Today is my last monthly column for Hooded Utilitarian. When I came on here just over a year ago, I really wasn’t sure if I’d last three months. HU writers are smart, critical thinkers, with a vast knowledge base in topics I know nothing at all about. HU readers are contentious, critical and unrelenting. I thought I’d give it a try and see how long I lasted. ^_^ I lasted way longer than I expected.
I’m leaving simply because of time constraints. I’m running out of time in my day and some things have to fall off the bottom of the list. Unfortunately HU is one of those things. If you enjoy reading my writing, feel free to visit me over at my blog, Okazu. I’ll still be there.
I really enjoyed my time here on HU and I’m sorry to have to leave – and I hope to be back from time to time with a guest post here and there. Thanks to everyone who read any of my columns here, especial thanks to folks who commented and to all the other writers who welcomed me among their ranks.
Farewell, I hope to see you again soon. (^_^)/
Note by Noah: You can see all of Erica’s columns here.
In 2010 I wrote a post about one of my three favorite manga/anime/TV/Live action movie series, Hana no Asuka-gumi. Asuka is indeed a righteous girl gang series, but it is not the oldest, nor the most successful. That honor has to go to what is one of the most awesomely outrageous series ever made, Sukeban Deka.
Life has not been kind to Asamiya Saki. At 16, she is doing time in a juvenile detention center for various crimes, when the police come to her with a nefarious deal – her mother is on death row for the murder of her father. If Saki works for the police to infiltrate high schools and root out criminal organizations, they’ll take her mother off death row. Saki agrees and becomes the Sukeban Deka – the Deliquent Detective.
The manga series, which ran from 1976 – 1982 in the pages of Hana to Yume magazine, was the first, the darkest and in many ways the craziest, of the three massively popular gang girl series. The manga spawned a live-action TV series that ran for three seasons from 1985-1987, in which the name “Asamiya Saki” becomes a title passed down through generations from the first Asamiya Saki to her successors. These were followed by two live-action movies in 1987 and 1988, in which two of the actresses that played Saki in the TV series reprise their roles. In 1991, an anime OVA, which covers the first arc of the manga was made (and for the finale alone, as Saki fights the evil high school crime leader on a burning oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, it’s totally worth seeing.) And, finally, in 2007 the series was resurrected for a brilliant homage/finale, distributed in English as Yo-Yo Cop, in which the original TV Saki, Yuki Saito, makes a cameo as the new Saki’s mother. All but the manga and TV series are available for purchase in English and I can’t stress strongly enough that you should at least see Yo-Yo Cop, because it’s pure genius.
Once Saki agrees to work with the police, she’s told that they can’t actually release her from prison…she has to escape on her own. With the help of her jail friends, Saki escapes and makes her way to the police, where she is given a Yo-Yo as a weapon (since minors can’t carry weapons, a proscription that Saki occasionally breaks when needed.) In the Yo-Yo is the Chrysanthemum seal, which Saki displays to let the bad guys know she is an official representative of the police. (Much as the protagonist of Mito Koumon displays the Shogun’s seal to let the bad guys know they were caught red-handed and by whom.)
Saki is taken under the wing of a half-Japanese, half-American named Jin who acts as mentor and boss. Jin and Saki eventually fall for each other, but they are never actually a couple in the course of the series.
As Sukeban Deka, Saki is enrolled in various schools long enough to draw the attention – and eventually the wrath – of the local criminal bosses. Saki takes down the gang, then the bosses and transfers away to the next school. In the course of the 22 volumes of the manga, Saki loses her memory, ends up on the west coast of the US for a while, and then the east coast of the US for a while, until she regains her memory. Towards the end, Saki is transferred to one last post – in a juvenile detention center, rather than a regular high school. And this time, her enemy is not another student, but the evil warden himself, who raises giant snakes. Saki defeats the warden, of course. The final arc is the darkest, as she faces an adult criminal overlord. She wins, but at the sacrifice of…well, everything. Jin and she are finally united in death.
And death it is, as Wada Shinji makes perfectly clear on the last page. There will be no sequels of this series, as there were of Hana no Asuka-gumi or continuations as there were with YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki. In fact, when the resurrections of those series brought girl gang manga back into the limelight a few years ago, Sukeban Deka was re-released as is, with no new material created.
The art style Wada used rode the line between shoujo and shounen at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so. Saki might be shown with “shock!” eyes, or with a murderously intense expression, and action shots were quite common. This style left its mark on many a mid-80s series, including Asuka and YajiKita . It’s not unfair to say that we might never have had a Revolutionary Girl Utena, or PreCure if we had not first had had Sukeban Deka.
My collection of obscura includes a Saki figurine and a Sukeban Deka Yo-Yo. But it’s this one still from the manga that is my most prized possession of Saki. This image of 16-year old Saki on her off hours, drinking and smoking will never again be replicated in today’s sanitized manga world. Sukeban Deka is a paean to a world that is lost, a world that contained high school crime syndicates, gang girl violence and giant snakes.
The deal went like this – Dad would read me a story, I would go to sleep. Nothing in that deal said I couldn’t be a little f$%*!er about which stories I wanted him to read. My favorite was Zorro, followed closely by Fury, the Wonder Horse, which I insisted on calling Furry, just to piss. him. off. I still laugh at that one.
I also really liked a book called Pierre. I called it “Pierre: the boy who said ‘I don’t care,'” but its real name is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue.
For it me, it was one of the smallest books in my collection of Golden Readers and picture books, part of the Nutshell Library, along with One Was Johnny, Alligators All Around, and Chicken Soup with Rice.
I’m old enough to have been too old to care when Really Rosie came out as an animation in 1975, with songs based on the above books. It was no more than amusing, really. I recalled the books of my youth, of course, but that was like a million years ago, when I was a baby!! No way I was getting excited about baby stuff. Chicken Soup With Rice was still pretty cool, though.
When Really Rosie went Off-Broadway musical, I was in college and still, honestly, didn’t care. I mean, sure, it was cool, and a whole new generation would learn to love Sendak, but I had no money, wasn’t ever going to see it and besides, musicals were so….
It’s only natural that when I became an adult that baby stuff became interesting again. And of course, by that time I had lost that little Nutshell Library collection of books. Amazingly, after looking around, I found the very same 1962 edition I originally owned. So, clearly Sendak hadn’t yet become the household name he is now. This was still in the pre – Where the Wild Things Are days. But that’s not the moral – the moral is, like Pierre, I learned to care.
If you read the social feeds this week, you’d think that Where the Wild Things Are was Sendak’s greatest work. Maybe it is, I don’t know…and I don’t care. When I think of his work, I think of alligators, crocodiles and lions that may or may not eat children if they don’t care enough for their surroundings.
One of the things I genuinely enjoyed about Sendak’s books was the cheerfully typical selfishness of the children that populated them. Whether they were singing paeans of joy to chicken soup with rice as they did bizarre and dangerous things, or running off from their bedrooms to become monsters, there was shockingly little consequence to their actions. The children riding the crocodile were not eaten, Pierre, although eaten, was fine in the end. Real and fake monsters are not the enemy of children that adults seems to think. The lion doesn’t eat Pierre because he is inherently dangerous – after all, he gives the boy fair warning. He does it because Pierre clearly needs an object lesson in manners and his parents aren’t holding up their end of the deal.
My Dad had bought that Nutshell Library because when he was young, Sendak lived in the basement of the building he lived in. Years before Sendak came out in a New York Times interview, my Dad told me that everyone referred to him as the “fag in the basement.” It was a tale told to me many decades after the fact, with a nostalgic smile, as if that was a cute, harmless nickname.
I sometimes imagine Sendak huddling in the basement, sensing the disdain with which he was regarded by the other tenants. I have no doubt that the children – those very same children Sendak wrote for, and are now beloved by as adults – were warned away from him, as if he were diseased.
It’s that season again. Events related to comics, manga and related entertainment are happening all over the world even as we speak.
Big and small, these events have several things in common – fans, many of whom are not otherwise social creatures, gather to share their love of a niche form of entertainment. If you’re used to American events, you’re used to mob scenes, long lines while people lounge around, sit on the ground…even pitch tents while waiting and general chaos caused by people swinging giant weapons in crowded spaces. People push past one another, run through the halls carrying large bags and props and shove and crowd their way to popular vendor tables.
In stark contrast, at the largest comic event in Japan – the twice-a-year Comiket, held at Tokyo Big Sight, there are distinct, mostly unwritten, rules of etiquette. Some of these are to allow for crowd management, some are simply built up over years of attendees acting politely and considerately.
This year I was also able to attend a small convention in The Netherlands, Yaoi and Yuri Con. With a few hundred people, crushing lines were not going to be a problem, and etiquette was more or less, “don’t be a jerk.” The gap between these events seems almost insurmountable, until you scratch a little past the surface. So today, I want to talk about the Big and the Small of anime/manga fandom. Let’s start with the Big.
Personally, I only go to Winter Comiket. Big Sight is open on the sides, so even if it is a cold day, Comiket provides a warm coat of people. I cannot imagine how sticky and smelly Summer Comiket must be and I hope to never know. Basically, there are so many people at this event, that I commonly refer to it as “a ride made of people.”
There is nothing at any American event even remotely approaching the crowd management at a show like Comiket, which reportedly gets 200,000 people in the building at one time, and probably gets close to 500K a day, over three days. Here is a time-lapse video of the line one day at Comiket. Dawn arrives at about 1:25, so you can see the way the line is organized and Comiket opens at about 2:00.
People are shepherded into blocks; the blocks are moved forward around and through the plaza that surrounds Big Sight. People coming out of the Ariake train station are walked out and around/behind the Big Sight area, so as not to interfere with existing blocks. Even at peak waiting times, the blocks are moved efficiently – we have never waited more than about an hour to get in. Signage and volunteers move people efficiently and there is very little standing around aimlessly wondering why nothing is happening.
Line etiquette is important at Comiket, because most of what one does all day is walk, then stand in line. People attend Japanese comic events to buy comics and limited goods sold by the companies. If one wants to get official series goods, one has to line up on special lines that go to the corporate level – they begin on the side of Big Sight, not in the front. Blocks are moved in from those lines outside to stand in another line that winds its way up to the booth itself.
If one is not interested in the corporate booths (that is, there’s no rare goods one simply *must* have) then one walks up the stairs and into the front entrance:
When you come out of the tunnel, to the left are the East Halls and to the right are the West Halls.
The East Halls are like this:
There are two sets of three Halls, on one side are Halls 1-3 and the other have 4-6, each of which is Airplane hangar sized.
The West Halls are three sides around a square:
In the middle of the square is the escalator one takes to visit the Cosplay area, which is separated from the Halls, so one does not get beaned in the head by unwieldy props. At Comiket, there are specific rules around not coming to Big Sight dressed in costume, where changing rooms are located and what times attendees are allowed to cosplay.
These rules are only partially followed and one can often seen vendors coming in partial or full costume. The last year we saw more cosplay wandering around the halls than in previous years.
Also notable were the presence of people who talked in line. If you’ve ever attended a western event, you are used to the constant background level of noise that being around several thousand chattering enthusiasts create. For years, on a Comiket line – especially outside lines – it was so quiet you could hear the click of phone buttons texting. This last winter we were surrounded by people talking in line, and even saw a Comiket date or two. It was a nice slide into a less ordered world for Comiket; this addition of “social” to an otherwise seemingly solitary pursuit.
Comiket is not a “convention” in the way most fans think of it. It is a selling event, where 10,000 vendors park themselves for 6 hours in order to sell derivative, transformational and original comic works, DVDs, games, and other related media. People line up to purchase, and possibly to praise, to ask when the next collected volume comes out, if the artist is a pro, or to simply show support in the most universal way possible – by handing over money. At its heart, Comiket is about creation of work, and appreciation for that work.
Now, for the small – Yaoi and Yuri Con (YaYCon) was held in a music venue, Atak, in Enschede, The Netherlands.
There were two stages for events and the Dealer’s Room was a collection of tables in the lobby, while the Artists’ Alley was in the basement hallway. They screened some anime, but the focus was, as it so often is with western cons, participation. Cosplayers wander the halls freely, without the space/time limits of Comiket, often clumping in front of exits in response to some universal human behavior.
The Dealer’s Room is only as popular as the rarity of the items in it – people are more likely to invest money in discounted books or unusually difficult to find goods or, even better, in custom artwork from the Artists’ Alley, rather than just buy what manga or anime is for sale. Online shopping has changed the dynamic for buying anime and manga and streaming is whittling away at what is left of that. A savvy dealer brings what cannot be found elsewhere, or goes home with a lot of stock. Since doujinshi, small or self-published comics, often cannot be purchased online, events are the place to buy these, just as at Comiket. Dutch fans seem to be particularly motivated to create original works. Even at and event of this size, there were a number of groups creating original works.
Comiket does have some panels, but they are not the focus of the event. There are a few behind-the-scenes meetings, as well. Western cons, relying as they do on fan participation, spend more time on panels and workshops. At YaYCon I was invited to do a lecture on Yuri. The lecture was packed, which is to say about 30 people. But, would they get my lecture, full of Japanese terms, American slang and the occasional polysyllabic words? Oh, yeah, no problem – they laughed in all the right places. ^_^ We followed this up later with a panel of Yuri manga that is currently or soon to be available in multiple languages; English, French, German, Polish and Italian.
YaYCon presents itself not only as a Yaoi and Yuri convention, but a LGBTQ friendly space. The dynamic of the attendees were open to all representations of all sexuality, with none of the expected intolerance of other people’s fetishes one sometimes runs into at American conventions. This was a nice change of pace from conventions elsewhere.
Participation, financial support for creators, social events, artistic expo, exhibitionism, niche enthusiasm and a dash of “I know more than you about this series.” Anime and manga events are a messy stew of these elements.
Whether they are big or small, it’s clear that the chaos of creation and participation thins the line between fan participation and semi-professional employment in unique – and universal – ways.
As I contemplate what to write for Hooded Utilitarian every month, I find certain images float into my head on a regular basis. These are the comics I grew up with, and the comics I loved, despite the fact that the art quite often was cringeworthy, the writing was often excruciating and even the concepts were frequently embarrassing to consider. Nonetheless, these are the comics I think about the most. These were comics I bought with my meager allowance, off the spinner rack at the local newstand and everything, just like any stereotypical 70s comic reader. Frequently, even when I was collecting them, I thought they were trash, and it was my love of awful things that kept sending me back to buy these truly dreadful stories, until the comics companies killed them out of pity. Some of these are actually quite good, but that wasn’t why I liked them. ^_^
The Defenders – I liked this series because they were total losers as a group. “B”-team doesn’t cut it. Individually, they were only partially effective as superheroes, as a team, they were a joke…which was mostly the plot of the series, in between some personality switching, possession and, of course, fighting.
The key to enjoying the Defenders was to realize that each and every one of the individual members was significantly broken in some way and when they joined together to fight as a team, those problems were magnified, rather than minimized. In my memory, more of the story was taken up with them arguing with one another than ever effectively handling any problem they faced.
The Defenders became the home for all drop-out dysfunctional heroes who found it hard to play well with others, or who had argued with their real team and needed somewhere to go on a sulk.
My favorite character was Valkyrie (oh gosh, I’m sure that’s a total shock) but not because she was just a female warrior. She was a female warrior from Norse Mythology – that totally did it for me. In an early expression of cluelessness about feminism (that has now become so extreme that comics journalism is replete with articles and commentary on it) Val couldn’t hit other women, but happily beat the crap out of male chauvinists, which were, not all that surprisingly, all males, since obviously feminism=man-hating. To be fair, most of the men Val dealt with were pretty chavinist, and all the men were clueless. This does not appear to have changed much in recent years.
In high school, I discovered another deep love for a crappy comic. This time it was a retro look at the days when we were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. The Invaders represented the Allies (well, the Allied countries and Submariner, because apparently the Nazis had it out for Atlantis too.)
I had this cover inside my high school locker. You’re probably assuming it’s because I found the idea of a leather-clad, giant female warrior physically attractive, but actually you’d be wrong.
My love for this cover has nothing to to with Krieger Frau herself, or the defeat of her and Master Man by the Invaders. My love of this cover has everything to do with a massive multi-media cross-over fanfic I wrote for about three years with a friend in high school. Krieger Frau just happens to looks a lot like the main bad guy in that fanfic. When I look at this cover, I see Snap Bar.
Nonetheless, there was joy to be found in the morality play that was a look at the “good old days” of World War II. There is a freedom in knowing that we were right, and someone else was wrong and there were no questions about the ethics of clobbering bad guys.
One of my prize possessions is a truly awful short-lived series by DC that was supposed to tell the Beowulf story, Beowulf Dragon Slayer. It didn’t. It strapped Beowulf into an uncomfortable-looking Michelin Man-esque costume, made of belts, and tortured a simple story beyond its own ability to tolerate. Many years later, I brought this series into my graduate class on Beowulf, and laughed while my classmates boggled that someone could get it so wrong.
This series really stands out for the inexplicable use of sentences written backwards as magical spells by the scop (who, in this series is a Druid-like wizard rather than a story-teller.) “Happy Birthday Caroline” becomes a Lovecraftian incantation “Enilorac Yadhtrib Yppah!” Surely I wasn’t the only one to notice?
There were so many things wrong with this series, on every level – indifferent art, incomprehensible story, that my reaction of loving it for its awfulness seems completely appropriate.
As I say, I love my awful comics. But there was one, finally, that I had to genuinely say was the absolute worst comic I ever read. It was killed at 13 issues, for which I was immensely thankful. Even I don’t know why it was created, except as a pathetic way to recreate the popularity of Spiderman, using all the wrong elements. Spiderman, you may remember, was a nebbish. He was a freelance photographer and a college student. He was a skinny, dorky guy. When the spider bit him, he did not suddenly become cool and suave – he was now a super-powered dorky guy. He cracked jokes to cover the fact that he was terrified. He now goes from dorky kid to cool dude in a matter of weeks, but that transformation took decades. In the 80s, he was still a dorky guy, a milquetoast by day, joke-cracking half-competent superhero in his free time.
So Marvel, cognizant that this kind of character had a readership, decided to try again. They created The Man Called Nova. I know they rebooted Nova in the 2000s, but they really laid the dorky loser on with a trowel the first time around. If you have never read the original Nova, and want to see how bad a comic can be, see if you can find a copy and read this.
The main character, Richard Ryder, has all the awkwardness of Peter Parker, without any of his sincerity or charm. He’s supposed to a science student (I might be wrong in remembering it as physics) but shows no understanding of anything. The premise is similar to that of The Greatest American Hero, except that instead of losing the instruction booklet, Richard is given his suit by an alien and has to get used to the thing. The first several issues follow him picking fights with street punks. When he first encounters super-powered villians, he fails spectacularly. Maybe it was just the time and place, but when Nova wrapped up, I set it aside with a sense of relief.
The one truly awful storyline that I adore with all my being from my American comics collecting days was when the ancient Egyptian gods kidnap and brainwash Odin into thinking he’s Osiris, in order to defeat Set. This storyline hit me in my weakest of weak spots – mythology as a hook. Could there really ever be anything sexier than Horus and Thor fighting on a pyramid, in order for Thor to retrieve his father? Yes, yes there could. There is a sequence mid-arc, where Horus and Thor fight together, on a giant causeway in space, against hordes of skeletons sent by Set, god of death (do not attempt to correct Marvel, they do not care about accuracy) while Jane beseeches Odin/Osiris to help his son.
Horus and Set fight one-on-one, while Thor protects Isis and Jane. Ultimately it is the human, Jane Foster, who awakens Odin from his trance, and so Horus is able to cast Set into the abyss of space and rescue his father, thus returning balance to the universe.
A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of young artists at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art. It was spectacular evening, and I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with several of the talented young people I met there. A few years later, at the annual MoCCA event, I ran into one of those young artists, Marguerite Dabaie. She handed me a self-published comic about transvestites during the Weimar Republic. I was instantly hooked by her personal style of story-telling that communicated emotion, without beating you with it.
A few years later, when I ran into Margot again, she had just published the first volume of her book Hookah Girl and Other True Stories. I read the first volume and have since been giving it away to people as an example of a voice that needs to be heard and a talent that needs to be enjoyed by as many readers as possible. I am quite literally in the habit of buying her book to give it away. One of those gifts gained Margot a short write-up by Brigid Alverson on Robot 6. Brigid writes:
[Hookah Girl] a memoir of growing up as a Palestinian Christian, within the immigrant community in the U.S., as well as a meditation on all the contradictions and labels that come with that identity. Dabaie starts the first volume with a set of paper dolls that embody each of those stereotypes‹Muslim girl in full hijab, suicide bomber with vest full of explosives, I-Dream-of-Jeannie seductress, starving artist. The stories touch on things that are familiar to immigrants in general — scary relatives, peculiar customs, native foods — but there is also an interesting comic about Leila Khaled that presents her as an interestingly complex individual. This book left me wanting to see more, and I hope there is a full-length graphic novel in the works. If there isn’t, there should be.
Today it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to Margot and her work.
Erica: Let’s start with the obligatory introduction.
Margot: I grew up out in San Francisco, dabbled in drawing for a long time, and decided to move to NYC in order to strike a match under my butt.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been working at a museum while attending graduate school (for illustration). I also freelance and teach art- and comic-related workshops. It’s a busy time for me right now, very productive, and I like it that way!
E: What was your motivation for The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories?
Two different threads led to the creation of The Hookah Girl: One is that I got a lot of “you should make a comic about this” comments from people who heard some of the stories that I ended up putting in the books. Tom Hart and Leela Corman were especially assertive about this, which I appreciate now.
The second thread stems more with my aggravation towards how Arabs are generally portrayed in the media and the public perception of them. I was very good at not paying much attention to the bad rap, and managed to just completely tune it out for a really long time. But then, 9/11 happened and it became impossible for me to ignore it. I had friends telling me to not let on that I was Palestinian so that I wouldn’t be discriminated against, and I think that really hit home. Of course, my friends meant well, but it was difficult to swallow that I now lived in a place—In the US, no less!—where some people gave a crap that my father was born in Ramallah. I had my own little “Arab Spring” throughout the years and one of the results is my comic.
I’ve nicknamed The Hookah Girl “Arab 101” because I ended up writing with a non-Arab audience in mind. I wanted to highlight that, while my family and some of their practices are not “western” and may be distinct, they are not any more or less distinct than any other family. The positives and negatives are not all that different from any variety of cultures, and they just are. I get the greatest thrill when someone comes up to me and tells me that my grandmother reminds them of their French grandmother, or Nigerian uncle, or Korean mother. This is exactly the kind of reaction I wanted—that we all have a Teta in our lives.
E: How has the reaction to Hookah Girl been? As a person of Jewish descent, it’s been hard for me to watch the vilification of everything Arab in some of the media. Like, haven’t we learned anything in 2000 years, seriously? I can’t imagine that you haven’t gotten at least some negative feedback.
M: The comic has been received fairly well. I have had some unfortunate instances where people did not agree with the political implications behind calling oneself a Palestinian (because just using the “P” word can be a political act) and dismissed it for that alone. I’ve also had people admonish the work because I mention some negative aspects—namely, my father’s sexist tendencies and my exploration of Leila Khaled, a 1960s terrorist. The positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I absolutely feel like making the comic has been worth it. The connection I have achieved with people is the whole point, really!
E: Well, for what its worth, it totally connected with me. You’re very outspoken about what you think, which I just love. What is the one panel you’ve done that best expresses yourself?
E: Hahah, I can totally see you like that. Who are your artistic influences, comic or otherwise?
M: Firstly, I’m really influenced by “folk” art. I especially love work that is flat and very graphic—patterns on textiles, tapestries, manuscripts on vellum, murals, and the like.
Some of the artists who I actively look at are Rembrandt, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Lorraine Fox (I can thank Murray Tinkelman for introducing me to her work!), Trina Schart-Hyman, J. C. Leyendecker, and Yoshitaka Amano.
In regards to comic influences, I’ve felt strong connections to Naji al-Ali and lots of older manga—especially anything made by CLAMP in the 1990s (RG Veda takes the cake), Masamune Shirow, and Rumiko Takahashi.
E: The manga influences really show in your story-telling style. You write a webcomic “He Also Has Drills For Hands,” where did you get that name? Tell us about the comic.
M: I originally started writing HAHDFH as a self-imposed exercise. I felt like my work was getting too precious and I wanted to publicly make a large body of work. So, I chose to leave the strip’s subject matter totally open (a lot of them deal with funny little everyday occurrences, but I still have my occasional Really Random Strip) and I draw them in a small sketchbook that’s really portable, so I can draw them while I’m out running around and doing my thing. They’re a lot of fun to make and when I started out, I was drawing one a day. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep that schedule up—grad school does that to you—so they’ve been knocked down to three strips a week.
The title alludes to one of my really early strips in which I talk about my childhood crushes. One of them is a robot named Crash Man who is a character from the video game Mega Man 2. The title was a line in the strip, because Crash Man does, indeed, have drills for hands! My kid self managed to look past the drills.
E: We’ve reached the obligatory “What are you working on right now?” question. So, what are you working on?
M: I’m currently in the research/very, very preliminary sketching phase for a historical-fictional graphic novel. It’ll take place in 7th-century Sogdiana, which was in modern-day Uzbekistan.
E: We talked about this a bit at New York Comic Con. It sounds pretty fantastic.
M: It will be chock-full of Silk-Road goodness. I’m going to put up a website about this project soon!
E: I know I’m looking forward to reading it. Margot, thanks so much for your time today!
M: Thank you!
I hope you’ll all check Margot’s work out at Margoyle.net – and let me know what you think here.
Qais Sedki knew that manga was popular in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and felt that it was time for a good manga story with heroes Arab children could turn to for inspiration. Manga, especially kids’ manga, is chock full of good, old-fashioned stories, full of guts and hard work and inspiration and heart. So, Sedki decided to create an original Arabic-language manga, and bring it to the UAE. That manga is Gold Ring.
In order to give the manga a genuine “manga” feel, Sedki worked with an experienced team of artists, who draw under the name Akira Himekawa, to illustrate and produce the manga. Jason Thompson and Mikikazu Komatsu did an interview with Himekawa last year when the book debuted in the UAE. Himekawa are probably best known in America for their work on The Legend of Zelda manga.
I was very pleased (with many thanks to Mikikazu Komatsu and Akira Himekawa!) to be the recipient of the first volume of Gold Ring. Even in Arabic, it was instantly apparent that this was a manga that any young fan would find approachable and entertaining. It follows young Sultan, a boy who lives in a small town with his mother and his dream to win the Gold Ring, a falconry tournament. For American readers, this is probably about the same level of exotic as a Pokemon contest. The book is indeed not dissimilar to Pokemon, with many of the same conventions in storytelling.
Sultan is instantly likable in a typical kid sort of way. He’s caught trying to sneak in to the Gold Ring arena with a friend, but they escape on his 4-wheeler. When his friend catches a falcon to sell, Sultan gives away his quad in order to save the falcon and let her go free. (Quality 1 of all the best shounen manga heros – they must have a kind heart.) In what is an absolutely adorable scene, the falcon returns his kindness by bringing Sultan a dead rat. Sultan and Majd (as the falcon is now known,) become friends and Sultan starts to tentatively train her. (Quality 2 of the best shounen manga hero – he and his sidekick are not master/slave, but friends.)
Sultan is introduced to a Bedouin who is a master at falconry, but dislikes the Gold Ring competition, as it devalues the art of falconry. But, because Sultan is a dear friend’s son, and because Majd and Sultan have a visible bond of love, he will – of course – teach him. Sultan has some natural skill and Majd is exceptionally intelligent, so they master basics quickly and are ready for the Gold Ring Trials in time. (Quality 3 of the best of shounen heroes – he must have some natural affinity for the skills he needs, but must have them honed through competition with stronger opponents.)
Anyone who has ever read any popular shounen manga knows what will come next. Sultan isn’t truly prepared, but he and Majd reach down into their hearts and find the strength and skill to succeed and make it into the Gold Ring competition! And, they are told, that they did it the old-fashioned way, with hand signals and hearts and mind as one, rather than using that bane of good old guts…technology.
And so we await volume 2, to see how Sultan and Majd do against their stronger opponents in the tournament. Already, we don’t like the reigning champion and can’t wait for him to be defeated. What will follow is undoubtedly a typical boys’ manga series as Sultan and Majd face enemies and turn them into allies with their combined powers of friendship and heart.
As I said, even in Arabic, the natural charm of this manga was instantly apparent to me. Now I’ve had the pleasure of reading it in English, and soon, so will you. According to Qais Sedki on Twitter, the English-language edition will be available for pre-order on January 26, 2012.
If you’re looking for something deep, dark, an expose’ on Arab religion or political conflict, you won’t find it here. In Gold Ring, people are happy, quests are personal, accountability is individual. This is a child’s world, an ideal world. The Bedouin is master of his world, there are no hardships or want. War has no place here. We don’t learn much about Sultan’s mother. Is the death of her husband a hardship? Is she being pressured by family members or money issues? We don’t know, only that to Sultan, she seems a happy person and a good mother. (I’m inclined to believe this since, in shounen manga, having only one parent is par for the course, but that parent is always positive and supportive – even when the child is unaware of this.) Sultan has several stand-ins acting as positive male role models for his late father, Suroor, the Bedouin, Hassan, the Gold Ring staffer and his Uncle, all of whom encourage him in his dreams.
So, while you will find an idealistic portrayal of life, what you will also find here is a tremendous example of the best qualities of a shounen manga translated with skill and love into a likable kids’ book, whether that child lives in Middle America or the UAE.
When I was first given the Arabic edition, I was asked whether I thought it would sell in America. Clearly, there are some people who will not like it on principle. Common phrases, such as Inshallah, are left whole in the text, even in the English translation. It’s sadly not hard to imagine that causing some sort of pointless kerfuffle during a reelection year for a mayor or freeholder of somewhere. But, as a story told for children, about a child and his animal best friend, with the shounen manga sensibility first and foremost, I said then, and still feel now, that it has a solid chance here in the US market. The translation is good, there’s no sense of awkwardness in the sentences. There is a short glossary of falconry terms in the back and in-margin translations of common Arabic phrases. If there was a single thing to complain about, it would be the font used. The Arabic fonts were more natural – and more artistic – where the English font is blocky and quite dull, with no emphasis or artistic flourishes.
For typically shounen-manga style idealism, and a genuine and approachable look at manga through UAE eyes, I recommend Gold Ring. After all, who wouldn’t love a story about a Boy and his Falcon?
Today is my last monthly column for Hooded Utilitarian. When I came on here just over a year ago, I really wasn’t sure if I’d last three months. HU writers are smart, critical thinkers, with a vast knowledge base in topics I know nothing at all about. HU readers are contentious, critical and unrelenting. I thought I’d give it a try and see how long I lasted. ^_^ I lasted way longer than I expected.
A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of young artists at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art. It was spectacular evening, and I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with several of the talented young people I met there. A few years later, at the annual MoCCA event, I ran into one of those young artists, Marguerite Dabaie. She handed me a self-published comic about transvestites during the Weimar Republic. I was instantly hooked by her personal style of story-telling that communicated emotion, without beating you with it.
