scene like this is so perfect, it almost moves: panel one established the traffic jam, two introduces the little car, three shows the car in contrast to the trucks, and four shows it managing to do what the trucks can't

That's not to mention the storytelling itself. This is a comic, it is not a storyboard, but it would be very easy to see this adapted to animation. Scenes flow from panel to panel, and he often uses cuts within scenes to give scenes depth. Like many of the best comic artists, it's difficult not to read his work at a glance, though Western readers need to keep the reversed right to left movement in mind.

The eye of the storm

My reaction to a book like this is something like I might to a Disney movie where the immediate reaction might be, "Oh, another one of these." And given a few minutes with it, that morphs to "Yes, another masterfully produced story."  Urasawa is doing something a lot more idiosyncratic than Disney or the like though. I slowly started to read the book a chapter at a time, but by the fourth chapter, I just burned through the rest and ordered the next volume. It was that good.

It's so frustrating when you try so hard to do something, and someone else does better than you without any effort

And the thing is, the kaiju from the opening page of the story is not a factor in the rest of the book. That's a taste of what's to come. Future volumes are going forward in time, and on the cover of book five, Asa is a student. It's likely going to get to the year 2020 before it's done.

On sale now!

I've never read a manga with the story in progress, I'm excited to read this one. I liked it so much that I've decided to try to read the Japanese version and get ahead of the English editions.