Now that it’s warming up, going out makes sense. On the town last Friday with some friends, the one that’s a priest introduced me to the U2charist. Statement from the church of origin:

I … floated the idea of a service in which all the music, from hymns to “service music” (like the Gloria or Kyrie) would be by U2, and a number of parishioners in different generations were really excited. So we built a team to design the liturgy and choose the music, and to ask questions like, How do we get the sound loud enough? and How do we play the music? a DJ? A CD? Powerpoint? We chose powerpoint since we figured we’d want the lyrics visible and for people to be hands-free for dancing and clapping if possible.

Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked.

Then I tried to answer the question, using mangafied Hitler and others from East Press.

Today, a related question: why do adaptations from manga not suck? Or, why do I always seem to prefer not the manga when given a choice? (Short answer: “You suck!”)

Someday I’ll write this all about the Urusei Yatsura TV series and movies, where the math’s Mamoru Oshii > Rumiko Takahashi. Also, Noah’s touched on this with regards to Nana the movie, though I think I’m more okay with Jpop than he is.

Today, Osen, where the math’s TV series > manga. Also, TV series ? manga.

The TV show ran for 10 episodes from April 2008. Kikuchi Shouta’s manga’s still going, with a small chunk scanlated by Kotonoha (my source for quotes).

I saw the show first. On paper, it was made for me: mostly about food, with long, erotic closeups of food. Good food. And fetching actors making said food. Food drama, like, “Oh no! We have run out of the traditional rice straw we use to cook our rice!” The final two episodes hinge on whether or not the makers of the traditional hunk of smoked fish using only the most traditional, labor-intensive methods will survive this modern world. Just the thing to watch on your cel phone.

Aoi Yu plays the lead like a traditional Miyazaki heroine, Kiki or one of the Totoro kids, only with a drinking problem. She talks to the food and pities the tea leaves when they get stewed. Whoever did the music plays it like a Miyazaki soundtrack. It’s all bright and good, and the food O Lord the food. Miyazaki’s food always looks like painted hunks of foam.

But here’s Osen with a scoopful of miso that looks like a fried chicken leg:

I swear I’d eat that whole scoopful right there on the floor.

So the show’s fun, with a nice Jpop theme song, cartoony performances, and eye-candy videography. The televisual equivalent of all-you-can-eat sushi, where the food’s kind of crap but you eat a ton and it reminds you of good sushi you’ve had so you don’t care. Finding out it had a manga source was no surprise, though the source was.

For one reason why, see the first image in this post. TV Osen’s getting trashed with the local toughs; manga Osen’s falling out of her kimono after a long night of getting trashed. (Both Osens like getting trashed, and the show usually starts with a hangover.) She’s got her best drunk-hither look on, and is basically a flirt. Also, her kimono does a poor job of containment.

Kikuchi draws her as an überbabe. Not that an überbabe in manga’s a surprise, but that it seemed so different from the TV series, where Osen’s sexlessly married to the restaurant while her mom, the former proprietress, carries on with eligible seniors.

Kikuchi’s one of those manga artists with quite accomplished, detailed art. He clearly values design for its own sake: his most striking pages are full- or double-page splashes, and note the patterning in this sample. But he also stays on model too faithfully. For instance, Seiji, the head chef, has one expression in every panel. Kikuchi draws it from multiple angles, but the guy’s a statue.

When I read manga like this, it feels like a lot of work to fill in the blanks. You’ve got his line, the character designs, and the story, but very little life in the characters themselves. He doesn’t have to be Milt Gross, but there’s a nonthreatening emptiness at its heart (contrasted with, say, an apophatic art’s very threatening heart).

Which is probably why it works so well as a TV show. Its characters are also drawn in broad strokes– Seiji’s got a spare expression. But they’re incarnated by a person, and watching the actors chew the scenery is most of the fun. Manga Osen’s überbabe perfection– she does bascially everything, and well– is a little easier to swallow when displayed by an actress who looks like she’d die if she ever actually drank a cup of booze.

Or maybe it’s just the food. You can’t eat drawings of food. Photos win every time.

One of Noah’s Wonder Woman posts elicited this comment from Cole Moore Odell:

…it shouldn’t be controversial that some characters simply don’t work, or they don’t work past the idiosyncratic spark of their original creators. There’s nothing wrong with limited shelf life. Yet this simple reality is warped by trademark holders who have unlimited interest in making money off of limited concepts, and by readers who refuse to let ideas go, even in the face of continued creative failure. … the same can be said for most superheroes. Most popular culture, really.

Reading the WW essays, I got the sense of an original vision both odd and personal; later attempts at the character, not so much. But it has enough cachet that people want to keep trying their own version. It could just be positioning (“the first female superhero”). Readers who won’t let go, I think, shouldn’t be faulted. They see untapped potential. (The Cubs could win the World Series; it’s not the fans’ fault for buying tickets.)

And the corporation’s a facilitator, never an author, no matter what the law says. The law’s the most interesting thing here, I think. Totally arbitrary and usually absurd, Odell’s right that it warps reality.

Without going into a laundry list of Boggsian aburdity, I’ll point to the English scrum over Lost Girls. Moore & Gebbie used Peter Pan characters still under copyright in the UK & EU. The hospital that owned the rights objected, so M&G waited to publish there until the copyright expired. An amicable solution, but still:

Why on earth does a hospital own Peter Pan?

(Yes, I know there are reasons. I could have my reasons to leave my fortune to a dog.)

So, my big question: at what point can a work be said to have reasonably escaped its author and been taken over by the culture? It makes less sense to say one person hospital owns & controls Peter Pan than it does to say Peter Pan’s just out there somewhere. I think this question especially important to comics works, which rely more on “characters and situations,” as at least one comics copyright has it, than on any particular story. Certainly, the superhero genre’s founded on the character more than the situation.

(Uninteresting side note: yes, lots of money is involved. So? Granite mining is a cutthroat industry.)

Finally, this is silly:

–Image (C) Tom Bell, sourced at Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license

Screw you, Sonny Bono’s ghost. Say I want to make creative use of the culture I’m in, works speaking in the language I grew up with. For a lot of people, pop’s the only language they have. And that language is owned & operated by companies. So I’m left with parody, the collective unconscious of the 1860s, or the lawless Mississippi kids who didn’t know they couldn’t remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Better than the original in every way, you can only see it through pirate versions as a legit release is a legal tangle.)

In film criticism, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson started the practice of using film stills without asking permission because studios routinely asked crazy fees for reprint rights. Now everyone reprints stills without permission, so a murky legal precedent’s set even if no case has been tried.

So, shouldn’t organized fan-unrest be able to destroy copyright? “24-Hour WW Fanfic Comic Day.” Or cosplay sit-ins, I don’t know. It might be worth it just to have thousands of people dressed as Amazons, going about their business. Maybe Moulton’s ghost would be pleased, if not as much for “24-Hour Hogtie Day.”

So I doze off and miss the first 15 minutes of the UK game. Surreal. And Meeks only has 10 points. Surreal.

Real weirdness: at halftime, I decide to catch up on the WW by typing in the title of this site.

Only I leave off the S: http://hoodedutilitarian.blogpot.com/

At first I thought we’d been hacked. By the Lord. Now I’m wondering whether Google really is all-powerful. Don’t they buy all the typos?