Category Archives: Columns

Gluey Tart: Yokan Premonition

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Makoto Tateno, Oakla Publishing and Digital Manga Publishing, 2010

I was having a bad day Friday, so I went to Borders, hoping to be soothed by the gentle and expensive caress of European fashion magazines. Which worked out, by the way – German Vogue has a rock theme! I skipped Italian Vogue’s questionable tribute to the Gulf oil spill, but I said yes to Australian Vogue and British Elle. No Dansk, alas, but I got the September issue of Details, which has a lovely spread featuring Gabriel Aubry. Everybody loves Gabriel Aubry, of course, but I love him specifically because he is the earthly embodiment of Yohji.

Perhaps you remember my Weiss Kreuz obsession/personality disorder – Yoji is the tall, blond ladies’ man florist/assassin. (He isn’t blond in the image above, which is from Ja Weiss, a doujinshi; he is blond in the anime, though.) (I share because I care.) I find Details sort of uniquely annoying, by the way, but this is a very fine photo session.

Why the hell would you want to know any of this? Because we have no secrets! That is the nature of our relationship. And you now understand why I was suddenly in a mood so buoyant that I decided to take a chance on the manga section. Because the Borders manga section, once a joy and a constant drain on my fiscal resources, has become a source of sadness, woe, and lamentation. Much like the rest of Borders. (I would say that is a discussion for another time, but who would I be kidding? Besides, we may never pass this way again. And, does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care about time?) The manga section is a pathetic shadow of what it was two years ago, and yaoi is now a wee, tiny proportion of the pittance that is stocked. It makes me frown. It make me cross. But I was in such a good mood (a contact high from the magazines), I decided that haunting the sorely diminished Borders manga section like a hungry ghost wouldn’t make me cranky and weepy. Up the escalator I went, approximately thirty pounds of magazines (that is to say, four) tucked under my arm.

It was fascinating up there because Dave Mustaine was in the house, autographing his new book, I Was Once in a Couple of Bands that At One Point Didn’t Suck, But I Was Always an Arrogant Asshole. Hundreds and hundreds of people had purchased his book (which has a hard cover and 368 pages and costs $25.99). Frankly, I was shocked. I mean, why? Of course, I bought Walk the Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith. Twice. So.

Let us change the subject.

(Except, did you see the video of Joe Perry knocking Steven Tyler off the stage? Joe said he didn’t do it on purpose. I’m sure the look of death was just a coincidence.) (Forty years is a long time, y’all.)

Gingerly stepping around Dave Mustaine fans, I found about five yaoi titles, all of which sucked. Except Yokan Premonition, by Makoto Tateno. I scooped this up without bothering to see what it was about or even look carefully at the cover. There’s no need – I loved Hero-Heel, Yellow, etc., and I already know what to expect from Makoto Tateno. There will be hostility and holding out and poorly drawn looks of shock and dismay. There will be garish lace pattern fills and snakeskin jackets. (And, in this one, there’s the S&M turtleneck with the buckle on it, a la Aya Fujimiya, the slightly less tall, red-headed brooding head case florist/assassin from Weiss Kreuz!) (The human brain fills in patterns, you know?)

______

Tateno’s characters look pretty much alike, and there is a certain mood. The particulars of the stories differ, though. Yokan Premonition turns out to be about a rock band (and lordy, I do love me some rock porn). Well, a visual kei band. Which is obviously not the same thing, but close enough, if you know what I mean.

I am wondering about the manga’s title, by the way. Yokan is a jelly made from bean paste, which doesn’t seem right on target, but there is an old-ish Dir En Grey song titled Yokan. (Dir En Grey is a visual kei band.) (A J-pop band called Heidi recently released a song with the same title; the main thing I remember from seeing the video is that the guitar player wore dropped-crotch harem/Hammer/sweat pants, and this is not a good look. Seriously.)

All right. Onward. One doesn’t like to shoot one’s wad too soon, but my favorite line in this manga is on page five: “Singing is just like masturbation.” Really? Because I had not noticed that. The deal is that Akira, the singer of the band the book is about, won’t sing a song written by anybody else, and he thinks of his music as a solitary pleasure. (I still think the metaphor went awry, but it made me laugh, so good enough.) And the setup is ridiculous, as always. (And as it should be. If I want realistic cause and effect sequences, I’ll knock over some dominoes.) Pretty little Akira, who complains that people always think he’s gay (hard to imagine why), happens to overhear a famous actor singing a fabulous self-written song to himself on a roof. I mean, that obviously happens all the time. Akira can’t get the song out of his head, and later, the famous actor, Sunaga, happens to run into Akira singing the song to himself in a hallway. He tells Akira he can have the song if he’s willing to pay the price, wink wink nudge nudge. Later still, when Akira is presenting songs to the rest of the band, they find Sunaga’s song (which Akira has scored, as one does), love it, and want to record it. For reasons that are so unclear it’s really a thing of beauty, Akira feels he must therefore record the song, and he calls Sunaga to find out exactly how much he wants.

This whole scene is delightful. Akira goes to Sunaga’s place and seems skittish. I love the dialogue. Sunaga asks, “What’s with that troubled look? What are you, too chaste or something?” “No, not chaste,” Akira says, looking miserable. “But I am a virgin.” (Insert afore-mentioned look of shock here.)

This spread perfectly demonstrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of this and most other Makoto Tateno manga. She strives for a hip, sort of edgy atmosphere, and her success is hit and miss. It hits enough to work for me, and when it misses, I find it kind of amusing and endearing. There’s also the element of one partner being aggressive, and the other partner wanting to get away – but being strangely drawn in. Tateno is a master at that plot device, if you like that kind of thing. The “symbolism” gets absurdly heavy handed – Akira’s band is called Charon, and he keeps talking about hell. Yes, yes, very clever. We get it. Now stop it. (She doesn’t.) And the art. There are some pretty panels to be found, but most of the art is not great. That final panel, where they come together, is really nothing to boast about. And yet – it works. For me, anyway – I can see how it might not be everybody’s cup of high-strung melodrama. I love the look on Sunaga’s face when he says “Come here,” and I love the understanding we get of his character when he adds, “Good boy.” I even like the twisty angsty nervous virgin stuff from Akira. Believable? Er, no. A hot setup for an absurd romance? Yes.

Spoilers ho!
But all Sunaga wants is a kiss. It’s a really good kiss, with some groping, but that’s it. He cuts Akira loose – but tells him he has a better song, and if he wants that one, he’ll have to do more. And Akira realizes he doesn’t have to use the song after all. It’s cute. As the actual story unfolds, Akira reveals how obsessed he has become, and there is sex, more obsession, growth and character development, and a happy ending for everyone (except the dead guy).

Oh, and there’s a final short story called “Sinsemilla.” It is not about pot, but rather about pills, which I found puzzling, but drugs are drugs, I suppose, and there is lots of sex. There are also some extreme head to body ratio issues. No plot to speak of. Just sex, pretty much. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Monthly Stumblings # 4: Dominique Goblet, Nikita Fossoul

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Dominique Goblet’s and Nikita Fossoul’s Chronographie (Chronograph)

Some of you monolinguists may ask yourselves why do I bother to write at the HU about foreign books written in a foreign language (?)… There are a variety of reasons which explain why a columnist chooses his or her topics. Being a foreigner myself (and someone who manages to, at least, understand Latin languages) I have access to many books that aren’t available in North America. In this day and age though you’re just a few clicks way from these great comics (I’m old school, so, don’t expect me to say “graphic novels” very often).

My last post was about a scriptwriter who wrote in Spanish. His comics are a bit verbose (this isn’t a negative criticism: as I said elsewhere: I prefer great words to mediocre images and vice-versa, of course), not to mention completely out of print, but my other stumblings were wordless or almost wordless. (Unfortunately that’s not what happens with the links below: they mostly lead to not so silent French and Belgian sites.)

When I say “almost” I’m not implying that the words don’t count (contrariwise to a somewhat goofy comment that I wrote answering to another comment by Noah who “accused” me of just writing about European art comics). For instance, I didn’t mention in my first post that Pierre Duba wrote a few phrases in Racines about identity and quoted  Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. (I thank my friend Pedro Moura who linked Racines to another central book in the ideal comics canon: The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James; maybe I’ll come back to Duba one of these days; I have to, I’m afraid!…)

I wrote about Héctor Germán Oesterheld because I think that he is the best comics writer that ever existed (yes, better than Alan Moore) and the world needs to know more about him. Being an Argentinian he’s at a disadvantage (like everyone else that worked or works in comics outside of the holy trinity: Japan, U.S.A., France-Belgium). This applies even to countries with fairly important traditions in the field like Spain and Italy…

My other posts just mean that a comics avant-garde scene (Bart Beaty calls it a postmodern modernism – 2007) truly exists in Europe (this is an idea that goes back to Jan Baetens in his analysis of Autarcic Comix – 1995 – as reported by Paul Gravett in the link above). What interests me the most in comics are those borderline examples that push the limits of the form. Publishers like L’Association, Six pieds sous terre, Ego comme x, Frémok frequently publish, with the help of grants from the French and Belgian governments, highly experimental books that shatter to pieces our expectations of what a comic is supposed to be. Authors like Vincent Fortemps or Jochen Gerner are part of this unpopular (to quote Bart Beaty again) cultural movement.

I will stumble on some North American comic one of these days, I’m sure, but I don’t know exactly when… (North American comics authors respect comics’ mass art tradition too much for my taste. They are afraid of being called pretentious or elitists if they forget goofy caricatures, I suppose; maybe they should embrace Milton Caniff’s, Hal Foster’ s, Alex Raymond’s tradition instead to tell contemporary adult stories? Are the technical skills a problem though? Sadly, I suppose so… those giantly talented graphic artists are hard to match.)

Dominique Goblet is also part of that nineties’ European comics revolution that I mentioned above (she’s a Belgian). Nikita Fossoul is her daughter.

In Chronographie (another quasi-wordless book) they publish ten years of their more or less biweekly portraits of each other (Fossoul was seven years old when they began and Goblet was thirty one). Words are few and far between, but when they appear they add important meanings, not as an anchor in a Barthesian sense, but as time and context info and as emotional descriptors. It’s mostly Nikita who uses the latter saying thinks like: “Faché[e]” – “Pissed off.” Being in a powerless situation children need to pay attention to the adults’ moods. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Dominique was pissed off at the time though: it may simply mean that she appears to be pissed off and Nikita noticed this after doing the drawing (see below). (Curiously enough the words gradually disappear from Nikita’s portraits. I’m sure that there’s a paper here somewhere.)

Confronted with these kinds of books this television show host asked: “Can we still talk about comics?” I would answer definitely yes, but I hardly count… My answer is in accordance with my expansion of the comics field to include things from the distant or recent past (said expansion may be seen as an anachronism and a decontextualization). What’s new in this case is that these authors really are comics artists. L’Association (Chronography‘s publisher) is a comics publishing house (whose publisher Jean-Christophe Menu, as been one of the most vocal actors in the comics field to defend that really there is a comics avant-garde). If Frans Masereel never thought about  it, I’m sure (I include him in comics history without his permission), they, on the other hand, want to do comics in a contemporary high culture context. As Dominique Goblet put it, answering the question:

We are at the crossroads between the visual arts and comics. The link that unites all this is a passion to tell stories.

(I would replace “tell stories” for “do sequences” because many things in, for instance, the Fort Thunder style shatters the narrative. On the other hand I suppose that it is defensible to say that two images put together, no matter what they represent, do tell a story of sorts… Also: the visual arts always have been a part of comics, so, I don’t see where the crossroad is. What Dominique Goblet says is understandable though: the visual arts have an important history of experimentation and comics don’t.)

In almost every session Goblet and Fossoul chose the same technique, the same composition solutions, explored the same particular aspects; they even shared model poses sometimes (see below). This coherence can only mean that Dominique Goblet was the art teacher and Nikita Fossoul was the student.

The book begins with graphite and black colored pencil  line drawings. It continues exploring washes, pastels, collages, acrylic paint. The supports are all kinds of paper (old papers, drawing papers, etc… two of the drawings seem to have been done on some sort of synthetic board).

The problem of resemblance is at the center of the portrait genre. If Dominique Goblet solves this problem easily Nikita Fossoul doesn’t even address it. As she put it in the book’s postface (in both French and English, by the way):

So I drew what I sensed (almost) more than what I saw: a mood, a special complicity… Thanks to this lack of interest in strict likeness, I too could let go and no longer be afraid of ‘going wrong[,]’ and that is how I dared to carry on.

As she also says drawing was a game at first, but an evolution can easily be traced in her drawing skills. As for Dominique Goblet she draws in a contemporary sketchy (sometimes fragmented) style, but she never destroys her model’s face. She obscures it sometimes because she has a real interest in shadows and light (great vehicles to convey mood). Sometimes she just did beautiful simple drawings like the two below.

Ten years is a long time in a person’s life and Chronographie is about the passing of time, but what story do these faces tell us? When she began this project Dominique Goblet wanted to explore a mother / daughter relationship:

I have always wondered about what is called ‘maternal instinct[.]’ To be honest, I have never fundamentally understood what it could mean.

In any case, to my great regret I have never been sure of anything that obvious. I don’t know if I resemble those mothers who talk about unconditional love, instinct, the need to unreservedly  protect.

One more time we reach the conclusion that philosophy, science, the arts start with the same impulse: the will to explore, the will to know beyond all clichés and common sense. A book depicting saccharine moments between a mother and a daughter would be a kitschy thing indeed. But that’s not what Chronographie is: there are moments of laughter, there are moments of bliss and there are moments of sadness. Life is a lot more complex and interesting than any pop myth (Dominique Goblet again):

Many things were said without words. The sequential work is carrying on, in a way, very slowly. What is told here traverses the prism of an imperceptible movement. The years spent together…

The essential is told, we have given more of ourselves than any memory would have done. This is no longer about details, let alone anecdotes.

The myth of the mother-daughter bond appears in another form: a silent tale.

Imagining myself as a devil’s advocate I could say that Nikita Fossoul’s drawings are amateurish and Dominique Goblet’s drawings are sometimes great, sometimes not so great. All that is true, but is it really important? What matters is the inquisitiveness, the patience, the bond between mother, daughter, and the readers… life being lived and shared (that’s what real art is all about)… those rare moments in which we receive our rewards and get some answers… That’s why I finish this post with the only portrait in the book in which a  young artist (she was twelve years old) captured her mother’s likeness, without even trying… It’s no wonder that she saw her with a pair of worried, slightly sad, eyes the size of the world… her world…

Dominique Goblet’s site

Strange Windows: The Adventures of Tintin in Otherland, Part V: Radio Coda

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On Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth program — moderated by the able Jean Feraca — Gene Kannenberg and I chat about Tintin and field listeners’ calls; you can find a streaming of the show at this link.

Enjoy my dulcet tones– or, rather, my robotic stammer.

———————————————

Some have chided me for overlooking the most excluded of “others” in the Tintin oeuvre, i.e. women.

This is indeed true. In all the albums, there are only three or four women with so much as speaking roles. I interpret this as a hangover from the fiercely puritanical Catholicism of Hergé‘s youth, mixed with his own dose of misogyny.  Hergé’s own explanation fails to convince:

“True, there are only a few women, but not out of misogyny. No, it’s simply because as far as I’m concerned, women don’t belong in a world such as Tintin’s; it’s one dominated by male friendship, and there is nothing ambiguous about such friendship! Of course there are only a few women in my stories and when they do appear, they are caricatures, such as Castafiore.

If I were to create a character who was a pretty girl, what would she do in a world where all the other characters are caricatures? I love women too much to turn them into caricatures!

Anyway, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comical elements.

Would it be the maternal side of women which prevents us from making fun of them?”

(That last sentence would be of interest to a psychiatrist…and, indeed, Hergé spent years in analysis.)

But there is one woman in Tintin with enough force and character to dominate any story she shows up in; yes, the divine ‘Nightingale of Milan’, the Empress of the Opera:

Bianca Castafiore!

What mere male can fail to wilt before such beauty and power?

As the good Captain Haddock says, a formidable woman.

Ah, Captain, submit to the inevitable; the charm and might of La Castafiore will keep you in her thrall!

The transition from ogress to goddess is most satisfying, and is consummated in Hergé’s wittiest Tintin album, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (‘The Castafiore Emeralds’)

Love her though I do, I must concede that the Castafiore is a monstrous caricature of woman.

What I delight in, however, is the way she serenely floats above every catastrophe…even when on trial for her life (in “Tintin et les Picaros”) she turns the courtroom into an opera stage!

You go, girl!

————————————–

Tintin wasn’t Hergé’s only series.

One may applaud the cosmopolitanism of the later Tintin albums (and of the redacted earlier work), yet still regret a certain earthy malice inherent to the initial work: Tintin was, in the beginning, a brawling, cunning trickster more than a boy scout. He was also definitely Belgian, as contrasted with the somewhat bland “international” Tintin of later years.

As a counterpoint, I recommend (to you who speak French) the series of albums featuring Quick & Flupke, a pair of wicked little Brussels street urchins.

The Belgian equivalents of the Katzenjammer kids or of Max and Moritz, these two lively pests were well grounded in the rich culture of that teeming capital, Brussels.

The series, composed of two-page stand-alone gags,  also lets Hergé indulge one of his major talents as an entertainer– the gagman… but in a childlike, gentle mode that didn’t exclude mild satire:

And the establishment– represented by the police– comes in for some tweaking at the hands of this delinquent duo:

Try this strip some time!

Strange Windows: “Someone had blunder’d”

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Frontline+Combat+cover+proof+with+signature

Art by Harvey Kurtzman

 

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

 — L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Among the most respected mainstream American comics ever produced are the war stories written and edited (and often drawn) by Harvey Kurtzman for the EC Comics titles Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat between 1950 and 1953.

EC publisher Bill Gaines (left) with Kurtzman

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Monthly Stumblings # 3: Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Francisco Solano López

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Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s and Francisco Solano López’s “Enterradores” (gravediggers)

A curious thing happened when Argentinian scriptwriter Héctor Germán Oesterheld found his own comics publishing house, Editorial Frontera. For a brief period of time, 1957 – 1963, mainstream adolescent comics raised much above the business as usual, pervasive formulaic dreck. Oesterheld proved to me a very simple and often forgotten truth: it’s easy to dismiss a whole category if we base our judgment on the worst examples (usually those are the only ones that the judges know about). It’s easy to debase something when the judge is socially much above the subject of her/his scorn; in these circumstances s/he can only be applauded by her/his peers while all outraged reactions can’t be heard outside of the attacked subculture.

I don’t defend adolescent comics, mind you, I’m just saying that when the best comics writer ever decided do try a hand at this particular genre (if we can call it that) the inevitable happened. Here’s what he had to say in Hora Cero Suplemento semanal (zero hour weekly supplement) # 1 (September 4, 1957):

There are bad comics when they’re badly done only. Denying comics all together, condemning them as a whole, is as irrational as denying cinema all together because there are bad films. Or condemning literature because there are bad books. There are, unfortunately in a huge ratio, lots of bad comics. But these don’t disqualify the good ones. On the contrary, by comparison, they should underline their quality. […]

Oesterheld is a German family name and Héctor inherited a German tradition which, according to Christian Gasser (in the Lisbon comics convention catalog, 2003) dates from the enlightenment:

This didactic interpretation of literature is a product of the 18th century. At that time, the qualities of literature and art were used to educate and morally elevate the common people. Meanwhile, these efforts became obsolete in literature, but not in the restricted domain of children’s literature where people continue to ask: “Very well, what can a child learn from this book?” The pedagogic function continues to be overrated.

Oesterheld viewed the, then, popular medium of comics as an opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents. At a certain point he felt the need to put the following warning on the cover of Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal: “Historietas para mayores de 14 años” (comics for those who are older than 14). The anti-comics crusade was still on and he didn’t want any trouble. Anyway, he wanted to both educate and entertain. What he meant by “educate” wasn’t exactly what may be on our minds today though…

He aimed at four goals: (1) to be accurate with his data (pedagogic texts about warfare punctuated his comics; he wrote stories in a lot of genres – Western, Science-Fiction, Historical, Noir –, but War – WW2, to be exact – remained the bulk of his magazines’ content); (2) he didn’t want to edulcorate reality or bowdlerize his stories; (3) he wanted to convey moral values of self-sacrifice, unselfishness, team work (he strongly opposed the individual macho hero as he – it’s usually a “he” – is seen by North American mass artists; ditto the glorification of violence… besides, the main character is usually someone socially “invisible” who reacts unexpectedly in a stressful situation); (4) linked to (2): Oesterheld didn’t want to hide what’s darker in the human condition, but, at his best (he produced hundreds of stories, so, lots and lots of them aren’t that good) he was never Manichean.

Four great draftsmen drew Oesterheld’s stories at Editorial Frontera before working (immigrating even) exclusively for the UK. After these artists disbanded the graphic quality of Frontera’s stories dwindled dramatically. Not even a young José Muñoz could equal them:

Hugo Pratt:

Hora Cero Extra! # 4 October, 1958.

Hugo Pratt did very rare unprejudiced portraits of black people in the 50s. In this Hora Cero Extra! cover he illustrated a story by Oesterheld about Senegalese soldiers fighting for France during WW2.

Arturo del Castillo:

Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal # 58, October 8, 1958.

An impressive Western scene from “Randall.” Castillo would do for the UK the best The Man in the Iron Mask comics illustrations ever.

Carlos Roume:

Frontera Extra # 7, May 1959.

Roume was a great animal artist. In this Frontera Extra cover he drew Pichi, the Pampa dog. A story scripted by Héctor’s brother, Jorge.

Alberto Breccia:

Misterix # 749, March 22, 1963.

Alberto Breccia and Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s Mort Cinder (a series that, in my view, isn’t as good as Ernie Pike) remains one of the most famous of Oesterheld’s creations (along with Argentinian cultural icon: El Eternauta – the eternaut). This doesn’t surprise me because of comics fans’ bent for fantasy. Even so the story to which the above page belongs, “En la penitenciaria: Marlin” (in the penitentiary: Marlin), is one of the series’ best ones.

I immersed myself in Oesterheld’s oeuvre for the last year. Reading hundreds of his stories I can safely say that he could have been one of those world famous South American writers like Jorge Luis Borges. Borges and Oesterheld knew each other and used to take walks together. Oesterheld was an inventive plotter and a purveyor of ideas and great phrases. Even when the story is no good at all (as I said, he produced too much) a phrase sparkles suddenly making the reading worthwhile.

I stumbled upon lots of Oesterheld’s great stories, but I had to choose one for this Stumbling. I chose “Enterradores.” In it a German major freshly arrived from Berlin to the Stalingrad front is shocked when he discovers that two German soldiers (Wesser and Hofe) of the disciplinary battalion (whose mission is to bury corpses) are burying Russians and Germans together:

Hora Cero Extra! # 1, April 1958.

The drawings are by Francisco Solano López. To be honest I don’t like Solano’s drawings as much as I like the work of those four artists above. I find his understanding of the human figure a bit strange and his lines a bit heavy and formless sometimes. Even so it seems to me that he captured the facial expressions of the veterans well in contrast with the major’s. The overall darkness of the atmosphere is more than adequate to convey the theme of the story.

The captain explains to the major how desperate the situation is (he wants to excuse the two men’s lack of discipline). Here’s what Oeserheld wrote in the last two strips: “It was in the Steppe, near the Don. / There stayed a shared grave different from all the others. A grave in which Russians and Germans mixed. / That grave was the revenge of soldiers Wesser and Hofe of the disciplinarian battalion.” Equally impressive are the eerie shadows walking into oblivion at the end…

Can you imagine such a story in a children’s comic today? It wasn’t even suitable for a children’s comic back in the 50s. And yet, Argentinian kids bought Hora Cero and Frontera in their various incarnations. Judging from Oesterheld’s example, maybe I’m not against children’s comics… maybe I’m against children’s comics that insult their readers’ intelligence, that’s all…

Gluey Tart: Otodama: Voice from the Dead

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Youka Nitta, 2010, Digital Manga Publishing

I was worried about reading this manga. The first and perhaps most “reasonable” reason (or, well, maybe not) is that I was frightened by Embracing Love as a child. At least, I was kind of turned off by the football player necks when the first volume came out, and I’ve stayed away ever since. I’m starting to think that might have been a mistake, but I can’t fix it now because the series is out of print and some of the volumes are woah!-surely-nobody’s-actually-paying-a-hundred-bucks-for-this-no-matter-how-good-the-sex-is expensive. The perhaps slightly less reasonable reason (again, this is obviously something of a judgment call) is that I hate starting a series and getting left in the lurch. I am immature and have abandonment issues and perhaps ought to consider Prozac (well, Fluoxetine Hcl, since my insurance insists on the generic), but I have a pathological fear of falling in love with a series and not being able to finish it. Or, you know, becoming somewhat interested in a series. Whatever. And a series by Youka Nitta is high risk, as far as abandonment goes.

Ms. Nitta left the industry for a while after an art-copying scandal in 2008, leaving several much-loved series on hiatus or dead or something. Nobody knew. Well, she is back (or so her new English-language Web site indicates), so maybe she’ll start working on Otodama again – but who knows? It’s unclear how derailed her career is. Not utterly, I hope, because damn it, I like this book (yes, it’s all about me). There’s apparently one more volume in Japan (which is not yet slated for publication in English, so far as I can tell – Doki Doki’s site doesn’t have any scheduled releases posted past summer 2010, which might just be a minor glitch but does nothing to ease my mind), and that volume does not conclude the storyline.

Only tangentially related aside
But in checking that out, I discovered that June is going to publish Ayano Yamane’s Target in the Finder series this summer! Holy shit, this is good news! I have the first two volumes in English but didn’t get the third before it went out of print, and I have suffered for years over this egregious lack of judgment. I even bought it in German because – well, we will not speak of that, but my German is only very slightly better than my Japanese, so I still need the English volume.

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Speaking of Doki Doki (yes, we were), that reminds me of my only real objection to Otodama – no sex. (Doki Doki is DMP’s sex-free line, damn their eyes.) In discussing this sort of thing, people often say things like “it was so good, I didn’t even miss the sex,” and brava, I say to them, for they are obviously mature about their comics reading in a way that I am not. Because Nitta is an artist and author who is deservedly famous for her explicitly sexy yaoi, and I want her to put out, damn it. This is an enjoyable supernatural police story, and no, the utter lack of sex doesn’t leave any gaps or anything – but the setup is sexy, and this is Youka Nitta! There could be lots of hot sex! Why wouldn’t I want that? And the series might never be finished, so if she was building up to it slowly, we might never get there! Arrgh!

Sigh. Life is cruel, but we will try to go on as best we can, despite our lack of inner resources. (“We” meaning “me,” of course, although you should feel free to overly identify.) This manga – Otodama, the book about which I am ostensibly writing – is really very enjoyable. The story is solid – batshit crazy, but solid – and the boys are pretty. Their necks are not overly thick, you’ll be relieved to know.

The setup is ridiculous. The first chapter is called “Aural Hypersensitivity.” Which is pretty funny all on its own. The details are good, too. Kaname (the pretty blond without the stubble or cowboy hat, as opposed to the mysterious Shoei, the pretty blond with the stubble and the cowboy hat – and boots – and, um, chaps, WTF?) has hearing so acute he can perceive things nobody else can, including voices of the dead. He was once a forensic researcher who was known as “the ears of the police” and was “famous throughout the agency for his good looks.” He is now an “acoustical analysis expert” and naps in a sound-proof shelter. This cracks me up, all of it, but especially the sound-proof shelter. Non-stubble blond sometimes works with Hide (the one with spiked dark hair and no glasses) a private investigator, former police detective, and brother of the senior investigator, Superintendent Nagatsuma (the one with the non-spiked dark hair and glasses). Unstubbled blond and spiky brunette did a lot of police work together but resigned over the same case, several years ago, all of which becomes increasingly important and germane as the story progresses. (If the story progresses. Wah!!! The uncertainty! The humanity!)

Ahem. Anyway. I have decided against outlining the plot. There’s a lot of plot here, y’all. Too much plot to capture in a few hundred words. Which is nice, especially since you can actually follow it, and it makes sense (in a batshit crazy way, obviously). There are two stories in this book, the first one kind of independent of the second one, except for all the setup (and there’s so much setup it gets kind of awkward, but it pays off eventually). The second one is longer, and it develops a lot of what the first story alludes to. And the crimes are solved very scientifically. A cherished example: unstubbled blond listens to a recorded cell phone message the police weren’t able to make anything of, and he announces, “Your client’s voice is coming from behind the suspect… From the atmospheric reverb, I’m certain they’re in a car. From his voice, I’d say the facial structure is unusually narrow… He’s young, too, no older than thirty. He’s short, and I don’t hear any stress, so he may be unemployed.” That last bit is what seals the deal for me. That is quality pseudo-forensic babble.

There’s also a female character who serves a structural role in the story and is insanely hot. I see this as an unexpected bonus. Kinukitty does not read yaoi – or sort of implied boys love, in this case – for the female characters. This is not because I don’t like female characters. Far from it. I’m just not much good at multitasking, and when I’m reading yaoi, my focus is on the guys. Perhaps the near-tragic lack of physicality between any of the guys has allowed me to appreciate Superintendent Tadashiki.

Nitta’s layouts aren’t the star of the show, but she does provide lots of nice details in the art. When Acoustic Man puts on his headphones and slumps forward, listening to police recordings, he looks pained in a way that makes you want to give him a cookie and put him in bed for a nap. Or in his lounge chair in the sound-proof shelter. And when spiky-haired brunet watches him suffering, you feel his pain and discomfort, as well. There are some interesting visuals, too.

I like the legs progression, although I can’t see any reason for it. It doesn’t flow very well into the next page, where spiky-haired brunet is anguishing. (Twice.) I do like that image, though, on its own. The art pulls its weight in telling the story.

So, was it worth it? Did my Otodama experience justify all the angst? Er, yes. Thank you for asking. The story isn’t a cliff hanger, so, hysteria aside, it really does kind of work as just one volume. There’s a lovely and, yes, fulfilling connection between the two characters. It’s enough.

Would have been better with sex, though.

DWYCK: The Dreams of Children

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The mellow mood of being on holiday has made me decide to shift tack from the more theoretical stuff I’ve been on about and instead dig into my archives for a post about a comic I love, and which despite its great fame bafflingly still seems virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. The article is a slightly edited version of a review I wrote back in 2005 for my website rackham.dk. I apologize for some of the scruffy scans and hope you’ll enjoy the piece anyway!

“Quino exists and Mafalda is his Prophet.” Those are the words the Argentine cartoonist Fernando Sendra has his best-known character, Matías, speak in an homage to his older colleague and countryman. It fairly precisely encapsulates the status enjoyed by Joaquín Salvador Lavado, better known as Quino (b. 1932), not just in his own country, but throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Quino, who made his debut in the mid-50s is today regarded as one of Latin America’s greatest cartoonists and his sophisticated satirical and gag cartoons indeed count amongst the best in their genres, but it was his comic strip about the small, critically insightful girl Mafalda and her friends that made him a household name beyond the borders of Argentina.

After an innocuous start as a never-implemented advertising campaign for a home appliance company, the strip debuted in the weekly paper Primera Plana in 1964; it moved to the daily El Mundo the following year, and upon the closure of that paper in 1967 ended up in the weekly Siete días in 1968, where it stayed until Quino decided to end it without further explanation in 1973, when it was at the height of its popularity and had emigrated into television and merchandizing. Quino has since continued his work as an editorial- and gag cartoonist, but has never returned to the strip format. In spite of this, generations of Latin Americans have grown up with Mafalda, which has been endlessly rerun and reprinted.

In the Spanish-speaking world the strip is considered amongst the greatest classics of comics and, because their obvious similarities, is often compared with Charles M. Schulz’ Peanuts, frequently to the disadvantage of the latter. Regardless of one’s personal preference in this matter, it is an apt comparison and Mafalda quite obviously occupies a similar position in Latin America to Peanuts in the United States and parts of Europe. Unfortunately, only over the last few years has it been seeing full publication in English, in a shoddily produced book series released by its Argentine publisher, to deafening silence.


“Do you improvise or plan our upbringing?”

What kind of strip is Mafalda? It makes sense to start with its similarities with Peanuts. In its conception, it was obviously indebted to Schulz’ strip, conceived as it was along the same lines—small philosophical, poignant and funny incidents between a group of wise middleclass children—but the strip is clearly its own thing. Where Peanuts is a suburban strip, Mafalda takes place in the big city; where Peanuts exclusively focuses on its child characters, who stand-in for the adult world, the relationship between children and grownups is one of the central themes in Mafalda; Where Peanuts delivers its punchlines in an almost timeless environment, Mafalda continually comments on and critiques its time, although it does this without ever becoming acutely topical. At a more fundamental level, however, the strips are different in tone: Peanuts takes place in a sleepy no-mans land, where dreams and aspirations dissipate in the emptiness above the trimmed lawns and white picket fences, while Mafalda—though not without melancholy undertones—is warm, friendly and vibrantly immersed in life as lived.


“All cops are nice”

Mafalda is the child of a troubled moment of her homeland’s history. During the period Quino chronicled her daily doings, the country saw six changes of government, all variations on the military regime. Political violence was rampant and democratic overtures were few and far between. During this period, most of Latin America was plagued by political unrest and repressive governments, the war in Vietnam was escalating, the Chinese Cultural Revolution started, and the arms race between East and West was running at full bore. All of this is reflected in the strip, even if only occasionally mentioned directly, as is the spirit of 68, women’s liberation and the rise of youth culture, with the Beatles as an incontrovertible primary exponent. Quino is basically a disillusioned humanist, deeply skeptical of all kinds of authority, whether the brutal hegemony of capitalism or the crushing grip of communism.


“Just imagine how peaceful the world would be, if Marx hadn’t been served soup as a child”

And as mentioned, Mafalda is his prophet—she embodies her creator’s skepticism, his sense of justice and his indignation. She’s her “irrepressible heroine, who rejects the order of things… and demands her right as a child not merely to live as debris in the wreckage of the world of her fathers” as Umberto Eco—Quino’s first Italian editor—writes. But at the same time, she is human and therefore susceptible to the same weaknesses as everyone else. While the sweep of history provides subtext, her world is quietly quotidian—school, TV, play, holidays, etc. The big questions are reflected in daily reality by way of recurring motifs of conflict and cognition, such as her distaste for the soup insistently served by her mother; her naïve questions to her parents about the world at large, which invariably result in quiet embarrassment; the absurdities picked up from passersby when one sits on the curb in the sun, or from the radio; the multitude of ways a kid may confound a door-to-door salesman, etc.


How you drive a door-to-door salesman crazy

Mafalda is the closest we get in the strip to ideal human representation, but as is typical in comedies of type, she is made whole only by the characters that surround her, which provide the spectrum of distilled human traits and qualities that make the work resonate. One of Quino’s masterstrokes is the introduction, about halfway through the strip’s life, of a little brother to Mafalda, Guille, who is manifestly anarchic in character of towards whom she is forced to reproduce the friendly but firm authoritarian disposition she herself encounters in her parents.


Mafalda ends up reproducing her parents’ reaction to the mercilessly inquisitive Guille.

Around the same time, we meet the tiny tot Liberdad, whose analytical sharpness and ability to see the Big Picture and always align herself with the People suppresses somewhat these traits in Mafalda herself and gives her more natural social insights room to breathe on the page.

Liberdad corrects her friends: money isn’t everything, but perhaps it is, after all, for those who don’t have it?

In the circle of friends we also find buck-toothed Felipe, the perpetual dreamer and just as perpetual loser:

Characteristically, his greatest hero is the Lone Ranger, but when he plays cowboys and Indians with the other, more realistically disposed kids, things never work out as he had hoped. We do not know whether the attractive—attractive, we have no idea whether she is actually sweet—girl on whose blind side he suffers has red hair, but the relation to Charlie Brown is evident, even if Felipe—typically for the strip—is more actively engaged with life than his North American brother by another father.

Miguelito is a child of nature with a prodigious imagination—wherever he goes, he sees a magical, different world. He is fundamentally inquisitive and his thoughts on reality are original and unexpected:

“My mirror image evaporates and spreads a little of me all over the city”

Characteristically for Quino’s subtle approach, it is never spelled out just how devastating the presence of this little visionary must be for Felipe, whose imagination always comes up short:

Contrast: Miguelito and Felipe on their way to school.

And at the same time, without it ever being addressed, one sense that Miguelito’s rather loose grip on reality has its reasons: only a few times do we meet his neat freak mother—cleaning her way through life obsessedly—to whom visiting children feel like an invasion, and she remains off screen, but the contours of an unstable home are felt.


Another home of unarticulated tension is that of the slightly dense, overweight Manolito. He only rarely has time to play because he must help out in his dad’s grocery store. He works hard to imitate his hard-working immigrant father, and is clearly expected to do so. The result is a one-track preoccupation with business, which ultimately shuts out other aspects of life for him. Manolito is socially inept to a degree where he drives away his friends with his constant pitching for ’Almacén Don Manolo’ and the advertising he scrawls all over the city.

It makes sense that the character who has the hardest time with Manolito is the other socially awkward child in the group: Susanita, the prim, and rather dim, little bourgeoise. She represents the old order in the most square fashion, spending most of her time dreaming about her future husband and family life while avoiding anything that rocks the boat, whether it is the upstart capitalist Manolito or the Beatles.


Susanita addresses women’s lib.

By such description of the characters, Mafalda might come across as rather bleak social satire, but far from it. Despite all their differences, the kids are friends and always end up accommodating each other. Quino’s belief in human beings as fundamentally social and moral is manifest. Mafaldas world—the local—is a benign community in a chaotic world and it is the belief in such community that makes Mafalda the humanist and idealist vision of society that it is.

At times, it flirts with banality—a recurring and slightly forced motif has Mafalda sharing the stage with a globe, which triggers all kinds of “poignant” and frequently rather trite observations about the madness of the world:

The world is sick, it’s hurting in Asia

At other times, it veers into the bourgeois—this happens especially when it describes small, cute episodes of family life. But most of the time, Quino maintains a level head, a sharp pen, and is very, very funny. His masterful character work is augmented by a refined sense of comic timing and dialogue:

It makes sense when he describes the cartoonists Sempé and Saul Steinberg as two of his main sources of inspiration, because his line precisely synthesizes central aspects of their very different approaches into an organically animated, personal “handwriting.” Sempé’s sweetness and cheek animates the sensitively captured facial expressions of Mafalda and her friends; his Parisian elegance is apparent in such details as a fugaciously suggested lamppost in the background of a park scene:

…while his atmospheric liveliness comes out when Quino draws the family’s messy, lived-in bathroom:

Quino has not only adapted his angular line from Steinberg, but also its intelligent use in the delineation of graphic elements such as the dexterous doodles Mafalda draw on the floor to denote her life:

…or the hatching on a policeman’s pistol holster, or the scrawl of inventive, messy childish graffiti on the angular, ordered walls of the family home, with their banally decorative paintings. Quino is conscious that every line, if drawn with attention, has its own life:

It is this vitality that stays with you as a reader of Mafalda, which focuses on the rejection by childhood of all forms of predetermination, insisting on free agency as essential. When the strip ended, Argentina seemed on course to better times with the return of the long-exiled former president and dictator, Péron, but the military coup in 1976 put an end to any optimism engendered by the new government and instead led the country into its darkest period in modern history. This happened without the companionship of Mafalda and one can only guess at Quino’s motivations. Beyond the basic wisdom of quitting at the height of your powers, his decision might indeed reflect the strip’s insistence that the world can be a better place and that the choice is in our hands. An insistence that makes eminent sense amongst children and which is too important for us to let it weaken as we grow older, into disillusion.


“In thirty years, the world will be a much better place, because we, the children, will rule.”