Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #118 by Drew Barth

Swamps & Things

Swamps are, for the most part, points of transformation. There is that disgust of the slime that permeates the water and trees. Nothing comes out of a swamp the same as when it came in. Just look at Swamp Thing. Or “The Swamp” episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Or the short story collection The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge. While its titular story is relatively short, this idea of transformation persists throughout the eleven stories of The Swamp as readers can go in with an expectation of 60s manga and leave with a completely different perception at the end.

All of the manga in Tsuge’s collection center on rather small acts: a trip to the hot springs, putting sake in a watermelon, finding a strange scroll, going hunting, etc. But in a testament to Tsuge’s skill as a mangaka, each of these relatively small moments become something tremendous. A trip to the hot springs becomes a run-in with Miyamoto Mushashi (until it isn’t); the watermelon sake disappears from history; a scroll becomes a map to strange kinds of fortune; clipping the wings of a swan on a hunting trip leads a hunter to a small home in a swamp. Over and over again these short works levy our own expectations against us—we want to hear about the success two friends have in creating watermelon sake or how a map leads to untold riches for a down on his luck ronin. But Tsuge continually twists his stories away from what we would want, but still finds some kind of happiness in the end.

What’s most significant about this collection of short manga is the fact that this is the first time we’ve had Tsuge’s works available in English. The fact that a creator as significant as Tsuge, credited as one of the chief figures in the development of gekiga—a style of dramatic comics centered on more adult themes—has yet to be officially published in English is staggering. It only cements how amazing it is to have a collection of his work in hand after all this time as many of these stories were first published in the mid-60s. Much like a creator like Osamu Tezuka, Tsuge’s work was foundational for what manga could become with its more adult oriented themes—much like America’s own development of underground comix around the same time. Having Tsuge’s work available now helps us to draw that historical link between where manga had started to what it would eventually become.

With publishers like Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics translating and publishing many of these essential comics from around the world, we’re finally able to get a more complete view of comics throughout the modern era. Comic’s history doesn’t begin and end with a handful of creators and publishers in America, France, and Japan—it is much broader than we could have imagined. And as we’re filling in these gaps with works from Yoshiharu Tsuge, I can only hope that we can really transform what we know about comics globally.

Get excited. Get more from your comics.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

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 #82 by Drew Barth

Energized and Anthologized

A good anthology is hard to find sometimes. Luckily, Peow released the first volume of their Kickstarter-funded anthology series, Ex.Mag, this past month. Their original campaign promised three volumes centering on three sub-genres: cyberpunk, paranormal romance, and dark fantasy. We’ll be seeing the second and third volumes later in the year, but for now, we’re focusing on their first cyberpunk offering The first volume of Ex.Mag, Full Metal Dreamland, is also a look into how Peow can create one of the best anthologies of the year with only a theme and some of the strongest creators working right now.

What’s actually in this thing? For the most part, almost anything you could want from a comic anthology centered in cyberpunk. Sophia Foster-Dimino brings us a story on the alienation of augmented reality-assisted online dating and the ways in which sculpting a living space is more important than any other way we present ourselves to the world in “On Show Now.” A fierce and silent kinetic energy runs through “Personal Companion” as Freddy Carrasco illustrates a cyborg being torn to pieces as it sprints toward a target. “Polygon Bird” by Giannis Milonogiannis shows us two AI that only want their program signature to continue in the freest form they know—a human baby. And video game character creation takes on a deeper existential meaning in Kelly K’s “Assembled by You.” This is a cross-section of everything good happening in comics right now as every creator has an interpretation of “cyberpunk” and what that can constitute. And that’s not even half the book.

Many of these stories deal with identity and how we express ourselves within the confines of technology. We’re treated to brain-linking, AIs, smartphones as tiny beings, cyborgs, an endless stream of wires, and that sense of dystopia that comes with all of the above. And these stories do what all good cyberpunk does: critiques the current age we live in through a lens of the perceived future. What we have here are ten different lenses—from short stories to generational narratives to work that pushes up against the idea of what can be comics—with each one showing us some splinter of a future. These creator’s lenses take that long look at what we have in our world right now and contort it into something simultaneously familiar and alien. Even if surroundings change, even if technology becomes incomprehensible to us now, there is still the core of a human character that maintains throughout.

As this is an anthology that looks into the future, I can’t help but feel optimistic about the work that will be coming from Peow’s anthologies soon. A strong anthology can only mean more great things for comics as a whole. While some of these artists have been long-established—I’ve even written about Milonogiannis multiple times now—a good anthology shows what is coming next. How many of these creators will show us work that reorients the way we think about the medium? The answer is always more than you think.

Get excited. Get anthologized.

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 #58 by Drew Barth

Let’s Not Forget Old City Blues

Fantastic new graphic novels and comics come out every week—so much coming out that some things end up not being as revered as they should have been. There are graphic novels and comic series still sitting on my shelf that I come back to every few months to remember how good they still are after all these years. One such graphic novel is the first volume of Old City Blues by Giannis Milonogiannis, released in 2011.

From the outset, Old City Blues wears its influences on its sleeve—Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell most notably. Beginning in the sprawling metropolis of New Athens in 2048, cyborgs are being murdered at random. Solano, a special police division detective, heads up the investigation. Milonogiannis spirals the story into the corporate intrigue, piloted mecha, and the general dystopia of the world he has created. And as familiar as some of these themessound, his direct storytelling and wonderfully kinetic pen and ink art renders Neo Athens bas more than the sum of its influences.

The example images included in this article are only from the first volume released in 2011 in a larger format hardback. The second volume, released in 2013, was released in a paperback volume closer to the size of a traditional manga. The third volume is still ongoing, but not in print—Milonogiannis has instead moved everything online. From the Old City Blues website, the entire series can be read: volumes one, two, and the still in-progress three.

As Old City Blues closes in on a decade since its initial release, it is still one of the most relevant comics coming out. From its environmentally dystopian setting to its musings on robotics and personhood to the ways in which the series has adapted to different release formats, Milonogiannis has created a series that will last well into the rest of the century. If there is a series worth remembering, it’s Old City Blues.

Get excited. The future is coming.

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 #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.

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.

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.

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 (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.