Tag Archives: Kate Dacey

Peace and Hate

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Most of the comics I’ve consigned to the Manga Hall of Shame are there for obvious reasons: a script so hammy you could serve it for Easter dinner, for example, or a female character conjured straight from the pornographer’s imagination. But the manga that earns my greatest scorn isn’t a boob-fest like Eiken or Highschool of the Dead or The Qwaser of Stigmata. No, my least favorite manga looks positively wholesome in comparison, with a nifty cover design and a familiar corporate logo just below the title. Don’t be fooled, however: Gandhi: A Manga Biography is a bad comic.

As I noted in my original review, Gandhi has problems like a dog has fleas. The script is tin-eared, with passages of old-timey formality punctuated by California dudespeak. (One character actually calls another “bro.” No, really — “bro.”) The pacing, too, is uneven, focusing so heavily on Gandhi’s formative experiences in South Africa that his crusade for a sovereign India reads more like an epilogue than a second act. Equally frustrating is author Kazuki Ebine’s tendency to reduce major historical figures such as Jawaharal Nehru to walk-on roles; from the few panels in which Nehru appears, one might reasonably conclude that Nehru was just one more person that admired Gandhi, and not one of Gandhi’s most important proteges — or, for that matter, India’s first prime minister.

The comic’s greatest sin, however, is that it’s boring, transforming the life of a truly brave and complicated human being into a series of artlessly executed tableaux. The script, in particular, labors mightily under the weight of Gandhi’s prose, which is frequently juxtaposed with Ebine’s clumsy attempts to articulate the opposing point of view. Confrontations between Gandhi and Muslim activists, British authorities, and separatist skeptics are presented with all the sophistication of a third-grade school play, treating Gandhi’s adversaries as mustache-twirling villains and Gandhi as an unwavering paragon of virtue, always handy with a sage remark.

Ebine also struggles to tell Gandhi’s story with a meaningful sense of urgency or coherence; events are presented chronologically in brief, disconnected vignettes that rely excessively on talking heads to create continuity. Consider the following scene: in April 1919, Gandhi organized a national strike to protest the Rowlatt Act, an anti-terrorism measure that granted British authorities the power to imprison, without trial, enemies of the state. Ebine depicts a strike-day confrontation between protestors and soldiers in Amritsar, a village in the Punjab state. That massacre, however, is staged so poorly that it’s difficult to follow what happens. First we see tanks rolling through narrow streets; then we see children playing on the periphery of a demonstration; then the British soldiers begin firing on the crowd; and last, Gandhi stands over victims’ bodies, sadly shaking his head. The disjointed imagery poses more questions than it answers: what triggered the shooting? Where were the soldiers standing in relation to the crowd? How many people were present? What happened to the large number of tanks seen in the very first panel? And when did Gandhi arrive on the scene: moments after the carnage, or a day later? Neither the dialogue nor the illustrations address these basic issues, robbing the scene of its potential dramatic or explanatory value.

Then, too, Ebine does such a poor job of recreating the period and the setting that the reader never feels transported to South Africa or India. Ebine focuses most of his efforts on costumes, recreating hats and military uniforms in just enough detail to suggest the early twentieth century. His backgrounds, however, are so devoid of information that Gandhi could just as easily be taking place in modern-day Texas as in 1920s India. Simplification is a common practice in manga, but in skimping on such elements as buildings and streetscapes, Ebine misses an important opportunity to show us how Gandhi’s environment shaped his thinking, his personality, and his strategies for non-violent engagement with the British.

Contrast the sparseness of Gandhi with a historical work such as The Times of Botchan, and Ebine’s poverty of imagination becomes that much clearer. In The Times of Botchan, Jiro Taniguchi uses period detail to immerse the reader in novelist Natsume Soseki’s world: we see the uneasy mixture of Western fashion with traditional Japanese costume, and the gleaming modernity of trolleys and railway stations contrasted with centuries-old homes. Taniguchi’s drawings do more than tell the reader, “This story takes place during the Taisho period”; they help the reader understand how a writer living in that particular place and time might have produced a satirical novel such as Botchan. Ebine’s illustrations, however, are too perfunctory to convey the squalor in which India’s untouchables lived, or the segregated train cars to which Indians were consigned — details that would have demonstrated the specific social injustices that Indians faced both at home and in South Africa.

To judge from the generally favorable reviews of Gandhi, I have no doubt someone will be offended by my suggestion that Gandhi is a bad comic. But when the basic mechanics of the book are so poor, and its treatment of complex, ugly periods in colonial history so simplistic, it’s impossible to give Gandhi a pass just because the subject matter is high-minded.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Manga and the Best Comics Poll

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Though manga has been a fixture of the American comics scene since the mid-1980s, it wasn’t until the anime boom of the following decade that publishers began to get savvier about what they were licensing and how they were packaging it. The shift away from manly-man titles towards teen-friendly material, and from floppy to trade paperback, had a big impact on who bought manga; once found only in comic book stores, manga now appeared in big chains like Borders and Walmart where young fans of the Dragonball and Sailor Moon TV shows could find it. By the mid-2000s, manga sales were robust enough to crack the USA Today bestseller list, inspiring more companies to jump into the licensing game.

The manga gold rush came to a crashing halt in 2008. A confluence of forces — economic recession, abundant scanlations, rising paper costs, teen fickleness — forced all but the biggest and best-financed publishers to cease operations.

It comes as little surprise, then, that many of the manga on the Best Comics list are ones that outlived the market’s dramatic boom-and-bust cycle. Lone Wolf and Cub, which ranked 48th in the Best Comics Poll, made its Stateside debut in 1987, just one year before Marvel Comics began releasing AKIRA (#40) and VIZ began publishing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (#73). Rumiko Takahashi’s beloved romantic comedy Maison Ikkoku (#73) is another long-lived series, going through three editions since 1993, when VIZ first acquired the North American rights.

Equally important is the role of the American comics establishment in anointing certain manga as masterpieces. AKIRA, Buddha (#71), Lone Wolf and Cub, and 20th Century Boys (#96) are all Eisner winners, while Pluto (#48), A Drunken Dream & Other Stories (#96), The Walking Man (#73), and Yotsuba&! (#73) were past nominees. The American industry hasn’t neglected creators, either; Comic-Con International has bestowed its Inkpot Award on some of the list’s best-known contributors, including Osamu Tezuka, Rumiko Takahashi, and Hayao Miyazaki.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the top vote-getters is how many of their creators embody the Great Man stereotype. Consider Osamu Tezuka, whose Buddha and Phoenix both made the cut. His role in the history of manga is analogous to Beethoven’s in orchestral music. No musicologist would reasonably claim Beethoven to be the first person to write symphonies, or even the first great innovator within the genre, but Beethoven’s distinctive compositional approach — particularly towards motivic development — had a profound impact on the musicians who came after him. Likewise, Tezuka didn’t invent shojo manga — as some critics have claimed — nor was the he the first person to pioneer the use of “cinematic” layouts. But the popularity and artistry of Tezuka’s work, and the uniqueness of his vision, cemented his reputation as one of the medium’s most important creators, someone who cast the same, anxiety-producing shadow over his successors that Beethoven did over his. (Small wonder that Tezuka’s last project was the bio-comic Ludwig B.)

Moto Hagio, author of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, occupies a similar place in shojo manga history. Along with writers such as Riyoko Ikeda and Keiko Takemiya, Hagio played a pivotal role in transforming comics for girls, drawing on myriad sources — Frances Hodgson Burnett, Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury — to create bold, taboo-busting stories that spoke to the concerns of teenage girls. Perhaps her greatest innovation was to apply Tezuka’s “cinematic” techniques to her characters’ interior lives, immersing us in their emotions and memories in the same way that Tezuka thrust readers into the action. Throughout her work, Hagio placed a premium on subjectivity, using fluid layouts, unbound by grids, and employing an elaborate code of visual signifiers to represent the full gamut of emotions — symbols found in contemporary shojo titles such as Fruits Basket (#73).

[An aside: As Shaenon Garrity observed in her essay about “lady comics,” Hagio’s most representative work has yet to be translated into English; A Drunken Dream is an anthology of short stories spanning Hagio’s career, and not fully indicative of her narrative skill. Tezuka, on the other hand, is fortune enough to have had many of his best-regarded works –- Astro Boy, Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, Phoenix –- translated into English, making easier for readers to appreciate the depth of his artistry.]

And no responsible manga critic could overlook the significance of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose AKIRA was one of the most widely admired — and imitated — comics of the 1980s. If Tezuka was the artist who translated Walt Disney from screen to page, Otomo was the one who brought the grittier world of 1970s cinema to Japanese comics. AKIRA owed a visual debt to Star Wars, but Otomo’s storytelling was, at heart, more attuned to the mood of the early 1970s. His story was complex and political, a grand, paranoid fantasy that questioned Japanese enthusiasm for technology and cast a doubtful eye on the government. Otomo’s artwork, too, was peerless; countless manga-ka – Naoki Urasawa included – imitated Otomo’s blocky character designs, sleek vehicles, and meticulously detailed cityscapes. And Otomo wasn’t afraid to cross the line into outright horror, as Kaneda’s grotesque bodily mutations attest.

As with any list, there are some outliers: Yotsuba&!, a slice-of-life comedy about a bachelor who adopts a tot with green pigtails, seems more a sentimental favorite than a classic title. The same could be said for Fruits Basket, which sold like hotcakes in the mid-2000s, but is already beginning to look a little dated. I say this not to diminish either series, but to observe that canon-building is a difficult and fascinating process; works that might seem essential to us now may recede in importance (and vice versa).

So what do these nominations tell us about the current state of manga in the US? First, that visibility and longevity were key factors in determining which titles made this list, and which ones didn’t. Second, that critics gravitated towards artists whose work could be labeled as “great,” “important,” or “pioneering” –- in short, artists whose work neatly conforms to Western notions of genius, a peculiar standard for a medium that is unabashedly conceived as mainstream entertainment. Third, that readers tended to nominate titles that fell within respectable genres; some of manga’s most distinctive voices –- Kazuo Umezu, Yoshiharu Tsuege, Suehiro Maruo –- are absent from the list. And fourth, that only a tiny amount of manga has been translated for English-speaking audiences; seminal works such as The Rose of Versailles, GeGeGe no Kitaro, The Song of the Wind in the Trees, and Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil have yet to be licensed here, begging the question of what results the next Best Comics Poll might yield.

Best Comics Poll Index

Three not-so-radical ideas for marketing manga to grown-ups

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One of the things that struck me when reading Erica and Brigid’s contributions to the roundtable was that each proposed solutions that made sense for a particular audience. In Erica’s case, that audience is comprised of adult manga fans who have a passionate engagement with the medium, a knowledge of its history, and an active interest in the Japanese publishing scene, while in Brigid’s case, that audience is comprised of adults who are receptive to the idea of reading a graphic novel, but don’t know much about manga. As publishers like Vertical, Inc. and Drawn & Quarterly have demonstrated, these two groups’ reading interests do overlap; Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, and A Drifting Life are three examples of manga that appealed to a wide range of readers, from folks interested in good stories to folks interested in reading works by seminal Japanese artists. It’s this piece of the Venn Diagram that I’d like to address, in the form of three simple suggestions for marketing books to both audiences.

1. License manga that appeals to older female readers.
There’s almost no English-language manga about women over the age of 22 (at 28, the heroine of Tramps Like Us is positively geriatric), and little to no josei that features genuinely strong, independent female characters. (It’s telling that two of the best josei titles to be licensed for the US market, Bunny Drop and The Antique Bakery, feature male protagonists.) That’s where an artist such as Murasaki Yamada comes in; her work has things to offer the hardcore manga fan and casual reader alike, from her pedigree (she cut her teeth writing stories for COM and Garo), to her elegant, naturalistic style and feminist outlook. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Tell a good story about the book.

In their responses to Brigid’s post, Noah and Ryan Sands raise an important issue: meet-the-author events and book tours are an important marketing tool for generating interest among book-buyers and media outlets. Though a few publishers have brought Japanese artists to the US for signings, the process is complicated, in Noah’s words, “by language and distance.” In the absence of opportunities for authors and readers to interact face-to-face, publishers need to step up to the plate to tell readers what’s so special about the books they’re licensing. Drawn & Quarterly’s presentation of Black Blizzard is a good example of how to do just that. Consider the back jacket copy:

In 1956, at the age of twenty-one, Yoshihiro Tatsumi arrived as a major new talent in Japan’s burgeoning manga industry with the publication of his graphic novel Black Blizzard. With influences ranging from Osamu Tezuka to Alexander Dumas to Mickey Spillane, Tatsumi’s noir thriller displayed a cinematic, hard-boiled aesthetic, as well as a prodigious knack for inventive, fast-paced storytelling. Long out of print and never before published in English, Black Blizzard is a rare piece of Japanese cartooning history and an enduring work of high entertainment. Drawn & Quarterly Publications and series editor Adrian Tomine are proud to present this lost treasure from a modern master.

Without even opening the book to look at the pictures or read Tomine’s interview with Tatsumi, readers know immediately (a) who Tatsumi is (b) where the work fits into his development as an artist (c) who influenced him and (d) why Drawn & Quarterly’s edition is significant. Bonus points for connecting Black Blizzard with more familiar Western points of reference.

Now imagine doing that for an artist like Murasaki Yamada — not only are you appealing to manga enthusiasts who know about COM and Garo, but you’re also pitching your work to readers who enjoyed Persepolis and Fun Home by positioning Yamada as a similarly important female voice in comics (and one with an interesting biography as well — in addition to writing for two seminal manga magazines, she also ran for Japanese Parliament).

3. Get librarians in on the act.
As my colleague Eva Volin pointed out in an earlier discussion about manga marketing practices (this one focused on manga for younger readers), there are a number of compelling reasons to pursue the library market:

1) There are a lot of libraries.
2) We buy a lot of books.
3) We rarely return the books we buy.
4) If the book we buy turns regularly (circulates a lot), we buy extra and/or replacement copies.
5) If a category turns regularly we increase the amount of books we buy in that category.
6) By doing all this we create loyal readers who will often go in search of books at bookstores to buy and keep for themselves.

If you want librarians to buy your books and talk them up with patrons, however, you need to do more than just send out fliers and point to reviews; you need to meet with them face-to-face, explaining how your books fit into a well-rounded graphic novel collection, identifying the likely audience for your books, educating them about the creators, and giving them samplers or review copies. You also need to provide convenient ways for librarians to preview titles online — and you need to tell them about those online resources. The SigIKKI website is a great tool for librarians interested in building a graphic novel collection for adults, as it allows browsers to read entire volumes of manga for free and provides background on each of the featured artists, but if you’re not already a manga fan, how would you know about the site and what it has to offer?

Librarians can perform another valuable service for you as well: they can host events to raise awareness about your book, introduce readers to one of your authors, or engage them in a discussion of a broader theme. Done right, these kind of events can draw in long-time manga readers and newcomers alike, especially if you find a compelling hook for the material: a local mountaineering expert discussing the backstory to Summit of the Gods (and maybe sharing a few of his own pictures of Mt. Everest), an art historian tracing a particular manga-ka’s style back to nineteenth-century print-making traditions, a translator discussing the difficulty of adapting a script for English-speaking audiences, a film historian comparing scenes from a Masaki Kobayashi samurai film with sequences from Satsuma Gishiden.

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Update by Noah: The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

xxxHOLiC Roundtable: On the Pleasures of Comeuppance Theater

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I’ll be honest: I was nervous about being assigned to run the anchor leg of this week’s xxxHOLiC relay. By now, I’d fully expected that the other participants would have exhausted all the clever things I’d wanted to say about the series, whether it was pointing out the artwork’s sensuous, Jugenstil-meets-ukiyo-e vibe or critiquing the effectiveness of the Tsubasa crossover. Then a funny thing happened: the other contributors did praise the art and, to a lesser extent, the unobtrusive handling of the Cardcaptor subplot, but they were pretty tough on the series as a whole, suggesting it was dull, overwritten, and just plain silly at times.

Well, yes. But that’s exactly the point.

The early volumes of xxxHOLiC provide CLAMP an opportunity to have their cake and eat it too, poking fun at the mystical claptrap that’s part-and-parcel of the wish-granting-emporium genre while offering them a vehicle for staging creepy, effective morality plays. In Adam’s post, he notes the tension between what Yuko says about personal responsibility and how she interacts with Watanuki:

Throughout volumes one through three, Yuko stresses that you must take responsibility for all your actions, and that you are the only one who can change your behavior. This theme could have served as a means of deepening Watanuki’s character. But it’s weakened by the fact that Yuko’s actions towards Watanuki completely contradict it. She magically compels him to enter her shop against his will, and virtually coerces him to make a “contract” with her, high-handedly overriding all his protests. And I see no indication that we are supposed to notice the discrepancy between her words and her deeds.

On one level, I agree with Adam: there is a gap between Yuko’s preaches and practices. Yet I think that inconsistency is intentional in the early volumes, not an accident of careless writing. We’re not meant to take Yuko’s Yogi Beara-esque glosses on fate — sorry, hitsuzen — too seriously; after all, she quotes the dictionary, which seems like a deliberate jab at the kind of overblown, careful-what-you-wish-for speeches that crop up in Pet Shop of Horrors and Nightmares for Sale. Moreover, many of Yuko’s monologues are punctuated by slapstick: early in volume one, for example, she lectures Watanuki at length about fate, then bursts into an effusive rendition of the Romper Room theme song, while in other volumes, the hitsuzen-speak gives way to drunken revelry with the round, bunny-like Mokona.

At the same time, however, by introducing the concept of hitsuzen (which translates roughly as “inevitability”), CLAMP is also setting the table for the morality plays that are generously sprinkled throughout the first three volumes. It’s de rigeur in comeuppance theater to construct some kind of philosophical framework around the action; here, CLAMP’s set-up gives them more flexibility to do something interesting with the stories instead of simply punishing people for their character flaws. All four of the morality plays — the tale of the chronic liar, the tale of the Internet addict, the tale of the ouija-board players, and the tale of the overly confident graduate student — have unexpected twists that illustrate the importance of personal responsibility. In the first story, for example, it’s the liar’s inability to be honest with herself that ultimately leads to her demise (which, I agree, seems a bit extreme), while in the third, it’s the students’ fervent desire to see proof of the supernatural that creates a malicious presence at their school.

Even the monkey paw episode is, at base, a meditation on owning one’s choices. The paw’s owner, a graduate student, wants what all PhDs-in-training want: praise for the quality and originality of her research. (I know: I am one!) Her punishment stems not from over-confidence in her abilities, nor from genuine ambition, but from her assumption that her success stems from an inherently lucky nature. By placing so much stock in coincidence, she denies herself the opportunity to succeed or fail on the strength of her own hard work; when her wishes yield terrible results, she completely loses her sense of self.

I’d be the first to concede that the early volumes of xxxHOLiC aren’t as gripping as the later ones. But if you take them at face value — as both send-up and tribute to one of the most enduring tropes in manga — they’re a lot of fun to read. Oh, and the artwork’s pretty nifty, too.
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Update by Noah: The entire xxxholic roundtable is here.