Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #52: Tokyo Roommates

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, manga

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #52 by Drew Barth

Tokyo Roommates

The slice-of-life genre has become a staple of manga for decades now. Small stories on the incongruities and oddities of everyday living coupled with a hint of comedic absurdity has turned a genre that focuses on quieter moments into one of the most popular genres being published today. Take Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Menas a staple of the genre. Begun in 2008 and available for the first time in English just this past December, Saint Young Men focuses on two friends leaving their homes to take a gap year in Tokyo. They celebrate Christmas, they struggle to pay rent, they visit amusement parks, and typically live an ordinary life in a small apartment together. And those two friends are Buddha and Jesus Christ.

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It isn’t simply the divine cast that has made Saint Young Men such a popular series among fans, but rather the simple humanity of the series as well as Nakamura’s picturesque approach to storytelling and comedy. Many of the stories in this first volume deal with the mundane: having enough rent money after an extravagant purchase, beginning a new hobby, or visiting the local community swimming pool. Nakamura is the kind of artist that is able to dive deep into those simple moments and extract something essentially human about Buddha and Jesus having a small argument over how much money they’ve been spending. More than anything, these are two friends living together—they have their inconsiderate moments and they are able to work through their issues together as well.

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Much of the comedy in the series as well stems from the clashing of these friend’s two personalities. Jesus is the impulsive one who will spend most of their money at the end of the month with rent coming due, while Buddha is much more level-headed, but still has his own moments of indignation. As the series progresses, a rapport between Jesus and Buddha develops and we see aspects of their personalities beginning to influence the other. Nakamura continually strikes a wonderful balance in the characters here: they maintain themselves as serialized comedic characters—never lapsing into easy tropes—but still showing aspects of growth throughout. Maintaining these characters over the years has been one of the main reasons why Saint Young Men has persisted as a favorite across the internet despite its limited availability.

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Saint Young Men now joins a pantheon of manga that, after over a decade of publication, is finally available for western readers to read legally. Coupled with the recent translations of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, many fan favorite series are finally seeing official releases from publishers like Viz Media and Kodansha USA and this can only be a good thing as the decade continues. There are still dozens of series that have yet to receive official, published releases, but hopefully Saint Young Men is only the beginning to more fantastic manga into eager reader’s hands.

Get excited. Pick up something fun.

drew-barth-mbfi

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #34: A Shorter Piece

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, Graphic Novels, manga

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #34 by Drew Barth

A Shorter Piece

Many of the works discussed in this blog over the past months have been long-running series or graphic novels. And all of those have been great. There’s an expansiveness to many of those works. In a way, many of these series act like literary novels in this regard. But as a result, few comics emphasize shorter stories. Not just series of less than ten issues, but stories that aren’t even a full issue. This focus on shorter pieces is something that is seen much more often in many manga as the result of a great number of manga magazines publishing weekly. Because of this, there’s almost always overlooked collections of short manga.

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One criminally overlooked title is Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. Only recently released through Fantagraphics Books (although, alas, now out of print again), this collection maintains a continual sense of compassion and wonder throughout. Hagio herself as a creator is known for her work that would become foundational for shojo as a manga genre both in its content and style. To read through “The Willow Tree” or “Iguana Girl” is to reach deep into shojo manga’s DNA. But what these stories here do as well is show off just how effective of a short story author Hagio has been. Her characters feel inherently human from panel one, and we can see that defined arc of who they can become by the end of the piece, most notable in “Iguana Girl,” which pulls from legends of an iguana falling in love and asking a sorcerer to turn her into a woman. The story follows that woman’s daughter and the struggles of believing herself to be an iguana from birth.

Other pieces like “The Willow Tree” or “Girl on Porch with Puppy” showcase an astute understanding of how an ending of a short piece that maintains an innocence can be fraught with tragedy. Hagio creates these short pieces with an almost effortless perfection in line and panel while maintaining pitch- perfect stories.

On the other end of the content spectrum is the creator Junji Ito. Legendary for many of his longer series likeGyo,Uzumaki, and Tomei, many of those works typically include a variety of his shorter stories as well, most notably the legendary “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

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Most recently, however, Ito adapted Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to much acclaim and included in that volume a larger variety of his short stories as well. Ito is known as a contemporary master of horror. From “Amigara Fault” to “The Neck Specter,” Ito’s short pieces deal heavily with the surreal and horrific that exists around us. With simple things like holes in a mountain and a house’s support beam or more bizarre premises like finding a man’s head with a six foot long neck, there’s a continual escalation of horror throughout. The art itself offers gruesome levels of detail incorporated combined with the uncanny. A fish with legs may not be the scariest idea, but with the right kind of shading and shadows, it’s up there.

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And then we have a work like Ken Niimura’s Henshin, a collection of short stories centered on the idea of change. What makes this collection unique is that it is a short story collection published by Image, a publisher known mostly for its monthly series. But that only speaks for the quality of the work itself. Much of the work is centered around the daily minutia of life in contemporary Japan, but typically with a small twist. A reunion between niece and uncle turns into an interview for becoming a hitman; a family enjoys a picnic when an old man asks them about suicide; a man saves the world with farts. And every single story is punctuated by this Niimura’s art that is deceptively simple in its line work but complemented by panel composition that stands up with some of the best manga of the twenty-first century. But it is Niimura’s commitment to the shorter form that lets these stories shine as delightful morsels of manga that is tough to find in many longer works.

There are avenues for shorter pieces of graphic narratives in America—many literary magazines now include short graphic works, and there are still a couple comic compilation books released seasonally, even Best American Non-Required Reading has a couple graphic narratives annually. But overall, many of those are few and far between. Western comic culture prioritizes the monthly issues or the graphic novel every couple years, not the persistence of the weekly manga magazines. One of the only consistent places to find shorter comic stories in the west is typically through the different annual series for superhero comics, but then those are limited to a specific cast of characters and worlds.

Why don’t western comics really have those avenues for shorter pieces? Series like Islandused to showcase new talent and shorter pieces, but that ended up canceled after fifteen issues. And there are still magazines like 2000 AD and Heavy Metal, but their visibility in mainstream comics isn’t as prevalent as it had been in the previous decades. To maintain a more healthy comics scene, we need these outlets for small shots of creativity—for pieces that aren’t going to be massive series or graphic novels, but short pieces that allow readers to discover something new in the medium.

Get excited. Read something short.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics are Trying to Break Your Heart #18: Got a Feeling So Complicated

08 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, manga

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #18 by Drew Barth

Got a Feeling So Complicated

Last week, I mentioned some issues inherent in many Shonen series—from the ways in which the continuous powering up of characters only leads to ridiculous escalations to the weekly (rather than monthly) production schedule that makes constant character growth difficult. I also mused on whether or not there was a long-running Shonen series that found an interesting solution to these Shonen problems.

Let’s talk about Jojo.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure began in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1987 and centers around not the first protagonist we see, Johnathan Joestar, but rather the entire Joestar family bloodline. Creator Hirohiko Araki could focus on more characters, and give each member of the family his or her own arc that begins and ends without having to resort to exponentially more powerful villains to defeat every couple months as the main dramatic engine. Because of this, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventureis divided into— currently—eight different parts that focus on eight separate members of the Joestar family throughout history (and dimensions).

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Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is one of those manga series that typified what a Shonen series is and what it could do with the genre. There are fights throughout the series—Shonen is still an action oriented genre—but through Araki’s almost boundless creativity, there is always something fresh to each conflict.

Take for example Part 1: Phantom Blood, which begins with the rivalry between Johnathan Joestar and his adopted brother, Dio Brando, in 1880. And to be clear and upfront about everything, Dio’s an asshole. He poisoned his own father, attempted to poison his adopted father, and burned Johnathan’s dog. If anyone you know talks about their admiration for Dio, be wary. And because Dio is an asshole, he becomes a vampire. Araki, however, treats vampires very differently in Jojo. Vampires don’t bite; they just shove their fingers into a person’s neck and suck out the blood like that. They also get eye lasers. “Bizarre” is in the title for a reason.

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The series continues with Joseph Joestar in the 1930s in Part 2: Battle Tendency while he fights ancient Aztec vampires named Cars, Wham, and AC/DC due to Araki’s love for western music.

Part 3: Stardust Crusadersfocuses on Jotaro Kujo going across the world to punch Dio (again) in his undead face.

Joseph Joestar’s illegitimate son, Josuke Higashikata, is the protagonist of Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakableand must stop a serial killer who looks suspiciously like David Bowie.

Giorno Giovanna (“gio gio” sounds like Jojo when spoken with an Italian accent) aims to take down the leader of the Italian mafia to keep kids from taking drugs in Part 5: Vento Auero.

Part 6: Stone Ocean follows Jolyne Cujoh as she attempts to stop a Dio (DIO!) obsessed priest from resetting the universe.

Johnny Joestar must collect pieces of Jesus scattered across America in a coast-to-coast horse race to keep the president from becoming too powerful in Part 7: Steel Ball Run (I’m not kidding).

And Part 8: JoJolionis a special case since that part is still being written and no one really has an idea what it’s about yet.

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Considering Jojo has been ongoing for over thirty years, there is quite a lot of history in the series. Luckily, many of the parts have been animated to ease a new reader into Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. If you would like to read a good majority of the series, though, then that is a completely different issue. As newer series were being bought by US publishers and brought into bookstores here, Jojo was strangely left out for the vast majority of its lifetime. Only three parts of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure are available in English in the US legally: Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency, and Stardust Crusaders.

For decades the only way to read Diamond is Unbreakable or Vento Auero was through fans buying Japanese copies, scanning them onto their computers, translating every single bit of dialogue and action, and putting them online, let’s sat extra-legally, for free. Many fans desperately wanted to read the rest of Jojo, but no US publisher wanted to publish anything past Stardust Crusaders.

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That lack of access is only beginning to change now. This Tuesday marked the official English release of Diamond is Unbreakable on the part’s twenty-seventh anniversary.

For me, this is massive, since this is my absolute favorite part of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure due to the utter bizarreness of it even compared to the rest of the series. Do you want an antagonist who looks like David Bowie? We got that. Do you want rats with dart guns that melt things into gooey flesh piles? We got that. Do you want a break from the drama so the main characters can enjoy a nice meal at an Italian restaurant? That’s my favorite chapter. Do you want an alien? Because we got an alien.

What makes Diamond is Unbreakable so unique within Jojo and within Shonen in general is how much the series wants to do. Araki shows us action throughout, but he also gives us these quiet moments of being delinquents in school or visiting a local author to cheat them out of money. The characters are allowed to breathe and react and just do small things that don’t have any bearing on the overarching plot.

And that’s great. Because sometimes the reader just wants to take a breath. Sometimes the reader just wants to have fun. So finally, after twenty-seven years, I can show you how much fun Diamond is Unbreakablecan be and how great it is to hold this story in your hand for the first time.

Get excited. The Excitement is Unbreakable.

drew barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #17: The Shonen Problem

01 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Anime, Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, manga

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #17 by Drew Barth

The Shonen Problem

Everyone loves a good Shonen series. They’re fast-paced, filled to bursting with action, typically include an expansive cast of characters for anyone to grow attached to, and are fairly fun with that right balance of drama to keep a reader interested. In many ways, Shonen manga and anime are quite similar to monthly superhero comics. And while tastes and styles are different, audiences come to each genre for the same thing: story, characters, and action.

Shonen Jump began as a weekly magazine in Japan roughly fifty years ago and has gone on to become iconic in its status as both the best-selling manga magazine as well as the starting place for many of the most well-known manga in the world. Nearly every major manga series to become popular in the states originated in Shonen Jump—One Piece, Dragon Ball, Naruto, Fist of the North Star, etc.

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The most popular, beloved series to come out of Shonen Jump is Dragon Ball. Created by Akira Toriyama in 1984, Dragon Ball is to Shonen what Batman is to superhero comics. Dragon Ball as a series has been ubiquitous in popular culture from recent fighting games to Patti Smith (thatPatti Smith) sitting down and enjoying the latest Dragon Ball film. Or perhaps you would prefer this fine fashion from Forever 21? But as a result of Dragon Ball’s ubiquity and popularity, its flaws have also influenced many other popular Shonen series as well.

If you have read Dragon Ball Z or watched the anime when they were younger, then you know the Shonen formula: There’s a bad guy. How do we handle the bad guy? We hit him real hard. That didn’t work. We hit him even harder. That sort of worked, but now the bad guy is also hitting harder. We almost lose and the bad guy is calling us pathetic. Now we’re going to scream and think about our friends/family until we can hit the bad guy SO MUCH HARDERand then we win. We celebrate.

But now there’s another bad guy who hits hard enough to blow up a planet. Guess we got to train/scream/charge up/etc. until we can also hit the new bad guy even harder.

From Dragon Ball Z’s Saiyan Saga onward, that’s more or less how stories unfold. Of course there were more nice character moments, some smaller villains, a bit of comedy, and an android marriage, but the beats perpetually returned to that same cycle.

Many other series ended up falling into this pattern as well. Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach were, and still are, among the other most popular series released by Shonen Jumpbut they still fall into these simplified drama trappings.

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As long as the main characters can power up through training or sheer force of will, they will always win in the end. Whether it be in the form of a character going Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan, utilizing the final techniques of the Sage Art, opening their final Bankai, or going into Gear Four, there’s always another level for all of these main characters to power up to defeat the nextbad guy in a long line of bad guys.

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When many of these series have hundreds of chapters and have been going on for over twenty years in some cases, the constant powering up and fights become repetitiously, repeatedly, redundantly tiresome.

However, this narrative weakness reminds me of a broader problem with Shonen and other manga genres: many manga chapters are published in various weekly magazines, be it Shonen Jump, Big Comic, etc., and many series chapters are anywhere from ten to eighteen pages. That is sixty to a hundred panels of penciled, inked, finished, and lettered manga in a single week, not including the labor for the mangaka to actually write the story and dialogue. The crunch time for a manga chapter sounds terrible, and with only the mangaka and maybe a couple assistants if they can afford them, I can understand why so many of the most popular Shonen series fall into the above tropes.

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At the same time, the tropes are partly why people love Shonen. Reading through chapter #645 of Naruto likely has the same effect as reading Detective Comics #1002. For readers, there is a familiarity with the characters, the setting, and the action that is likely comforting. Shonen manga provides a slightly different use of character since a series is typically a single creative mind working toward an end goal with all the character growth and development that comes with the years of a series being published. But, like with Superhero comics, there is that tendency to fall into the above tropes since there is only so far a creator can take the one or two characters a series is focused on. It makes me wonder: are there are any Shonen series that are roughly thirty years old that don’t have the typical Shonen issues?

Get excited. Next week is a Bizarre Adventure.

drew barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Gutter Space #1: Why Focus on Comics-That-Aren’t-Superhero-Comics?

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Art, Comic Books, Gutter Space, manga

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Tags

bandes dessinés, comic books, Douglas Wolk, gag strips, graphic narrative, gutter space, horace, independent comics, indie comics, Justin R. Hall, leslie salas, propaganda, Reading Comics, rene magritte, Scott McCloud, Sequential art, Simonides of Ceos, the new yorker, The Treachery of Images, Tijuana Bibles, Understanding Comics, visual literacy, webcomics

Gutter Space #1 by Leslie Salas

Why Focus on Comics-That-Aren’t-Superhero-Comics?

Comics as a medium has a richer and more involved history than many people recognize or remember. Comics analyst Douglas Wolk explains in Reading Comics “the argument about the between relationship between painting and poetry, the generic classical terms for image-making and word-assembling, has been going on for a long time. The earliest people to try and figure it out concluded that painting and poetry were basically different forms of the same thing.”

Simonides of Ceos’ formulation poema pictura loquens, picture poema silens aptly illustrates the point that “poetry is a verbal picture; painting is a silent poetry.” (Horace later reduced this to ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry.”) This is mostly true in the broad sense that both are ways of representing perception: comics functions as a successful marriage of the visual and lingual.

The medium of comics also goes by many names such as graphic narrative and visual storytelling. In light of this muddled nomenclature, let me clarify that by saying “comics,” which seems to be the most common term, I specifically refer to “sequential art,” as defined by cartoonist Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Comics started their ascension into literature around World War II in the form of propaganda ads: some sort of illustration with a caption below it. Think of the captioned cartoons in The New Yorker or René Magritte’s famous painting, The Treachery of Images, with the painting of a pipe and the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”—“This is not a pipe.”

From there, the art form evolved into gag strips, like those you would see in the newspaper. The strips took a pornographic turn with Tijuana Bibles to help soldiers overseas needing entertainment (or as psy-ops propaganda leaflets to convince reduce soldier’s morale),

and even mainstream comics still had a political agenda (see the cover for Captain America #1, where Captain America is punching Hitler in the face).

The political content of American comics caused them to be cut off from Europe and Asia (Axis vs. Allied Powers). As a result, two other comic traditions, Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinés, evolved independently. It is only now, several decades after the end of WWII, that all three styles of comics flourish worldwide.

Comics critic Justin R. Hall notes that “comics meets [people’s] sensibilities on a cognitive level.” We live in a visually saturated world, so many people of all ages are naturally drawn to the combination of words and pictures. Reading comics, however, requires a different type of literacy that incorporates not only words, but visuals such as movement between panels, line of sight, and gutter closure.

By reviewing independent comics and webcomics that aren’t superhero comics, my goal is to draw attention to some of the interesting and effective techniques used by cartoonists all over the world. This can help develop visual literacy, identify various narrative structures, provide a dynamic view of cultures, and prompt interdisciplinary study. Plus—it’s interesting and fun!

And if you’re sad that I’m excluding superhero comics, check out Sean Ironman’s column, Heroes Never Rust. He’s got you covered.

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Leslie Salas writes fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and comics. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute. In addition to being an Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Leslie also serves as an assistant editor for The Florida Review, a graphic nonfiction editorial assistant for Sweet: A Literary Confection, and a regular contributing artist for SmokeLong Quarterly.