Author Archives: subdee

Hatshepsut

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A friend tipped me off to this manga, by Year 24 artist Yamagishi Ryouko. Hatshepsut belongs to the old-school of shoujo in which, quote, “batshit crazy girls go to ridiculous lengths to FOLLOW THEIR DREAMS (or whatever).” There are two stories in the volume, neither of which is officially translated – and for good reason! The images in this post will therefore be from scanlation, courtesy of translation group Lililicious. BTW, while the manga is not pornographic, it is both erotic and taboo-breaking. You should consider yourself warned. With that out of the way, we can proceed.

First, some background I was able to glean from the internet: According to her English wikipedia page, Yamagishi Ryouko is best known for stories with supernatural and erotic elements, drawn in an Art Nouveau style, about Russian ballet or classic folklore. She’s also the author of possibly the first published yuri manga. For the purposes of this post, what really matters is that she has a number of other Egypt stories to her name. These include Sphinx (1979), Tut-ankh-amen (1994 and 1996) and Isis (1997). The author’s enduring interest in ancient Egypt perhaps explains the great attention to period detail in Hatshepsut (1995), in which the figures actually resemble Egyptian art at times:

I read a movie review once that said that if the script for Gladiator had been written by a woman, there would have been more attention paid to people’s dress and hairstyle. In fact, the author makes a point in Hatshepsut of paying attention to these things. Characters change hairstyle and clothing in response to changes in station, age, and presented gender. There are other details, too. When a character is drugged, it’s with mandragora. A legitimate successor is preferred over an illegitimate one, but marrying a half-sister can strengthen your claim to the Godhood. At one point Ryouko Yamagishi even works an anthropological explanation for the Cretan Minotaur into the story – but I’ll get to that later. I want to first talk about the opening story in the volume which, in classic Year 24 tradition, is deeply inspired by another Year 24 work.

THE ONE AND ONLY FEMALE PHARAOH IN AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

You see, there are two sisters in this story. One is beautiful, emotional, passionate, but brainless. The other is shrewd, ruthless, practical, and ordinary-looking. Of course men all prefer and are in love with the beautiful, lustful sister. Sounds familiar, right?

nhatshepsut_011

The sisters look so different that one wonders if they are really full biological sisters. The story says that they are: their father, now decreased, had the power to stop blood from flowing and the power to see the future. The beautiful brainless sister has inherited his blood-stopping abilities, while the more practical, uglier sister has the ability to see the future.

The split of talents reminds me of SF parable Fingers by William Sleator, in which the genius pianist Laszlo Magyar is reincarnated into two brothers: one of whom has the “hands” (a piano prodigy at age five) and the other of whom has the “brain” (composing music for his brother and teaching him musicality). Because the talent is split, each needs the other.

It’s the same situation in this story. The beautiful sister might be brainless, but she’s their primary asset: not only because she has the mystical ability to stop blood, but also because her ability to have strong emotional outbursts is helpful in their second career as professional mourners. The long-suffering older sister’s ability to see the future, meanwhile, is next to useless. The one time it manifests, in a premonition that Hatshepsut will be Pharaoh, no one believes her. The manga ends with a shot of the older sister dying alone and impoverished, still not believed even after the prophecy has come true.

nhatshepsut_030

When talents are “split” between an unworthy sibling and a golden child, it calls to mind splitting as a psychological concept. In this case, the parent sees one child as “all good” and the other as “all bad” (or alternately idealizes and devalues a single child).

Speaking of a single child, if this story hadn’t had that parallel with Hagio’s Half-Drawn – see Noah’s previous post – this probably wouldn’t have occurred to me, but: what if those sisters aren’t separate people at all?

Unlike in Hagio, there’s little evidence within the art to support this conjecture. I can only argue from within a logical framework: as a single person, the younger sister might represent the emotional, animistic, lust-driven self that exists only in the present. The older sister, meanwhile, is not only the rational self, but the self that is “cursed” to see the future, and to plan for it. No one likes her, but she’s the self that keeps their show on the road: that makes sure they are paid and that they’ll be able to eat. The beautiful sister couldn’t exist without her; in a way, the beautiful sister doesn’t make sense without her.

Or maybe not. After all, there’s a perfectly good reason within the story for them to be always together: on his death bed, their father told the older sister that she and no one else was responsible for her younger sister. In that moment, and probably before, they became an inseparable unit. The younger sister is the way she is because the older sister is there. The older sister is the way she is because the younger sister is there. For all intents and purposes, they are a single unit, even if they are really separate people.

Depending on your perspective, their inseparableness makes this scene either less of an issue, or more disturbing:

nhatshepsut_017

If they’re the same person, does the older sister love the lustful, brainless side of herself, even though it’s a pain and a burden? If they are different people, does she love her beautiful brainless sister because she is the one in control of their joint destiny? Or perhaps in the world of Hatshepsut, beauty is a kind of power, and we should love and respect that power for its own sake? Of course, if you saw the panel at the top of the post, or have read Hagio, then you will know that the Brains does resent the Beauty, after all.

OK, enough psychological realism. Despite all the period detail, this isn’t meant to be a realistic story. Probably the best way to see that is just to consider that the younger sister is blonde! Since there are a lot of other (presumably correct) period details in the manga, I tried to look up whether “blonde hair” really was considered attractive at the time of Hatshepsut (circa 1480BC), as is claimed within the story. This proved to be very difficult because white supremacist cranks love to talk about how the ancient Egyptians were actually blonde Europeans. I couldn’t find any real evidence. Did the author make a mistake here? Perhaps it comes from the fact that prostitutes in ancient Rome were required by law to dye their hair blonde? All I know is that T.E. Lawrence and Lawrence of Arabia have a lot to answer for. Not all princes of the desert are blonde!

So these two sisters, representing perhaps two sides of a single personality, meet Hatshepsut, who immediately claims the younger sister as a lover. However, they later run into some bad luck and are executed. It’s a brutal and unforgiving world, and Hatshepsut, by becoming the ruler of this world despite her birth gender, is the most brutal and unforgiving of them all. S/he is also, in keeping with the theme of beauty/sexuality as power, the most alluring:

nhatshepsut_038

The next story attempts to answer the question of where Hatshepsut’s allure and ambition might have come from.

MINOTAUR

The Minotaur of the title is the Minotaur of ancient Crete. This story hinges around the actions of a Cretian princess staying at the Egyptian court. Incidentally, because Ryouko Yamagishi works without assistants, there’s very little screen tone or shading in Hatshepsut; backgrounds are minimal and figures are drawn in a cartoony style or in outline. The priestess is an important figure, and we can tell because her robe is filled in:

fhatshepsut_063

She’s also noticeably foreign compared to the other characters in the manga.

Right away, it’s clear that the priestess has some nefarious purpose in mind – that there’s something unwholesome about her. Rumors begin to circulate at the Egyptian court about children who have gone missing from other courts during her stays there. Eventually, the gossipers hit upon the idea that she has come to Egypt to kidnap children of noble birth, who will be brought back to Crete and fed to the Minotaur. The priestess explains that there is no Minotaur, that it’s all a misunderstanding:

fhatshepsut_076

This is what I mean about research: it’s the kind of explanation you’d find in an anthropology book.

The Minotaur, as it turns out, is a red herring. I might as well get the most hilarious thing about this story out of the way early:

fhatshepsut_092

Yup, the Minotaur is actually Godzilla.

With that out of the way, we can return to trying to take this bizarre short story seriously. One of places Ryoko Yamagishi shows her strength as an artist is through the conveyance of character through clothing and body language:

fhatshepsut_070

The young Hapshepsut is kitten-like. She doesn’t want to be a girl, so she dresses in a boyish style and keeps her hair cut like a boy’s. She’s successful: strangers see a little boy, not a little girl. It’s explained that the boyish Hapshepsut has been indulged in this way because her older brother, formerly the Pharaoh’s favorite, died in battle on the day she was born. However, when Hapsheptsut officially becomes a woman, the time for fond indulgence will end and she’ll be expected to act properly: to be pretty and docile like her half-sister, and to marry her half-brother, strengthening his claim to the throne. Tagging along with the men on a military drill, the young Hapshepsut thinks wistfully that if she were really a boy, her father would pay more attention to her.

The most unfair thing about all of this is that Hapshepsut is even a better boy than her half-brother is:

fhatshepsut_073

All of this so far has been a fairly standard critique of rigid gender roles and of limited roles for women. For a boyish child like Hatshepsut to play around with gender is not considered to be a big deal. The tomboy Hapshepsut is not yet the androgynous charismatic charmer we met in the previous story, and certainly not the ruthless power player we know from history. What happened?

fhatshepsut_093

Yes, this is a rape. It’s even more disturbing in context: on the previous page, Hatshepsut is distraught because she – he? – has just had her first period. >_> Once you know, you can see the hints the author was dropping earlier on. But on first read-through, this is shocking.

There’s a long and venerable tradition of rape as a transformative plot device in Japanese novels and film, of course. Generally, the raped woman (I think it always is a woman) is transformed into a Bodhisattva able to accept the man who raped her, as we all meditate upon themes of universal forgiveness and cosmic love. Wings of Honneamise is a notable example, especially as it nearly universally critically praised. Please Save My Earth explores this theme at some depth.

In this case, the effect is somewhat different, as the priestess claims to have – through the mechanism of rape – made Hatshepsut a man. It’s an absolutely bonkers reversal of a plot device traditionally visited on women. The scene itself combines masculine and feminine in a weird way. Hatshepsut is terrified but is forcibly brought to orgasm. She becomes “a man” on the same day that “she” became “a woman.” There’s also an element of being inducted into an arcane mystery – the cat, the snake – as well as, of course, the fact that the “ceremony” was officiated by a priestess.

The priestess is a chaotic force within the story. She drops hints that lead to the death of Hatshepsut’s older brother. On top of that, she’s creepy:

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It’s through the traumatic event of the rape that Hatshepsut’s transformation into the beautiful, androgynous, powerful and ruthless Hatshepsut we saw in the first story is begun. Her forced early sexuality contributes to his later charismatic allure – the (female) soft power of sex and beauty. At the moment of climax, Hatshepsut is told that she must become Pharaoh if she wishes to escape the lot of women. This event, understandably, leaves a very strong impression. It’s the catalyst for a personal transformation, explaining the character’s later (male) open ruthlessness. Male and female, in balance, as prophesied and set into motion by the creepy foreign priestess.

In conclusion, this manga will never, ever, be published in English.

The Country of Multi-Talented Women

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I think I forgot to introduce myself last time, so I’ll do that now. Hi, I’m subdee, short for sub_divided. I’m still not sure what this column will be about, but I have a feeling it’s going to involve a lot of very popular, very commercial, but nevertheless very weird Japanese comics; and Kpop.

With that out of the way, I was reading this great analysis of Star Trek: The Next Generation over on Grantland.com when I came across this paragraph about Harry Potter:

One of the reasons J.K. Rowling’s books exerted such an appeal over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you’re a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series. It’s the Slytherins and Death Eaters who have it in for mudbloods, not Harry and his friends, Hogwarts’ true heirs. The result of this, I would argue, is an absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration of basically the entire cultural heritage of England. It’s as if Rowling reboots a 1,000-year-old national tradition into something that’s (a) totally unearned but (b) also way better than the original. Of course it electrified people.

Have your cake and eat it too! How many pop cultural flashpoints does this apply to?

Twilight: they are dangerous immortal creatures of the night who want to eat you up (in all senses), but the good vampires practice self-control and abstinence before marriage, while only the bad ones give in to their base desires.

50 Shades of Grey: BDSM is hot, but people who are into BDSM are emotionally damaged. Never mind how damaged they are, though, because BDSM is hot! Also, the characters look a bit like Edward and Bella from Twilight. But you bought the book because it is popular, not because you wanted to read about all that.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: violence against women is bad, and we will prove this by repeatedly exposing the heroine to violence. Also, she’ll sleep with the married, middle-aged writer-narrator, because he is supportive and nonjudgmental. This will never blow up for him, or anything like that (though it might strain his marriage a little bit).

Pretty much any comic that decries violence against women while also making it a major part of the narrative… (paging Frank Miller, Frank Miller to the table).

While these things are fun to list, they mostly don’t involve an “absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration” of the literature of an entire Imperial power – rather, they are mostly mild-to-medium exploitation fare that decry sex acts while also pleasurably indulging in them. In fact, I feel that by bringing them up, I am diluting the purity of the original author’s idea, which he goes on to discuss in terms of Star Trek: TNG being a fantasy of a conservative, hierarchical society (Starfleet Academy) organized around the pursuit of liberal ideals like inclusiveness and multiculturalism.

I can think of a recent novel/anime/manga series that might fit, though: and that’s Sainkoku Monotagari.


Clumsy girl + multiple hot guys with long flowing hair and robes = must be shoujo

Saiunkoku Monotagi, “the story of the country of many-colored clouds,” is a light novel series centered on the adventures of a young would-be government official, who dreams of passing the imperial exam and loyally serving an Imperial China-esque country. The catch is, she is female, and therefore forbidden from sitting the exam.

You see where I’m going with this, right? There’s a history of these Fantasy Imperial China stories in East Asia, but traditionally the women in these stories are either great marital arts masters (if wuxia) or supernatural creatures (if supernatural kung-fu). In the more “realistic” palace-drama stories, meanwhile, they are either married to/the daughters of male characters; or evil harridans who work behind the scenes, through the men with official positions. They don’t study hard and work diligently to accomplish great feats right out there in the open…


Yeah, why not!

Sainkoku isn’t the only story to look at history and imagine a better place for women, of course. It’s been compared to the 2003 K-drama Jewel in The Palace, about the Joseon Dynasty’s first female court physician, for instance. (And indeed the plot of Saiunkoku – first volume published in November of 2003 – shares many similarities with the plot of Dae Jang Geum.) Looking beyond historical dramas, there have been an even greater number of fantasy re-imaginings. Here’s an excerpt from the TV Tropes entry for Feminist Fantasy:

Another type of Feminist Fantasy is a feminist retelling of an old story, like a fairy tale or folktale. These are very popular nowadays, and seem to be the way this generation of Disney princesses is turning out—see Enchanted and Princess And The Frog. The former is completely self-aware and sends up the traditional Disney Princess archetype, and the latter is about a princess who wants to be a businesswoman and ends up with a guy along the way.

On the Princess and the Frog –> Enchanted continuum, Sainkoku falls in the middle, but closer to Princess and the Frog (straightforward pursuing-a-of-dream-that-does-not-involve-a-man) than to Enchanted (purposeful deconstruction of genre tropes).

Which genre tropes are we talking about, though? Reverse-harem tropes, where the female protagonist is inexplicably surrounded by hot men who compete for her attention? Shoujo tropes, where the protected, naïve main female character betters the lives everyone around her with the strength of her pure love? Palace Drama tropes, where factions cross and double-cross each other in a struggle for political power? Wuxia tropes, where supernaturally gifted swordsmen wander the countryside righting wrongs or at least testing their skills?

If you picked E, all of the above, you’d be right. Sainkoku is a palace-drama story dressed in shoujo reverse-harem clothing, with some wuxia and supernatural elements thrown in to keep the audience interested.


See this page for more on wuxia

In Japan, most fans are fans of the novel series, first, and of the anime series (released but now out of print in the US) and the manga series (currently publishing under the Viz – Shoujo Beat line) second. If they are really fans, they might also collect the mini-novels and calendars; read the spin-off novels focused on other characters; and listen to the drama CDs by the anime voice actors. SaiMono, in other words, is an institution with a wide reach… JK Rowling, incidentally, is currently at work on a spin-off novel about Sirius…

As far as who reads the books: SaiMono isn’t just a shoujo series targeted at young girls, it’s also one of the pinkest shoujo series ever. Check out these covers:


Surrounded by beautiful men, check, pink, check, flowers, check, long flowing robes and hair, check and check…

In fact, “pink” is more true of the anime series than of the novel series, whose covers actually become progressively less pink as time goes on. Still, it’s partially thanks to the breast-cancer-awareness levels of pinkification going on in the anime and early novel illustrations that my friend Charmian – notesonleaves – spent so long trying to convince us that Saiunkoku Monotagari is a strong dramatic story outside of the “reverse harem” and “anachronistic girl power” and “shoujo whitewashing of brutal history” trimmings. And she was right! Actually most of it is politicking and character development. To hear more, read on…

In Saiunkoku, the bad old days of civil war, famine, poverty and unpredictable politically-motivated assassination are within the living memory of most of the cast. Not only that, but these events – and dysfunctional family power struggles – have left most of them with PTSD, or personality disorders, or other remnants of trauma. In the middle of this group of very competent, but very damaged weirdos, Shuurei sticks out not because she is especially sheltered, but because she was able to depend on her family at all. The past playing itself out in the present, especially through barely-suppressed memories of past trauma, is another thing Saiunkoko Monogatari shares with Harry Potter, of course.

On that note, while the SaiMono-the-manga is mostly just a mechanism for delivering the story of the light novels, one place it really shines is the conveyance of subtle shifts of emotion – especially when it comes to Shuurei’s main love interest, the King –


Ryuuki, who became King by default after his older siblings all eliminated each other

It’s against this background that the story takes place, initially framing itself as the story of Shuurei pretending to be a member of the harem so she can get the thrice-shy Ryuuki, who is pretending to exclusively like men, to participate more in his own government.

So since this story begins, literally, within a harem, let’s first talk about the reverse-harem angle. SaiMono owes a big debt to Fushigi Yuugi, the story of a modern girl sucked into a fantasy novel. Miaka finds herself at the center of a web of beautiful and damaged men, despite being, like Bella and Sailor Moon, a clumsy and gluttonous teenager without many traditional leadership qualities.


Fushigi Yuugi’s Miaka and Tamahome

Measured against this yardstick, Shuurei emerges largely as a refutation. She’s not clumsy or gluttonous: she’s good with money and skilled at a classical instrument (the ehru). Furthermore, Shuurei’s goals stand directly in contrast to Miaka’s goals: to serve her country impersonally and professionally as an official, relying on her own intelligence and skills rather than a man.

A traditional feminine failing possessed by the protagonists of these kinds of stories – because, let’s face it, they aren’t cute if they don’t have at least one – is not being able to cook, but the story explicitly makes Shuurei a great cook. Her father, a mild-mannered librarian with a hidden ruthless side, is the one who cutely can’t cook.

All is not refutation and subversion, however. Shoujo plots work better if their main characters are a bit naïve or idealistic, so they will work to change the system rather than accept their place within it. This is the case in Sainkoku, where Shuurei stands out among the traumatized cast as having been unusually sheltered. She’s helped, often secretly, by very many men throughout the narrative, including her father (secretly a SPOILER), her retainer (secretly a SPOILER SPOILER), her uncle (with SPOILER family connections); and the King, who wants to marry her but in the meantime will support her dream.

What’s interesting about all of these sheltering men, actually, is the way that SaiMono insists that the male urge to shelter young female relatives is at least partially pathological. Her father and the retainer, for instance, are secret – or maybe not-so-secret – psychos who are largely genial and apathetic in all things – until you threaten their loved ones (and isn’t that usually considered a feminine quality – the mother bear protecting her cubs?). The worst culprit in the arena of psychotic over protection, though, is Shuurei’s loving uncle Reishin, who is so determined to love and protect her from afar that he can’t even approach her, but only watch over her secretly. Even his friends think he’s a creep.

Within the story, the fact that Shuurei has been sheltered is actually a problem – it gets in the way of her being an official. The male cast are constantly watching her, and constantly telling each other not to interfere too much – to let her make her own mistakes and learn from them.

So SaiMono is a fix-it story, designed to rectify this one galling aspect of otherwise very enjoyable palace dramas: that there’s no space in them for strong female characters to pursue their (non-romantic) dreams. Not only is it a fix-it story, it’s one that sticks with its principles even against what the readership might like to see. For example, even the other characters, after a certain point, are rooting for Shuurei to end up with Ryuuki – but to do that would be to throw the story back into that other kind of narrative, of women working through men. She can’t marry him without giving up her dream, and he can’t make her do it without betraying her trust. The two premises of the story, that it’s a shoujo fantasy and that it’s a feminist fantasy, are at odds with each other. It’s not clear until the very last moment which one will win out.

A properly feminist story can’t have only one good female characters, of course: it also needs strong female role models. So SaiMono has a character who’s a princess with wuxia skills; another who’s a high-class courtesan owner of a brothel; another who’s a ninja; another who’s an inventor; and so on. The author appears to have put some thought into Sainkoku as a work of feminist fantasy, in other words.

That being the case, are the old bugaboos, the evil women with special powers, exorcised in this story? And are those who don’t think it’s appropriate for a woman to become an official recast as the villains, the way they are in Harry Potter? Sort of, but then again not really. There *is* an evil supernatural woman (although, on the other side of the ledger, also a good one). Shuurei is on the side of progress for women and inclusiveness in government, but also on the side of entrenched “major clans” over the wishes of the members of the petty nobility. Since there are a lot of factions, it’s hard to say who the “villain” is, apart from the people Shuurei has to win over.

That’s because SaiMono, despite initial premises, is committed to the idea that the world is complex. For instance, passing the exam doesn’t magically confer respect upon Shuurei, who continues to struggle with others’ perceptions that she is not capable. Similarly, it’s not enough for Ryuuki to suddenly decide that he wants to participate in the leadership of country: there are forces that have already moved to fill that role, and some of them are no less patriotic and well-meaning then him, and are much more competent.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: SaiMono is still young adult fantasy entertainment. Even “complex” issues tend to have simple solutions, as when Shuurei fixes the fortunes of a poor province with no natural resources by establishing a university there. Still, simplified or not, these kinds of plots are what I was hoping to see in The Legend of Korra, another story about a young, sheltered female protagonist with the potential to do great things. Korra let me down when the writers supported her choice to become a vigilante, but SaiMono surprisingly held up.


Korra looking over Ba Sing Se, the capital city of the Earth Kingdom and a complicated place.

Sainkoku Monotagari is idiosyncratic in other ways besides just the commitment to a feminist message. For instance, the author has a favorite reoccurring character type: the seemingly-well-adjusted mild-mannered underachiever, who turns out, almost invariably, to be a scarily competent and ruthless person. In the world of SaiMono, younger siblings very often assume leadership within clans while their more-damaged overachiever older siblings play hooky. There’s also the fact that the series’ main love interest, the King, is bisexual – a surprising angle, and possibly the most subversive thing about the series. Although, sadly, this plot point doesn’t get a lot of play after Ryuuki decides that Shuurei is the love of his life and that he’ll take only one wife.

Returning to the original premise of this post: perhaps that opening quote doesn’t apply as well as I thought, as there is very little that’s “subliminal” about the feminist retelling of this series. It’s not only a clear attack on the idea of separate roles for women, but also pretty careful to include a wide variety of female role models. On top of that, though I’m not familiar enough with this to say for sure, I do sometimes get the idea that “subversion” is a wuxia genre trope to begin with… although then again Saiunkoku is more of a palace drama than a wuxia story…

A better case might be made for some of the other idiosyncrasies of the series: for instance, Sainkoku’s take on standardized test-taking (passing the test is when your problems begin, not where they end). Or how about the insistence that birth order and skills are less important to success than personality and temperament? What about all those “lazy” hidden genius characters who don’t work hard but succeed anyway, but then throw that success away? …Actually who am I kidding, that’s not a subversion, that’s the premise of lots of Japanese fiction. They are really entertaining, though.


Ran Ryuuren, eccentric genius #10 in an ongoing series

Since this article started with a discussion of Harry Potter, I’ll end with a short list of other ways in which it is superficially similar to JKR’s bonkers subliminal reconfiguration: first of all, an emphasis on wacky hijinx among a large ensemble cast; related to that, a strong sense of character and of individual characters having their own motivations and lives outside the main storyline; finally, the nominal “mystery” plot of each volume – which is however much less mysterious after all the politicking and hijinx are stripped away.

Finally, of course, it’s a massively popular series! Light novels series, anime, manga series, voice actor drama, tons of character goods and officially sanctioned side-stories and spin-off novels…. there’s a Saiunkoku machine. And no wonder. I feel like some bronies should be discovering Saiunkoku, which is another one of those sparkly pink woman’s stories purposefully built to include asskicking as well as dark, tragic pasts. Maybe if the anime weren’t out of print, or the characters didn’t have such damnably difficult to remember names (Shuurei vs Shuuei vs Seiran vs Seien vs Shouka vs Shoukun vs Shusui). If the anime ever gets put back into print, perhaps we’ll see.


Or, you know, young adult entertainment

HU Gangnam Style

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The many faces of Psy in Gangnam Style. You can buy these as stickers. Collect them all!

First of all, here’s the video, if you haven’t seen it already. If you are sick of the song, you can also watch it without music.

Secondly, in my third-most-ever-favorited comment on metafilter, I talked about Psy’s Gangnam Style and race in America:

Gangnam Style isn’t the first viral smash Kpop song, or even the first viral smash Kpop song that sort-of sounds like LMFAO and was produced by Teddy Park of YG Entertainment (who has been working with the artists to adapt the same ultra-mega-popular song into a huge smash hit every six months like clockwork – here’s 2NE1’s I Am The Best and Big Bang’s Fantastic Baby, if you missed them the first time).

But of those three acts – each of which has already gotten a lot of U.S. attention, i.e. Pitchfork wrote about 2NE1, Will.i.am worked with them, MTV Iggy called them the best band in the world; Big Bang were crowned Best Worldwide Act at the MTV Europe VMAs and have been written up in US and European business magazines – Psy, a previous unknown (to the US), is the act the entire Western celebrity world has decided to back.


Psy and Bigbang’s G-Dragon, hanging out.

On metafilter, I speculated that while not precisely a conspiracy, the choice to throw US media and celebrity weight behind Psy and not another act was a tactical move:

Compared to those other songs, “Gangnam Style” is a lot more relatable to the average person – it’s a song about acting like you are rich, whether or not that’s really true, rather than a song about being actually rich and famous (although Psy is both of those things, in South Korea).

More than that, it’s relatable for the average American, who can comfortably put Psy in a couple pre-existing mental boxes: hilarious “not attractive” guys partying hard and getting the girl; funny Asian guys; funny viral videos built around dead-serious funny performances in public places; even subtle social commentary. Bringing Psy over here broadens people’s ideas of a viral pop song a little bit, since it’s in another language, but not too much, since, after all, Psy is singing about how he isn’t the rich person he dreams of being typical celebrity guy.


Psy x Justin Bieber. They share a manager in the US, Scooter Braun.

To expand on that a bit more – and please forgive me for retreading already well-tread ground – Psy’s Gangnam Style video isn’t just funny in ways that Americans recognize, e.g. the hot tub scene borrowed from Austin Powers. It’s also implicitly critical of “all flash no substance” celebrations of celebrity vanity/megalomania.

For instance, here are videos by B.A.P., f(x), Jo Kwon, Tasty, Girls Generation and After School proclaiming their own greatness – although this last one is a Japanese single released by a South Korean group, not properly a Kpop song. It is, however, a great example of the kind of stadium-ready pop South Korea has been making since the World Cup last summer, and again this summer in celebration of the Olympics – for which Psy has, natch, written the official theme song.


Psy performing at one of his famously crazy concerts, underneath (cartoon) images of himself.

The difference between those groups and Psy isn’t precisely hubris as Gangnam Style is, after translation into English, already plenty boastful. Rather, it’s a comment on artificiality: Psy’s video is set in the real world – albeit one full of celebrity cameos and action-movie stunt acting – while other groups save money by filming in constructed worlds made up of empty mansions, empty clubs and empty rooms; or else in the “real” Kpop world of stage lights and dressing rooms. And that’s if there is any nod to reality at all. In its purest form, Kpop features locations that aren’t just abstract and prone to disorienting lighting, but subject to no other logic but the logic of capitalist consumption – a predilection that’s been noted on this blog previously.


Psy live in Australia, in a concert still that looks like an action-movie poster.

Of course, there’s a lot of self-awareness in the artificiality of these videos… in addition to being generally more economical, they sometimes also double, Lady Gaga-like, as commentary on their own artificiality (one, two, three).


Images of Psy proliferating everywhere on the latest episode of South Park.

But to return to the topic at hand: The good-looking teen and twenties celebrities who populate Kpop music videos belong in their world, being in part “constructions” themselves – that is, the groups are definitely constructed; the personas are partially constructed; and the faces and bodies are meticulously constructed through a combination of professional makeup, professionally-guided diet and exercise, and plastic surgery. Psy, although also a nominal member of this set – and actually hailing from the swank Seoul district of Gangnam, Korea’s plastic surgery capital – does not look like he belongs with them, and therefore has to fight to be recognized as belonging to a glittering world in which only handsome people exist.


Speaking of handsome people: Psy with Hugh Jackman

Despite what the Atlantic would have you believe, however, Psy is far from alone in his satirical take-down-from-within-the-industry. Even apart from direct critiques – of superficiality, of sexist double standards, of government censorship, of materialism and gender roles – Gangnam Style actually comes in the middle of a move toward broadening the appeal of Kpop by setting it in real places. Like This and Ice, for instance, are two of this summer’s other attempts, proceeding Psy’s, at LMFAO-style outdoor flashmob videos.


Psy leading an impromptu(?) flashmob on The View

With that said, there’s still plenty of artifice to go around. On metafilter I concluded that trying to viral-market any of the more obviously constructed groups in the US

would require a long explanation about what Kpop is and why those artists “really are” famous. This would require the U.S. public to buy into a world where the U.S. is not the center of all pop music production “that matters”. So yeah, I think there is quite a bit of commercial calculation behind the media push of [Gangnam Style]. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a great song worthy of being spread, just that there is a reason it was thing this song, and not some other one.


Psy presiding over many images of himself on the latest issue of Billboard

Do I still think this way about Psy’s smash hit? Yes and no. Here’s Ask a Korean, probably the first place you should go for answers to these kinds of questions, on the reasons for the song’s success overseas:

First, Korean pop music has been laying a solid groundwork for PSY to succeed. It is true that, thus far, efforts by Korea’s pop stars to break into the U.S. market resulted in a flop. Top stars like Wonder Girls, Girls’ Generation and 2NE1 never made a dent on America’s public consciousness. Nevertheless, the groundwork that these groups laid remains important. Because Korean pop music at least got on the radar screen of the insider players of American media market, PSY’s music was easily accepted by those insiders.

This is a crucial point that separates Korean pop music and pop music from other, non-Anglophonic countries. Through repeated contacts with American media, Korean pop music had a ready audience among American media insiders.

Check the original post for more, including a great graphic of a T-Pain-centric view of the universe.


Psy with ultimate Hollywood insider Steven Spielberg.

Though initially on the “why this song and not another?” train, I’ve since rethought my position. Maybe it’s true that Gangnam Style doesn’t threaten a US-centric view of the US’s place in the center of world the way that another, more nakedly imperial song would. On the other hand, this song is also popular in Istanbul!

This has been on my mind since I was Turkey recently. Istanbul, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, has pockets of hyper-capitalism inside a generally conservative culture – kind of similar to Korea? In any case, a gazillion Turkish parodies exist for Gangnam Style, including this one with found footage of old men dancing at weddings. “Uncool” guys acting “crazy” for the benefit of young, conventionally attractive women, whom they would like to impress, is a near-universal phenomenon, it would seem.


Another artist who is popular in Istanbul, Sardor Rahimhon. Lacking Psy’s discipline, he is occasionally photographed out of uniform.

And everyone loves a silly dance craze. This is anecdote, but it’s not just that this song is playing at cafes; from our hotel room in the old city, we saw a guy doing the horse-dance down the street…


Deadpool doing the Gangnam Style horse dance on the latest issue of The Avengers.

I have kind of come around on Gangnam Style, then, and now think the silly – and yet instantly recognizable – dance on top of the ridiculous – and yet instantly recognizable – LMFAO-style beat is the main thing, along with the boost from American media/celebs who rightly saw the viral potential of the video and performer.

In the final analysis, then, the viral power of Gangnam Style comes from its being instantly recognized, widely liked, and easily reproduced. But where is Psy getting that cool-dorky look from anyway? Technically, from trot: Korea’s traditional pop music form which is currently experiencing something of a revival. Psy only looks trot, though: his music is pure 00s bombastic stadium rock, mixed to already sound like it is being played over loudspeakers at a large sporting event.

But what about that trot beat, eh? Another thing I will throw out for your consideration – if only because I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere – is Serbia’s entry in the 2010 Eurovision contest. Op, op, op! Ovo je Balkans! For more on this connection, read on…

Frank Kogan – Koganbot – has been writing about what he calls the Austral-Romanian Empire, a pop music spectrum that ranges from Tu Es Foutu and We No Speak Americano in the East (Australia/Oceania) to D-D-Down and Mr. Saxobeat in the West (Romania). To his list of Kpop singles that incorporate sounds from across the (Eastern) world music spectrum, I’d add Musiche by Crazyno (pronounced Cray-ZEE-no)… a guy dressed up like a Balkan entertainer/a trot performer/Psy…


Crazyno is from Australia! Perfect! But is he willing to wear that suit every day for the rest of his life?

The influence isn’t one-way, of course. Kazakhstan has their own Kpop-style boyband, for instance: Orda, also here. And meanwhile, a Kpop group that’s always had a strong European following is TVXQ, who right now have my current favorite take on the LMFAO Party Rock beat. Even knowing about this connection, however, it took going to Istanbul for me to notice exactly how much like typical Eastern European pop the video for Tallentalegra – by former TVXQ member Xia Junsu – is. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? It’s a look that’s so well known (on women) that it was parodied by Hilary Duff in Iraq War black-comedy War, Inc.


Last celebrity cameo! Psy with Golden Girl Betty White

So there’s that. In other examples of trend-chasing, meanwhile, there’s the micro-trend of British-chart-sounding singles at YG Entertainment (Psy’s company): Dancing on My Own, I Love You, Don’t Hate Me, CraYon. For comparison/contrast, here is UK pop group Girls Aloud.

No corner of the globe is safe, however! If you want to find some Spanish guitar-y singles, you can find them as well: Wow, I Wish. Is Block B going for a similar audience, or a US audience, or in fact a worldwide audience with their Pirates of the Carribbean-sounding single Nallila Mambo (which you absolutely must watch)?

All of this is without even getting into Kpop’s first successful overseas expansion…to Japan. As my friend Sabina said, this is where the Italo producers went after Italodisco died in Europe. 4minute have multiple Japanese singles in this style. When people talk about Kpop, “Gee” and the Norwegian wave, they are generally talking a collaboration between Kpop songwriters and European dance producers. Many words have already been spilled on this particular connection, so I won’t spill any more – check Thomas Troelson’s wikipedia page for a general idea.

So it’s no surprise that Turkey is ready to embrace this pop amalgam, existing, already, at the crossroads of pop. Pop music television in Istanbul is a mishmash: they got stuff from the US and the UK, stuff from Eastern Europe, stuff from Russia, stuff from India…


Okay okay, this is the last celebrity cameo. Psy with Ban Ki Moon, current Secretary-General of the United Nations

Someone called the Kpop style the style of the mashup, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think there are some unique things that no one else really does, or at least that are not a part of mainstream pop elsewhere. For example, I think that Kpop produced for an older domestic audience follows slightly different trends and is slightly less bombastic – or at least is bombastic in a more complex slash tortured slash melodramatic slash tragic way. But as this post is already a bit long, perhaps I’ll talk about that next time.

To bring this back to Psy, the market is nothing if not adaptable. It didn’t take underground-rapper-with-pop-ambitions E.via very long, for instance, to come out with a response song and video. She’s even using a cartoon image of herself to promote!

And speaking of cartoons, you have been wondering about that Deadpool-doing-the-horse-dance Avengers cover, right? Wonder no more: Deadpool VS Gangnam Style.

I hate you because I love you: Shonen Jump boys’ club edition

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Seconding other contributors that I don’t go out of my way to read comics I don’t like, so for this roundtable I had to reach back – way back – to when I’d read anything.

You know how it is: you read comics with your friends, and you’re all willing to spend more time on the things you don’t like – maybe because you haven’t worked out how to tell yet, within the first couple chapters, when a series is going to the dogs. Or maybe because you’re students or underemployed, with more time to spend on stuff that’s bad (in an interesting way) as well as on stuff that’s good. Or maybe because your friends are like me and mine, a bunch of fanfiction writers who are drawn to flawed art like wolves to wounded prey.


Not this kind of wolf, obviously

In any case, I don’t hate these flawed comics (or manga). Rather, I am fond of them: because they were good enough at the time, because even the bad ones were entertaining, and because I read them as a part of a community that didn’t expect perfection – and actually, probably, preferred some flaws in the first place.

So why read something you hate – I mean really, truly hate? Because you didn’t know you would hate it? Because other people – the in-crowd, the public – love it? Because the people who matter – your friends, critics you respect – love it? Or maybe because in another lifetime, you might have loved it too?

Though there are exceptions, it seems to me that very often, to hate something you also have to love it. A series you “hate” in this way is a series you would have loved, if it wasn’t for this one, specific, terrible thing that you hate. That’s the kind of hate I’ll be talking about in my article about Bakuman.

Bakuman is the second manga series by writer-artist pair Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, who previously worked on Death Note together. Death Note was a mess by the end – and morally challenged from the beginning – but I have fond memories of it since it was the first manga series I got really into with other people on the internet.

There was so much bad faith moralizing in that series. A single sociopath high school student was going to make the world a better place by killing already-apprehended criminals, who were waiting in jail for their sentences to be decided, using a magic notebook. This would deter other criminals from committing crimes, leading to a better, crime-free world. Because it’s the countries that have a transparent, (semi-)functioning justice systems and active, (semi-)free cultures of journalism, that report on crime and imprison criminals according to the rules of law, that are the worst off, am I right?


You tell ’em, L!

The thing is, while Death Note did a pretty good job of painting Light, the megalomaniacal serial killer high school honors student who lucks into the possession of an instrument of mass murder, in a negative light (because power corrupts and only the corrupt seek power), it didn’t really have many characters who were much better – who were morally upright and competent. When a character with brains and morals did show up, s/he was first brought down below even Light’s level (supporting torture, for instance), or else shown up by Light, and then killed. And more importantly, Death Note never really questioned whether Light’s “plan” to become “God” of the “new world” would work. If you are smart, you are better than the system, but when you exercise that superiority, you become a monster, the series suggests. The System eventually catches up with you and kills you, justice is served, the end.


It’s not a spoiler because the series had to end this way.

But I don’t hate Death Note. In its own way, it’s an interesting morality story, or at least an interesting look into Ohba’s twisted mental landscape. It’s also a work of the zeitgeist, tackling – among other themes – Japan’s 2004 shift from trial by judge to trial by jury (see below) and whether torture can ever be justified. You can also, if you squint, see some questions about memory and identity, as Light becomes a very different person during the brief period when his memories of the Death Note are removed.


Japan’s shift to a lay jury system was also tackled by absurdist Nintendo DS series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, now a live action movie directed by Takahashi Miike

We don’t know very much about Death Note author Ohba, other than that he – or she – is a bit OCD, draws him/herself as a woman on the album sleeves, and is rumored to be a well-known novelist when not moonlighting as a rookie manga author. Obata, meanwhile, is a very well-known artist, having previously illustrated Yumi Hotta’s critically acclaimed manga Hikaru no Go and worked as an assistant under Nobuhiro Watsuki on fan-favorite Rurouni Kenshin. Death Note’s success, as a comic and not a vehicle for Ohba’s wacky ideas or convoluted plots, is no doubt down to Obata, who reportedly handled most of the character designs and, especially in later volumes, the page layouts. In a comic where everyone either agrees with the hero or is hopelessly naïve – or is pursuing a private agenda – Obata’s distinctive character designs help to make every character unique and identifiable.


And he has great fashion sense, too

Flash forward to Bakuman. In an Ouroboros-like plot, this is a manga about making manga. The protagonists, childhood friends Moritaka Mashiro and Akito Takagi, are an artist-writer pair just like Obata and Ohba. They share a dream, of being published in Shonen Jump (the magazine that serialized Death Note and Bakuman), coming in #1 in the reader popularity polls, and having their comic adapted into an anime, at which point Moritaka’s childhood crush will be cast in the title role and they can finally be together.


Moritaka and his future wife have a pure love. There are no Freudian implications here at all.

It’s exactly the kind of thing I really like. As in a lot of other exaggerated, but ultimately (mostly) non-fantastical shonen manga, you can learn something by reading Bakuman. In this case, you are not learning about bread, or wine, or shougi, or go, or American football; rather, you are learning how to become a famous mangaka for Shounen Jump. There’s a lot of actually very good behind the scenes analysis in Bakuman, covering topics like: how the popularity poll results are counted, how to submit work to a contest, what kind of work sells for what reasons, how to work with an incompetent editor, and how to hire and work with assistants. Just like in Hikaru no Go, you don’t get the sense that the protagonists are “ordinary” or that their rise to the top is easy. In Bakuman, Moritaka and Akito live and breathe manga. At one point Moritaka – still in middle school – is hospitalized for overwork, proving he is off to a good start in his professional career.


Adhering to the friendship! hard work! loyalty! Jump formula, with a few notable twists: two middle school boys in pursuit of their dreams

Just like in Death Note, the plot is fast-paced, with the first three volumes already covering three years. Ideas come fast and thick and in this case, have a natural outlet, as Moritaka-Akito work on countless series and toss out countless ideas that mostly all sound like they could be pretty good B-titles or short films. Other mangaka come on the scene, each with a separate and plausibly developed title. It’s a good showcase for Obata, who uses a different art style for each series-within-the-series, with his signature, realistic style reserved for the pair’s main series about an eccentric inventor, a hapless child, and a punishing female authority figure. There’s a bit of the “Theory of Mind” that was on display in Death Note – characters either agree with and support the main pair, or are irrational – but again, as in Death Note, the character designs are distinct and memorable, leading to an interesting and entertaining main cast.


Obata uses his signature realistic style the most when drawing the protagonists’ own manga

It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s a perfectly serviceable diversion, especially if you like inside-baseball comics about the business of making comics. The main pair are also immensely appealing as a pair, the kind of BFFs who have each other’s backs in business as well as in romance, and can finish each other’s sentences. Who doesn’t want a partner like that?


Brainstorming session

Then there’s the thing I hate: and that’s that Bakuman is really, really sexist.

You can sense the hand of an editor, somehow, in the introduction of the martial-arts-loving writer’s girlfriend, who karate-kicks him whenever he does or says something particularly outrageous. Subtle, no! But effective, yes! Women are, after all, 30% of Shounen Jump’s readership, so it wouldn’t make good business sense to insult them too much.


This is a panel from early on before, I suspect, an editor intervened to stem the damage. Or alternately, here’s Jog’s excellent analysis, including speculation that the sexism in this series is somewhat knowing.

It’s something, but it’s not enough. A partial list of Bakuman’s sexist and misogynist plot points might include:

–Marrying your girlfriend so she will shut up about the other girl who likes you (and whom you might like a little bit, too)

–Training a female mangaka in the art of catering to men: only in this way can her work be validated/successful

–General insistence that girls’ opinions don’t count, that only pretty girls matter, but that smart and pretty girls who don’t cater to men are actually “dumb” and unattractive

–To even out the balance, there is a plot arc involving the repulsiveness of a fat, slovenly, otaku male mangaka, who ignores his cute geek girl assistant to focus on a woman who is way out of his league. He gets what he deserves when both women reject him.

And on and on. While really bottom of the barrel guys have their characters dragged through the mud, too, there’s a clear, obvious line between the basic decency and grooming required of men, and the flawless beauty and sainthood required of women.


I’m just gonna like… leave this here.

The funny thing about this is, while a lot of shonen manga series are passively sexist, in that they don’t have any strong or interesting female characters, Bakuman, because it is actively sexist and misogynist, paradoxically includes a lot more strong female characters – very beautiful, very smart women we are supposed to dislike for their “bad personalities” unless and until they prove they are willing to abase themselves to men. Thus, Akito’s karate-loving girlfriend is eventually tamed, and puts Akito first in everything. Once he is engaged to her, she can’t question his feelings for other women, and she can’t have goals beyond the promotion of his career.


Perhaps true love means accepting me even when I am a jerk to you?

Or there is Moritaka’s future wife, a pure and distant paragon of virtue, who proves her goodness when she turns down an offer to undress to further her acting career. Or Aoki Ko, the female author of a respected shoujo series, who for some inexplicable reason submits herself to the boys’ club at Jump. She’s smart, pretty, and humble, but she can’t be any good until she learns how to pander to the male readers.


Although OTOH, the idea of being “trained” in the manly art of drawing panty shots is admittedly pretty funny.

The thing is, a bunch of these issues are real issues for women. When’s the last time you saw a boys’ comic address rampant sexism within the industry (and within the voice-acting industry, as well)? Or the struggles of women in a sexist society?

These issues are addressed in Bakuman, but not from a place of love and understanding. More from a place of contempt and loathing. I haven’t read until the end of the comic, so it’s possible that the series does turn itself around. But I doubt it! There are just too many clues that Ohba and/or Obata really mean it.

In the final analysis, Bakuman is one of those series I would really love, if it wasn’t for this one specific thing that I hate. I think that makes it a pretty good candidate for this week’s roundtable.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Araki Hirohiko at the Louvre (pt. 2)

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A continuation of this post about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.  With the backstory out of the way, it’s time to talk about Rohan at the Louvre, a standalone art comic published – in English! – by the Louvre as part of its original graphic novel series.

The main character of this book is Rohan, a professional mangaka and assumed self-insert character for Araki Hirohiko, the mangaka of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.  Although Rohan is a character from Arc 4 of Jojo, he is most visually influenced by the themes of Arc 5 (the  Italian gangsters arc). This makes sense as Rohan in the Louvre is a graphic novel commissioned by – and set in – the Lourvre Museum in Paris. As one Amazon reviewer puts it: “The question of what art is, is central to the story. What emotion does art evoke in its’ viewers? What inspired the art? What part does the art play in history?”

I’m not sure I possess the visual knowledge to truly deconstruct this book, drawing as it does from Renaissance and Medieval art as much as from pulp and superhero comics. (That same Amazon reviewer says: “This comes highly recommended for art (almost Gil Kanish)… [it] reminds me of a Poe poem brought to life, almost the Casque of Amontilado”). Instead I’ll just post a bunch of scans and do my best to comment on what’s going on in them.

Here’s the first full illustration:

Araki is well-known for cross-hatch shading, odd poses and gestures, and (especially) garish color combinations. In this case, the book’s first plate continues the pink, green and blue theme of its cover. In a surprise move, however, the rest of the book is fairly restrained (in terms of its color use, anyway). Instead of combining three or four strong colors on a single page, each section of the book is dominated by a single color with perhaps another strong color acting as an accent.

(Read from right to left.)

The book begins in the past, with a young, hot, aspiring (but not yet published) Rohan spending his summer vacation at his grandmother’s inn. The primary color of this section of the story is a faded parchment, fitting in with the flashback and Japanese countryside vibes, with Rohan’s green hair and a mysterious young woman’s pink shoes (and, later, kimono) serving as accent colors. Araki’s black and white art tends to feature a lot of heavy cross-hatch shading, which he draws in himself, by hand, at great speed, eliminating the need for assistants to add screen tone. The cross-hatching adds speed and dynamism to the drawings, but often makes individual pages look heavy and dark. (Or perhaps that’s just the way they look scanned in – the perils of reading unofficial translations.) The watercolor and marker coloring of this book, however, allow for more subtle and lighter shading. Most of the time the drawings look like fashion illustrations.

I’ve been making a big deal out of Araki’s beefcake men (see previous entry), but he is perfectly capable of drawing hot women too. Notably, his women as well as his men tend to have well-defined muscles. The close-up on this page is on a part of the body that’s sensual for both men and women.

From these panels, you might be getting the impression that Rohan at the Louvre is a classy, largely wordless comic without much narration or dialog getting in the way of the visual storytelling. If you thought that, you’d be wrong:

In fact, Rohan talks a lot!

So far all of these pages, while having that strong sense of movement necessary for a popular serialized manga (where the idea is that each page in a 200-page weekly “phonebook” anthology should take less than 10 seconds to read), have been laid out in a straightforward way, with square panels set at right angles to each other. This is the usual way of laying out shonen (boys’) manga, where panels tend to follow a clear sequence – useful for, say, action sequences – in contrast to shoujo (girls’) manga, which tend to play around a bit more with composition in order to highlight the emotional or inner life of the characters. With that in mind:

The panels are mostly still square, it’s just that the borders are bit tilted, giving a sense of action to the page. In this case, though, the action isn’t a battle scene or anything like that: it’s romance. I wanna call particular attention to the middle panel on the page – doesn’t it kind of remind you of that one Roy Lichtenstein painting? The one that’s all about highlighting the melodrama of romance comics as the woman sinks beneath the waves?


Something like this, right?

Actually, the resemblance to Lichtenstein is probably not coincidental:

There are a few things going on here beyond the Lichenstein-level melodrama and (once again) shoujo-style askew borders. This is probably the most intimate scene in the book, as Rohan and his youthful crush gaze into each other’s eyes; it’s also the first scene where Rohan invokes his Stand, which allows him to open people up like books. As a part of this power, he is able to read their thoughts and life stories, and to write in his own words in their place. In Jojo proper, Rohan rarely had qualms about exercising these powers. In this case, however, he is a gentleman and exercises restraint.


Rohan’s unrestrained self in Act 4 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Not only are Rohan’s actions restrained on this page, but the art is restrained – or at least clean – as well. Although he is opening up her face, there’s no blood or gore; her face closes as neatly as it opens, with no scars left behind. Even the edges of the “pages” of her face are perfect right angles. People’s heads will explode in much more messy and permanent ways later on in the book, so keep this page in mind as you read on.

When she’s in a better frame of mind, the woman tells Rohan about a terrible painting, said to be made from the blackest cursed ink, which belongs to the Louvre. The painting is a good excuse to draw some great all-black panels, and the all-black panels help to set off the black school uniforms of the characters on the facing page, who like Rohan come from Jojo Arc 4. The connection between Rohan and the Mona Lisa is pretty tenuous, as one of the characters points out on the page (“But that’s a woman! And just a painting!”). But no matter! We are not concerned with the logic of chance in this comic, we are concerned with the logic of works of art, and of memory.

With that tenuous connection, we’re now on our way to Paris to find the painting so “black” it literally curses everyone who sees it. Along with the scene change, it’s time to change the color scheme: from now on the dominant color will be pink, with blue accents. Why pink? Why not? Perhaps it reminds Araki of an old picture postcard of Paris. (Sorry for the bits of paper covering up the art – I was in a rush when I scanned in this page.)

Here it is, the panel we’ve been waiting for! Of course I am talking about the one where a character in Jojo poses like a high-fashion model for no  reason. Although this is still an interior illustration – so the color scheme is still restrained – you can see all of the colors of the issue coming out here – pink Paris, blue accents and sky, some green on the buildings and even some of that parchment color from the flashback scenes. This page is purely a fashion plate, not meant to progress the plot in any way.

This must have been confusing for non-Jojo fans. But anyway, why go through the trouble of making a self-insert character, if not to make that character AWESOME with the AMAZING POWER OF INSTANT DRAWING? And of course, naturally, no authorial fantasy would be complete without adoring fans recognizing you even in another country and asking for an autograph – right?

(In fact, Araki has a lot of fans in Europe, especially in Italy.)

I’ve talked a bunch about how Jojo has a lot of different influences, some high-culture and some pulp. When Rohan arrives, there are a bunch of noir-ish panels, where he leans over the shoulder of a Louvre employee as she looks up the painting he is after on her computer, makes phone calls from her desk, etc. Instead of those panels, though, I wanted to highlight this one because it has the best view of her awesome polka-dot tights.  I want them!

The story is set in the Louvre, but it would be a bit of a drag to have to draw the galleries of the Louvre over and over. So we quickly move the action to the vaults in the basement. There’s a three-dimensionality, a sense of space and perspective, to these pictures. The color scheme shifts to blue, with pink accents. There’s some black here as well, but actually the underground is going to be mostly blue and green. That’s because Araki needs to reserve black for the monstrous cursed painting made from the blackest ink.

Now we’re getting somewhere. The painting is locked up in a dark vault. On this page you can see some great prison bars. Not only was one of Araki’s first manga series, BAOH, a horror manga set in a prison, but he also did an entire arc of Jojo in a woman’s prison. He’s a past master at drawing endless prison bars in perfect perspective, in other words.

Do you remember when I said that Rohan’s power allows him to open people up in a way that is very neat, very orderly, and doesn’t leave scars – there’s no harm because he leaves people exactly as he found them? Well…

Victim #1.

There’s a couple things going on here, I think. One is the black ink seeping out of the security guard’s head, along with his brains and so on. (In case one explosion of viscera is not enough for you, Araki draws this scene three more times, from three different angles.) Another is, as I mentioned, the clear contrast between this scene, where someone’s head messily explodes, and an earlier scene, where Rohan neatly and cleanly opens up a girl’s head to read her memories (before thinking better of it).

In fact, the evil painting doesn’t just make a mess: it ALSO reads the memories of its victims, in order to create illusory zombies of their dead loved ones. These zombies walk around like bombs, killing anyone who touches them in the same way the zombies died themselves. The evil painting, in other words, has powers that are quite similar to Rohan’s powers; except that while Rohan is content to learn people’s secrets and then leave them the same way he found them, the painting wants them die in horrible ways.

In fact, the similarity goes even deeper than that.  When originally introduced, Rohan explained that his powers would only work on the first person who saw a finished page of his manga for the first time, and then only if the other person understood his art.  Eventually, he learned to use his power on anyone.  In a similar way, the painting in the basement of the Louvre exercises its voodoo hex powers only over those people who want to take a closer look.  It’s a dark mirror of Rohan’s powers, in other words; and a fitting power for a cursed Work of Art (which, while it can have good, neutral, or bad effects, does not have any effect on people who aren’t interested enough to really look).

 

Zombies!

Along with prisons, exploding guts and brains, and people turning into cubes – or contorting themselves non-fatally into bizarre shapes – zombies are a reoccurring theme in Araki’s art. Last year, he published a book of essays on horror movies which included a list of his top 20 favorite horror flicks of all time. These films are (courtesy of my friend Sabina):

1. Zombie (‘78 director’s cut)
2. Jaws
3. Misery
4. I Am Legend
5. The Ninth Gate
6. Alien
7. Ring (TV version)
8. The Mist
9. Final Destination
10. Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
11. Deliverance.
12. The Blob
13. 28 Days Later
14. Basket Case
15. Sleeping With The Enemy (yes, the Julia Roberts domestic abuse psycho-thriller)
16. No Country (…surely he doesn’t mean No Country For Old Men?)
17. The Exorcist
18. Funny Games (‘07 US remake)
19. Hostel
20. Wrong Turn

Non-Jojo fans probably don’t care, but this list is interesting if you are a Jojo fan. (Sabina says: I’m surprised Final Destination isn’t higher on the list given it is basically Araki-bait.) You can see that zombies – and people’s exploding innards – have multiple places of honor on this list.

I feel as if I am probably giving too much of this comic away, so I’ll skip the rest of the inventive gore. Suffice to say that Rohan’s companions die in uniquely visually interesting ways. If you’re a horror manga fan, you might want to look into this even if you don’t know anything about Jojo.  The art in this section is awesome.

Eventually it’s Rohan’s turn to die:

This page is probably my favorite. Like the earlier page where the first guard died, it’s dominated by white. The speech bubble of Rohan’s final dying words and the bottom panel’s faceless silhouettes frame the page in a way that turns them into the background, and leaves the actual action of the page in the foreground, where it looks like a bubble. It’s as if Rohan’s final moments are just a thought, about to “pop” and disappear.

Some classic work of art must be the inspiration for Rohan’s pose here, right?

How does Rohan survive this onslaught of white – an unstoppable, all-powerful force that turns your own memories and history against you? I’ll leave it as a surprise for people who buy the book.

In conclusion, I’m really glad I bought this! Fifteen dollars for a full color Jojo standalone story on nice 8.5 x 11″ paper really is a bargain, especially if you’re a fan. The pictures look even nicer at full size.  The plot follows genre conventions fairly closely, but like every Jojo story doesn’t stay within a single genre. Araki’s art is adaptable yet distinctive, changing to match genre requirements while still being unmistakably his own. It’s funny and scary and idiosyncratic and weird.

Bottom line, if you’ve read this far: you really should consider reading Jojo. You can start from the Western comics style series reset (Steel Ball Run) if you don’t want to brave the earlier art. It’s even mostly incomprehensible to new fans, just like a Western comic series restart would be.

Or, of course, you could start with this.

Araki Hirohiko at the Louvre (pt. 1)

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“I can’t tell if it’s a gay manga disguised as a battle manga or an adventure series disguised as a fashion magazine.” –fan reaction to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Araki Hirohiko is an immortal vampire, and also the author of long-running Shounen Jump manga series Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. According to Wikipedia, Jojo is “Shueisha’s second longest running manga series at 106 volumes and counting (only Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari K?en-mae Hashutsujo, with over 170 volumes, has more)”. I can’t do a better job of summing up this series than Jason Thompson, one-time Jojo editor, so I suggest you go over to House of 1000 Manga to read his summary/review. The quote above pretty much nails it, though I’d also add that Jojo is a horror manga disguised as a superhero comic – or vice versa – an especially strange combination as the two genres are opposites. (Superheroes are a fantasy of absolute power while horror is a nightmare of absolute powerlessness.)

Recently, the Louvre Museum in Paris published a standalone short story set in the Jojo universe.  This book is titled Rohan at the Louvre, in the manner of a museum exhibit.  Plot-wise, it’s a horror short story with side-trips into other pulp and literary genres.  Art-wise, it’s like 50 pages and full color!

Lots of people have written about Jojo before: it’s artsy enough, strange enough, and superhero-inspired enough to be right up HU’s alley. With the recent book out (in English!), however, now’s as good a time as any to revisit the series. In other words, even though Jason already said it all, I’m going to say it all again. I’ll be talking about Jojo proper in this entry, and the recent book, Rohan at the Louvre, in another entry tomorrow.

I.

Though it’s considered a single long-running series, Jojo is divided into distinct arcs with different characters, different plots and different artistic/literary/pulp antecedents, each starring a different member of the Joestar family.  The first arc is set in Victorian England and stars the heroic Jonathan Joestar, a buff young man in the vein of early 20th century U.S. pulp comics (i.e. highly muscular and highly anatomically incorrect). In an arc inspired by Victorian Gothic horror, he is locked in a private psychological battle with the evil Dio Brando, his adopted brother, taking place largely in their father’s large country mansion. However, when their  father dies, the comic takes a turn toward Edwardian pulp adventure, as Dio becomes an immortal vampire, takes over a castle in Scotland, and converts a number of people (including, if I recall correctly, Jack the Ripper) into his zombie minions. Jonathan Joestar must then learn the mystical arts of Hammon, or ripple-energy, from a mysterious wandering Italian, while fighting off subvillains including an evil Fu Manchu-ish Oriental. In an iconic scene, he defeats Dio and clutches his severed head as they both sink to the bottom of the Atlantic.


Forever embracing, Jonathan Joestar and the severed head of his evil adopted brother.

II.

In the sequel arc, Johnathan Joestar’s grandson, Joeseph Joestar, a buff young man in the vein of influential Japanese battle manga Fist of the North Star (e.g. with three-dimensional shaded muscles which are relatively more anatomically correct), travels around the U.S. fighting Nazis and Aztecs, in a series inspired by Indiana Jones and the 40s pulp comics that inspired Indiana Jones. In this arc, the three ancient Aztec Gods who created the mask that turned Dio into an immortal vampire awaken from their slumber, disturbed by Nazi scientists. Joseph must use his strength, wits, and good looks to defeat them in honorable combat, along with reluctant ally/eventual best friend Caesar Zeppeli, the grandson of the wandering Italian of the previous arc. In contrast to the strong and righteous Jonathan, Joeseph Joestar is righteous and devious, delivering speeches about honor while finding a smarter way to win.

III.

Following this arc, Joeseph Joestar’s grandson, Jotaro Kujo, a half-British-American-half-Japanese high school student and buff young man in the Tom of Finland vein (i.e. muscular, smoldering, uniform-wearing, and continually provocatively posed) is forced to travel to Egypt in order to defeat a reanimated Dio Brando. This arc introduces the concept of Stands, or companion-spirits which are physical manifestations of psychic powers. Araki has said that he invented Stands in order to add visual interest to his drawings of psychic energy battles, and that they should be read as an artistic convenience or metaphor. This arc was heavily inspired by Araki’s own trip through India and the Middle East, reading at times like a battle manga, at times like a horror manga, and at times like a travelogue. In one chapter, the heroes might roundly and straightforwardly defeat a villain who has been attacking from a hidden location using a long-range power, delivering a dramatic speech about how his cowardly actions can’t be forgiven. In the next, they might fight off an entire village of zombie-fied Indian villagers without questioning the morality or logic of the horror-movie set up.

This hybrid-genre, adventure-horror, macho-slash-homoerotic-posturing arc is Jojo’s most influential, spawning a TV series and a videogame, as well as inspiring the designs of a number of fighting game characters (and the fighting game convention of travel to new location, fight, travel to another new location? Or did that come first?  Whatever the order of inspiration, you can check this page for a list of Street Fighter characters based on characters in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure). This arc is also the favorite of mangaka-collective CLAMP, who not only got their start with Clamp in Wonderland, a doujinshi (self-published comic) featuring the lovechild of Jotaro Joestar and best friend/fellow beefcake Kakyoin, but who have also been basing their stoic badass protagonists on Jotaro ever since. (One theory goes that CLAMP’s Wish is essentially Jotaro/Kakyoin fanfiction.)

IV.

In Jojo’s fourth arc, we are finally introduced to Rohan, the main character of Rohan at the Louvre. The balance between horror and adventure in Arc 3 was occasionally uncomfortable, as readers were asked to consider the unrighteousness of some transgressions by the villains while ignoring others as necessary scaffolding for the comic’s horror and gore. This is corrected in Arc 4, in which a more modestly buff Josuke Joestar, the surprise son of an aging Joseph Joestar, as well as a hot guy in the vein of 1970s Japanese working-class manga (i.e. with the same exaggerated Greaser hairstyle as Ryunosuke Umemiya of Shaman King), must investigate a series of strange happenings in his rural Japanese town. Going back to Araki’s roots as a horror artist, this arc is a mixture of horror and comedy. The lighthearted tone and small-town setting – the smaller stakes – allow Araki to draw endless pictures of exploding intestines without compromising the genre conventions of a normal Shonen Jump battle manga, which in the usual way of things would require a certain number of semi-serious speeches about hard work, friendship, loyalty, etc.  Compared to the globe-trotting, super-villain-besting antics of the previous arc, this one sticks closer to home, going in for quieter, more refined psychological portraits of e.g. its illegitimate child of a single mother protagonist (and cleaner, less heavy art).

Rohan, the protagonist of Rohan at the Louvre, is introduced in this arc and immediately leaves a strong impression. You might be getting the impression that Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is an extreme, comedic, violent, and somewhat strange comic. This is all true. Additionally, it’s a comic where many characters are very powerful and intelligent. Rohan, the author-avatar, is no exception:


Kishibe Rohan, Araki’s self-insert character who is also a mangaka for Shounen Jump

Rohan is powerful because his Stand allows him to open other people up like books, to read their thoughts and memories, and then to write instructions on their “pages” which they must follow even when these instructions defy physical laws. In other words, he can pretty much make anyone do anything. He also has the ability to alter people’s memories and to draw 20 pages in a split-second so that he’ll never miss his weekly publication deadline. Personality-wise, he’s arrogant, distanced, intense, and easily irritated – kind of a frightening person, really.  It’s lucky for us that he’s not a villain.

To be clear, Rohan is not the most powerful person in this comic by a long stretch.   There are people who can alter the laws of time and space in Jojo.  Still, he’s pretty powerful!  When he is introduced, Rohan’s powers only work on the first person to see a completed page of his manga, and then only if that person understands his art.   Like all limitations, this is something he eventually forgets all about.  With his trademark arrogant humility, he describes his abilities in Rohan at the Louvre as follows: “A trifling matter, of little to no consequence – indeed, I can literally read people like books”.

The next arc of Jojo is a turning point for the series, so I will discuss it even though we’ve already caught up with the backstory:

V.

Though it started out as almost a pure pulp adventure comic (albeit a very strange one), with each iteration the comic has become more prone to digressions into horror and comedy – or maybe just a bit smoother about those digressions, so that they feel more integrated into the overall tone.  After all, Jojo was always pretty unserious, even when it was serious; and always pretty horrific, even when it was righteous. The characters also become slimmer: in the manga’s current run, they are toned like runway models or teen pop stars or soccer players, rather than like bodybuilders.  They are also, increasingly, avant-guard and fashionable; and the major turning point for this change is Arc 5.

Arc 5 is set in Italy and is probably inspired by classical art and sculpture, as well as by European high fashion. This arc focuses on the adventures of Giorno Giovanna (GioGio), the son of Arc 3’s reanimated Dio Brando and an anonymous woman. Since the immortal vampire Dio survived his trip to the bottom of the Atlantic by attaching his severed head to the body of his adopted brother Jonathan (did I forget to mention this?), Giorno is a half-villainous and half-heroic character, a mobster whose goal is to be the ultimate Gang Star. Giorno is probably actually the “strongest” character in Jojo, with powers that eventually include rewriting the rules of physical reality.

A friend of mine who visited Italy in part due to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure swears that you can see the influence of classical renaissance art in (especially) the proportions and convoluted poses of the characters in this arc. Additionally, perspective becomes the subject of many drawings as strange mirror worlds, shapes, and cubes dominate the surreal landscape.


Giorno inside the mirror world

While the Stands in Arc 4 had powers which leant themselves to horror (e.g. the chef whose food was so delicious and healthful it made everyone’s intestines burst out), those in Arc 5 often have visually interesting and complex powers relating to the manipulation of space and time. This allows Araki to show off the skills he’s picked up since starting Jojo. For instance, there’s a villain whose superpower is to turn his enemies into cubes, while one of the heroes, Bruno Buccelati, has the ability to create zippers on any surface which open up portals into a subspace dimension. Araki’s interest in the manipulation of space was evident in the previous arc, as well – e.g. Rohan can open people up like books, a villain can turn people into paper – but is more fully developed and central to the action here. Somewhere along the line, Araki seems to have picked up an interest in physics and in using Stand powers to explore (and then exploit) physical laws.

In addition to the focus on art, perspective, and the manipulation of space, Araki also plays with the manipulation of time, with several characters possessing the ability to speed up, slow down, skip ahead, skip behind, pause, or rewind time. I’m just going to leave this picture here for my fellow Jojo fans:

Now that you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it, can you?

VI etc.

Arc 6 is set in a woman’s prison and continues Araki’s interest in melding horror, high fashion, and pulp, in addition to being possibly the result of a personal/editorial challenge to DRAW MOER WOMEN. (The protagonist, Jolyne Kujo, is Jotaro’s estranged daughter.)  The arc immediately following is Steel Ball Run, a series reset in which Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando, rather than being the children of a British Peer, are American cowboys competing in a trans-continental horse race. In a nod to the increasing psychological sophistication of Jojo, the heroic Jonathan is now a cripple, ruling out acts of physical heroism, while the villainous Dio, while still coming from a bad background, is now a complex and occasionally sympathetic character rather than one who is simply and irredeemably evil. More surprisingly, Johnny is not the arc’s main protagonist (that would be Gyro Zeppeli, a younger/hotter version of the wandering Italian from way back in the beginning). However, the characters still have great fashion sense:


Steel Ball Run’s Jonathan Joestar in his stars-and-stripes ensemble

That’s all of the (completed) arcs of Jojo so far.  Tomorrow: Rohan at the Louvre!

Update: And the post on Rohan at the Louvre is up.

 

 

Metatext of Doom

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Homestuck: where to begin?

In a book I haven’t read, Rob Salkowitz “explores how the humble art form of comics ended up at the center of the 21st-century media universe” by talking about the mother of all trade shows: the San Diego Comics Convention. In this book, which again I haven’t read although I have read some excerpts on Amazon, he talks about how the focus of SDCC has shifted from intellectual property delivered via printed books to intellectual property that might, once, have been printed on a page, but that is bound to be far more profitable on screens: on movie screens, of course (though as with all good things the superhero movie boom must one day come to an end) but also on television and computer screens (TV shows, games) as well as tablet screens (digital serialization). Despite all this talk of “digital,” however, webcomics only get a few pages near the end of his book! And even then they are brought up largely as an example of artists who lack business sense! (Note again that I haven’t read the book.)

Nothing else in this article will focus on business, trade shows, superheroes, or the construction of what ruthlessculture.com calls trans-media megatexts. I only felt like I had to open with something appropriately journalistic or academic to fit in with the general tone of this website. “Trans-media megatexts,” however, is a label that might apply to a work like Homestuck, as I will discuss later on. Bear with me, I am going somewhere!

Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic with a large fan following, which as of November 9th of last year was 4,107 pages and 326,796 words long. That’s half the length of Atlas Shrugged, only taking into account page titles and captions. Words that come together with the art are a whole different story, and not included in this analysis because they are too difficult count. They are largely sound effects or image macro-style commentary on the action, anyway.

What enables this preposterously high wordcount is the inclusion of long chat logs below the art in which the characters comment on the action, crack jokes, and discuss their feelings. Because duh. How else would a group of teenagers who only know each other through the internet communicate while playing a cooperative computer game which can create and destroy reality?

Before getting any further into the plot of this comic, I want to talk about what it’s actually about. Homestuck is a self-aware work which is knowingly preoccupied with low or “junk” culture and this is expressed in a variety of ways. To start with an obvious one, John, the first character we are introduced to, and arguably the “shoujo heroine” of the series, lives in a room decorated with “bad movie” posters. His greatest irrational (?) fear is that the evil Betty Crocker will do something unspeakably awful to him, but Gushers replenish his health. Meanwhile, Dave, his smart-cynical rival and best friend, the ultimate “cool kid” of many talents (although he rarely leaves his room), lives surrounded by bad videogames and junk food, which he claims to love “ironically.” He is also the author of an intentionally bad dada-ist webcomic.

A panel from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff,
the intentionally bad webcomic drawn “ironically” by a character in Homestuck.

The love-hate affair with low culture doesn’t end there. Whole character arcs in Homestuck are built out of bad puns, as when a character identified with the Sagittarius zodiac sign is revealed to be too strong for his own good (because he is a StrongBow – get it?). The character, “Equius,” was raised by a monster resembling a centaur who is also a butler – which is only appropriate, as his blood is literally blue.

Equius Zahaak, a character whose entire personality is built from a pun
on “blue-blooded” and the Sagittarius Zodiac sign

 

As frivolous and inconsequential as these jokes might have been in the hands of another author, in Homestuck they are taken, not just “seriously” as elements of the narrative which must be as carefully and exhaustively thought out as any other element of the narrative, but often to their most tragic logical endpoints. For example, the strong blue-blooded character is unable to pursue hobbies in archery or robotics as he continually breaks the equipment. More tragically, several millennia of suffering and oppression have resulted from the blood caste color system he supports.

An unrelated scene of mass death

 

In fact, the logic of Homestuck often dictates that frivolous things lead logically, predictably, and inevitably to tragic outcomes. For instance, when John receives a stuffed bunny from the Nicholas Cage movie Con Air for his birthday, this sets off a chain of events which causes the game he and his friends are playing to become, according to its own rules, unwinnable.

Nicholas Cage and Con Air are reoccurring jokes in Homestuck

 

In this way, throwaway jokes, bad movies, fast food, and other ephermalia of US and internet culture take on mythic – and often tragic – weight. It’s only appropriate, then, that the structure of the comic follows the same general shape as the Dark Carnival mythology created by horrorcore band Insane Clown Posse, becoming much darker around the 5th Arc. Like Robertson Davies, who built an entire mythology out of a kids’ snowball fight in a rural town in Canada, Andrew Hussie of Homestuck takes these elements of low culture, destined to be thrown away, and enshrines them in a traditional epic narrative.

Mass consumer culture is not the only source mined by Homestuck for hilarious or tragic potential. Internet memes – e.g. horse_ebooks, “all the things” – are also fodder for Homestuck‘s long-running epic narrative. In this way, Dave’s love/hate relationship with low culture might (if one was so inclined) be read as representative of the author’s conflicted perspective, and the work as a whole can be read as commentary on the centrality of junk to the current US cultural landscape.

Naturally, there’s another kind of “low” culture that’s central to a work as meta-referential as Homestuck: of course I’m talking about online fan culture, and specifically online fanfiction, fanart, and fanshipping culture. In the original set of characters, John and Dave hobby-program and insult each others’ tastes in music, movies, and videogames; Rose dresses in a gothic way, fights with knitting needles, and writes fanfiction about wizards. Another female character, Jade, rounds out the original set of characters and is a more-or-less wholesome person who happens to really like anthropomorphic cartoon animals (in other words, she’s a furry).

Jade, the anthropomorphic cartoon animals fan

 

The inclusion of recognizable fandom “types” within the comic goes a long way toward explaining Homestuck’s fan culture, which is going strong not just in traditional nerd spaces like 4chan, gameFAQs and reddit, but also in places were female media fans hang out out like tumblr, livejournal, and devientart (and of course on the Homestuck forums). Furthermore, fan activity is not a one-way street, as art & music created by fans, fan speculation, fandom romantic pairings, and fandom injokes have increasingly found their way back into the comic in a kind of inclusive and transformative echo chamber.

A character in Homestuck cosplaying as another character in Homestuck

 

Perhaps this is the logical endpoint of a form of comic production that originally took reader suggestions directly into account: in Andrew Hussie’s previous comics and in Homestuck before the readership reached several million, readers could write in “commands” in order to directly affect the action. On the surface, the comic is a parody – or homage? or example? – of an interactive text adventure game, maybe the ultimate form of improv storytelling in the computer age. I’m not too familiar with the genre conventions of interactive text adventure games (though like everyone else I started but never finished Hugo’s House of Horrors in middle school), so I’ll just link to Get Boat as an example of an awesome long-running work of interactive fiction of the type Homestuck aimed to be.

To enter the Homestuck fandom, then, is to be trapped in a hall of mirrors in which your own culture is reflected back at you in an immediate way by a prolific author (Andrew Hussie updates Homestuck at a rate of up to 20 panels a day). Maybe it’s this element of reflection that explains Homestuck‘s position at (from a specific point of view) the zeitgeist. The massive popularity of the comic contributes to the centrality of its messages in certain online spaces: as happened with the Joss Whedon series Firefly, phrases which originated with or were popularized by Homestuck have found their way into the everyday speech of fans: all the feels, because reasons, coolkid, grimdark.

On another level, it’s possible that Homestuck has had an impact on, not just fannish vocabulary, but also readers’ vocabulary for the discussion of mental illness. Particularly as the comic becomes darker, entire chatlogs focus around feelings of helplessness and depression. A popular fan-created spinoff series, Brainbent, combines a DSM-IV understanding of the characters with responses to individual readers about managing mental illness.

A campfire singalong from Brainbent, a fan-created spin off comic set in a mental institution

 

But let’s not overstate this too much: this is still a comic where comedy or tragedy is bound to interrupt any time the discussion gets too deep. Or as a friend of mine observed: “the part that’s filtered back out of this giant epic narrative made of pasted together lulzy memes is… more memes. XD;”

So what kind of comic is it that can hold all of these things – the low culture, the fan shout outs, the sudden tragic reversals which often follow times when everything seems to have been going just a bit too well?

At its core, Homestuck is a comic about creation and destruction. The reality-altering computer game the characters are playing revolves around building – building up another player’s physical space and building up your own stats – but with greater power comes greater ability to break stuff, and that’s without counting all the meteors and falling rocks and ticking time bombs and insane homicidal maniacs who now and again will randomly – except that nothing is random in a comic which revolves around prophecies (of doom), time travel (proving you are already doomed), alternate universes (which are doomed) – destroy all the stuff you just built with your awesome godlike powers. At which point, the cycle repeats…

Driven forward by the propulsive logic of this pacing style, and held within a strongly logical structure built out of playing cards, chess pieces, light/dark dualities, and time travel paradoxes (with callbacks often occurring to events hundreds of pages in the past: no one can be more obsessed with Homestuck than Andrew Hussie, who does this for a living) – the comic is a carnival of amazing things and small moments – to make up for its violent and depressing tendencies? In the world of Homestuck, there is always something new to see and experience. Animation, short videos, a soundtrack, and playable “levels” are incorporated directly into the narrative, giving Homestuck the feel of one of those trans-media megatexts discussed earlier.

Click through to watch an early atmospheric and non-spoilery animation from Homestuck

Questions to ask about the work include: is it ultimately an optimistic or a pessimistic narrative? Does the depressive logic of the series, in which characters are repeatedly told that the story will end badly no matter what they do, cancel out its huge create energy? On a personal level, outside the privilege of being able to participate, however indirectly, in a zeitgeist, is it worth your time to spend hundreds of hours on a comic which is (however knowingly and intelligently) obsessed with junk culture and might end horribly?

Of course this will devolve to questions of personal taste. Are you someone who spends a lot of time online? Do you like things that are well made with a strong understanding of cinematic framing and pace? Is there value in the pleasure of small moments, or truth in the back and forth of the characters as they discuss depression? Do you enjoy art which is self-referential and actively engaged with its audience? Do you trust in the author to deliver a satisfying ending? Are you a nerd on the internet?

Personally I have a strong suspicion that whatever the case, the series will end in a logical and appropriate way. This is Andrew Hussie’s fourth comic, after all. And anyway, who doesn’t love a good rollercoaster ride?

The Homestuckkers were out in force at Comic-Con, by the way.