gottsuiiyan at The Eastern Edge bought the new issue of Switch Magazine, and it’s got a feature on the new One Piece movie, Strong World. One Piece is basically the best adventure comic, so I’m looking forward to Strong World. Especially if it has stuff like this:
That mooseasaurus rex in the link looks great, too. Good to see that Oda’s Nami is still 2/3 legs, too.
Heidi MacDonald has the details on a new survey for comics readers, masterminded by Megan Milliken. A bit of cut-n-paste:
I am a University of Chicago graduate student conducting research on comic book readership. I’m interested in demographic trends of comic book readers as well as the medium’s effect on readers’ consumption of other cultural goods and participation in civic activities. I’m motivated to do this research first and foremost because I am an avid comic book fan who has derived a great deal of pleasure and inspiration from both the content itself and the community. I’m interested in how comic books have impacted readers and hope to see what it is about a comic book that keeps a reader coming back month after month. That said I have two surveys (the first is for under 18 respondents, and the other is for respondents that are 18 and over) that I have assembled. It is intended for comic book readers as well as non-comic book readers as I would like to compare responses between these two groups (so please pass it along to the norms as well).
If you’re 18 and over, click here. If you’re not 18, learn to speak when spoken to and click this one. There’s nothing NSFW in the 18+ one– I took it and it had questions about salary and education. I assume the 18 and under one asks about toys or Justin Timberlake or whatever.
One major minor quibble: manga’s been around in the US since the ’80s, at this point. There have been several fairly high profile releases. One of the best comics out in the US this year is from Japan.
Can we stop pretending that manga is a genre? Over the past six months, I’ve bought 1800 pages of historical fiction manga (Vagabond), 600 pages of science fiction manga (20th Century Boys), and 400 pages of slice of life manga (Yotsuba&!). The only thing those books have in common is country of origin and format.
Manga = comics, I don’t know how to put it plainer than that. The differences between Japanese manga and American comics, at this point, are semantic at best.
Manga = comics. Treat it like that.
Tekken 6 came out on PS3 and 360 a while back (and is forty-four bucks on Amazon right now and totally worth the purchase
(It’s like playing with dolls, only they fight.)
The thing with Tekken, though, is that its story is dumb. It has a space alien/ancient Japanese ninja who looks like a bug, a bear who takes over a corporation, a kangaroo that gets divorced and that kangaroo’s son who goes on a quest to find his deadbeat father, and a series of people being thrown into volcanos, off cliffs, and into space so that someone else can become president of Mishima Corp. Everything is treated as having happened, including the dumbest “I had a secret twin all along!” twist I’ve seen in my entire life.
It would work very well as a comic, and luckily, Japan is on top of things. Ultra Jump, a spinoff of Shonen Jump, has an online arm called Ultra Jump Egg. And on Ultra Jump Egg is… TekkenComic, a Tekken manga by Rui Takato (author of Scape-God, summaries available here), produced for Tekken’s 15th anniversary and Ultra Jump’s 20th.
The twist is that it’s also available in English, which is new and neat. Pressing a button overlays English text over the Japanese balloons. It’s a little punctuation starved, save for… ellipses, and the font could scale better, but it reads pretty well. And it’s funny. It opens on the story of Paul Phoenix, who, along with Steve Fox and Marshall Law, have entered the King of Iron Fist Tournament to cheat their way to the ten million yen.
The comic has three chapters up (of three?) and it’s pretty entertaining. The shower scene is kind of gratuitous, and I hadn’t realized exactly how much of a stereotypical anime girl Asuka Kazama was before now (all she needs is a magically appearing hammer). Despite that, Lili as Schoolgirl Imperialist really, really works. And I dug Leo’s brief interlude, too. Considering the last page of Battle 03, if this is an ongoing thing (and some 4l! reader with Japanese language skills please let me know!) I’ll tune in once a week. It’s just as delightfully dumb as the game’s story, which may well be the anti-pull quote of all anti-pull quotes, but I like it. Maybe Viz will license it and put it out over here?
Fair warning, though. Battle 03 is basically frilly panty heaven. Or maybe hell, depending on who you are and where you work.
-Wait, who is that? Who let Gavin on the podcast? Did he hack my computer?
-Theme music: 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-I Made Esther Read: Street Angel, by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca. Check out this clip.
-Deadpool. What’s the deal with that guy? And Agent X, remember that?
And of course, there’s bad news– the Fourcast! is on hiatus for at least a month and change. Unavoidable technical issues, time, unrelated stress, blah blah blah– we’ll be back at some point in January, most likely. Call it a holiday, and call it a comeback in a month or so.
Subscribe to the Fourcast! via:
–Podcast Alley feed!
–RSS feed via Feedburner
–iTunes Store
-Colleen AF Venable at First Second/:01 is amazing. She’s got another design post up on their blog, and it’s a great read. Is there another company-sponsored blog as good as :01’s? I don’t think so.
-Graeme McMillan, the man behind the man behind the man of comics writing, wrote the best post on colored folks in comics in ages, and I’m including ones that I’ve written in that number. It’s very good.
And how did Rhodey get his start as a superhero again? Oh, that’s right; he replaced Tony as Iron Man. Just like John Stewart got his start replacing Hal Jordan as Green Lantern. And John Henry Irons, replacing Superman back when he died. Oh, and don’t forget Monica Rambeau, Marvel’s second Captain Marvel. Or, hell, the Justice Society of America’s Mr. Terrific or Johnny/JJ Thunder, the Legion of Superheroes’ Computo and Invisible Kid, DC’s Mister Miracle (and, for that matter, Manhattan Guardian) or even The Spectre (And, again, who can forget Black Goliath, who replaced Hank Pym’s original White Goliath – except, of course, the “White” was silent in his name).
Graeme pokes at Rhodey’s history and finds something interesting at work, and ends up saying a lot about what it means to be black in comics. It’s absolutely worth a read or two, and it’s something to keep in mind when looking at black characters in comics.
I hadn’t even realized how few black characters were not “fight the power” types. Storm isn’t, but that’s because she’s completely divorced from any semblance of blackness. Just Bishop and Icon? And Bishop is borderline because of how he was placed at odds with the X-Men. It’s just the “Angry Black Man” stereotype poured into a new bottle.
The post’s excellent, go read it.
Tucker Stone, the hands down nicest guy in comics, takes on last month’s books in Advanced Common Sense Episode 6 on comiXology. Click through to see what he has to say, or just press play below. Who knew last month was so awesome?
Real life buddy Sonia Harris wrote a piece on ten implausible things in comics that I really dug. A sample:
Why can’t you see her food, when she’s just eaten, before it’s digested?
This has always confounded me. As far as I remember, in the Invisible Man, you could see his food, until it was absorbed by his body. That seems logical to me. However, no one talks about Susan Storm’s food, or being able to see it.
Two things surprised me about Keitaro Takahashi’s Jormungand 1 after I finished it. The first was just how much I enjoyed reading it. The second was the fact that Kate Dacey (review on MangaCritic) and Danielle Leigh (review on CSBG) didn’t like it. I usually agree with their reviews, and if I disagree with one writer, then I agree with the other. To have both of them dislike something I dug feels weird.
Regardless! I don’t think I can explain why I like Jormungand without explaining my experience with Black Lagoon. I’d had Black Lagoon recommended to me by several people who thought I’d dig it. It hit a lot of my interests, but never clicked. The script was a little too Tarantino, the dialogue a little too consciously gritty and vulgar, and the action a little too Matrix. Revy’s portrayal felt overbearing. Guns akimbo, booty shorts, bad attitude, and tragic past do not a compelling character make. I think I quit the series seven or eight episodes before the end, just due to being tired of the entire affair.
Jormungand, though, hits the spot in a way Black Lagoon didn’t, but should have. I think that the secret is in its approach. Where Black Lagoon reveled in its excess, Jormungand manages to tone it down a little, but still be fun. Koko Hetmatyr, the leader of an arms-dealing firm, is (and I’m being 100% serious here) a blend of Misato Katsuragi from Evangelion, Sailor Moon, and Sir Integras Hellsing poured into the mold of an arms dealer. Excitable, and seemingly immature, but very, very good at her job. Kate describes her as “garrulous and profane,” and that’s on the money. Rivals underestimate her because she just seems like a young girl in over her head. And then the rivals get shot in the face, because whoops, she knows exactly what she’s doing, and she’s better at it than they are.
Koko’s newest hire is Jonah, a very young kid and experienced child soldier. Takahashi dances in and out of the real tragedy of being a child soldier, picking and choosing what can make a solid story. Jonah doesn’t sleep in a bed. He sleeps in a corner, wrapped up in a blanket, and with a gun in his hand. He’s quiet and withdrawn, almost sullen, and rarely asks questions.
At the same time, he’s very good at his job. He carefully watches possible enemies, delivers that info to his team, and isn’t afraid of pulling the trigger with a detached facial expression. He hates weapons, due to his parents being killed in a war, but he’s good at using them and joins Koko’s company of his own volition. There’s something bubbling in the background there, like Jonah is looking for the people directly responsible for killing his parents, or revenge, or something. There are a couple of brief interludes that seem to suggest as much.
The rest of the team are a motley crew. There’s the old guy who is probably a little washed up, but thinks higher of himself than he really deserves. There’s the girl with an eyepatch and a crush on Koko, who is apparently the best of the best. Think Sakaki from Azumanga Daioh with a knife and one eye. The rest of the cast is a little undefined, but undefined in a way that makes me assume they’ll be fleshed out in the future. They behave like a family, rather than a company, with gentle ribbing, bad cooking, and ridiculous jokes (“A mummy!”) being the order of the day.
The art does one thing I don’t know that I’ve seen in a book before, but really enjoyed. When time passes, the last panel on the page before the change or the first page after has a portion of it cut out and shadowed, kind of like a fade-in/fade-out effect. It isn’t 100% successful, but it is an interesting way to show the passage of time. The art is enjoyable, though it waffles between mostly realistic and anime/manga cliche exaggeration a little too often for my tastes.
Takahashi gets the hardware right, though. There’s a great shot of anti-air equipment, the guns look great, and the BDUs are believable, but still cool looking. The combat only gets overly flashy a couple of times, but when it gets down to brass tacks, it’s very straightforward. And hey, people practice trigger discipline, which is always nice to see in books. Takahashi did his homework. Not quite to the extent that Kenichi Sonoda did with Gunsmith Cats, but close enough for government work.
I liked Jormungand 1. I can see why Kate and Danielle didn’t, but something about it just worked for me. It feels a little like Gunsmith Cats with the gun fetish and light humor, which I am 2009% okay with. The casual approach to violence (the full page dedicated to Jonah using a handgun in the second chapter, the knife fight in the woods for seriously no good reason [as acknowledged by the fighters]) is something that’s morally reprehensible but, pretty entertaining. If the quality of the plotting and characterization picks up, this could be something very cool. As-is, it’s a shallow romp, but a fun one.
Sometimes, knowing a creator’s work means realizing partway through a book that yes, this guy is seriously going to take everything he’s good at, put it down onto the page, and throw it right into your face. I was a couple of chapters into Naoki Urasawa’s sixth volume of Pluto when I realized that that was exactly what was happening.
Urasawa’s proven himself to be a master of tense, emotional confrontation, believable conversation, and careful pacing. What he isn’t as known for is high impact action scenes, but Pluto 6 manages to put that notion to bed.
The first third or so of Pluto 6 follows a formula similar to the earlier volumes. Gesicht is investigating and talking to people, there are brief asides where small robots break your heart into pieces with an equal mix of adorableness and poverty, a mysterious teddy bear does something frightening, and secrets are slowly passed out.
The difference here is that the secrets are passed out like candy. We find out exactly what Pluto is and where it came from. We find out why Gesicht killed a man. We find out what it looks like when a robot is consumed with hate. We learn just how deep certain characters are, and we get to see true grief in the face of more than one person. We learn the meaning of “500 zeus a body” and it’s the saddest thing.
We also finally get to see Gesicht in hard action. I’m talking wall running, hand turning into a laser gun, fighting a giant monster, dashing through the exploded remains of your enemy action. And Urasawa pulls it off just as masterfully as everything else. It’s horribly violent and utterly tragic all at once, as Gesicht is forced to fight something that either doesn’t know any better or isn’t interested in knowing better, because the truth is too awful to bear.
Pluto 6 is paced in a way that it all feels very inevitable. Inexorable. The first scene in the book is an uneasy conversation between Gesicht and a scientist from Persia. It sets the tone. Where Gesicht was once on top of things and ahead of the investigation, he’s apparently slipped a step. He finds out something surprising at the end of the first chapter, and the hits keep coming from there on out.
Tragedy is the fuel that makes Pluto go. By the end of the volume, we realize that Gesicht, our hero and point of view, has been lied to, betrayed, misled, and hindered by forces beyond his control. All of this despite being a more powerful being than most of the populace. He has to consult a murderous robot to even find a semblance of truth. He’s a good man in a world that doesn’t deserve him.
Pluto is that book where a conversation is just as tense as two robots fighting, and the last eight pages just raise the bar. Two people, one a robot, the other a human, embrace on the border of the past and the future. They open up in a traditional Japanese garden outside of a hotel, as a high-tech city looms menacingly in the background.
Pluto 6 is the best yet. There’s really no other way to put it. It’s everything that’s made Pluto the best series of the year, but simply done better than before. That’s impressive.
Matthew Brady has a good review of this volume. He includes some scans and it’s good reading.
You should be buying this comic. Blah blah blah, I don’t read manga, it’s backwards, it’s black and white, whatever- shut up. It’s the best. You’re doing yourself a disservice by missing out.
There may be a few audio hitches in this one. I tried to even it out, but some of them were unavoidable. Recording problems blah blah blah, it should be fixed for the show after the next.
-Intro drop: Jamaal Thomas of Funnybook Babylon. And he does like comics. He liked Luke Cage Noir, the recently ended Marvel miniseries set in Harlem.
-Theme music: 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-The Shield: I was surprised I liked it, and try to get across a little of why I did.
-Batman & Doc Savage Special #1: I was surprised I didn’t like it, Esther was surprised that Batman grabbed a boob, and we gab about it for a bit.
-CEOutro
Some visual aides, words by Azzarello, art by Noto:
Subscribe to the Fourcast! via:
–Podcast Alley feed!
–RSS feed via Feedburner
–iTunes Store
