With the Speed Racer live-action movie imminent, the moment is right, it seems, for a relative deluge of Speed Racer comics and manga to hit the English-language market. Balanced precariously on the peak of a still-rising mountain of reprinted American Speed Racer comics from the 80s and various more recently licensed efforts comes the Mach Go Go Go boxset from Digital Manga Publishing (DMP), an unabridged reproduction of the original manga by series creator Tatsuo Yoshida in two hardcover volumes.

Speed Racer: Mach Go Go Go
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Like Speed himself, Yoshida is better known for his contributions to anime. In 1962, he founded Tatsunoko Studios with his brothers and eventually produced a number of classic anime series including the internationally distributed Speed Racer and Gatchaman (aka Battle of the Planets/G-Force). With only this material to judge his relative acumen as a mangaka, an argument can be made that the relative paucity of content needed to fill a thirty-minute cartoon (as opposed to serial manga) better highlighted his strengths as an infectious stylist if not a particularly imaginative storyteller.

For the six remaining people in North America who do not know, Speed Racer is a young race car driver who, along with his family who double as a pit crew, races his car, the Mach 5, in a variety of dangerous and exotic locations for progressively ridiculous reasons. The opening story, “The Great Plan”, establishes most of the recurring cast as well as a good chunk of the plot formulas that harshly govern these early Speed Racer manga. The introduction of Racer X adds some much needed narrative tension in the second installment, but later stories don’t so much build on it as they do recycle its more successful moments over and over until diluted beyond recognition.

The work is always at its strongest (both, I suspect, then and now) in those moments when the otherwise nonsensical plot insists on some outlandish racing and, gratefully, they come early and often. The early races are more visceral as Yoshida features his racers on the Japanese terrain he would know best. As the locales become more and more exotic (deserts, oceans, etc.), the Mach 5 threatens to draw attention away from Speed as it becomes laden with ever-more-complex technology to adapt to these new terrains. As an artist, Yoshida seems more comfortable (or more interested) drawing the cars than he does the people that inhabit them. His character design shows a tremendous debt of influence to Osamu Tezuka without exhibiting the nuance of character development for which Tezuka is widely celebrated.

Whatever its limitations might be, the Mach Go Go Go collection was an enjoyable read. To their credit, DMP did an excellent job with the design of this project that adds value to the presentation with its obvious reverence for the source material. While Yoshida’s Speed Racer manga may never exceed the narrative sophistication of your average Golden Age superhero comic, it is as undiluted of a glimpse as one is likely to get at his original vision of hyperstylized cars and racing that went on to inspire millions around the globe. And that, as they say, is something you just don’t see everyday.

Most of my manga/manhwa acquisitions happen because I am familiar with the artist or because a trusted critic recommends it for my attention. Kingdom of the Winds got my money the old-fashioned way, with a striking cover and an intriguing premise well-articulated by the marketing blurb on the back. It also helps that the story is not only historical fiction, but it covers a geographic area and time period (Korea around the time of Augustus’ reign in Rome) about which I know almost nothing.

Kingdom of the Winds Book 1
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Kingdom of the Winds focuses on the royal family of the kingdom of Goguryeo, one of three kingdoms that were the cultural foundation for modern Korea. While the story has as many characters as King Yuri has wives and children (hint: it’s a bunch), the reader is invited to experience the story through Prince Muhyul, who will someday become king himself. Kingdom thrives on conflict and balances the threat of invasion from neighboring kingdoms with the internal power struggles taking place as King Yuri advances rather menacingly towards his own death.

Kingdom of the Winds also expands on the exploration of Korean natural mysticism that is used to such striking effect in manhwa like Bride of the Water God and Dokebi Bride. The cosmology in Kingdom hews closer to Dokebi Bride in the sense of danger that accompanies the manipulation of these primal forces. Kingdom, however, uses these gods and their powers as the engine for elaborate battles that can stretch on for several pages.

Artist Kimjin’s character design for the supernatural beings, in particular, is imaginative and the battle scenes frenetic sometimes to the point of abstraction. The human characters suffer some, though, from a reliance on costuming over iconic design to keep them differentiated. Visually, overall, I think Kingdom of the Winds has a lot to offer a potential reader. Kimjin makes excellent use of setting in the opening chapter, the pitch black of a rainy night to create a kind of atmospherics I might associate with Lone Wolf and Cub.

The story, however, is Kingdom’s stronger selling point. Prince Muhyul’s dilemma of keeping peace within his family as his father grows more paranoid by the day, while maintaining his vigilance against foreign enemies, is a compelling one. Kimjin aggressively uses flashbacks to give the kind of context needed to fully appreciate the complex relationships that bind each character together. The sum is a dense story that rewards multiple reads and even comes with a little map and historical essays at the end to draw it all together. While the large cast and occasional histrionic battle sequences may put off some readers, the well-researched and compelling story was more than enough to leave me looking forward to the next volume.

After nine editions serialized worldwide, rave reviews from Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, and the Guardian UK, a movie deal in the works, and over 10,000 copies in print, The Bluesman Project is proud to announce that the single-volume hardcover edition is finally upon us.

Bluesman
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This June, NBM Publishing will release this definitive edition of Bluesman into the Direct Market for only $24.95. The Diamond Order Code is APR08 4026. The graphic novel will begin its move into bookstore markets in August, allowing retailers and readers alike to benefit from this two-month window of direct market exclusivity. Bluesman is a taut period thriller that pushes the boundaries of the graphic novel while addressing core issues of race, faith, and redemption that continue to haunt public discourse to the present day.

If you are a fan of blues, comics, or (in a worst case scenario) of me, please consider doing one or more of the following things…

1. Go to the newly revamped Bluesman Project website to find out more about how to get a copy of the book for yourself.

2. Go to the Bluesman Project MySpace page and add us as a friend.

3. Share the gospel of Bluesman with as many friends as you can via your website, podcast, blog, or even drum circle.

Thanks for all of your support over the years and I hope to see you all soon at the Bluesman Project website and MySpace pages!!

[Space is collected along with Yamato in the third volume of the English language editions of Phoenix. Interested parties can read my review of Yamato.]

Phoenix: Yamato/Space
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True to its name, Space is the first of the Phoenix cycle that takes place predominantly in space. It is set during a time alluded to as past events in Tezuka’s dour opening to Future (volume 2): a time of deep space exploration as the final expression of human curiosity and know-how. What sets Space immediately apart from those portions of the cycle which proceed it is its radical departure from the worldbuilding that dominates the other openings.

Tezuka instead opts to open the book with one of the more viscerally engaging experiments in visual storytelling from his entire body of work. Here’s the set-up. Five humans are piloting a ship back to Earth over a distance so extraordinary that the voyage will consume most of their lives. An emergency claxon brings four of them out of their hibernation only to discover that the crewmen currently on active duty is not only dead (apparently of old age), but that the ship has been damaged and is nearly exhausted of its fuel. With no chance of surviving with their vessel, the four reluctantly enter separate escape pods and are ejected into the black of space. With a year and half of oxygen and six months’ worth of rations, their chance for survival is non-existent.

In these opening scenes, Tezuka uses his panel borders inventively to evoke the extremely cramped quarters of the spaceship as characters seem to emerge from between small gaps in the panels much as they would a hatch or narrow doorway. But as the crew members launch into the vastness of space in their individual escape pods, Tezuka takes this device to a whole new level. The escape pods are essentially coffins with elaborate gauges and switches surrounding the occupant. Barring short flashback sequences that take place on their planet of origin, the first half of Space is told using an elaborate grid system that not only directs the flow of the dialogue but mercilessly reinforces the maddening isolation of the hapless players.

Of course, storytelling devices are only as effective as the stories that they are used to tell. Tezuka uses this one to spin his version of the classic locked-room murder. As the pods drift further into space, and eventually, further apart, each crew member shares secrets about the others that slowly create motive and means for the murder. The story spends more time worldbuilding during these flashbacks, creating a picture of a human culture flung throughout the galaxy and barely recognizable to our own.

The appearance of the Phoenix some eighty pages into the story signals (as it usually does) a transition as the remaining two survivors crash-land on a alien planet, along with a mysterious fifth escape pod that was launched after the rest had already evacuated. This second half of Space is at once reminiscent of earlier Phoenix stories and novel in its execution. The worldbuilding exercises that served as mere garnish in the first section become the entrée as the remaining survivors, Saruta and Nana, explore the survivable but surreal environment that they now inhabit. While Tezuka restrained his speculation on alien life in Future to essentially one species, Space embraces this staple of science fiction with imagination and enthusiasm in abundance.

Space is also somewhat unique in the number of different incarnations of the Phoenix that it presents to the reader, each enjoying a slightly different relationship with the mortals who live and die in their shadow. Considered a particular way, their differences can be seen as a continuum that stretches from natural to the supernatural or, for the more materialist minded, from matter to energy. Segments like Dawn and Yamato, both set in the historical past, feature very tangible incarnations of the Phoenix. While humanity is shown as the clear master of all other animals it encounters, the Phoenix, not unlike the volcanoes it prefers for its nesting ground, is shown as being both a part of and a force of nature on a scope that surpasses human understanding. Despite its amazing powers, though, the Phoenix still bleeds. In order to emerge renewed from the ashes, it must first, like all other living things, die. In this sense, the Phoenix is shown as subject to the same laws that govern all life without a hint given as to how those laws came to be or by whose hand they were fixed.

The second incarnation, featured for the first time in Space, is an anthropomorphic bird goddess who resembles in an idealized way the inhabitants of an alien planet. Unlike the folkloric incarnation described above, this Phoenix is imbued with human ideas of morality and fairness and uses her power to enact justice in a universe otherwise blind to the corrosive nature of evil. If one is tempted to think of the first incarnation as sympathetic to the views of Taoism, this aspect of the Space Phoenix is a Hellenic goddess willing to silently stalk a hapless mortal across the span of several human lifetimes to enact justice on the unrepentant.

In comparison to the other segments of the Phoenix cycle, Space has relative strengths and weaknesses. The severe formal restrictions placed on the first half of the story creates a sense of two, if not three, different kinds of stories simultaneously vying for our attention. Those concerns aside, Space is one of the more atypical segments in the Phoenix cycle and, at times, one of its most intriguing. As always, highly recommended.

Just as his own status as Manga no Kamisama (God of Manga) was being slowly eroded by the more serious gekiga school of manga towards the end of the 1960s, Osamu Tezuka embarked on an ambitious quest to re-imagine not only the form he re-christened to his own liking but to re-invent himself and his audience’s expectations of him. This middle period of his career is representative of the most ambitious of Tezuka’s works, beginning with his recommencement of his Phoenix cycle in 1967 and concluding, arguably, with his completion of Buddha in 1983. Apollo’s Song, begun in 1970, enjoys many of the artistic successes of those two landmark works while stumbling over fewer obstacles than his Ode to Kirihito, a work begun the same year, in the process of navigating these previously uncharted narrative waters.

Apollo’s Song
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Apollo’s Song is the story of Shogo Chikaishi, a young man with the irrepressible urge to murder all living things that express love. The story’s narrative oscillates between Shogo’s real life and a series of extended visions in which he must act as an unwilling player; visions that function, for all intents and purposes, as self-contained parables with their own meaning and contribution to the over-arching themes of the book. His first experience, a hallucination brought about by electro-shock therapy in the state mental hospital, bears special consideration as it dictates the content of all others that follow.

In this “dream,” Shogo finds himself in a massive Greek temple that is dominated by a statue of what appears to be the goddess Athena, though she is never named as such. She demands Shogo to explain to her why it is that he hates love. In a flashback sequence that details his troubled childhood with an unfeeling mother, Shogo makes a case for his psychotic behavior and appeals to her mercy for having been shaped by forces beyond his control. Unimpressed with his defense, the goddess curses him to “love one woman again and again but before the two are united in love, one shall perish. Even in death, thou shalt be reborn to undergo yet another trial of love.”

For the remainder of the book, these episodes interrupt the main narrative for extended periods and create a framework for Tezuka to explore any time, place, genre, or whim that suits his theme. In this sense, Apollo’s Song echoes the audacious narrative scope of the Phoenix cycle without taking eleven self-contained but thematically intertwined long-form manga to accomplish his task. Going down the list of genres utilized, one finds science fiction, historical fiction, general adventure with a tinge of Old Testament iconography, and Greek mythology used seamlessly as points of departure from and returning to the main narrative. These frequent location and period changes give Tezuka ample opportunity to showcase both his unequaled skills as a visual storyteller and his emerging fascination with meticulously drawn natural landscapes.

If both strands of Apollo’s Song’s narrative were as potent as these sequences, it would definitely rank among the finest of any of his work. Several forces conspire, however, to undermine the main narrative in such a way as to render it mildly silly and, on even rarer occasion, dangerously close to incomprehensible. After his eventual escape from the mental hospital, Shogo is taken in by the enigmatic and beautiful Hiromi Watari. Hiromi, the daughter of a once-famous marathon runner, sees great potential in Shogo as he runs from the police and proposes to train him to become a world-class marathon runner at a secret mountain hideaway in order to honor her father’s legacy. In case someone is keeping score, that’s the silly bit. That strand of the story, while framing some of the more potent emotional moments, follows a continuum from ridiculous to utterly implausible and adds little or nothing beyond additional pages to an otherwise excellent story.

The good news, in contrast to Ode to Kirihito, which suffers the same problems but has no other narrative to which to turn for its salvation, is that the allegorical elements of Apollo’s Song add up to more than enough to classify it as an important, if not fundamental, work. It reveals insights into Tezuka’s own views regarding gender and sexuality (a topic which could make up an entire dissertation on its own) as well as the timbre of the time period in which it was produced. Readers should be warned that Apollo’s Song is neither gentle nor squeamish in its rendition of violence and can be thought of as Tezuka’s own Titus Andronicus in this regard. Otherwise, it is highly recommended as a substantive addition to the body of Tezuka’s work currently available in English.

This volume of Swan continues the international ballet competition begun in volume ten that will, in fact, continue and, no doubt, conclude in volume twelve. With most of the characters already well-developed and the contour of these competitions well-established in earlier volumes, the plot through this section hinges around the introduction of the enigmatic German dancer Leonhardt von Christ and the effect his presence has on the various dancers in the competition.

Swan Book 11
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At eleven volumes into the series, there is little here that feels unfamiliar. Ariyoshi seems well set into her formula of presenting Masumi, the lead character, with some competitive challenge one notch beyond that which she believed herself capable. After nearly suffering an emotional breakdown, she is somehow able to reach into the core of her person and pull out a performance that is technically less impressive than her rival, but possessing some unquantifiable emotive quality that wows the judges enough to hand her a surprising victory.

This one-note samba of a plot line, ever accompanied by sobbing and wailing, would no doubt become unbearably tedious in the hands of a lesser storyteller. What makes Swan one of the best shojo manga to be translated into English, then, is Ariyoshi’s unrelenting excellence in the execution of that story. Freed from elaborate plotting, she focuses her energies on costuming and experimental visual devices designed to suggest the singular qualities of the various ballet and dance styles employed by her players. As always, her layouts positively sing with imagination and amplify the visual impact of the often-wordless dance sequences.

Even with several continuity threads yet unresolved, I don’t get the impression that Swan is likely to veer into unexpected territory before its eventual conclusion. Personally, the process elements of the series (i.e., the dances themselves) that serve as vehicles for Ariyoshi’s stunning artwork are more than enough to sustain my enthusiasm and interest in Swan for as long as CMX continues to publish it. The soap opera plotlines, limited as they are, do little to diminish the undeniable virtuosity on display, even if they add little to its narrative substance. Whatever its weaknesses might be, Swan is one of the few shoujo manga available in English that earns every iota of its status as a classic of the form.

Like NetComics’ excellent Dokebi Bride, Bride of the Water God is a Korean manhwa that draws heavily on the animistic mythology of that country as the source material for its plot. Though the two series could not be any more different in execution, surprisingly, neither suffers in comparison to the other. In fact, they can be appreciated in context with one another as two different attempts to integrate Korea’s spiritual past with its materialist present.

Bride of the Water God Volume 1
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The “Bride” in question is a young girl named Soah who is sacrificed by her village to the god of Water, Habaek, in order to end a drought. To her surprise, she is not killed but rather brought to Suguk, Habaek’s kingdom, as his bride. Soah’s designation as sacrifice and subsequent voyage to the realm of the supernatural take up almost no space in the book at all. The reader is given very little information about Soah herself and is, then, forced to speculate on the details of her character as she goes through the process of orienting herself in an unfamiliar land.

Whereas Dokebi Bride juxtaposes a more grotesque imagination of these nature spirits against the ugliness of the modern world, Bride of the Water God presents them as an beautiful race of eccentric immortals and offers their world an escape from the brutish world below. Though the latter Bride lacks the former’s mystical leanings, it has plenty of strengths of its own to draw upon instead.

Foremost among them is creator Mi-Kyung Yun’s stunning artwork. Though working from the Korean sunjeong tradition (a style aimed at young women), Yun embraces with reckless abandon the decadent detailwork of the halcyon shoujo manga of old. As one might suspect, enormous detail is spent on costuming and architecture, both crucial in establishing Suguk and its inhabitants as otherworldly. Knowing nothing about the production arrangements that might have gone into the production of Bride (like how many, if any, assistants were employed in its creation), lavish illustration, however ambitious, doth not alone a good manga make. But Yun also demonstrates a comprehensive and dynamic palette of visual storytelling techniques that can not be explained away by a talented production staff. She deftly weaves the reader’s attention between the verbal and visual narratives, keeping both occupied and engaged as the story unfolds. There are a number of stirring, silent passages that, garnished by the relentless embellishments, taken on a transcendent lyrical quality reminiscent of Kyoko Ariyoshi’s Swan.

The plot, at least in volume one, is textbook fantasy romance material, but given Yun’s obvious ambitions as a visual storyteller, I am open to having my initial expectations surpassed in her execution of a timeless story. Even if what we’ve seen so far is representative of Bride of the Water God’s average depth, there is already ample excuse to consider it as a satisfying diversion and an important addition to the sum of well-executed Korean manhwa now available in English. Highly recommended.

The third segment in the Phoenix cycle, an historical tale called Yamato, is collected in the English-language edition with the fourth segment, Space. Without precluding the correspondences between these two stories (the urgency of which is no doubt magnified unnaturally by their proximity in this collection), I wanted to focus our full attention on each narrative segment as a stand-alone sequence as the cycle unfolds. After each book has been thus dissected, perhaps then some time can be spent discussing the threads and themes that tie them together into a cohesive whole.

Phoenix: Yamato/Space
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Set a mere fifty years after the end of Dawn, Yamato speculates on the continued hostilities between the native people of Kumaso and the more-developed people culture of Yamato. It can, despite the essentially self-contained quality of each Phoenix segment, be read as a sequel to Dawn though the continuity ties between them are ephemeral enough that it is not necessary to have read the former to appreciate the latter.

The commonalities between the two volumes do not stop there. Yamato’s plot can be read as a distillation of Dawn’s, like an echo having become more simplified in its second rebound. To Tezuka’s credit, this decision proves to be a valuable one creatively as his recurrent meditations on the sacred nature of all life are able to resound with a greater clarity within this narrowed scope.

Like Dawn, Tezuka begins his world-building process with a glimpse into the everyday lives of the respective leaders of Yamato and Kumaso. According to Wikipedia, the Kumaso were “a people of ancient Japan, believed to have lived in the south of Kyûshû until at least the Nara period” which began in the 8th century of the Common Era. Kyûshû is the southern and westernmost of the four main islands of modern Japan. While the Kumaso may have persisted as a culture until the 700s, this particular story is set roughly four hundred years earlier, in what is known as the Kofun period.

A little historical context, in this case, goes a long way towards illustrating how adroitly Tezuka understands the task before him in rooting his story in exactly this place and time. A kofun is a particular type of burial mound that appeared during this period, the same type of burial mound that is one of the two central focii of this story. The Kofun period is distinguished from all those that preceded it by the development and codification of the first written Japanese language, using Chinese characters but a diverging vocabulary base and grammatical structure sometimes referred to as Old Japanese.

While Tezuka was forced to rely on myth and oblique historical references from the Chinese for the foundation of Dawn, Yamato marks the boundary of Japan’s own written historical record. The second focus of the story is on the production of the oldest historical document written in this first language, the Kojiki. In order to plausibly tie Yamato into Dawn’s continuity, Tezuka plays a little loose with the history here, essentially producing the landmark work four hundred years early, excusing himself, one supposes, by never insisting that THIS Kojiki is THE Kojiki.

But even as the king of Yamato is compiling his kingdom’s version of the history of the world, he catches wind of a competing volume being written by the king of the Kumaso. Fearful of his own scholars’ inadequacies, he sends his youngest son to Kyushu to subdue the Kumaso people and subjugate them under Yamato rule. This setup is a convenient if effective means to illustrate the old aphorism that history is written by the victor and works exceptionally well as the motivating force to keep the players moving towards their final (and often grisly) destinies.

As with Dawn, Tezuka’s narrative sympathies lie clearly with the Kumaso, despite the obvious gaps in development between them and the dominant Yamato. The King of Yamato, who is nameless beyond his title, is portrayed as a monomaniacal buffoon and his court populated by incapable yes-men. Only the youngest son, Oguna Yamato, shows signs of being immune to Tezuka’s disdain. He serves essentially the same function as Em Dee, the doctor from Yamato that betrayed the Kumaso in Dawn, as a narrative bridge as both between the two cultures. As Oguna infiltrates the Kumaso people and slowly gains their trust, he develops three relationships that are important to the outcome of the story.

The first is with Lord Takeru, king of the Kumaso. Despite the counsel of his ranking warriors, Takeru welcomes Oguna into their presence and treats him as an equal, despite his status as foreigner. Though Oguna is open about his mission to subdue Kyushu for the Yamato people (which cannot be accomplished without murdering their king), Lord Takeru openly shares the singular aspects of his culture with the young prince. Though they are clearly adversaries, Takeru and Oguna come to respect one another as equals and the eventual loser in their inevitable clash bestows his name upon his killer as a sign of respect for his character.

Oguna also develops a relationship with Lord Takeru’s sister, Kajika. Kajika, like all Kumaso women, is a skilled warrior and distrustful of Oguna’s presence among them. Though she persistently encourages her brother to have Oguna killed to protect himself, the pair eventually become romantically involved, again mirroring the relationship between Em Dee and his Kumaso bride. Like Nagi from Dawn, Kajika also winds up in Yamato after fleeing the unrest in her homeland in order to gain revenge, only to find herself forging a strong emotional bond with the very person she sought to kill. Given the insistence with which he repeats this theme over and over, Tezuka seems to suggest that the assimilation of one culture by another is an act that is, at once, about both death and love. Put another way, it is a process that almost always begins with horrific violence but, within less than a generation, is often perpetuated by strong emotional bonds that develop between once sworn enemies.

Lastly, Oguna is our window to the Phoenix herself. While in Kumaso, Oguna subdues the Phoenix peacefully by playing music for her every night. For the first time in the Phoenix cycle, the mythic creature willingly gives up a portion of her blood to a mortal as payment for his kindness. Though he, like nearly every character in Yamato, commits murder to further his own agenda, his motivation in coming to Kumaso is as means to convince his father to end the practice of burying servants alive in the king’s tomb upon his death. The Phoenix is moved by his compassion for his fellow man and allows him to stain a piece of cloth with her blood that he might use it to preserve those lives in the event that he is unsuccessful at changing the ingrained traditions of his people. Though the Phoenix is given time in the story as a transcendent mythical figure, Yamato’s version of the Firebird is less aloof than most to the plight of humanity, at one point, actually interfering directly in the battle between Yamato and Kumaso in order to save Oguna’s life and allow him to return to his people.

Moving beyond the mechanics of the plot, Yamato exhibits a few singular traits, both visual and narrative, that bear mentioning. Known for regularly relying on a star system from which to choose his players, it is surprising to see that most of the characters in Yamato are not derived from the normal batch of visual archetypes. While the burden of creating new character designs for this people-dense piece finds Tezuka occasionally teetering on the edge of ridiculousness (like Kajika’s outfit, which looks like something out of a third-rate production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle), Yamato is definitely richer for the extra effort required to execute that particular creative decision.

Another curious trait is Tezuka’s urgent reliance on what I like to call narrative frontality; an intuitive term, not unlike “graphic novel”, intended to borrow elements from its constituent components without being held to the strict restraints placed on each as a formal term. Frontality, as it might broadly be applied here, is a key feature in portraiture prior to the development of modern Western perspective techniques and persists in many global art traditions to this day. A recognizable example of partial frontality is the well-documented Egyptian paintings that feature a profile shot of the head and a frontal shot from the neck down. While drawings of this kind do little to satisfy those acculturated to Western standards of realism, their facility as a tool for communication was greatly enhanced by a creative decision to openly decry their fictional status in presenting a known thing in an unrealistic way. The drawing of the thing should not and, by virtue of its design, could not be mistaken for an actual object or, in this case, person.

Narrative frontality then might be thought of as a tendency in the work to routinely reveal itself to the reader as a fictional story and not as a facsimile of life itself. Whatever you want to call it, this disruption of the audience’s suspended disbelief is at the absolute core of Tezuka’s entire body of work. The more obvious examples of this include his aforementioned use of the star system, the hyoutan-tsugi (a weird, pig-gourd looking thing that appears generally out of nowhere for a panel or two), and Spider, the nonsensical dwarfish figure that nearly always proclaims that he is “here to meet ya!”

In Yamato, Tezuka takes this disruption to a whole new level as he hinges most of its comedic asides on anachronistic references to issues and ideas contemporary to his own time. This kind of juxtaposition for comedic effect is one of Tezuka’s slapstick staples, but here, he seems to bet the entire funny farm on this one joke. In one sequence, he actually frames a character’s internal monologue in the form of an advice column while in another, student protesters picket the environmental damage caused by the construction of the king’s tomb. Without an obvious tie into Tezuka’s loftier themes that otherwise work so seamlessly here, the amount of space in the book dedicated to these comedic asides remains something of an enigma. It becomes a mystery tinged with irony when one considers the great lengths that Tezuka goes to in order to immerse the reader in not only the physical aspects of geography but the more intangible aspects of culture (religion, politics, etc.) specific to this historical period in time. Just as in Future, the creative value for Tezuka seems to be in the irreconcilable differences between these two opposed concepts.

A moment should also be set aside to remark on not only the splendor of visual storytelling techniques that Tezuka packs into this dense piece but the almost uncharacteristic precision with which they are largely applied. There is a restlessness that haunts all of Tezuka’s work that often finds him preoccupied with testing out new experimental storytelling techniques at the occasional expense of clarity and emotional focus. In Yamato, we see this same drive but in service to the thematic focus and dramatic punch of the work as a whole.

Early in the book, Oguna must participate in a ritualized stick fight elevated high off of the ground with one of the Kumaso warriors. This eight-page battle sequence truly ranks towards the top of Tezuka action scenes in terms of dramatic staging and use of perspective to reinforce the sense of danger. A good deal of the story also deals with music and Tezuka uses the presence of this abstraction to dabble in playful psychedelia that would resurface in his later examination of the life of the Buddha.

The final profundity to be taken away from Yamato is how many facets of interpretation it manages to present in a paltry 174 pages and, in the end, I think it is representational of why I believe that the Phoenix cycle is one of the most important works in the history of narrative art, whether comics, manga, bande dessinee, or what-have-you. From volume to volume, Yamato included, Phoenix is not without its flaws. It is a deeply human work whether or not it articulates Tezuka’s often cited but rarely defined humanistic philosophies. It asks the existential questions that plague every human being, of any culture or time, while simultaneously dissecting the worldviews and ideologies that have guided, do guide, and will continue to guide the course of human events. It’s a lot to ask of lines on paper but, that is why there will only ever be one Osamu Tezuka.

Greetings! This is the Flash trailer for my newest comic series, Inanna’s Tears. As my normal function here at Comics/Manga Worth Reading headquarters is as a reviewer of manga, it may come as a shock to more casual readers that in addition to my rude habit of criticizing other people’s work, I exhibit equally bad taste in my insistence on scripting a few of my own. I try to treat both disciplines like disassociated personalities and encourage them not to interact any more than is absolutely necessary for reasons both creative and ethical.

That said, Johanna had asked that I post a release notice for Inanna’s Tears #1 to let interested C/MWR readers know that it was out there in their local stores. I just so happened to have a fully-scored, forty-five second Flash trailer for the series laying around on my hard drive and thought, “You know, maybe I should let someone else see this…”

Wheels turned. E-mails flew and here we are.

The trailer was created by Robert Butler, a graphic designer from Dallas, Texas, working over a score that was composed by Ryan Jones (of the Dorian Small Band) and me and performed/recorded by Ryan.

Inanna’s Tears is a proto-historical tragedy, delivered in five acts, set in ancient Sumer circa 3000 BCE. Series co-creator mpMann and I pre-serialized Inanna’s Tears online at Modern Tales from January to June of 2007, and the series immediately transitioned into print with Archaia Studios Press with its debut at the San Diego Comicon this year. I wrote this introduction for Inanna’s Tears when it debuted at Modern Tales and was later interviewed by the most excellent Shaenon Garrity over it.

Interested parties are also invited to the Archaia Studios Press website to learn more about buying a copy of Inanna’s Tears #1 for themselves. $3.95, 25 pgs + house ads, full-color, five issues total and shipping bi-monthly through April 2008. Intended for mature readers due to non-sexualized female nudity and graphic violence.

For English-language readers, there is a mystic aura that has settled over shoujo manga from the 1970s that can be suggested, if not wholly explained, by both the revolution in aesthetic values that it brought to manga as a whole and the surprisingly small amounts of it that have been translated and published for English-language audiences.

To Terra… Book 1
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While the audience for English-language shoujo manga has grown faster than probably any other sector of comics in the past ten years, there is also still doubt about that market’s ability to support work that appeals to scholarly interests over popular ones. With the landmark works of the movement (Heart of Thomas, Rose of Versailles) yet to see print in English, readers have been forced to read more peripheral pieces and infer the commonalities of its core.

Despite Keiko Takemiya’s credentials as one of the central figures in the Magnificent Forty-Nine group, To Terra… exhibits few of the stylistic qualities that make that group’s material precious to Western readers curious about the evolution of shoujo manga. Serialized originally between 1977 and 1980 in Gekkan Manga Shonen, To Terra… is a much shorter work (the English edition wrapping up at the third volume) than Takemiya’s more celebrated (and more shoujo) Kaze to Ki no Uta (Poem of Wind and Trees). While Vertical’s motives in choosing to publish this three-volume series over its much more famous fourteen-volume predecessor can be applauded as pragmatic, there is something unsatisfying about trying to figure out Takemiya and her impact on shoujo manga from reading first this lesser, later work.

To Terra… Book 2
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To Terra… is a science fiction manga that borrows thematically from Aldous Huxely’s Brave New World but with less ambiguity about exactly how dys- the dystopia really is, sort of like Logan’s Run but in space! The narrative is split between the Terran population, as seen through the eyes of Keith Anyan, an elite cadet with a mysterious background, and that of the Mu, a variant race of human telepaths expelled and hunted by the Terran population. The Mu are led by the enigmatic Jomy Marcus Shin who seeks to return them to Terra and resolve the conflict between humanity and the Mu once and for all.

As a work of science fiction, To Terra… has identifiable strengths and weaknesses. Takemiya shows an affinity for the world-building demands of the genre, drawing together ideas from other sci-fi classics with more than a few of her own to create a believable stage on which her story may then unfold. While the pedigree of those ideas she appropriates is often impressive, too much of To Terra… feels like it is recycled from better written prose from decades earlier.

Much of the plot revolves around space and the future of humanity, but Takemiya manages here, at best, soft science fiction that treats the genre like an historical setting (a typical strength of shoujo manga) rather than a distinct tradition. People look costumed rather than clothed, give speeches instead of communicating with each other or the reader. Takemiya resorts to the mystical, rather than the futuristic, for the fantastic element of her story, often robbing her characters’ determination of its emotive value in exploiting easy, psychic resolutions rather than difficult, human ones.

To Terra… Book 3
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Despite its shortcomings, To Terra… improves considerably as it moves along. The early stages of laying the foundation for the story ahead seem laborious and scattered in comparison to the unity of focus enjoyed by the latter third of the story. It is only in the furious pacing of the ending that some of Takemiya’s genius as a storyteller manages to work its way through all the genre machinations. Indeed, while the more detailed drawings of ships in space and the like in the first two volumes often come off as stuffy and a little sterile, her scenes of mass destruction in the closing one hundred pages or so take on an almost operatic timbre.

The problem that remains upon finishing To Terra… is a troubling one. Despite nine hundred plus pages of work now available in English, I don’t feel like I really know much about Keiko Takemiya’s manga or why she is considered fundamental to the Magnificent Forty-Niners revolution that took place over thirty years ago in Japan. To Terra… feels like hesitant storytelling from a creator who found unexpected success doing a specific kind of material for a particular audience and was encouraged to branch out on the basis of that success.

Given the noticeable improvement that seems to take hold about two-thirds of the way through, it is certainly possible that Takemiya became more adept at filtering in what made that earlier work notable while still satisfying the whims of her new, broader audience. If To Terra… is a transitional work, then beginning with a clear idea of what she was transitioning from or to might have been a more solid foundation from which to judge this critically. Robbed of this context, To Terra… comes off as dated and more than a little creatively incurious.

The second volume in the Phoenix cycle finds creator Osamu Tezuka switching gears from historical fantasy to science fiction. Where volume one’s Dawn was very interested in the elements that came together to form civilization (at least the Japanese one), Future is more broad in its scope as it examines the likely causes behind its dissolution, a fate he finds inextricably linked to the destruction of humanity as a species.

“3404 AD. The Earth was rapidly dying.” Tezuka’s narrative begins thus, hanging ominously over a series of bleak landscapes, detailing the degradation above ground necessary to drive humanity underground for its terminal phase as a species. The final five million inhabitants of Earth populate five “great” cities and live in distinct monocultures carefully regulated by supercomputers. The first phase of the main narrative begins in one of these cities, Yamato.

Phoenix Volume Two: Future
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It is instructive to note that while Future was completed after Dawn, Tezuka’s art in the first half of the volume looks regressive in comparison. The stirring feats of naturalist drawings that flow from Dawn’s historical setting can be read in context with a body of his middle period work that emphasizes illustrative over dutiful narrative drawings. Future begins in all-too-familiar territory, Tezuka’s cartoony and crowded vision of the future as defined by the emergent technologies of his own time. The conceptual self-plagiarism on display stretches, at times, to the very beginning of his career with early and more awkward works like Metropolis.

Populated by all of the Tezuka archetypal players one comes to expect from his work, the opening can seems almost like business as usual, which is odd for Tezuka in general and the Phoenix cycle in particular. But where Astro Boy is fueled by Tezuka’s curiosity about the future and what marvels it might hold for the human race, the tone here is markedly different enough to warrant re-examination of exactly how Tezuka is using that awareness of his earlier work to comment on the story that he tells. Without a miracle, sought relentlessly, not unlike the Phoenix herself in book one, human life on Earth is about to cease forever.

As in Dawn, the narrative sections of the story are partitioned by an appearance of the Phoenix. In the first, Masato Yamanobe, a young man in the Yamato Space Patrol, is forced to defy his superiors and flee the city in order to protect his girlfriend, Tamami, from execution by the state. She is not human but of a race of aliens known as the Moopie who are able to tap into human consciousness and provide vivid hallucinations that supersede reality. Her species has been declared forbidden in Yamato and Yamanobe himself had been involved in missions to exterminate them. Their flight leads them up out of the city and on to the wasted surface of the Earth in hopes of finding an observation dome before the toxins in the air and treacherous weather conditions kill them.

As the story moves, in one narrative strand, to the surface, Tezuka begins adding more detail and scope into his panels. Split between Yamato, where a world war begins to brew over Yamanobe’s escape, the Earth’s surface, and the interior of one of the aforementioned observation domes where the pair find refuge, we still find ourselves confined to more claustrophobic and technologically dominated environments than open and natural ones, however devastated.

With the mutual destruction of the great cities, the story is brought into a unity of location at the observation dome. The Phoenix appears to a famed scientist within this dome, instructing him to receive the fleeing refugees and, in her appearance, opens the second section. Tezuka reduces his players down to four, three men and one Moopie. With the law that declared the Moopie a danger to humanity made moot in the wake of civilization’s passing, Tamami becomes a commodity. The Doctor, seeking her cells to complete his experimentation into creating life; Roc, the same bureaucrat who sentenced her to death in Yamato, now wanting to take her into deep space to try his luck among the stars; and Yamanobe, who just wants his girlfriend back. But this love quadrangle doesn’t last long as the supervolcanoes erupt due to the multiple nuclear blasts and, even the observation dome is cracked, radiation poisons its inhabitants towards a slow but inevitable death.

Tezuka resolves the second section relatively quickly with two twists. First, Tamami gives up her human form that the Doctor might be able to construct Yamanobe an immortal body. Ironically, the Phoenix appears to Yamanobe and transforms him into an immortal being even as Tamami is stripped of her human form towards the same, now unnecessary, end. Within pages, everyone is dead except for Tamami, now trapped in her amorphous natural state, and Yamanobe, who is impervious to injury and, by all reckoning, immortal.

After the first two sections in safe and comfortable territory, Tezuka makes a broad stylistic leap in the third. It opens with the Phoenix’s revelation to Yamanobe that takes him on a trip of scale from the macro-cosmic to the quantum and back. With no analogous works from this period or before available in English, one is tempted to identify this as a new riff in Tezuka’s work that would resurface again in the more mystical sections of Buddha. Western readers may also feel a simpatico at work in this section (and others like later in the volume) with Steve Ditko’s work on Dr. Strange as well as more recent mystic explorations in comics like Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s The Birth Caul.

With the reduction of the cast comes one of Tezuka’s most bleak storylines ever committed to paper. Yamanobe spends an eternity on Earth as its only sentient creature until all vestiges of his former life are forgotten. With humanity and its technology destroyed, the some of the page’s focus returns to the natural landscape but, oddly, Tezuka rarely moves fully back into the deeply illustrative approach of Book One. The Earth, as it slowly regains the potential to sustain life, is drawn in a more cartoony fashion, rounded edges and irregular shapes reminding one at times of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess).

As the story plunges deeper and deeper into the future, the distinction between that future and the past we assumed at the story’s beginning becomes as disassociated as Yamanobe’s recollection of his former life. Life arises, complexifies, dominates, and destroys itself over yet again before Yamanobe finally fulfills his task of repopulating the Earth with humans and is, at last, allowed to rest. In fact, the volume’s end reproduces the opening of Book One, lending credence to the idea that Tezuka considered ending the cycle in this one binary circuit.

Of the various installments of the Phoenix cycle, there is none so sprawling in its scope than Future. Though it technically adheres to the pattern set by the cycle as a whole (alternating from the past to the future with each volume), Future subverts the notion of keeping track of time in a linear fashion and, uncharacteristically, attempts to answer the existential questions that are tangled in the heart of the series as a whole. For some, Tezuka’s answers to these questions may prove less evocative than the asking itself but rarely in the series is the Phoenix so forthcoming with her vision and plan for humanity within it. Taken as a whole, Future is not the most visually impressive of the Phoenix cycle and the opening may underwhelm Tezuka enthusiasts looking for something novel. But given its scope and bold twists on the plot towards the middle and end, it is definitely one of the must reads of the series and stands well both on its own and in context with the series as a whole. Highly recommended.

The first three volumes of Dragon Head represent the first long narrative segment of the series and are thematically unified enough to warrant simultaneous consideration.

Dragon Head Book 1
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The opening to Dragon Head is a mash-up of sorts of a classic disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure with the heady psychological overtones of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as three high-school students survive a train wreck that kills hundreds of their classmates only to discover that they are buried in a collapsed tunnel with little hope of rescue. Creator Minetaro Mochizuki’s ultimate success in evoking a palpable sense of dread can be traced to a number of carefully executed storytelling decisions that dominate these opening chapters.

The first volume opens with a short sequence of black pages; the first, adorned with a solitary tiny white mark; the second, totally black; and the third, featuring the faintest hint of a broken horizontal white line that travels down the page’s length, accompanied by a sound effect that suggests the dripping of water.

The following page-turn is an extreme close-up on the series’ protagonist, Teru Aoki, as he opens his eyes for the first time after the wreck. To heighten the surprise and better fill the page with his chosen image, Mochizuki rotates it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, stacking the eyes as if they were on top of one another. This careful staging places the reader squarely into the narrator’s shoes as he takes in the nightmarish images that surround him and tries to piece together his tenuous memories of what has happened.

Dragon Head Book 2
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Much of the power of these opening volumes of the story can be attributed to Mochizuki’s nearly obsessive efforts to create a finite and believable environment for his characters to inhabit. This begins inside the train itself as Aoki explores first the car containing the dead bodies of his own class and then those beyond, all filled with corpses.

The technical aspect alone of believably rendering the inside of a wrecked commuter train is impressive enough to warrant critical attention. The relentless manner in which Mochizuki employs it, often creating long silences in the story as he visually dissects the intersection of a ruined wall and the rockslide, or the angle of the train in relation to the collapsed tunnel, shows a full command of visual storytelling techniques that include and, in some cases, transcend the influence of motion pictures.

As the players’ list expands to include a girl and another boy, some might find the lack of characterization invested into the cast somewhat disappointing. In the course of these first three volumes, the reader learns very little about them even through occasional flashbacks (bulletin: teenagers are sullen) beyond their immediate reaction to immediate circumstances. We are not invited to ponder the injustice of their situation due to the virtue of their character or the ambition of their dreams.

Dragon Head Book 3
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As the currency of success or failure in manga is often built on this interaction between the audience and the author, through the fictional characters, enjoying Dragon Head then depends squarely on Mochizuki’s ability to make the situations compelling beyond their emotional impact on the characters. At times, it seems like exhausting work for author and reader alike, but then so is escaping from a collapsed tunnel.

As the narrative goals of Dragon Head become dramatically more diffuse about a third of the way into book three, it is tempting to look back at the opening and admire its simplicity and effectiveness in comparison. The tension that Mochizuki is able to sustain for five hundred or so pages is without many credible peers in the contemporary English-translated manga market. While the series will never spawn plushes or panty-shot variant action-figures of its female character, it is one of the better examples of pure cartooning on the market today and manages to both entertain and edify. Highly recommended.

Hokusai: First Manga Master is a short guided tour through the Manga of celebrated Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Originally released to wide acclaim in Japan as fifteen separate volumes over a forty-year period, the Manga is a work that defies easy classification by Western standards. It is, at once, a copious sketchbook left by one of the 19th century’s most influential artists, an encyclopedia of Japanese visual culture before Westernization, as well as the supposed precedent for one of the world’s now dominant narrative art traditions. For me, as a critic, there are lingering questions about the relationship between contemporary manga and Hokusai’s work by the same name that I hoped this book would answer, setting a high expectation on my part in finally getting to read the manga equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for the first time.

Hokusai: First Manga Master
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Writer Christophe Marquet highlights an unanticipated element of the Manga’s global significance in his introduction, noting that, “although it is undoubtedly the work of a draftsman of genius, it is also the product of a collaboration with the engravers’ and printers’ guilds, which created these albums of wood engravings” (17). This is a sober reminder that, for all of experimentation focusing on the interplay between words and images that took place prior to the 19th century, the birth of comics (or manga) was dependent on certain technologies to slowly develop that could adequately reproduce a particular artist’s line and then mass produce it for public consumption.

With fifteen volumes and over four thousand images to choose from, the editorial emphasis here is on presentation over quantity. The images in this book are carefully displayed as historical documents, retaining the faded coloring implicit in the original reproduction process. The plates are grouped and commented upon thematically, reflecting Hokusai’s original encyclopedic intention for his work as a primer for visual artists in a variety of media. The writers do an excellent job of showing when and how Hokusai regularly moves the material beyond that original function, delivering stunning and, occasionally, narrative drawings that push the envelope of the production process to which his work is subject. Readers familiar with the artist’s more celebrated landscape paintings will find loads of material here worth pausing over for study.

The work on display here is stylistically restless, though First Manga Master no doubt magnifies the contrast between volumes much in the same way a Greatest Hits album can for a musical band with a long career from which to draw. A good portion of the drawings are journalistic in their intention, realistic to the point that the production process will allow. Hokusai spends a good deal of time in this mode recreating animals, plants, tools, and, in some cases, elements of landscape. For the more evocative or fantastic images, he exaggerates form in service to the first hints of narrative expression. Occasionally, as in the much reprinted “Game of One Hundred Grimaces” plate, what begins as a simple image list begins hinting at the possibilities of a sequential visual narrative but never develops meaningful content to sustain it.

A third aspect of Hokusai’s work presented is a surprising nod to essentially Western perspective techniques as well as a number of impressive architectural drawings. While European art movements like Japonisme would lionize the Japanese for the untainted quality of their fine art tradition, the Manga clearly shows that nation’s most celebrated artist as not only curious about but in mastery of a number of Western drawing techniques some forty years before the so-called opening of Japan. Other plates, essentially schematic drawings, of handguns and cannons underscore this curiosity as a recurring theme in Hokusai’s Manga.

On the final question of whether there is enough continuity between Hokusai and Tezuka’s work to warrant the latter’s appropriation of the term manga from the former, First Manga Master falls disappointingly silent. There is little on display here to support the idea that Tezuka’s work was somehow more connected to Hokusai than, say, Popeye. Whether further evidence of that might exist in the remainder of Hokusai’s Manga not covered in this book is yet unknown (at least to me), but, based on the material displayed here, the claim for continuity between the original mang-ster, Hokusai, and the contemporary manga tradition seems less compelling than it did. That caveat aside, Hokusai: First Manga Master is a fascinating and multi-layered overview of the Manga that will yield new treasures with each subsequent reading.

While Osamu Tezuka may have created work that was more popular (Astro Boy) or more accessible (Buddha) than his Phoenix cycle, it is the latter alone that Tezuka himself referred to as his “life work.” Consisting of twelve thematically linked but essentially self-contained stories, the Phoenix, in its entirety, is a dramatic time-elapsed photo of a master at work across different phases of his career. Its scope, stretching from the dawn of Japanese history into the far-flung future, is dizzying and demands deep reading in order to gain an adequate appreciation for the tapestry that unfolds in the thematic interplay between the individual books.

The first volume, Dawn, speculates on a series of events that would lead to the establishment of the proto-Japanese culture. Tezuka deftly blends myth and history in building the cast through which the reader will experience this tumultuous period. The story begins in a remote village, Kumaso, which sits at the foot of a smoldering volcano. This volcano is also the home of the Phoenix, an immortal bird spirit prized among humans for its ability to bestow eternal life on whosoever should drink its blood. The book opens with just such an attempt, a young hunter named Uraji whom we learn later, is hunting the Phoenix in order to restore his young bride back to good health. Paying for his failure with his life, the story passes quickly to the people of Kumaso who live simply by the ocean in a manner depicted by Tezuka as being more governed by superstition than reason.

Phoenix Volume One: Dawn
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In less than sixty pages, though, the winds of war and cruel fortune make mincemeat of the village and only two of the residents, Uraji’s widow Minaku and his younger brother Nagi, manage to survive; both of them, prisoners in one manner or another. In Nagi’s case, he is adopted by Surata, the general who led the attack on Kumaso, in hopes that he might someday return there and slay the Phoenix for the aging queen of Yamatai, Queen Himiko. The least ambiguous villain in a piece populated by heartless bastards all around, Himiko is presented as capricious and vain, ruling over the people of Yamatai through fear and superstition. Her brother, one of many Christ figures that litter the Phoenix’s landscape, urges her to begin the transition towards a rule based on reason but her lust for power and immortality is unyielding. It is her tragic flaw, an unwillingness to adapt to changing times and, in a broader sense, accept her own mortality, which dooms Yamatai like Kumaso before it. The quest to slay the Phoenix distracts Himiko from her primary task of remaining prepared against hostile neighboring countries and her capitol is sacked by invaders.

Given Dawn’s setting at the dawn of the Japanese civilization, it is fitting that Tezuka would use his story to dwell on questions of ethnicity and social identity. In Kumaso, the reader is invited to see culture as an accumulation of shared behaviors. This tribal existence is made to look inferior in comparison to the Yamatai who destroy it, both in the ways of medicine, which sustains life without prejudice, and war, which eradicates it with the same equanimity. Once the story is re-established in Yamatai, though, we find characters held back by this same devotion to the supernatural over the natural and the mystical over the empirical. Yet Dawn, like every other volume in this cycle, is framed by its inclusion of the Phoenix, a supernatural being, whose continued existence supersedes the short lives of the various mortal players and ties them all together into a single continuity. While critically frustrating to parse out, these interwoven paradoxes are the heart-blood of the Phoenix series and suggest that Tezuka is more comfortable deriving meaning from irreconcilable conflict than from harmonious resolution.

Though Dawn is the opening book of the cycle, it is not the oldest of Tezuka’s work on display in Phoenix. The illustrations of nature in general and the volcano in specific in Dawn take on ever-progressing layers of detail, rivaling, in some cases, Tezuka’s awesome renditions of the Himalayas in his Buddha series. As with most of Tezuka’s middle and late period pieces, there are so many exotic visual techniques employed, it becomes tough to single one of them out for praise. After moving the story to Yamatai in the second section, he restricts most of Queen Himiko’s scenes to a stage-like frame that begs comparison to Greek theater with its soliloquies and chorus of attendants. When that two-dimensional world is intruded on by Nagi’s three-dimensional desire to put an arrow through her throat, Tezuka chooses to reconcile neither with the other but superimpose these perspectives onto one another to almost surreal effect.

Phoenix Volume Two:
A Tale of the Future
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Later, Tezuka decides, seemingly arbitrarily, to use the occasion of a fight scene to reverse all the light values in the scene and draw the figures, ala Alex Toth, in silhouette for dramatic rather than representational purposes. One is tempted to invent some scenario by which it had to be replicated that way (it was originally in color and he didn’t want to completely redraw it for black and white reproduction?) but even a casual appreciation of Tezuka’s many other works lead just as quickly to the notion that it just amused him to draw it that way. Whatever its intended purpose, it is but one diversion in a veritable forest of storytelling strategies that keep the reader engaged throughout.

Read specifically as an opening to the Phoenix cycle, Dawn’s mixture of the natural and the supernatural sets the tone for all that follows ably. Even as Tezuka jerks the story in the second volume some four thousand years into the future (soberly predicting the world’s utter demise in less than years from our present), the contrast between this mytho-historical fantasy and the science fiction in the latter volume is reconciled by the recurrent symbols and themes that echo down through the series. In comparison with the other historically themed volumes, Dawn is one of the more fully-realized, with multiple narrative threads running simultaneously, often crossing and even terminating unexpectedly. I’m willing to go one step further and say that Dawn is a good place to get a general introduction to Tezuka’s more sophisticated manga. Highly recommended.

I’ll open this particular review by saying that I don’t care how much manga you’ve read, you’ve never, ever read one quite like Dokebi Bride. Purists might be quick to point out that, originating from Korea rather than Japan, Dokebi Bride isn’t manga at all, but manhwa. Let’s be frank here. Much of the manhwa that has been translated into English thus far can only be meaningfully differentiated from manga because it reads left-to-right naturally and the author almost always has three short names instead of two long ones. While recognizing the distinction, it’s critically defensible (at least at this point) to say that many manhwa are certainly dependent on manga as a tradition if not wholly derivative.

Dokebi Bride is not devoid of manga stylisms and, more broadly, tropes of manga storytelling that have proven to be effective for pacing long-form stories. In fact, in some ways, it’s a textbook example of effective manga with an evocative setting, a rich cultural trove from which to draw story content, elaborate costuming, and well-defined characters that invite reader identification. Yet, even with all of those staples firmly in place, Dokebi Bride regularly transcends the expectation of that-which-seeks-to-entertain and delivers an urgent and complex story that defies simple description.

Dokebi Bride Volume 1
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The opening volume of Dokebi Bride functions as a prelude to the larger story, framed elliptically to show us the heroine, Sunbi’s, peculiar childhood as a ward to her grandmother. The pair live in a dwindling fishing village where the grandmother, Okboon, had once served as shaman and is living out her final years. The circumstances by which Sunbi comes to live with her grandmother are parceled out one morsel at a time across this and subsequent volumes, but she is estranged from her father who lives in Seoul and works as a doctor.

One must credit author Marley with the precision with which she builds and executes her metaphors. Okboon, as village shaman, embodies that village and, as she reaches the end of her life, so goes the village. Or is it the opposite? In the opening chapter, “The Ritual of the Dragon Spirit,” readers are treated to a sumptuous recreation of both the rural, seaside environment and the elaborate dances and costumes that are associated with the calling of the Sea Dragon to bless the fishing season. It is also our first introduction to the dizzying set of rules and regulations that govern the petitioning of gods and spirits that eventually become the life-blood of Marley’s plots. Her depictions of nature, rich and as vital as they are to the story, are miraculously outdone by the sheer bravura of her drawings of the supernatural. It’s not just the characters who are awed by the visual presence but the reader, as well.

As many nice things as there are to say about Marley’s drawings, it is the implications of her story that linger beyond the back cover. Shamanism, the last vestige of the world’s oldest religion wherever one encounters it, stands in for the way people lived for thousands of years before science and civilization explained to them that they were going about it all wrong. As it appears that humanity’s last link to the supernatural forces attached this particular place is to be severed as Sunbi is shuttled off to Seoul to live with her father, we feel a triple sense of loss: one for her childhood as it fades away, one for the village that is destined to dissolve in the face of pressing civilization, and one for the elaborate beliefs that made people feel intimately connected to the particular place where they were born and for which they were expected to become and remain as stewards.

Marley establishes and then follows through on her symbols so effectively that volume one of Dokebi Bride feels, in its own way, perfectly self-contained. Don’t let this fool you. The genius regularly on display in this opening, heartbreaking volume is no fluke and just keeps getting better with each new layer added to the story. If pressed vigorously, I would be more inclined to compare this series to Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III’s Promethea or David Mack’s Kabuki than to anything else out there in the manga/manhwa mesocosm. If you like your comics, by whatever name, startling as opposed to just really good, Dokebi Bride is a must-read.

Genju no Seiza Book 1
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Genju no Seiza is one of two Matsuri Akino manga currently being serialized in English, along with Kamen Tantei, also from TokyoPop. As in her first English-translated manga, Pet Shop of Horrors, Akino finds great success here in mining myth to generate content. This time out, it’s a mish-mash of Hindu theology and Buddhist philosophy superimposed over a juvenile power fantasy as teenaged Fuuto Kamashina discovers that he is the latest incarnation of a deposed, foreign god-king (i.e. like the Dalai Lama).

Genju no Seiza Book 2
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What struck me most as I read through these three volumes again was how ideally they are paced and structured for potential anime adaptation. Akino sticks to essentially self-contained stories for the first volume, adding with each new “episode”: a new supporting character, a new power for Kamashina to discover in his moment of greatest need, and just a snippet of larger concerns that impinge momentarily on the more episodic concern of that particular chapter. When those external plot threads pile up long enough, we earn a big two-part episode and a big confrontation that resolves (albeit temporarily) the crisis. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Genju no Seiza Book 3
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Adhering to a formula, however cynical, is neither crime nor sin and if, as a reader, you enjoy what Akino does very well, chances are that you’ll like this better than most. Her stories slyly refer to a number of strains in contemporary shoujo without becoming wed to any of them. Like Pet Shop of Horrors, she fills Genju no Seiza with story after story of humans and animals interacting as peers with the resulting trove of her stunning naturalist drawings. As with any good shoujo, the costuming in this story is elaborate and meticulously rendered. While male-male relationships are rarely consummated, both Genju and Pet Shop fall somewhere between bishonen and shonen-ai with Akino frequently blurring the gender boundaries of her characters, as in “Father and Son,” when Kamishina is possessed by the spirit of a dead woman to confront her husband.

By virtue of working these particular angles so diligently, Akino turns out a number of genuinely sharp pieces. One of the best, “Partners”, closes out the second volume and is both classic Akino and a textbook example of how good, episodic writing can be meaningful in its own right. The story becomes more fixated on the “big picture” by volume three but, given the craft regularly on display here, I’m not really in hurry for this to go anywhere but onward.

There are those among the regular Comics and Manga Worth Reading audiences that have expressed an interest in more information about my reading habits and preferences in order to have more context in which to consider the reviews that I contribute to this site. Ever the populist, I’m only too happy to oblige these noble readers with a short overview of some of my favorites.

As the manager of a Direct Market comics shop (Atomik Pop!: Norman branch), I have access to an astonishing number of comics of every stripe from all over the world. I try to at least thumb through 90% of what comes in every week in the interest of serving my clientele ably. Because of this unfettered access, I tend to research things that I ‘m thinking about buying carefully and, as a result, enjoy most of what I bring home. I like to think of myself as an eclectic reader, balancing my narrative art diet with a dozen or so monthly superhero comics, another dozen manga that I follow on a volume to volume basis, graphic novels from my favorite American lit-cartoonists like Kevin Huizenga, Renee French, and Eddie Campbell when I can get them, and as many collections of comic strips as I can afford.

While a grand survey of all of these fields of interest would no doubt be entertaining to write, it would also guarantee that this document would never, ever be actually finished and, thus, serve you the reading public the least. As I intend to contribute mostly manga reviews to the Comics/Manga Worth Reading hub, I figured I could start with just my manga recommendations with the idea that said list could be expanded to include these other interests should time and circumstance warrant it.

On a week to week basis, I read more shoujo manga than anything else. I rationalize this two different ways. Number one, shonen manga often revolves around themes and visual tricks that I’ve already read to death in superhero comics. Superpowered being fights monstrous evil to save the world? Done that, been there. Young girl leaves home to enter the high pressure world of international ballet? Even Grant Morrison’s Batman hasn’t tried this one. Number two, the wife likes to read manga as well and I’m always inclined to save money by picking something that we both can enjoy. As a student of history and an enthusiastic consumer of manga, I’m always open to historically rich stories as well as historically significant manga of any kind. That said, here’s a few of my favorite manga.

Lone Wolf and Cub
Volume 1
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1. Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. Available in 28 volumes from Dark Horse, I’ve given up waiting for any manga reading experience that can match Lone Wolf in scope, intensity, or educational value. Lone Wolf and Cub, the epic saga of a dishonored samurai’s complex plot to take revenge on his enemies and restore his family name, sets the bar on historical fiction in narrative art ridiculously high. It is also fascinating to study as one of the few celebrated collaborative efforts in manga as an artform. The interplay between Koike’s narrative and Kojima’s expressive brushwork is truly one of the highwater marks for narrative art as a medium in the 20th century and is a must-read for any serious student of the craft of making manga.

Astro Boy Volume 1
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2. Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka. Also from Dark Horse is this groundbreaking series from the God of Manga himself, Osamu Tezuka. Although Astro Boy is not my favorite Tezuka series available in English (that honor falling to Vertical’s Buddha followed hotly by Viz’s Phoenix cycle), it is the most fun and accessible of the three. More serious readers may be put off by the formulaic aspects necessitated by the rigors of creating a work like this over the course of three decades but, pound for pound, the imagination and cartooning mastery on display here is enough to earn Astro Boy a foundational slot when considering of Tezuka’s work as a whole. Volumes 6-8 are far and away my favorites and would be a great place to sample before committing to the other twenty volumes of the series.

Saikano Volume 1
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3. Saikano by Shin Takahashi. There is no doubt that one of my favorites things about manga is how amazingly morose it can be. Shin Takahashi’s Saikano, a story of ill-fated love set against the backdrop of terminal world war, relentlessly piles insult on to emotional injury in its exploration of the toll that indiscriminate warring takes on the regular people who end up fighting and dying from it. Throw in emo-mech themes first cultivated in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Takahashi’s apparent determination to create a shonen manga that often quacks like shoujo, and you get a manga with a little something that appeals to everyone. The pacing is reallllllly decompressed in comparison to the anime but if you ever wondered what a Depeche Mode manga might read like, this is your huckleberry. Get this from Viz now before chunks of it start falling out of print!!

Swan Volume 1
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4. Swan by Kyoko Ariyoshi. One of the only DC/CMX manga I read, Swan is the better of two dance manga available in English. Swan, as obliquely referenced in my opening statements, is about a young girl who ascends the ladder of professional ballet dancers and performs under high-pressure circumstances to people all over the world. The first and strongest appeal of Swan is Ariyoshi’s stunning linework and sequential prowess on display in each and every panel. Simply put, this is some visually startling manga will turn aside even the most entrenched belief that manga artists are somehow deficient in comparison to their Western counterparts. Ariyoshi uses Swan not only to develop her characters and themes but also to teach about the history of ballet as well as make an impressive case for the cultural importance in sustaining its practice. The story is very melodramatic but Ariyoshi always delivers real substance when it matters. There is a sequence in Book Five that stands as an uncharacteristically vulnerable moment when Ariyoshi seems to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the reader about the perils and pleasures of being a creative artist that is very moving and cemented my already high assessment of this series. Highly recommended for readers of any age.

Sugar Sugar Rune
Volume 1
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5. Sugar Sugar Rune by Moyoco Anno. When I first heard that ADV was planning to release an all-ages magical girl series from Moyoco Anno, author of bawdy josei manga like Happy Mania and Flowers and Bees, I was certain that someone at ADV was definitely smoking banana peels on the job. [Edit: It's actually Del Rey that publishes this.] How could punky, scratchy Moyoco Anno possibly create manga that would be acceptable for an all-ages reader in the United States? The answer, revealed upon opening the cover of the first volume, is that she does it with a completely unexpected quantum leap of creative genius that resulted in one my favorite manga. Sugar Sugar Rune is the story of two extremely cute little witches who come to the mortal plane in order to compete in a heart-collecting competition that will decide which of them will someday become Queen of the magical realm. On the one hand, it is amazing to me how blatantly Anno has designed this series to optimize its stories and characters in a variety of media. It borrows philosophically from other mega-cash cows like Dragonball Z, Pokemon, and Yu Gi Oh with its game-inside-of-a-story structure and imminently merchandisable character design. This might be cause for concern if the story and art in Sugar Sugar Rune wasn’t so groundbreaking, but, lucky for everyone, it is. Whether by hard work or by hiring better assistants, Anno transforms her early manic art style into the lushest, most inviting manga on the market right now. Her page layouts, which are undoubtedly not the work of assistants, are incredibly dense and pack tons of information into every page. More importantly, the evolving story in SSR is anything but stock material and should convince even the most cynical reader that cute doesn’t have to mean stupid.

Pet Shop of Horrors
Volume 1
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6. Pet Shop of Horrors by Matsuri Akino. Pet Shop of Horrors is the story of an androgynous man-pire named Count D who runs an arcane pet shop in the Asian district of San Francisco. In it, Akino mixes a number of genres and conventions together to end up with a very satisfying brew of bishonen horror told largely in self-contained stories. Though there is a larger story thread that winds its way through all ten volumes, the individual segments are organized around the arcane pets (that often appear as human to their new owners and other sensitive folk) that D is dealing and the moral lessons that accompany them. The writing in Pet Shop is routinely solid and packs the narrative punch of your average Tales from the Crypt story with the same horroriffic twist at the end. The real lure here, though, is Akino’s immaculate linework and visual meditations on a wide array of fauna. She really embodies the contemporary tradition that extends from the decadent shoujo artists like Ariyoshi while keeping her layouts and embellishments looking current and fresh.

Maison Ikkoku Volume 1
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7. Maison Ikkoku by Rumiko Takahashi. Maison Ikkoku isn’t the only Takahashi manga that I enjoy but it is the one that I enjoy most. Completely eschewing the fantastic story elements that characterize her more popular series, Maison Ikkoku is a romantic comedy with an ensemble cast of social misfits that share living space in the maison in question. What makes MI great is the underpinning of serious consequences that pile up beneath the comedy as a hapless young college student tries to win the affections of the young widow that runs the house for her departed husband’s family. While their mutual attraction is never far from the focus of the story, there is doubt up until the last fateful volume as to whether or not the young Godai will be able to overcome his own tendency to self-destruct at the worst possible moment. Takahashi’s art here may lack some of the dynamism of her more popular series like Inu Yasha or the most excellent, Mermaid Saga but, for my manga dollar, Maison Ikkoku shines as THE contemporary blueprint for romantic comedies in manga.

It sucks to be a female superhero these days. Last week (the same week in fact that I picked up Empowered), I casually thumbed through two other new comic books featuring Supergirl, Supergirl #15 and Brave and the Bold #2. In the former, Supergirl discovers, the hard way, that her new boyfriend is a mouth-breathing woman-beater who also, as it turns out, is probably a psychotic stalker. Oh sure, she beat him thoroughly for his transgression, giving him a well-deserved superknee to his power-groin, but only after 16 pages of being dragged around by her hair while being instructed on the finer points of subservience. In the other, she travels through space with a Green Lantern (who can’t focus on the mission in front of him because he has to really concentrate in order not to solicit her for some good old statutory rape) only to fight gladiator-style against space-heavies but, you know, dressed like a really sexy six year old. With a lollipop.

Empowered Volume 1
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I’m not sure if this was before or after the thing with the boyfriend but it hardly matters.

This briefest of glimpses into the murky depths of contemporary superhero continuity is not a scathing indictment of the institutionalized misogyny that pervades modern capes-and-boots comics. Adam Warren’s Empowered, on the other hand, is. It is also probably only the second great work of genius produced by a true synthesis of the comics and manga forms, the first being the first five hundred pages or so of Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest.

Empowered is composed of a continuing series of short stories that grow longer as the volume progresses, about a superheroine with less than ideal powers that diminish as her ultra-thin, body-tight costume is regularly shredded, ripped, or exploded off of her body during super-battles. This scenario, repeated in nearly every segment, not unlike Krazy Kat getting hit in the head with a brick thrown by Ignatz Mouse, usually winds up with Empowered nearly naked, bound, and ball-gagged, as she must endure, once again, the gloating of her villainous foe only to be rescued by her otherwise loathsome teammates, The SuperHomeyz.

If that synopsis seems a little repulsive, Warren treats these themes, only mildly caricatured from a holy host of superhero comics, as found art objects that merely inhabit the story rather than defining it. While his exploration and exploitation of them provides much of the ironic humor that drives Empowered, it is his warm characterization of the richly believable cast that drives the deepest nail into the coffin of superheroic cynicism. Instead of making the sum of the title character’s life an expression of this cycle of humiliation, Warren provides her with friends that offer her meaningful solace from the inhospitable superhero game. It is in this palpable sense of community that Warren draws heavily on manga themes, showing his typical sensitivity to storytelling differences between the two forms rather than aping surface details, which are drawn almost whole-cloth from the superhero genre.

For all this meta-textual hoo-rah supposedly in play, Empowered is neither labored nor shrill. In fact, it’s one of the most laugh-out-loud-funny works I’ve read in years. Warren’s writing, even when blended in with the sensibility of other artists handling the illustration, as with recent projects from Marvel like Livewires or Iron Man: Hypervelocity, is stylish and recognizable. Empowered is a playful but incisive reminder that, when given the forum to write and draw his own work, Adam Warren may have many compatriots in the Ameri-manga experiment, but not many peers. Breathtaking and utterly singular.

Ode to Kirihito is a massive (800 pgs+) single volume collection of what could only be termed a medical thriller written by the sometimes-God-sometimes-Godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka. As indicated in his biography on the inside back flap, Tezuka completed his studies to become a doctor before abandoning medicine in favor of a career creating manga. Doctors and medicine in general are, not surprisingly, a recurring theme in most of Tezuka’s work whether by virtue of Astro Boy’s preponderance of robot scientists (many of whom regularly create and modify mechanical life), Buddha, who is often presented as something of a doctor/mystic, or even Black Jack, a later Tezuka drama about, of all things, a rogue surgeon with a disfigured face and a heart of gold.

Ode to Kirihito
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For all its commonalities with these other works, Kirihito is a different kind of story as it regularly wanders away from its title character to deal more directly with an inexplicable ailment that Kirihito studies and, ultimately, contracts, called Monmow Disease. The ode then is to Kirhito’s quest to reclaim his humanity in spite of the dog-like appearance that Monmow survivors must endure by exposing the truth about the disease and those who would seek to profit from it to the world.

There is so much to like about Kirihito, before even addressing the story and whatever shortcomings it may have, as to make the act of criticizing it seem almost superfluous to the work itself. If one is hunting for pure cartooning mastery at work, seemingly any Tezuka work (certainly all those available in English) will more than ably meet the minimum standard for genius by whatever standard it is measured. This period in the early 1970s is a fruitful one for Tezuka artistically as he begins to infuse his stories with a new level of breathtaking illustrative detail that the incredible demand for content during his butter years drawing Astro Boy never allowed.

When applied to a compelling story (as in the case of Buddha), Tezuka regularly exhibits sustained periods of first-rate storytelling that may well be without peer among his contemporaries in any tradition. Despite its many laudable qualities, though, Kirihito falls shy of this kind of superlative description due to perceptible weaknesses in the story itself. He seems a little out of his element, trying to create a believable world populated by mostly vile people where, by virtue of his determination, a just man finally gets what is due to him. His characterization of female characters in particular thuds flatly against the restraints of this world he creates.

More damning is the frequent use of coincidence to bring the plot around to where you know it’s going, some three hundred pages before it gets there. This sense of expectation is more forgivable when brought about by a clearly articulated motivation of a major character by virtue of their actions but too often in Kirihito, Tezuka goes back to more primitive devices that don’t deliver the same sense of satisfaction.

There is some truth to the idea that Tezuka, on his worst day, is inherently better than 99.99% of the work from any tradition that one might stumble upon. In this sense, Ode to Kirihito represents a much-welcomed addition to the miniscule fraction of Tezuka’s work currently available in English. It’s not, by far, the least compelling work in that group and features the incentive bonus of being a self-contained work available in one smartly-designed volume. But in comparison with even the totality of that limited pool, Kirihito lands cleanly below the high mark established by Buddha and the Phoenix cycle in that it clarifies some issues about Tezuka’s transition into this later phase of his career but demonstrates very little that is new about his work as a whole.

An online preview is available.