Author Archives: Cerusee

Midnight of the Roundtable

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When Noah asked me if I would contribute to Hooded Utilitarian’s Anniversary of Hate, I didn’t have too much difficulty coming up with a list of personal candidates.  Despite my normal preference for setting aside entertainment I’m not enjoying on the grounds that life’s just too short, over the years, I’ve still managed to amass an artistic shitlist — a list of things I hate so much I’m still angry I read them.  So I ran through the list, and thought about writing about how John Ney Rieber’s using The Books of Magic as some kind of writing therapy for his intense self-loathing destroyed one of the most refreshing new characters Neil Gaiman had created for DC.  Or about how the increasingly unsubtle and didactic right-wing politics of Bill Willingham in Fables is almost a case study in how not to integrate your personal politics into your work.  Man-oh-man, was I ever tempted to pull out my copy of The Best American Comics 2006, and eviscerate a particularly horrible anti-Muslim short story that offended me so much when I read it that I actually gave in to the desire to hurl the book at the wall. (I wanted to pull it out and look up the title of the story, but I recently moved, and it’s in a box. I think. It might be in Massachusetts. I really have no way of knowing.)

But in the end, I decided to go with an old un-favorite, J. Michael Straczynski’s weirdly personal opus Midnight Nation.  Midnight Nation is a twelve-issue limited series that I read a few years ago in hardback, about David, a cynical cop with a heart of blah blah, whose investigation into a gory murder is curtailed when his soul is unexpectedly ripped out by ghoulish monsters.  He wakes up and walks right out of his body, essentially a ghost–a soulless ghost; what precisely David is, when he is neither body nor soul, is never discussed–and spends the next year walking cross-country with a mysterious, cranky, half-naked guide named Laurel, trying to reclaim his soul before he himself turns into one of the monsters that removed it in the first place.

Why did I say weirdly personal?  The hardback edition I originally read a few years ago was accompanied by an essay penned by Straczynski (which, alas, I have not been able to put my hands on again to refresh my memory), relating a terrifying experience in his youth that he claimed was the direct inspiration for the series.  He was walking along a beach one night, and had some kind of near-miss with a gang of violent thugs that apparently opened up to him all the deep secrets of the universe and the perilous balance of humanity.

It does sound a titch traumatic.  But the work this encounter supposedly inspired features long speeches about the wretchedness of the human experience manifest in, among many other things:

1) People who talk in theaters
2) Christopher Reeve being confined to a wheelchair
3) Permissible counts of rat droppings in hot dogs
4) War

I’m open to the possibility that the ironic juxtaposition of petty annoyances and profound evils was meant to be witty, but it didn’t read that way.  It read stupid; a list of pet peeves someone tried to elevate into profundity. Here are the revelations that come on the heels of a death narrowly dodged: people talking in the theater are just the worst.  It’s so sad when bad things happen to people we like.  War.  What is it good for? Nothing.

I’m tempted just to list all the absurd little details of the speechifying, but I really should mention the terrible art, since it goes a long way towards making the book as bad as it is.  The art is terrible!  I don’t know what went wrong–I liked Gary Frank, the penciler, just fine when he worked on the 1990s Supergirl title (that’d be one with a heavy emphasis on Linda Danvers and angels), and he’s a competent artist, but his work on Midnight Nation is characterized by dead-eyed stares, stiff bodies and faces, and character designs that alternate between boring, exploitative, or flat-out stupid-looking.  (I’ve never been able to figure out why Laurel spends the first few issues wandering around in an exercise bra, low-rise jeans, and a thong. ((SPOILERS: the best theory I’ve ever come up with is that it’s supposed to be an inversion of angel iconography, an angel being what Laurel is eventually revealed as. But if you can’t manage to undercut religious iconography without making your main character look like a refugee from Victoria’s Secret–well, bite me.)) Or why David’s ghoulish attackers, the Walkers, are green and bald with black tattoos, and wear crazy cultist robes–a colorful aesthetic jarringly out of place with the everyday look of the rest of the book.)  Could it have been the inker?  The colorist?  Maybe Gary Frank had a bad cold that year.  Maybe he phoned it in because he hated the script.  (Probably not.  But I wouldn’t blame him.)

(I tried to describe this comic to my sister, and she said, “I think I’m getting a feel for it– the sort of 90s’ extra-gritty slasher softcore that’s basically an excuse for the author to express his inner teenager.” I told her it’s not all that gritty. “That’s even worse, somehow,” she said.)

The first time I read Midnight Nation, I just thought it was bad and pretentious and boring.  The second time, what mostly occupied my mind was the thought that there is a great dissonance between what I think Straczynski wanted to do, and what he did.  I think he wanted to write about the margins of society, the way human beings fall through the cracks of the world and vanish, and where they go, metaphorically, when that happens.  It’s the kind of metaphor story Joss Whedon (who I think Straczynski is often compared to, based on some superficial similarities in dialogue) used to pull off so well on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the kind of interplay of reality and story that made Sandman sublime.  But the script is not sublime.  It’s awkward and forced.  A dead-eyed grocery cashier launches into a moralistic lecture to a dead-eyed customer about how she shouldn’t waste her life, speaking of a lost vitality completely absent from the flashbacks to her childhood.  The characters refer to the out-of-phase dimension they inhabit as the metaphor side of things, but the relationship of the metaphor to their reality goes unexplored; it’s simply a setting.  Moments that were perhaps meant to convey warmth or wit or fear are left dry and emotionless by the stiff, lifeless art.

I can’t attribute the book’s failures just to the lousy art, though.  Straczynski is, after all, responsible for the plot, the pacing, the characterization, the development of relationships, and of course, the dialogue.  When Laurel and David first meet, Laurel is intensely hostile to David, refusing to answer his questions, making snide asides, and complaining about being stuck shepherding someone so annoying.  When they meet her acquaintances, they also treat David like an idiot, and sympathize with Laurel for being stuck with him.  But David’s not that annoying–all of his questions are the obvious ones you’d ask, if you’d been savaged by bald, green cultists with claws and zig-zag tattoos, and started having an out-of-body experience with someone who told you your soul was missing.  They’re such obvious questions that they don’t even do anything to establish David’s personality; they’re the rote questions of exposition.  What’s Laurel so annoyed about?  David’s not irritating, he’s just boring.  There’s supposed to be some kind of zesty, push-pull relationship between the weary-and-wise traveler, and the bewildered-yet-spirited greenhorn, but it’s more like watching a confused dog being dragged along by its ill-tempered owner.

The whole book is characterized by this tension between what Straczynski wanted to do, and what actually came out on the page. That shouldn’t be hateworthy–there’s nothing wrong with ambition, and there probably isn’t an artist on earth who hasn’t had a project that failed to live up to their dream.

But I was already dubious about Straczynski when I first picked up Midnight Nation.  In fact, the only reason I read Midnight Nation was because of an argument I had with a friend.  My friend was a huge fan of Straczynski, but my only encounter with him at that point was in his awful “Sins Past” stint on The Amazing Spider-Man (for those fortunate enough to have forgotten, that’s the one where Gwen Stacy has Norman Osborn’s love babies), which I’d hated.  The bad faith of Straczynski’s legendary feud with the writers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (in which he encouraged his Babylon 5 fanbase to make accusations of plagiarism on his behalf) had put me off ever getting into the TV show that made his name. But my friend hoped I might change my mind on Straczynski if I got a chance to see what kind of material he could produce when his work wasn’t bound by editorial dictate or hampered by lousy special effects, if I could experience his writing in a context and a medium that didn’t undermine him.  This was supposed to be the superlative Straczynski work that turned me around, something where I could see the genius that justified the ego and the dedicated fanbase.

I’m still looking for it.

And that is the thing that has really kept me from simply forgetting all about a comic that is, ultimately, more forgettable than hateable. I’m not a fan of Straczynski.  I’m an un-fan.  I become less of a fan with every passing year. He’s an arrogant person, someone who starts petty feuds with his peers, writes the shittiest storylines editorial can dream up, and is cheerfully complicit in fucking over a fellow artist because eh, bad contracts happen.

If you’re going to be that big of an asshole, you need to be a goddamn genius.  A goddamn genius ought — when paired with a halfway competent artist and given the chance to write a twelve-issue miniseries whose concept was inspired by what he claims was a profoundly life-changing personal experience — to be able to produce something beautiful, something memorable, something that tells a truth so undeniable that I retire from it shaken, drained, wondering and muttering its wisdom; the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts. Something that doesn’t feature cheap titty shots and does not weigh tainted hot dogs equally as heavy as the hell of war.  It’s become impossible to untangle my disdain for the work and my loathing of the creator.  I can’t read the arrogant “let me whisper the dark secrets of the universe, so that you may comprehend and choose” speeches of Midnight Nation‘s villain without thinking that’s Straczynski’s voice, so smug and sure that he’s got it all figured out. Every time I hear about some dickish thing Straczynski has said or done with regards to one of his fellow writers, I think to myself, “Where does he get off?  His book was terrible.”  I can’t even figure out why this guy gets work, much less how he’s managed to attract a rabid fanbase.

__________
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

all good things

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The green beans are flourishing, my peonies are dying, and my summer vacation is drawing to a close. Probably also Bill Randall will be returning at some point, so this marks the end of my guest-blogging stint on The Hooded Utilitarian. It’s been fun! Thank you, Noah and company, for having me.

Female Creators Roundtable: Jane Austen and yes, eventually, some damned zombies.

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I’ve been on a big Timothy Hutton kick lately, so naturally I had to go watch Ordinary People, the famous 1980 film for which a young Hutton won an Oscar. Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch, etc; they’re all fantastic. Actually, Hirsch doesn’t really rock my world–I think I’ve seen better psychiatrists on screen before–but the rest of them are such deeply felt performances that I couldn’t even bring myself to scoff at the emotional tribulations and petty problems of wealthy American suburbanites. You’re rich! You have no material wants! And okay, you’re in a life-destroying emotional hell caused by severe trauma. That actually is a real problem.

If I’d read the original novel by Judith Guest, instead of watching the film version directed by Robert Redford, I could have stopped there for my contribution to the women creators roundtable, but I didn’t, so I have to go another direction. What’s sort of been on my mind is the extraordinary subtlety of Ordinary People: it’s brimming with delicate, minute observations of the interactions of people, the better to show how fragile they are, how broken the Jarrett family is. In the middle of the film, there’s a perfectly awful conversation between Moore and Hutton’s characters, a scene in which the mother and son, who have practically no relationship at all, try to reminisce; in just a few seconds, it goes horribly sour and becomes apparent that these people, who have lived in the same house for years, do not have emotionally compatible memories of the past. They can’t connect.

The delicacy of the filmmaking reminded me of the experience of reading Jane Austen novels. In popular culture, at least, Austen’s works are mainly considered in terms of their romantic appeal–and I will say now that as I love subtle, understated passion in fiction, I think Pride and Prejudice is among the most totally awesome romances I’ve ever read–but there is also the manners part of her comedies of manners.

Once, when I was enthusing about the Regency Romance queen Georgette Heyer to a fellow bookseller, I said that she was all the fun of Jane Austen, but purely fluffy. He, an aspiring horror writer, replied that he thought Jane Austen was fluffy. If you’re oriented towards Kafka-esque horror, I guess that makes sense, but if you read Austen in the right mood, she can make your skin crawl without needing any addition of fucking zombies. (I’ve been predicting for years that the next natural step after the publishing boom of sexy vampire romance porn and werewolf romance porn was zombie romance porn, but this wasn’t quite was I was expecting.)

Actually, one of the biggest differences between Heyer and Austen, aside from the fact that the former was a twentieth century writer who ruled the romance genre spawned by the nineteenth century novels written by the latter, is that Heyer likes everybody. Her books feature plenty of dumb, petty characters who screw up life for her heroes, but she treats them gently. Heyer’s work is happy, and in her romances, which are deeply pleasurable fantasies, she chuckles at human foibles and leaves it at that. Austen is more cutting, less forgiving of fault, and the constraints of social expectations bind her characters more tightly. Her novels are not narratives of rebellion, nor anthropological studies, but observations of the way people live and feel within the existing frameworks of a society. Possibly I’m just reinventing the English Lit 101 wheel here, but man, that’s huge; that’s why we still read Austen. Somewhere between the psychological freakout of The Yellow Wallpaper and the extraterrestrial thrashing ooze of Lovecraft, there is the horror of going down to have breakfast with family members who think more about flossing their teeth than about your inner emotional life. (Parts of Ordinary People remind me of parts of Persuasion. You may get out alive; you may even get out sane, but you cannot get out of these scenarios without personal damage.) In terms of their literary worth, creeping insanity and New England towns that worship tentacled alien gods certainly have their merits, but most people probably deal more with the minor and major horrors of human dealings than with those first two things.

Austen doesn’t just reflect social mores in her books; she offers harsh judgement on people and behaviors, albeit discreetly voiced. It requires relatively close reading to get all that, as her prose is both precise in meaning and complex in structure. That’s part of the modern-day fun in reading these books, of course. Elizabeth and Darcy wouldn’t be half so romantic if they communicated in simpler language; it’s all about the delicacy and the intricacy of their conversations and abbreviated meetings, right up until their restrained-but-heartfelt mutual agreement of affection in the finale. I haven’t read all of Austen’s novels, but the same restraint ruled in Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, so I think it is kind of her thing. Encounters with nineteenth-century gothic romance have made it clear to me that the emotional restraint is definitely an Austen-specific thing, too, not a period feature.

…

My sister makes fun of the Keira Knightley movie version of Pride and Prejudice for being so emotionally naked; personally, I liked it because it had big, smelly-looking pigs running around in the yard and there was a lot of mud. What it lacked in mannered restraint, it made up for with literal earthiness; I thought that was kind of neat. There have already been like five billion screen adaptations of that book, most of which didn’t have goddamned Colin Firth; at least the Knightley version had some sort of unique concept in that it substituted minutely observed detail of the physical reality of middle-class country life in Regency England for the novel’s minutely observed detail of the social interactions of the middle class in Regency England, which played to the strengths of the adapting medium and still left a lot of space for unsaid feeing. It’s a film; can you blame them for wanting to make it atmospheric? And I suddenly realize I’ve come round full circle and am again talking about a movie with Donald Sutherland in it.

Speaking of questionable adaptations, though, anybody see that hideous recent Marvel comics version of Pride and Prejudice? I wish they’d beaten Grahame-Smith to the zombie pastiche thing, at least, since putting zombies into everything is I think Marvel’s main sales strategy these days.

something is rotten in the garden patch

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A terrible, terrible metaphor I ran across in a story on tomatoes at the NPR site:

I could never stand to see tomatoes treated that way. Just thinking about it makes me hungry. And it’s almost lunchtime. Out in the vegetable patch, the Brandywines are as red as raw steak. The Juliets are as ripe as their Shakespearean namesake, and the Arkansas Travelers are blushing pink.

The Juliet of the famous play, age 13, was not even ripe by the standards of the day, much less now. I have by now seen a couple of excellent Juliets, which was enough to bring me around on the romantic power of the play and the character, but calling the tween Juliet ripe has ickily Lolita-esque implications. Bad metaphor! Bad!

Kids Comics Roundtable: Hazardous Travel

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Back when I was a bookseller, and for the last two or three library positions I’ve worked at, I’ve had to recommend comics titles for kids–in two cases, I was not working anywhere near public services or collection development, but I was asked for recommendations as soon as I mentioned that I read comics, as comics are hot in libraries, but comics-reading librarians are still in short supply. Embarrassingly, though, youth titles are my weakest area; I just don’t read that many of them, and when I do, I’m not reading them in mind of their suitability for youth.

One of my sisters has a Master’s in Children’s Literature, and secondhand exposure to her education has led to a lot of overthinking on my part when I’m trying to recommend kids comics. So I always feel a little under-equipped dealing with them, because as a selfish adult reader, what I’m constantly looking for is glimmers of adulthood in those books–complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication–and I get excited when I see them, so excited that I sometimes forget that what makes a book a good grown-up book isn’t necessarily right in a kids’ book. The first service of children’s comics is not adult readers like me, but to children.

As obvious as that is, people miss it a lot. Children’s TV shows like Barney and Teletubbies frequently draw mockery for their simplicity and their innocence–qualities that are perfectly appropriate in material created for toddlers. Works that mix the more innocuous elements of adult appeal in with appeal to children can pull double duty–Calvin and Hobbes was pretty successful at mixing the childlike imagination with adult observations, creating a comic that could be sincerely enjoyed on several levels–but I do wonder whether that actually makes them any better as works for children. (I’d guess that a great portion of C&H’s enduring popularity with my generation is due to the fact that the adult perspective mixed into the child’s adventure gives nostalgic adult re-readers something to enjoy beyond the nostalgia itself.)

One of my favorite recommendations as a core YA manga title is Hikaru no Go, but I must confess that I like it as much as I do because it’s so solidly crafted, not because it taps into my latent childish imagination. And honestly, craft and skill weren’t all that high on my list of priorities when I looked for books as a kid–I certainly reacted to, say, the lively, funny, expressive quality of Berkeley Breathed’s cartooning in Bloom County, but I didn’t register the level of skill required to produce it until much, much later. It impresses me now on an intellectual level I just didn’t have when my brain was still a work in progress. I’ve had some good luck suggesting gorgeously made children’s comics to children and their parents, but I’ve also had some serious failures–the universal rejection of Jeff Smith’s Bone by the YA graphic novel club I used to co-host springs to mind–and I have had to learn to swallow it, and not push my adult aesthetic sensibilities on child readers.

(Incidentally, I love Bone, with all its whimsy and frolicking fun, but I wouldn’t love it as much if not for the way that the unsettling nightmares and the darkness permeate the thing. However, though the interplay of light humor and of horror in Bone is one of the highlights for me now, I think I would have been less enthusiastic as a child; I had a much lower appreciation for the sense of creeping terror when I was ten years old. Other ten-year-olds might certainly feel otherwise.)

In the vein of adult sensibilities, I really enjoyed these Thought Balloonist essays on a set of TOON books—Charles Hatfield’s essay here, and Craig Fischer’s response–not least for Fischer’s comment that despite his and Hatfield’s lack of ardor for them, “I suspect….that kids might be more enthusiastic about these books than us crabby old adults are.” But the key bit I am thinking of is in one of Hatfield’s observations on Silly Lilly, which had been praised for its deceptive simplicity: “Not to be curmudgeonly, but the flatness of the approach seems to me to invite a rather adult construction of childhood ‘simplicity.'”

I gather that’s not an uncommon pitfall in writing for children–that is, talking down to children when trying to invoke a child’s point of view. I had a similar thought while reading Guibert and Sfar’s very precious Sardine in Outer Space–there seemed to be too much winking and nodding about the formula of a child’s adventure story for the book to sincerely be a child’s adventure story. But, as my sister pointed out to me, affected childishness doesn’t necessarily stop children from enjoying a book. She cited Peter Pan to me as a classic example: it’s a condescending meta-commentary about children’s imaginations, winking at adult readers, but simultaneously it’s a very successful children’s story with demonstrable staying power and a significant hold on our cultural imagination.

Ultimately, when it comes to actually trying to match up kids to kids’ comics, I try to take my cue from what other children appear to actually enjoy, as we modern librarian-types do. I don’t trust my natural judgment in this area–at the end of the day, I like adult comics, and I like them for their adult qualities–but I’m not interested enough to cultivate the real critical perspective on the field that would better equip me to navigate children’s publishing. Blah.

Alice Hoffman flips out; internet scoffs

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It’s been pretty dead at my house. I haven’t read anything interesting in a while, except for lots of Rex Stout, who’s pretty fab, but who doesn’t exactly keep me up at night pondering the deep questions.

This story caught my eye the other day, though. I particularly love the blase reaction of Roberta Silman, who went on vacation in time to totally miss Alice Hoffman’s embarrassing public flip-out over nothing (in her review of Hoffman’s latest novel, Silman described the book in question as lacking the spark off Hoffman’s earlier work, which she says she liked), followed by Hoffman’s asinine defense of herself (“Girls are taught to be gracious and keep their mouths shut. We don’t have to,” said Hoffman, trying to write off her blatantly immature act of malice against another female publishing professional as for god’s sake, feminism), and Hoffman’s subsequent deletion of her Twitter account. It would be dull to sit through it all first hand, but how lovely for her to get back from a weekend in the Berkshires and be presented with this brief snack of schadenfreude.

It’s amazing that anyone could even wonder whether disseminating someone’s contact information and instructing your fans to harass that person over a minor professional slight might just perhaps be going too far, almost as amazing as Hoffman’s implication that only in the age of electronic mass media and microblogging have authors finally been given the power to respond to book reviewers. No one who’d ever read the letter column of The Nation could read that with a straight face.

Suburban Girl: Love and Work

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I just finished watching this totally lame Sarah Michelle Gellar/Alec Baldwin chick-flick romantic comedy thing, Suburban Girl, adapted from The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. You can’t blame the leads for the lameness–they were clearly trying–but despite the odd clever one-liner and a few scenes that were almost inspired, it generally bit. There was just nothing there–no spark, no chemistry, no insight. It’s about Brett, a 20-something associate editor (Gellar) with a New York publishing house, and her tepid romance with Archie, a 50-year-old legendary publishing veteran (Baldwin). Brett’s a suburban girl because her WASP-y family comes from some unnamed suburb of NYC, although this has very little bearing on the tepid NYC setting, depicted with tepid fashion and tepid personalities. Brett likes her job, but doubts her path, her abilities, her crazy new boss, yadda yadda yadda, meets Archie, they hook up, she dumps her present guy, Archie’s a diabetic alcoholic, Brett shops with her dad at Bed, Bath and Beyond, there is some tepid drama; I am introduced to the musical act Badly Drawn Boy, which is pretty awesome. The romance is, as I said, tepid, but I could swoon over Archie’s sweet townhouse, which is well-furnished and has long staircases.

Despite the fact that it was as thrilling as a warm glass of slightly off milk, I enjoyed Suburban Girl, in a mild sort of way, for the same reasons I dig josei manga . It was about a woman in my general age range, and it focused on her career as much as on her love life. In this case, it’s publishing. With Nana, it’s rock music, and punk music, and Hachi ping-ponging around, looking for purpose; with Walkin’ Butterfly and Paradise Kiss, it’s fashion and modeling, with Suppli, advertising, Tramps Like Us, journalism (Hataraki Man, ditto, although I think that’s technically seinen–but it’s by Moyoco Anno, and content-wise, it’s certainly in line with josei), Honey and Clover, the various professional uses of an art degree. With Happy Mania….god knows, but the romance, if it could possibly be so termed, is just as scattershot as the career arc; Happy Mania is an odd duck. Josei manga is all about the love and the sex, but it’s all about the career, too.

Historically, I’ve been all about science fiction and fantasy, so my chick-lit background is lacking, but the stuff I know–okay, here I was going to list all the chick-lit novels and movies I know, but all I could come up with was the movie version of The Devil Wears Prada, which I honestly loved. (I think it was about 50/50 Hathaway and Streep / gorgeous clothing porn, there.) The romance subplot I admit to having snoozed through, but I felt married to a terrible job at the point when I went to see that movie, and I was all over the career dilemma part. So I guess the upshot of all this is that as far as I can tell, I like the parts of chick-lit that deal with jobs, careers, and the vocation/avocation tension.

I think there’s a particular kick to the career stuff in josei manga, because the women in manga who go for a career are swimming against the tide. Everything I know about women in the workplace in Japan is depressing and frustrating–sexism thrives in the Japanese workplace; unmarried women over the age of 25 are considered spinsters; working women typically retire from their jobs as soon as they marry or get pregnant. I don’t think it’s remotely a coincidence that so many of the working women in manga with contemporary Japanese settings are OLs (Office Ladies–menial positions that involve performing minor errands; it is my impression that to call them secretarial in nature would be to give them too much credit); the OLs that frequent the manga landscape are probably an accurate reflection of reality. So the women characters in manga who are pursuing serious careers in anything–including, yes, fashion–are formidable almost by default, and often admirable.

I wonder if there are men’s manga in translation that deal with careers the way that so many josei manga do? I went over to my bookshelves to jog my memory, and made a list of the manga that have as major component careers or functional equivalents. Some of my best contenders (Hikaru no Go, Iron Wok Jan, Yakitate Japan) owe a lot to what I always think of as shounen tournament manga. Regardless of the activity (fighting, cooking, playing a sport), the manga will follow certain patterns (someone starts out as a rank beginner, is inspired to improve, matches off against others, experiences personal growth. Lather, rinse, repeat as long as the sales stay good). I couldn’t come up with much outside of the shounen titles, though. There’s all the manga about creating manga, I suppose, although I always saw that more as generic creative navel-gazing than a mirror of any social struggle. Do men’s career manga not exist? Are they not in English? Have I just managed to select against them? I have no idea. I can believe that Japanese men don’t have to navigate the same tricky waters that Japanese women do when it comes to following a career path, and that the job-related frustrations for men take a different face in creative work, but I don’t really know.

Drifting back towards the subject of romance, some of my favorite romance-themed manga have a major a career focus (the shoujo titles Penguin Revolution and Pearl Pink, both about acting; One Pound Gospel, boxing), or a vocational interest that pleasantly surprised me–Suekichi’s improv troupe in Dance Till Tomorrow, Godai’s late-blooming career as a daycare center worker in Maison Ikkoku (speaking of Takahashi, Ranma 1/2 was at least as much concerned with personal betterment in martial arts as with romance. I don’t know if it’s a shounen tournament manga as such, but it shares some qualities). In every case, I was there for the romance, but appreciated the way that the vocational themes deepened the characterizations. Bland as it is, Suburban Girl certainly benefits from Brett’s dedication to her job, and from the natural conflict posed in having a romantic entanglement with an older, more experienced person who has already mastered everything she’s just encountering. All of the movie’s best moments pertain to Archie’s role in Brett’s career after she meets him–the status and experience he lends to her as she struggles with difficult assignments, and her ambivalence about accepting those things from him.

In the adult-oriented titles, at least, the dual focus on love and work really clicks for me–those are omnipresent concerns for most adults, and important to our sense of identity. What do I do? and Whom do I love? are pretty good questions to ask if you’re wondering who you are, and knowing yourself is crucial when pursuing success in either work or love. In fact, a dual love/work theme works better for me than either alone. I don’t really care that much about the minutia of publishing, journalism, or the music industry, except as they figure in a character’s life, and I rarely attach to a given love interest strongly enough to care if the protagonists ends up with them, or someone else, or no one at all–I care how it unfolds, less so how it ends.

Love and work are also a nice theme pair as they conflict so often, even if only in simple time allocation–and there’s a classic modern woman’s narrative for you. I think the relationship stress of a time-consuming job specifically comes up in Suppli, Hataraki Man, Tramps Like Us, and Nana. Nana also features a professional rivalry between two of its lovers, both of whom are too emotionally and creatively invested in their musical careers to be able to set it aside. Yazawa explores that one beautifully and with nuance, which is one of the many reasons why we all love Nana.

I wanted to make this all a little neater, tie it up with something, but I’ve been gnawing on this for a couple of days, and I’m sort of stuck here. Modern women’s themes, I dig them. I need to read more chick-lit in English and think about it. Can anybody recommend some to me with good prose? I’ll put up with a lot of flaws for good prose.