Mangafication I

Posted on by

Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked. No helpers appeared with either generosity or bile, just me.

And this is my response, half-answer, half-question. Purely from the stance of what’s pleasing, not what’s good business, since Japanese cross-marketing is pretty ridiculous. I mean, cow catchers.

First, classic-to-manga. (I’m saving manga-to-movie for another day.)

Like Tezuka’s Disnefications of Crime and Punishment and Faust. Both kids’ works from the early 50s, they’re strange marriages, like the Otto Preminger-Jackie Gleason acid-trip movie Skidoo. Once Groucho Marx shows up as God, you can’t stop wondering how such a thing ever happened. There’s Faust, cute as a button! There’s the devil, a nice doggie!

Worse yet:

Yes, that’s him. Thank East Press.

They publish a few books you might know, like Travel and Disappearance Diary. They also do Comic CUE, the flashy, infrequent cousin of the alt-manga anthology Ax everyone’s talking about lately.

They been mangafying the classics. Rashomon, War and Peace, freaking Marx, Machiavelli, Hitler. With twice as many books as the last time I looked. They’re shameless: the series is entitled, more or less, “Finish reading them with manga!” Since no-one would ever read all those words, certainly not illiterate youths. Cliff’s Notes and all that.

I’ve only read their version of Sakaguchi Ango‘s essay ??? (“On Decadence”) and story “The Idiot.” He’s a writer I treasure, whip-smart and wry, the first to read Japan’s utter failure in the war as a gift. I particularly love his ?????? (“My View of Japanese Culture”), in which he decimates German architect Bruno Taut for finding “the Essence of Japan” in temples and palaces rather than a piss-stained toilet in the back of a nightclub. (His point’s far more nuanced, but you get the idea.)

So his outrage and sense of the absurd might fit in manga. I paid my money and I took my chance.

Ouch. I was going to post about manga’s tilt to melodrama, and how Manga-Ango running around screaming would fit better in issue #53 of the Sub-Mariner rather than a version of a classic. About how just drawing a writer this mercurial as a cartoon character, fit for a model kit, betrays his technique. Then I started rereading the source works and wondered if I should write a column about this.

At least the manga has modern-day Shibuya crossing in flames.

So as I see it, the question isn’t whether manga/comics/macrame can or can’t do nuance. They all can when the artist isn’t “Variety Art Works,” who takes all blame for the East Press books. The question is, in an ideal world, what do you get from mangafication? More than just quick & easy consumption? Are some things (stats books, LotR, weddings) better-suited to manga than others (wakes, House of Leaves, Georges Bataille)? What in your life should be mangafied, and why?

0 thoughts on “Mangafication I”

  1. Googly-eyed Hitler. I hate to ask, but what did the Jews look like?

    Earlier you said all manga adaptations were bad. But do they have to be bad? The examples here look like they’re for kids. I mean, East Press advertises its adaptations as student aids, and Wikipedia tells me Tezuka was the guy behind KImba the White Lion. (Who did Speed Racer? Maybe that guy adapted Germinal.)

    So, since I’m told there’s non-googly eyed manga, couldn’t someone do a nonabsurd adaptation of Crime and Punishment, Mein Kampf, etc.?

    On the flipside, I have trouble thinking of any decent comics adaptation of a novel, movie, or whatever. Are there any?

  2. I like Bill Sienkiewvitz’s Moby Dick. I enjoyed a couple of the H.P. Lovecraft comics adaptations I saw (though some were bad.) Junko Mizuno’s adaptations of Cinderella and the Little Mermaid are pretty great.

    So there are a couple. You’d think they’d be a bit thicker on the ground, though…

  3. Hey, Conan! Well, kind of.

    Elric, but I haven’t seen them.

    But we’re getting off course from manga here.

  4. is there a manga adaptation of “house of leaves”?
    that might have some trainwreck appeal.

  5. Comics adaptations: do Star Trek comics count? I learned to draw faces by copying them as a kid.

    Oh, wait, Dave Lasky’s Ulysses. My Irish lit prof passed out copies and all the grad students used it to follow the plot.

    Tom, I’d call the style here “seinen,” for “young men.” But it’s more of a demographic than a style, and more of a nit to pick than a useful way of thinking.

    Style. I’d say there’s no “manga style” if everyone didn’t know exactly what it looks like.

    The different subsets people throw around (shoujo, shonen, josei) cross-pollinate. Then there’s the ones in the underground history Manga Zombie: Trauma, Outsider, and Fleshbomb.

    (John Gallagher did a great translation of the book and everyone with the stomach for horrors should check it out.)

    In Japanese, I’ve always seen “manga style” (????contrast with “gekiga style.” (???). Pretty imprecise. Then there’s King Terry’s “good-bad” versus “good-good” and “bad-good.”

    Maybe manga’s an idiom? Or is this semantic nitpicking? I thought Jog’s riff on what he learned from manga in that article I linked was both hilarious and right-on.

    (And I’d read the Hitler book, but the carry trade collapsed, sending the yen through the roof.)

  7. Ok, we’ve established there are decent comics adaptations, and that manga doesn’t have to be googly-eyed, so to circle back to the pronouncement that started us off … why couldn’t there be decent manga adaptations?

    Point 2: There’s a manga style called Fleshbomb? Good God.

  8. The adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Karasik and Mazzuchelli?) is pretty good…as is the adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Peter Kuper?)