I’m going to be completely honest for a minute here. My favorite genre isn’t crime. It’s “violence.” I like my violence stylish and casual. You can’t work that hard at it, unless you’re John McClane, and even he makes it look effortless. I’m talking about single bullet in the head, hard jerk, splash of blood on the sunglasses violence. We gotta kill every rat-bastard one of them violence. No-look pass violence, where the hand that holds the knife moves so quickly and smoothly it’s almost independent of the body. Fade to black, the tip of a cigarette goes bright orange, one gunshot, and that’s all she wrote violence. I’m talking about the fact that bullets cost about twenty cents a piece, so your life is much, much cheaper than you think it is.

My most recent fix for that is Keitaro Takahashi’s Jormungand. I’ve written about it before, but I think I spent a lot of time introducing it, rather than actually talking about it. Its premise is fairly simple, which is the weird part about the lengthy introduction I wrote. A child soldier who hates weapons joins an arms dealer and people die. That’s it. There’s subplots involving vain crushes and revenge and all, but that’s flavor.

The second volume ended with Jonah, the child soldier and theoretical focus of the series, going into a suicidal rage and attacking a man named Kasper, brother of his boss, Koko Hekmatyar. The first chapter of Jormungand volume 3 reveals why he hates him. Three months ago, in an unnamed country in West Asia, most likely Afghanistan, Jonah was sent to support a military unit. Present in the camp are a group of local orphans. Jonah befriends them and protects them. Halfway through that first chapter, a vile arms dealer takes two of the orphans and goes out looking for the US military ordnance that he was planning to turn into profit. When he accidentally triggers a landmine, he uses the body of Malka, a young girl, to shield himself. She dies. He doesn’t. Jonah has a very reasonable reaction.

“I can’t accept that Malka died and not that bastard. I’ll personally send him to hell.”

By the end of the chapter, every soldier in the base is dead and the the arms dealer has four new holes in his face.

Jormungand is primarily an action manga. Its primary focus is strictly on entertainment. Bullets are expended by the dozen, each member of the cast has their specialty (sniping, tech, knife fighting, alertness, a willingness to murder), there’s a hopeless romance, fanservice, goofy comedy, and a quirky/wacky character. With that said, it isn’t completely empty of meaningful content. Jormungand is about violence. It’s about the application of violence, its beauty, its ugliness, the way it twists and distorts people with its pressure. It’s about the necessity of violence.

After his… temper tantrum, Jonah becomes a bodyguard for Koko. He hates weapons, and the people who make and use them, due to the fact that his family was killed as a direct result of arms dealers prizing profit over basic human decency. Due to his situation, and his history, Jonah is sullen and withdrawn, and not at all eager to open up and soften his facade. Which, of course, means that people are eager to talk to him and they talk at him. The cast discusses weapons and violence with him a couple times in each volume. In volume two, Koko discusses the UN’s Millenium Development Goals with Jonah. She tells him that nearly two hundred countries pledged to raise twenty-two billion dollars to genuinely improve the world. She says, “But that figure was recently surpassed by the average annual amount of money spent on weapons in regional conflicts across the globe. Can you believe that? Clearly the world likes war a lot more than it likes little kids!”

She goes on to ask him who owns most of the guns in the world. Military? Police? Private militias? Terrorists? No. Civilians own sixty percent of all the guns in the world. Less than one percent are owned by radical militias. This PDF link to “Transition to Peace: Guns in Civilian Hands” suggests that her figures are accurate. Finally, Koko says, “It’s a world where it’s easier to find a gun… than to find kindness for a stranger.”

You know what I like in my action comics? Actual facts that are more depressing than anything in the world.

Violence and weapons, they’re like a genie that’s come out of its bottle. They are not going to go away. The best you can hope for is to minimize the damage. One thing that comes up again and again in Jormungand is what it takes to defend something. Koko is of the opinion that the guns, in and of themselves, hold no values. What matters is why you use them and what you believe in. Jonah is disgusted by weapons, period. They exist only to hurt and to kill. They took his family from him.

At the same time, the necessity of them drives a lot of his actions. He is in danger simply by existing, and especially due to who he associates with. He’s a bodyguard, and you can’t defend someone with pacifism. For Jonah, weapons are a necessary evil. He can’t escape them. He knows that he needs weapons to get the job done. Early in the first volume, Jonah and Koko have a one-sided conversation about killing arms dealers. “Can you really give up the gun?” Koko asks him. She answers for him, saying, “No, you can’t. You’ll never be able to walk away from weapons. You may hate them more than anyone… but you know better than most how powerful you are with a weapon in your hand.” Simply put: you can’t bring a knife to a gun fight, and every fight is a gun fight.

Lehm, the old thrill-seeking mercenary of the group, emphasizes the importance of a cool head. He tells Jonah that the violence they engage in is just business and that they do not get into feuds. Control is what separates the men from the boys. One kind of violence destroys both sides. With control, only one side goes down. When another man describes a gunfight as “symphony,” Lehm tells him that he’s wrong. A gunfight is “a farting contest. Something awful, ugly, messy, and most of all, shameful!” Lehm thinks that a gunfight should make you apologize, and, after killing a young woman, he does exactly that to a teammate. It was necessary to kill her to protect someone’s life, but Lehm regrets it regardless.

Valmet, the eyepatch-wearing knife-wielder, prizes efficiency and emotion over all else. She believes in doing just enough, and doing it for a good reason. She has a cartoonish crush on Koko, the kind that’s obvious to everyone but Koko, but it also means that she’s fiercely loyal. While she has a certain amount of flair, since this is an action comic after all, she’s very straightforward. No flourish, no tricks, just doing what needs to be done.

Mildo, a member of a rival group, considers Valmet the big man on campus and wants to make her rep by beating her. She provides a nice contrast to Valmet. She fights because, after a while, all of the violence and death makes you empty on the inside. You take up a gun to protect your family or fight for your country, but after a while, all of that just becomes a rationalization. Mildo does it because she wants to be the best.

I find Jormungand so interesting because there are all of these questions and motivations swirling around. Every character, including Jonah, acknowledges the fact that, at a certain point, violence is a necessary evil. Jonah knows that he can’t get justice without weapons. Koko has used her position as an arms dealer to gain a greater appreciation of the way the world works. Lehm is a mercenary because it’s exciting, but he knows how to control the more unpleasant aspects of it.

I don’t know if this is making any sense. I have this theory that the stuff people describe as mindless entertainment, or popcorn movies, or whatever–none of that is worthwhile. It’s the entertainment equivalent of treading water or ten cent ramen noodles. It’ll kill some time, and you won’t come out of it angry or anything, but it won’t make an impression, either. The stuff that people remember and talk about and genuinely enjoy tends to have something beyond lasers and cool fights. It’s got to have something for you to latch on to. Jormungand is an action comic with something to say. There’s a lot of action and several exciting gun battles, but between all of that are the conversations and arguments that give context to all of the violence. It’s kind of like having your cake and eating it, too.

I was sitting here thinking about what I wanted to go up on the site today and drawing a blank. I have several posts in progress, but none I really felt like finishing tonight. A couple need more research, another would require some scanning, and I’ve had a long day. I threw on the Akira blu-ray I picked up the other week and had been putting off watching.

I think it’s safe to say that Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira was the first anime I ever watched, barring translated stuff like Puss-n-Boots and a few other fairy tales. It had to have been ’90, or ’91. I know I was living at my grandparents’ house at the time, and my uncle picked it up from the local video store. It was Akira and Fist of the North Star, and then Ninja Scroll a few years later, that ran my anime world. (FotNS was important to a much lesser extent than the others–my grandmother walked in on a headbusting segment and I didn’t see the end of that movie for a couple years. By the time I got back to it, I’d discovered Ranma and probably Tenchi Muyo. The animation looked stupid by then.)

The opening sequence of Akira got me thinking. Frank Miller’s Sin City burned a love of crime stories into my brain. I think that Akira, a movie I definitely saw before I turned ten, ruined me for science fiction.

I’ve briefly mentioned my problems with a lot of sci-fi stories on here before. I’ve never been into the super sleek Star Trek stuff. It’s too clean, too boring. Star Wars came a little closer, but still tended toward the shiny. Too much sci-fi indulges in utopianism, or at least some kind of frontierism, and I think that’s where the break happens. I’m not enough of an optimist to believe in anything utopian, I guess. It all rings false. The future isn’t going to be shiny.

No, the future is Neo-Tokyo.

The city design in Akira, movie or manga, is fascinating. There are pipes that spiderweb around the city. Dirty alleys lurk around the corner. Glitzy neon signs litter slums. The city is confused, with a ton of brick and stonework next to jury-rigged pipes and metal. It hints at rapid, unchecked expansion. Otomo’s incredibly detailed artwork makes the buildings look real, or at least real enough. There is depth and weight to them, and when they begin falling, it’s like the end of the world. After the rise of the Great Tokyo Empire, you can look and see how the ruins came from a real city. The city makes sense, which is something that is vital in establishing a setting or mood.

The thing about Otomo’s future is that it isn’t the far-flung future. There is technology beyond our capabilities, and it is clearly not the present day. It’s tomorrow. And the thing about tomorrow is that it looks a lot like today. Today? It looks a lot like yesterday. We wear our clothes a little different, we talk a little funnier, but society doesn’t change that much. The visions of the future from the World’s Fair or science-fiction didn’t come true. Our cities don’t walk on wheels, our cars don’t fly, and we don’t eat pills for breakfast. Well, most of us don’t. Our buildings are taller. Our roads are the same. There’s just a different layer of dirt on everything.

That’s Akira. Neo-Tokyo isn’t ugly. It looks normal, but just a little different. There’s a certain beauty in its crowded, cluttered landscapes. There’s something to it that reminds me of Moebius’s work on Silver Surfer: Parable or Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled. They all show history through a weathered building or clusters of trash in the street.

What I like about it is that there’s been a clear progression from now to then. It looks like what the future might actually look like one day. It looks like Tomorrow Plus. A little dirty, a little dingy, but clearly the future. No utopia, no grand sense of exploration, and no sleek, sex toy-esque cars. The lasers are bulky and unwieldy. The backgrounds are dirty and old.

I think I like the future, but only when it looks like an older version of tomorrow. Akira works for me. Star Trek doesn’t. Maybe that’s Otomo’s fault.

Good villains deserve what they get. We look forward to it and revel in it when it finally happens. That’s why they commit crimes, make us afraid, or do terrible things. Sometimes this leads to situations where the accumulated crimes of the villain are too heinous to be settled by a punch in the face. When done properly, however, the fistfight on top of a burning building is just what’s needed to salve the wounds caused by a villain’s actions in a story. The villain catches a bad one, the hero gives with a quick one-liner, and fade to black.

It’s a tried and true formula. Someone does something bad, someone else punches that first person in the face, and we all feel better. In One Piece 16, subtitled “Carrying On His Will,” Eiichiro Oda switches up the formula a little. Wapol, the villain of the volume, was introduced in a scene that was more funny than threatening. He chewed up a bit of the Merry Go and was punched over the horizon for his folly.

Later, the Straw Hats show up on Drum Island looking for a doctor. Wapol shows up once again and attempts to reassert his control over the kingdom. He does some more buffoon-type things, in addition to beating up a former subordinate, and then moves along. He causes some more minor mayhem, but nothing overly serious, on the way to reclaiming his throne at Drum Kingdom’s castle. He eventually scales the sheer cliff face that sits below the castle, only to find Luffy, Nami, Sanji, and their two new allies, Dr. Kureha and Tony Tony Chopper, occupying it. He flips out.

The problem is that despite his antics thus far, he hasn’t quite managed to become a worthy villain. He’s an obstacle. He is, at best, on the level of a mid-boss, someone you beat up on your way to tackling the real bad guy. Wapol’s arrival is just a stepping stone to the point. He’s been completely undersold. There’s no “Oh no, Wapol!” or “Grrr, this guy!” at work. He’s just a funny fat guy with an eating disorder-based superpower.

Oda seems to recognize this, too. There’s no build-up or no big speech from Luffy. He just says “I’ve got a score to settle with you guys!” and whips his arm back for a Gum Gum Bullet. Quick, easy, to the point. Pop him once and we’re on to the next one.

Freeze frame, director. Wapol’s eyes are bugged out in surprise. Luffy’s fist is six inches away from impact. His muscles have gone tight from the strain. He got as far as “Bul-,” with the “-let” sitting somewhere in the future. The record scratches and we pick up six years in the past.

We see the story of how Tony Tony Chopper came to be. We meet Dr. Hiriluk, a quack doctor who does about the same amount of harm as he does good, in the service of a kingdom that is lacking in doctors. We see Dr. Hiriluk rescue and befriend Chopper, who is drawn considerably more round and fuzzy than he is later in the series, and we watch their relationship blossom over the course of the year. We meet Dr. Kureha back when she was a spry 133 years old.

And then there is Wapol, the spoiled prince who became king and immediately began squandering his father’s legacy. We get a proper introduction to Dalton, a warrior who doesn’t like where Drum Kingdom is headed. We see how Wapol ignores the politics and civility that are required of his station. In a remarkable coincidence, we see Wapol literally bump into a young Nefeltari Vivi, bruising her forehead, and watch her react with poise and sincerity. And then we see Wapol cause the death of Dr. Hiriluk and motivate Chopper to become the greatest doctor the world has ever seen.

The film skips and fades out on Wapol’s laughter. The camera fades back in eighty-eight pages and six years later. We’re looking from Wapol’s perspective and see Luffy’s fist swung back and a hard grimace on his face. The camera turns 180 degrees and focuses on Wapol’s face contorted in surprise. Wapol says, “Wha–!!?” Luffy says, “-let!!!!”

Impact. To be continued in volume 17.

Hey, Wapol of Tin, leader of the Tin Tyrant Pirates… you earned that.

Eiichiro Oda’s skill at pacing, building tension, and and creating believable characters puts many other creators to shame.

I talked about the shared storytelling techniques in Unforgiven and Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece last month. I was kinda bummed out, because the animated version of that chapter wasn’t online at the time, but Hulu recently put a whole bunch of episodes online, dubbed and subbed. So, re-read that essay and then come back here and watch this fantastic episode of One Piece.

I’d say that this is the main turning point in One Piece, the moment when you know whether or not you’ll like the series. I was interested way before, probably during the brief arc that introduced Zolo, but this here is where Oda’s style and planning start to pay off. Like every shonen manga ever, OP is about friendship and trying your hardest and being the best, but Oda’s use of screwball humor, clever pacing, and willingness to just let loose with the wackiest concepts and characters he can think of puts it a step above Dragon Ball Z or Naruto.

I do think that OP owes a lot to Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, at least in terms of humor. Dragon Ball Z wasn’t a super serious affair, but it was several orders of magnitude more serious than its frankly ridiculous predecessor. Oda took the nigh-constant humor of Dragon Ball and spruced it up a little, resulting in a series that is a mix of genuinely funny jokes (Luffy’s “Oh, a mystery _____” when confronted with fairly simple ideas never fails to slay me, as does Chopper’s child-like terror on Skypiea), emotional confrontations that aren’t overbearingly emotionally manipulative, and seriously rocking fights.

One Piece is hands-down the best adventure comic.

It’s not hard to see that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is going to end horribly for everyone involved. The book opens with pictures of fifteen characters, eight boys and six girls. They are the main characters of the book, the ones who will be piloting the giant robot against whatever threats care to invade Earth. Save for one younger girl, they’re all in the seventh grade.

The cast feels distressingly large. Not helping matters any is the way that the characters fade into a vague blur shortly after they each deliver personal introductions. We know their names, we know their ages, we know their relationship to each other (friends, with a sidebar for family), and that’s it. We’re instantly faced with a cast that means nothing to us.

Generally, large casts can mean a couple of different things. In the case of Lord of the Rings, a large cast is an opportunity for an author to tell several stories at once by splitting the cast into smaller, more manageable pieces. In Uncanny X-Men or Legion of Superheroes, a sprawling cast allows for serial storytelling that has a fresh, but regular, cast. In Bokurano: Ours, the cast is so large because basically all of these children are going to die.

The story should sound familiar to fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Fifteen young kids sign a contract to play a game with a giant robot. They soon find out that the robot is real, the threats are deadly, and the robot is powered by their lives. After the threat is defeated, a person’s life force is sapped and they fall down dead. Later, when another threat appears, another pilot is chosen and the process is repeated.

Bokurano: Ours feels like a counter-shonen comic. A lot of shonen comics, like American adventure comics, revolve around wish fulfillment. The scrawny nerd gets powers, the village idiot finds out that he’s the most important person of all, a fighter becomes the best in the world, and a dumb kid no one likes ends up being the only person who can save the world.
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I saw on twitter a minute ago that the trailer for the film adaptation of Inio Asano’s solanin came out. It’s all in Japanese, and I’m pretty sure it blows something that was supposed to be a surprise, but check it out:

The casting looks really good. Kato is dead on, and while Meiko is substantially less freckled than her comic counterpart, but she looks good. The bit with her and the knit cap– that’s cool, totally true to the book. Their circle of friends looks pretty good, too.

Doesn’t this look like the perfect 20-something movie? A bunch of attractive post-college kids working out their issues and forming a rock band. It looks universal, like people of any culture could get into it.

I reviewed solanin a while back and really enjoyed it.

A few days before I received my copy of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece: East Blue 1-2-3, Shueisha announced that One Piece volume 56 had a print run of 2.85 million copies, the largest first edition print run in manga history. A couple days after I finished reading its 600 pages, a chart detailing the best-selling manga in Japan by series for 2009 dropped, revealing that One Piece sold 14,721,241 copies over the course of the year. To put this in perspective, according to Brian Hibbs’s Bookscan analysis for 2008, the total units for comics sold in America last year was 15,541,769. The top 750 sold 8,334,276 total copies.

What I’m trying to say is, even before you factor in toys, movies, other media tie-ins, and video games (though if you don’t own a Wii, it’s been a while since one of those), One Piece is an industry of its own. It’s kinda like a big deal.

It’s not hard to see why. One Piece is the story of Monkey D. Luffy, a teenager who wants to be the King of the Pirates by finding Gold Roger’s lost treasure “One Piece.” Along the way, he collects a crew of interesting weird crewmates, battles incredible enemies, leaves a trail of broken bodies and new friends in his wake, and punches so far above his weight class it’s a wonder that he doesn’t simply get squashed by his betters.

Except this is shonen manga, and like every other shonen hero, Luffy has heart, magic powers, the power of true friendship, and about thirty gallons of blood in his body. His heart comes from his drive to become King of the Pirates and live up to the expectations of his mentor, Red-haired Shanks. His friendship comes from the mutual respect between all members of the crew, even when they quarrel. The blood is a genre trope, and the magic powers come from the time he eat the Gum Gum Fruit, which turned him into a rubber man.

Luffy is kind of like Reed Richards, if Reed was good at fighting, really really dumb, but focused enough to achieve anything he put his mind to. His rubber skills range from purely offensive (Gum Gum Gatling) to protective (Gum Gum Balloon) to ridiculous (Second Gear), but they are all visually entertaining.

Oda’s style is somewhere between Dragon Ball and Looney Tunes. The proportions vary from character to character (Nami’s impossibly long stick legs [she’s like 2/3 legs, seriously], Usopp’s nose having actual bones in it, Luffy’s rubber body, Buggy’s weird face), but they all manage to look good. It looks weird, but endearingly so. Several traits that I usually associate with American animation or cartooning mix with traditionally Japanese effects, resulting in situations where characters simultaneously bug their eyes out like Ren & Stimpy while sweat drops or anger clouds (for lack of a better phrase, the swirly anger stuff usually seen around yakuza/hooligans) flood the panel.

One Piece has some great fight scenes, in part due to the weirdness of the design and art. Characters have powers that are more than just “shoots lasers” or “ninjutsu.” One guy splits apart into floating pieces, another’s made out of sand, another uses three swords at a time (Santoryu: Three Sword Style means two in the hand, one in the mouth), and still another just has an ill iron jaw and an axe for a hand.

East Blue: 1-2-3 collects the first three volumes of the series for fifteen bucks or so and establishes everything that you need to know. The piracy tends toward the fun and melodramatic, but there’s a clear delineation between fun and “We will straight up kill you.” Luffy and friends stay on the fun side, of course, but some of their villains are genuinely villainous.

Over the course of the volume, we meet the first three members of Luffy’s crew, though the third doesn’t join just yet, get all of the introductory business out of the way, and meet a gang of villains, only a couple of which are recurring characters. You get to know the weird nature of the series through the lion tamer who has hair just like his pet Richie (it’s not a mask) and Luffy’s Amelia Bedelia-esque nature.

He’s very… credulous, if I can use that word like that. He’s not too far off from Yotsuba in that sense. When an enemy, when referring to one of Luffy’s friends, says, “Maybe I know… then again, maybe I don’t,” Luffy simply responds, “What are you talking about? Are you an idiot?”

Oda created a manga that’s both funny looking and funny. It switches from hardcore action to comedy to tear-filled drama at a moment’s notice, and it never feels like a jerk from one kind of writing to another. It’s always very smooth and well-earned.

One Piece is one of my favorite manga, and it’s definitely the one I’ve stuck with the longest and read the most of. I discovered it back when Shonen Jump first started, and though I’ve taken breaks off and on, it’s one I’ve kept up with over the years.

Oda’s painted a world that’s a great storytelling engine, with enough freedom to tell almost any kind of story. Just when you think you’re going to get yet another story about pirates vs pirates, you end up with a civil war or a trip to heaven or something equally ridiculous. (Both of those happened.) Or hey, you can get a madcap escape from an underwater jail with several floors of gimmicks. It’s fresh and interesting and it’s easy to see why it’s such a huge hit in Japan. It’s childlike in a way that adults and kids can both appreciate, not very deep, but immensely entertaining.

I’ve got to praise this new 3in1 format, too. It’s a masterstroke, making it easy for new readers to get into the series or long-time readers to have handsome new volumes on their shelves. If you get impatient, you can just pick up the series where the omnibus leaves off. East Blue covers the first twelve trades, so there are three more of these due over the next few months. I’m hoping that these sell well enough to justify the next arc, and the arc after that, catching 3in1 releases. I love these. I went ahead and preordered the next three (4-5-6, 7-8-9, and 10-11-12), because, at Amazon prices, these are basically three for the price of one at full retail.

That’s a steal.

solanin‘s strength is in the way it takes a rite of passage most of us have to go through and shows how it affects one young girl. Its melancholy tone reflects our feelings about the difference between dreams and reality, resulting in a very sad, but powerful, read. We map ourselves onto Meiko and relate to her struggle.

Viz sent over a review copy of Inio Asano’s collection of short stories, What a Wonderful World! 1, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it complemented solanin to an extraordinary degree. The first story made me wonder if it was going to tread over the same ground as solanin, with the slightly depressed post-college female lead, but it quickly took a hard left turn in a new direction.

What A Wonderful World! fits into solanin like a puzzle piece. It’s clear when you compare the capitalization of the books, even. solanin uses a time of trial to show how the harsh realities of life and lofty goals of dreams eventually intersect and even out. What A Wonderful World! takes people in bad situations and shows them just how beautiful life can be.

There’s a slight, but important, difference in the two approaches, and it’s one I appreciate very much. Each story has a person at a crossroads, or who has fallen from grace, and gives them a motivation to pick up the pieces. Sometimes it’s in the form of a crow, which is itself the embodiment of someone’s fear and self-loathing. At other times, it’s a man in a bear costume with a dark secret. And, once, it was a turtle who recognized that he was in a situation with a bleak future, so he did the only thing he could: changed.

What A Wonderful World! is not a subtle book. The exclamation point in the title is there for a reason. Characters repeatedly reiterate the message of the book, which is that life can be wonderful if you just reach out and grab hold, in very plain language. “There are times in life when we must go forward,” says one character. “Move on, despite everything. Even if I’m making a mistake, I won’t have regrets.” Clear as day, right?

The book is separated into nine chapters, called tracks in the table of contents. It immediately put me in mind of an album, which turned out to be very apt. If you’ve ever heard a record where each song leads into or relates to the next song, whether it’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves, you can appreciate the fact that the relationship between the songs makes the entire album better.

That’s true in What A Wonderful World! as well. Something connects the current story to the next one. Sometimes it’s as deep as a character who appears in one track gaining a bigger role in the next track. Other times, it’s a shared location, or a dragonfly flickering from one scene to another. This connective tissue makes the book into something greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of being isolated tales of people suddenly discovering how to be happy, you get the feeling of happiness going from story to story, spreading like, well, a disease. You know how they say that a smile is infectious? Like that.

I really liked reading What A Wonderful World! 1, and the first thing I did when I finished was hop on Amazon and order What A Wonderful World! 2. Both books come out on 10/20, next Tuesday. After solanin and What A Wonderful World! 1, Inio Asano is a must-buy for me. He’s a member of the Naoki Urasawa club. His work is engaging and uplifting in a way that I respect, and honestly don’t see often enough. He’s got a deft grasp of cartooning, pacing, and emotion, which gives his comics real weight.

Inio Asano’s Solanin is about a young girl stuck in that period of time where youthful dreams give way to cold reality. Meiko, the main character, is forced to confront that she may not grow up and get to be whatever she wants to be, and may have to take what she can get.

Meiko’s struggle and listlessness is very easy to relate to. Meiko is at a point in her life that I think most, if not all, of us go through. She’s graduated from college and is working a dead-end job that she doesn’t enjoy. She feels like her live-in boyfriend is freeloading, just a little, and while she’s not unhappy, she isn’t in a very good state of mind, either. She needs a change, but she doesn’t know which change or even how to figure that out. So, at the beginning of summer, she quits her job and decides to live off her savings for a while.

Her boyfriend and friends are similarly familiar. Her boyfriend is Naruo Taneda, and she simply calls Taneda most of the time. He’s accepted post-college life as something that’s endured. He goes to work at his freelance illustration job, accepts the crap hours, and deals with the crap pay.

Kato is a slacker, still fooling around in his sixth year of college. His girlfriend tolerates it, because she knows that adult life sucks. It’s boring and it’s long, so she might as well let him have his fun before she has to really crack the whip.

The word for Solanin is “melancholy.” Meiko’s thoughts are spelled out in a monologue over the course of most of the chapters, and she’s equal parts unsure and hopeful. When she finds something that can give her the get up and go that she needs, she embraces it, but even that isn’t enough, and she soon falls back into old habits.

The characters have embraced the idea of “it is what it is.” No one is particularly satisfied by their lot in life. Meiko struggles to find something to give life meaning, Taneda noodles around in his band, and Kato dreams about betraying his girlfriend. Rip, another of their friends, isn’t sure if he’s happy in his life, either, but he tries to make the best of it.

What’s interesting about Solanin is that since the majority of the cast is searching for ways to be happy, every smile is a worthwhile one. They take happiness where they can get it, whether it’s through dumb pranks or genuine breakthroughs. When Meiko watches Taneda and the band perform their new song, she smiles and says, “Yes. This is how it should be.”

Really, every emotion is earned. While there is one telegraphed and basically cliche twist partway through the book, the payoff for it is excellent. The scenes where the band performs are powerful and portrayed as raw emotion. The band’s rediscovering what they love, and through that, trying to find happiness.

Solanin is about coming to terms with real life. As kids, we are told and taught and assume that we’ll have these exciting lives where we own our own business, act in movies or plays, sing, write novels, or do something exciting for a living. In reality, though, most of us will spend our time working toward making someone else richer. Over the course of the book, Meiko learns that you have to take happiness where you can get it. A life of pure bliss doesn’t exist, it’s a child’s dream, and you have to grow out of a thirst for that before you can enjoy life as it should be.

There’s a powerful image toward the end of the book, of Meiko bent over, her head touching the ground. Nothing’s visible except for her figure collapsed on the ground. It’s one of my favorite images in the book, in part because of what it represents. She came to terms with what life is about and has finally decided what to do.

Solanin is very good. Maybe it’s because I’m around the same age as the cast of the book. I like to think that it’s because Solanin is very good in and of itself. It’s some 400 pages long, but I burned through it in a couple of sittings. I wish I’d read it last year when it came out. However, Asano has a couple more books coming out this month– What A Wonderful World! volumes one and two. I’m definitely going to check those out just because Solanin was so enjoyable.

Yotsuba&! 6 is very, very funny. Easily the best book in the series thus far, if only due to the way the stories end up snowballing into a larger tale. Yotsuba’s trek to Fuuka’s school did an amazing job of capturing just how awesome real life is, which is something Yotsuba&! already does very well.

You already know how much I like Yotsuba&! Rather than doing a recap and review of volume 6, I want to discuss something that makes me love it a little less.

My problem is with the translation. It’s not to my liking, to be honest, and pales in comparison to the ADV Translation. It’s not that it’s bad, exactly, but it is a little too faithful to the source material.

Part of the beauty of Yotsuba&! is that the source material is very, very strong. The relatively few cultural jokes have easy analogues, as in Miura visits the Ayase household dressed as a cardboard robot. In the ADV translation, she says that her name is Cardbo. That’s pretty easy, right? Cardbo->Cardbord->Cardboard robot. It makes sense.

In the Yen Press translation, Miura calls herself Danbo, a reference to the Japanese word for cardboard. And, okay, that’s cool, but it isn’t a joke, exactly. It’s a reference with a footnote. It’s like when someone tells you a joke, and you don’t laugh because you don’t get it, and then they explain why it was funny. The problem is that after all of that… it still isn’t funny. You get it, but you don’t laugh.

Similar to the Danbo translation is the use of honorifics– chan, san, and so on. While an integral part of Japanese, they don’t really have any place in English. It’s another joke that doesn’t work. There are ways around it, of course– Fuuka-neesan can just be “big sis,” for example. Oftentimes, however, nothing is truly lost by leaving them out. An adult referring to Yotsuba in Japan may say “Yotsuba-chan,” while an American would say “Yotsuba.” Both are equally valid and both read the same. The chan is just a clue for us to go “Oh! She’s talking to a child!”

The sound effects are also left untranslated, for the same reason that I assume the honorifics were left in. Untranslated isn’t exactly right, though. There are little notes next to the first iteration of each sound effect in a group that explains what the sound is. Otherwise, the sfx are untouched.

It’s a little lame and distracting, if I’m being perfectly honest. It’s another case of being too faithful. I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I know that “doki doki” is the sound of a heartbeat, “ora ora ora!” is what people say when they’re punching someone over and over, and that chicks go “piyo piyo!”

The thing is, that sort of thing doesn’t really translate. It tends to just look silly, and yep, in Yotsuba&!’s new translation, it looks silly. When the Japanese sound effects are left in the text, the book ends up looking more like a fan translation rather than a professional work.

Fans are notable for being extremely reluctant to be anything but absolutely faithful to the source material in an attempt to be truly authentic. This often leads to awkward, or nonsensical translations. Yotsuba&! being strong enough to shine through an awkward translation doesn’t make the translation any less awkward. The honorifics don’t add anything to the book, beyond it seeming more “Japanese.” It’s like the book has been translated, but not localized.

Part of the draw of Yotsuba is how it’s fairly minimalist, to borrow an idea from Jeff Lester. His specific example was toward the end of Yotsuba & Delivering, when Koiwai bonks Yotsuba on the head for bicycling so far away from home. It’s a completely white panel with Koiwai, his fist bonking Yotsuba on her gigantic head, the sound effect in kana, the romanization of the sound effect (“go”), and “bonk” in parentheses.

In the original Japanese, it’s a very simple and to the point panel. However, in Yen Press’s translation, it’s got the romanization and the actual translation on top of the kana, which just clutters things up. It takes away from the minimalist style of the panel. The problem is that editing out the kana and simply inserting a “bonk” sound effect in an appropriate style would’ve been much more straightforward and, well, funny. The panel has two bits: Koiwai bonking Yotsuba and the “bonk” sound. Instead, it has the bonking action, a symbol that’s essentially meaningless to me, the translation of that symbol, and then the actual sound effect. It’s too much. It weakens the joke by layering on too much information.

My favorite translation, bar none, is the Geneon Lupin the Third dub. It took an old series that would not have benefitted very much from a direct translation (judging by the original Monkey Punch manga I used to own), looked at the characters and their personalities, and crafted new lines and jokes based on that. The characters never felt out of character or inappropriate, and the jokes were actually funny, rather than just being references to Japanese pop culture. This is an extreme example, of course, but it shows how this kind of thing can work.

It’s similar to how ADV approached their Yotsuba&! translation. Certain things won’t translate seamlessly, but rather than compromise a very funny book by making it less funny, they bent the rules a little and kept the book’s spirit, if not its letter.

I totally understand why Yen Press’s translation is the way it is. JuYoun Lee, Senior Editor at Yen Press, gave an illuminating interview with Deb Aoki over the translation. I don’t agree with the way they chose to go, but it makes sense from a certain angle. It’s more accurate and exact, but I don’t think that that is a universally good thing. It leads to too many jokes ending up explained, rather than allowed to breathe, distracting gremlins ending up on the page, and having to qualify my love for the series when recommending it to people.

At one point during Yotsuba&! 6, Koiwai says, “I love the way she reacts to stuff like this.” That sums up the entire series. It’s got a strong dose of humor, wonder, and love. The source material is some of the best out. Yotsuba&! is a very, very good series, but certain aspects of the translation are disappointing. That isn’t a dealbreaker, but I wish it were a little better. It deserves it.