Shigeru Mizuki's Spirit Manga Exhibition

 I recently had to fortune to visit an exhibition looking at the career of Shigeru Mizuki. A fantastic exhibit. Click through to read.

Shigeru Mizuki Spirits Manga Exhibition

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.

I Really Should Read This 22: Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

Ping Pong Volume One, by Taiyo Matsumoto

1996, English Edition 2020

I consider myself a fan of Taiyo Matsumoto's work, that I've read in English. I have Tekkonkinkreet, Sunny, and Cats of the Louvre. I'm not always taken by the story of these books, but I love the atmosphere and emotion of it. His work has an alien quality that I need to appreciate in a different way from conventional comics or manga. 

The cover of the book isn't very good; this is a better taste of the book

But I was hesitant to get Ping Pong. It's older work of his, done in the sports genre, which was made into a movie and into anime. Without reading it, I just assumed it was more conventional manga made before he became THE Taiyo Matsumoto. And maybe it is more conventional in some ways, but I loved reading every page of this book.

Ping Pong Vol. One 

I'm no judge of the genre of sports manga. As someone who has never watched or played sports, my main experience of them is their use in movies and TV. I was worried about what I would latch onto when I couldn't care who won a match. Ping Pong doesn't seem to care that much about it either. Certainly, it features table tennis matches, but when the tournament comes up, it skips a lot of them too. It puts more focus on the first round of matches than on the final.

Instead, the book focuses on the egos of the players involved. How they feel about winning and why is more important than the games themselves. The book covers the table tennis teams between high schools in a smaller city in Japan, and many players have relationships stretching beyond their extra-curricular team. Only one player, a Chinese transfer student Wenge, is disconnected, but even he has a connection of sorts in that he relies on being better than the Japanese to sustain his ego. Every kid in the tournament calls him "China" to exacerbate that status.

That line on the ball as it impacts against the paddle is exquisite

Matsumoto is a poetic artist. Where a lot of manga is mechanically precise in its illustrations, Matsumoto has what I'd call an "artistic line." He lets the pages breathe. The only perfect lines seem to be in the ping pong balls themselves, which are smooth circles. He also practices extreme perspective throughout. Not Jack Kirby style, but I think Kirby would like what he does here.

The book is worth buying just for the scenery

And of course, he draws the hell out of the table tennis matches. It helps that Matsumoto isn't an artist intent of copying his own work and repeating faces and scenes. Every picture seems new, no matter how repetitive the content is. The art breathes, there doesn't seem to be a better word to express it.

The little nibs on the paddle create a texture on his finger. There's so much love in every image

In the writing too, there is poetry. I don't want to belabor it too much because it may not stand up to deep analysis, but Matsumoto works in ideas that color the overall work. The main two characters are Hoshino and Tsukimoto. Hoshino goes by the nickname of Peco, which is Japanese slang for hungry (ペコペコ). He is an aggressive player and wants to be the best, but he's just as happy goofing off. Tsukimoto goes by the ironic nickname Smile, because he never smiles. He is the best player, but has no hunger to win. He seems to play to be closer to his friend Peco. At the same time, the kanji for their names use 星 and 月, star/hoshi and moon/tsuki. Those are not uncommon last names in Japan, but it seemed too cute to be coincidence. As I read, I saw star and moon motifs used in the book, including a pattern in inner cover, so yeah, they are a hungry star and the unsmiling moon.

And I love how Matsumoto gives players gestures. Smile is constantly pushing his glasses up. It's a choice to have him adjusting himself. 

There are probably 100 pictures of him doing this in the book. Note the moon on his shirt

The closest thing to an antagonist in the book are the students at the Kaio/Neptune school, and their star players, Demon and Dragon, but they are students who want to win more than real villain characters. 

Again, I don't want to belabor the metaphor too much, because these are all human characters. Perhaps Matsumoto uses these grand ideas (star/moon/Neptune/China) to root his characters before he gets to work fleshing them out 

Peco gets a little fat

This is the first half of the complete series (and I love manga like this that clocks in at 1000 pages). I don't know what resolution will come of it. In the first half, no real problem has arisen. Smile is the best player, but has little ambition to win. Maybe he will want to win, but I suspect not.

My favorite part in the whole book is a coach speaking to a student who has lost and will no longer be able to compete in high school table tennis tournaments. The player tells the coach he feels like a pathetic loser. The coach laughs, and tells him as a friend, not a coach, "you're life's just started. You've just arrived at the starting line." For all the emotion these players are putting into this game, it'll end up only being a footnote in their lives.

I Really Should Read This 15: Berserk, Deluxe Edition volume 6, by Kentaro Miura

Berserk, Deluxe Edition volume 6, by Kentaro Miura

collecting work from the late 1990's, published in 2020

Berserk is one of the more popular manga out there. There are 40 published volumes in Japan, video games, anime shows and movies. For me, that's usually a sign I can just stay away. I've sampled popular manga like ONE PIECE and Attack on Titan, and not been very impressed. So I can't say exactly why I tried out Berserk. I saw images from one or two pages somewhere last year and decided it looked crazy enough that I would at least give it a try. It's good, but somewhere along the way while reading, I started to realize it might just be Great Art.

I'm going to take that sticker off

Berserk is the story of Guts, the toughest man in the world, who carries a two meter sword, and has been branded with a mark that attracts evil demons. He is accompanied by a pixie-ish elf, and they travel the land, generally going nowhere in particular. 

Volume 6 of the Deluxe Editions put out by Dark Horse collects volumes 16-18 of the regular collections. It starts mid-story from where 15 cut off. No effort seems to be made in collecting complete story arcs in these books. Each volume collects about ten chapters, and an arc could be six or sixteen chapters. Normally, this would frustrate me, and while I don't want to say it works for Berserk, I find the stories to be beside the point. I've read a 3,000 pages of this stuff now, and can barely remember how any plot ends. But I have vivid recollections of images and occurrences. So volume 6 starts mid battle with an elf butterfly that has been kidnapping children.

The sword often takes up a lot of the panel

I was thinking about what goes into making a compelling story. For example, a hero that has to overcome personal difficulties to achieve a goal. Berserk does not have this. It has an unhappy wanderer that makes mincemeat of anything that crosses his path. The difficulties may increase, but there is little doubt that Guts will cleave it in half. And there isn't a clear destination. There is an overarching bad guy in the book, but he's far removed from the center. The book operates much more like a video game than a traditional narrative, at least in terms of Guts' story. Guts walks into a new land, encounters new enemies, there will be a big bad he takes down, and then he'll move onto the next place. And that will be 500 to 1000 pages of story.

There is a McGuffin in the overarching story, the Behelit, an egg with face parts on it that can connect the real world to the demon world.

But it's all a framework for Miura to create insane imagery, rendered in a variety of techniques. Sometimes it's tight nib-drawn ink work, and sometimes brash brush work.

Miura shows all sorts of disturbing imagery

A common idea of modern storytelling is that the reader's imagination is more horrific than anything that could ever been shown (think the shark in Jaws), and Miura does the exact opposite of that. Miura intends to show you images that will haunt you.

They used to be dogs

It shouldn't work, but it does, and it works superbly because Miura (and likely a team of super-talented assistants) have to skills and imagination to pull it off. He's placing these characters in extreme situations, and because we can see how insane their experience is, we can better empathize with them.

This volume gets into the topic of religion, with a holy army overseeing a nation fallen into famine. As life gets worse, faith starts to evaporate, and like the medieval papacy, sometimes extreme means are used to keep people "believing." And it's one thing to show a torture device and then shut a door and hear screaming. Here, you see everything that is done with the device. In every single instance, Miura shows and tells, he doesn't imply or rely on the viewer's imagination.

Father Mozgus and his devoted Toruturers. The character design in this is good

A new character in this edition, the leader of the holy army Lady Farnese, tenaciously keeps her faith despite any doubt, and the story works hard to show how someone who believes they are working on God's behalf could do horrific things. It's an astute portrayal, and while I wouldn't want to call it sympathetic, it's at least giving the character an inner life.

How not to feel guilt for torturing others

The book doesn't shy away from sex or violence, and graphically shows it. It's crucial to give the story weight. I don't take issue with sex or violence in other books, but often it's used to excite readers without actually adding to the book. Here, it's the point. This volume and the last two had rape scenarios come up, something often used poorly by writers. In Berserk, each character has very different reactions and and there are lasting ramifications. As well, the character Guts himself was raped in an early issue and has lasting trauma from it making him process rape and sex differently. I can't go so far as to say it's well-handled, I don't feel qualified to, but Miura does not treat rape as a problem to be solved with revenge and a quip. 

There is a subplot with a demon worshipping orgy

All in all, the series goes in depth to places like nothing I've ever read. There's been horror and fantasy works out there before, but possibly not of this graphic complexity. It's hard to fathom he's done 8,000 pages of this so far. 

The dark world

It would be simple to just dismiss Berserk as a juvenile work of titillation.  On that level, it certainly works, it has violence and sex. But I think there's something a lot more to it, more in line with Hieronymus Bosch, where he's digging into extremes of human emotion and horror. This is an artistic exploration of human nature and society, draped onto a tough guy with a two meter sword.

I'm going to keep on with this, and read volume 7. Dark Horse may plan to eventually publish every one, but they'll be up to 7 this month and have announced up to 9, which will be 27 of the Japanese tankoban collections. I can't believe that this will end with any sort of satisfying resolution though. The story just keeps winding in and out of places and themes. That's alright. This book is like a jazz jam, bringing things up then bringing them down. I don't really want an ending.

I Really Should Read This 8: Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Edition 1, by Yukito Kishiro

1990's, deluxe edition 2017

I've lived in Japan 18 years, and I love comics, but I've had a pretty small appetite for manga in that time. In 2020, I tried to remedy that with deep dives into Kentaro Miura's Berserk and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. After finishing Akira, I told a friend I was going to get Ghost in the Shell next, and he suggested Battle Angel Alita.

This book collects the first two Alita books in an oversized hardcover package. It's a good looking collection with strong production values.

I bought it, and left it up on the shelf for months. I didn't really want to read it. On the outside, it seems a natural companion to Ghost: sexy robo-woman with a gun, a futuristic sci-fi setting, and coincidentally both had big budget Hollywood flops within a few years of each other. I'm just wary of sexy lead characters in books made by guys these days. I read a lot of that stuff in the late 80s to early 90s.

I read Ghost a few months ago, and while I could appreciate it, it felt like a book that I had to be reading at the time to really get its impact. It's visually incredible, but the complicated story is buttressed by an excess of footnotes and jargon. It's a dense book told in a single volume (with later sequels) made up of short stories. Alita is really different in execution. The focus is much narrower: there's Alita, her savior Dr. Ido, and a third character is introduced in the second book. And the story is manga paced, meaning there is relatively little story in its 400 pages. Fights can last 100 pages. At the end of the collection, the characters have been fairly clearly established, but not a whole lot has happened.

What year is this?

What's good in here? The art is exceptional. It's tight and clear, but you can see the human hand involved in most of the art. It doesn't suffer from the mechanical lines of manga that often turn me off.

My favorite thing in the book is the rendering of her leather suit. It looks like it was done with Sharpies 

While there isn't much of a story, it's interesting nonetheless. Akira and Ghost are established to take place on a future Earth, but Alita is much closer to a fantasy world. Probably it is future Earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, and it isn't relevant to the story as of yet.  They live in a dark, industrial place called the shipyard, with a massive floating city, Zalem, above them. They never go there, and people talk about how nobody goes there, and that is something I want to see. If I read more, that's the hook for me: I want to see what life on Zalem is like. Kishiro builds up the world really well as it is so that Zalem is a mystery.

There's a lot of this

There's nothing about it that is bad, but some of it is merely perfunctory. Most of the first book is a long fight scene with a super cyborg, and calling it a story would be generous. The character Yugo introduced in the second book would have had more narrative weight if he'd appeared in the first book. All the arcs are pretty standard tropes of sci-fi/fantasy. But, it was an enjoyable read.

Ultimately, this story does what it's aiming to do really well, and lays just enough groundwork to make me interested in the larger world. My worries about the sexiness of it were pretty unfounded. Alita is attractive, but this isn't a cheesecake comic.  I'm looking to pick up the second deluxe edition when I can.

Reading Through 2021 11: The Troublemakers, by Baron Yoshimoto

The Troublemakers, by Baron Yoshimoto. c.1970s, translated by Ryan Holmberg 

2018

This is part of Ryan Holmberg's attempt to dramatically increase the amount of Gekiga (mature manga) available in English. It seems to be the first translated work by Yoshimoto. Right off the Batman that's a stunning cover, and representative of Yoshimoto's work. Most of the stories are about sex or violence. The stories are mostly about Japan in the 60s and 70s, though one story is about WWII in Europe. Gangsters, strippers, gamblers, aimless lower class folk, upper class folk exploiting their money... Yoshimoto writes about tough times.

The art is a mystery to me. The art in the early stories is super-tight, in a way I don't care much for, but he does some pages with a loose Japanese brush, which are beautiful. 

The WWII story veers into full Tezuka-style cartooniness. The essay at the back shows some samples of his work over the decades, so I have no real handle on what Yoshimoto's style actually is. 

Was he someone following his muse as his style evolved, or was he adjusting his style to suit what he could get paid to make? I don't know yet, but he certainly made some stunning images.

It's the first time I've ever read Yoshimoto's work and I'm definitely interested in reading more.

I want to see a book done with this brush!