Barbara

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Barbara (DMP, 2012).


A few years ago, my friend Helen McCarthy was giving a presentation, and told an audience that we should all urge Vertical Publishing to put together an American reprint of Osamu Tezuka's weird, surreal and violent 1972 serial Barbara. Since Helen knows what she's talking about, I turned right around to a fellow from Vertical and asked him to reprint Barbara. And Ambassador Magma; that, too.

Vertical is one of my favorite publishing houses in the world, but while all of their many Tezuka reprints have brought them lots of attention and love, they probably have not planned on translating and repackaging every single thing that Tezuka wrote and drew over his fifty-year career. Nevertheless, I made sure to mention Barbara to them, and Ambassador Magma, whenever the opportunity presented itself.

A couple of years went by, during which Vertical did not do anything that I kept pestering them to, but licensing other Tezuka comics instead. Meanwhile, another company, good people with the horrible name "Digital Manga Publishing," used Kickstarter to fund a second printing of their release of another Tezuka serial, Swallowing the Earth. The experiment was so successful that they tried crowdsourcing the funds for a small run of Barbara. Well, that got my attention.

I picked up their release of Barbara from a dealer at Anime Weekend Atlanta a couple of months ago. It's a nicely-sized book, 440 pages along with a detailed introductory essay by Frederick Schodt, who's been writing about Japanese comics and cartoons for a good few decades, and who can put this very odd and very striking serial into perspective. It's one of many from the early seventies where Tezuka was, on the one hand, planning and preparing some comics and the attendant cartoon adaptations and merchandising for a mass audience, and other stories in smaller circulation anthology magazines that targeted adult readers.

So this is the story of a novelist named Yousuke Mikura who is slowly losing his mind, questioning the reality around him, so obsessed with questions about the value of the art that he's creating and that all of the craftsmen, painters, and writers who preceded him had designed that he is beginning to suffer from very dangerous hallucinations. He stumbles across this vulgar, alcoholic hippie bum named Barbara in a subway station and invites her home. Barbara seems, at times, to be there to defend Mikura from his delusions, but, at other times, to bring more chaos and turmoil into his life. Some days, she is inspiring him like a muse, and other days, she is destroying his life like a supernatural force.

It's very much a story for adults, but also very much a story of its time. The level of domestic violence in this book is - even accepting that Mikura and Barbara are out of control drunks who have big issues with reality - completely shocking. The nudity is also a real surprise. There were pretty strict limits in Japan at the time about what an artist could draw in a commercial publication, and Tezuka used angles and perspective to make certain scenes appear more explicit than they actually are. The artwork is stunning throughout, with very curious choices in character design. Mikura doesn't look like a standard Tezuka leading man, but more like a lump of granite with sunglasses, and Barbara, stumpy and stumbling, with eyes that see everything, is hardly a heroine type.

The story goes in completely wild directions, but little of it can be trusted. We seem to get an explanation for Barbara's otherworldly influence on the proceedings, but it's not from a very reliable source. As fortune tellers and witches and even one of Tezuka's fellow comic artists offer the protagonists their take on what's going on, the answers are still murky. It's a mean, strange ride with an unforgettable climax.

I mentioned the curious nature of the book's American publication above because it has meant that, apart from sparking a brief controversy between a few Big Name Fans about the morality in publishers taking pre-orders through Kickstarter, this book received a very small print run and is slightly harder to find than would be ideal. Some Amazon sellers are offering it through that service, although Amazon itself has already sold out of their stock. Independent stores might also have difficulty sourcing it. Digital Manga Publishing has proceeded with this business model, and I understand that they plan a spring release for Unico and a summer release for Triton, two other Tezuka serials. For what it's worth, I genuinely don't care where the upfront money comes from if it means more Tezuka in print in English. I really, really don't.

So. About Ambassador Magma, people...

Princess Knight vol. 1

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Princess Knight volume one (Vertical, 2011).


I haven't had the opportunity to pick up any new domestic releases from the great Osamu Tezuka for quite some time, but a really wonderful reader sent me an Amazon gift card, and I figured the least I could do was pick up something from my wish list that I wanted to read and share with y'all.

Princess Knight, a comic that originally ran over three years in the mid-1950s, surprised me somewhat. I knew that it was a lighthearted adventure series for girls - Japanese publishers categorize it and like-minded comics as "shōjo," although the insistence among American fans of Japanese comics to use the same terminology remains baffling to me - but I had no idea just how whimsically it begins, and how dark and mean it becomes. I was expecting a medieval fantasy, but not really a fairy tale. Frankly, it's probably not possible to read it and not find it charming.

Tezuka's habit was to rewrite and recreate his comics after their original publication, and I understand that Vertical's release of Princess Knight, across two volumes, comes from a 1963-66 version for Nakayoshi magazine. It's the story of Sapphire, the only heir to the throne of Silverland, who must masquerade as a boy to inherit. Complicating matters is that she was born with both a "boy heart" and a "girl heart." Her boy heart gives her the talent to master swordfighting. When her girl heart unexpectedly dominates her, usually as a result of evil, magical intervention, she swoons and goes "ohhhhhh" and has to drop her sword. Not, perhaps, a comic for readers who study contemporary gender politics with great intensity.

It begins as light as gossamer and half as deep, but Princess Knight is a pleasant diversion with real surprises. It's dated, certainly, but the fairy tale mice and angels don't detract from the downbeat avenues that the plot takes. When Sapphire and her mother are imprisoned - Sapphire's deception is exposed quite early on thanks to villains getting the queen drunk, although her dual life continues by posing as two different people - it really does look bleak. The artwork is consistently amazing and, honestly, I enjoyed this even more than I thought I might. Recommended for all ages.

The Book of Human Insects

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Book of Human Insects (Vertical, 2011).



The household budget crunch of 2011 meant that I had to curtail my purchases of Vertical's growing library of Osamu Tezuka comics, but that publisher sent a representative to Anime Weekend Atlanta, and I'd have been remiss in leaving without a copy of their most recent release at the time: a hardcover collection of the quite obscure Book of Human Insects. Originally serialized in 1970-71 in the pages of Play, this story didn't even merit a mention in Helen McCarthy's delightful The Art of Osamu Tezuka, which helps shine a light on how badly a complete, extensive and annotated English language resource and bibliography is needed.

So I had the pleasure of reading this story without any background whatever, not knowing what to expect. Sadly, I can't provide even one of my half-baked reviews without giving you good readers at least a hint of what you might find in this volume. The story begins with a young writer, Toshiko Tomura, enjoying the accolades and awards for her debut novel, The Book of Human Insects, following very short and very successful careers as a designer and an actress, leaving behind a wake of very bitter and angry men toasting her celebrity from the depths of their obscurity or ruin. But the suicide of another young, hopeful writer suggests that there might be more to Tomura than anyone suspects, one of bold, superhuman plagiarism and predatory, bizarre sexuality, including a deeply strange relationship with a statue...

Some reviewers have compared this to Tezuka's 1968 serial Swallowing the Earth, which is also available in English through the publisher DMP. There are certainly some similarities. Both serials are set in the present day and are political-minded thrillers with only elements of fantasy grounding their character-driven plots. Tezuka, throughout most of the 1960s, had masterminded several family-friendly, plot-driven series with television or film adaptations in mind, and one reason that most of his 1970s work is comparatively obscure to American readers is that he made a deliberate effort to engage with older audiences through work that is, on the one hand more challenging and more adult, but also much shorter and never intended to provide the fodder for TV cartoon series and merchandising. American audiences, who came to know Tezuka via his TV cartoon series and merchandising, were unfamiliar with works like Swallowing, and the earlier Vertical releases Apollo's Song and MW until very recently.

The investigation into Tomura's past, and focus about what she will do next, takes a remarkable detour in the third chapter, when she finds herself involved in a world of high-finance boardroom intrigue. Shortly after her new position, one of the men from her past resurfaces and things take a really weird turn. Her actions don't leave the character in any way sympathetic, but it remains a tight and fascinating read because her game is so astonishing. My questions about how she's able to pull off her plotting are not really answered as fully as I thought Tezuka was going for, but they don't really need to be, either. It's not that sort of story.

The artwork is, as ever, utterly amazing, with one very curious exception. Tezuka and his studio used his distinctive character styles to create a realistic, solid world. There are no artistic shortcuts or cheats, and the places in his stories look real, and lived-in, and breathe like no other environment in comics. Rugs, pillows, jail cells, tower blocks, everything feels solid, with an attention to detail that nobody else in the medium ever quite matched. The characters stay on-model, without the frequent trope in Japanese comics of changing shape or form to indicate high emotion. But then Tomura disrobes - the script finds reason for her to on several occasions - and she turns into the least erotic being in comics. She is wildly off-model, all graceless, soaring curves, with hips like a horse and a torso six feet long. I thought this a very neat touch, Tezuka drawing attention to the character's nudity by making her, naked, every bit as inhuman and alien as her actions. I never claimed that this was a beautiful or life-affirming story; there's far too great a body count for that.

I wish that I was better able, financially, to support Vertical's commitment to releasing Tezuka in English. I know that there's more coming; the first of two volumes of his popular 1960s Princess Knight is out now, and the early '80s Adolf is coming in two volumes later this year. Still no news about the much-requested Ambassador Magma, Barbara or Vampire, but maybe if all you good readers go order The Book of Human Insects, they'll reward us with some good news for 2013. How about it, guys? This book is recommended for older readers.

Black Jack Volume 12

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Black Jack Volume 12 (Vertical, 2010).



I'll have to confess that either through a combination of the rapid release schedule or the identikit design of the books, the latest volume of Vertical's Black Jack library completely missed my attention. One hand evidently wasn't watching what the other was doing at Bizarro Wuxtry, the shop in Athens where I have a regular order for the series, and volume twelve didn't make it into my bag a few months. So it sat on the shelf until the next visit, when Devlin, the manager, asked whether I had it. Honestly, I was not sure. It was only because I remembered that I had the notion to do a little writeup here of every fourth volume in the series that I figured that I must have missed it. Who would have figured that my little conceit would make a difference?

Even paging through the first installment reprinted inside didn't help much; the patchy, mostly subplot-free nature of the episodes don't always make them extremely memorable for me. So it is that, twelve books in (of a projected seventeen), the small cracks in one of Osamu Tezuka's best-known series start to show. With so few recurring characters and only occasional hints of subplots, the art becomes the main thing that keeps me coming back to the comic.

Case in point, I finished this most recent volume a week ago, and this morning tried to remember which fourteen episodes appear in it. I failed. I can name fourteen Black Jack episodes easily, and when one of them features one of the most unusual examples of Tezuka's "star system" of rotating faces and characters from previous comics into his other series and lets Jungle Emperor Leo appear as a different lion cub, it's pretty simple to remember that one. It's in book twelve, and so is an interesting look back at the hero's youth and a classmate who will not stop laughing. Otherwise, this book is really more of the same. I certainly recommend that anybody who enjoys comics pick up a couple of Black Jack books, but twelve volumes in, I'm starting to wish that Vertical would release these a little more slowly and make them more special, and fill in the gaps in their schedule with some other Tezuka comics, like Princess Knight or Ambassador Magma.

Sorry to not sound as enthusiastic as I should - these are, despite my malaise, very good comics by one of the medium's masters - but if I understand correctly, with volume 12, we're fast approaching the point where Tezuka transitioned the series away from a regular, twice-monthly episode and only released a handful of installments a year. Black Jack is wonderful, and an occasionally sinful little treat, but even its creator seemed ready to move on to something new. Recommended with reservations.

Pluto Volume 8

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Pluto Volume 8 (Viz, 2010)



Pluto has finally ended, and I'm sorry to see it go. This was a genuinely terrific adventure, one which never outlasted its welcome or felt overlong. Naoki Urusawa can take a bow; this was among the best comics of the last decade.

If you were among those oddballs who failed to jump on board while it was ongoing, you might have missed what we were raving about. I described it last year as a "simply expert blend of detective fiction, classicist science fiction and big robots knocking the bejezus out of each other." It's actually a revisionist expansion of a celebrated Astro Boy adventure by Osamu Tezuka, in which some unknown force has been eliminating both the greatest and most powerful robots on the planet along with robot-friendly scientists. Only another robot could destroy the heroic droids who previously brought an end to a worldwide war, but robots are programmed never to harm humans, so the detective Gesicht has a dangerous problem on his hands, one that threatens to plunge the world into darkness.

If Pluto has a failing at all, it's that book six could have been the conclusion and I would have been satisfied. Sure, it would have meant one heck of a bleak ending, and one quite opposed to the always optimistic Tezuka's worldview, but Urusawa created a climax there which knocked me for a loop. Honestly, the real ending, while still quite satisfying, just doesn't have the emotional resonance of the earlier moment. There's an unexpected epilogue with a hell of a payoff, too. If you enjoy mysteries, comics or old-school SF, there's a lot in Pluto to surprise you. Strongly recommended.

Black Jack volume 8

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Black Jack volume 8 (Vertical, 2009)



They're coming thick and fast now, aren't they? It really does seem like just a few months ago that I was idly hoping, in the pages of Reprint This!, to one day see Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack collected in English, and here we are almost halfway through the series. Vertical's eighth volume (of a planned seventeen) was released a couple of months ago. The ninth is said to be out there already, but Diamond does not appear to have shipped it to comic stores yet. Then again, well, it is Diamond. It's wrong to expect miracles.

By this point, there is probably no particular reason to include regular reviews of Black Jack here at the Bookshelf beyond the fact that it's my darn blog and I'll write about what I want to. We're almost two years into the run; you've either bought in to one of comics' best treasures, a wonderfully clever mix of inventive stories and eye-poppingly good art, or you're totally out of the loop. But just in case you're still on the fence or haven't quite got around to trying out Black Jack, the series is told with minimal continuity in a collection of 20-odd page stories, so any book is a good starting place.

In the eighth volume, there's a terrific story about a desperate woman who switched babies in the maternity ward, and, years later, is blackmailed by a nurse who caught her in the act. Tezuka does a magnificent job in just a few panels capturing the dismissive cruelty of the blackmailer, leading up to a great courtroom scene that sees Black Jack appearing as a surprise witness to the proceedings and a fabulous twist ending. There's another good tale which puts Black Jack in the background and uses Pinocho, disobeying his orders and following him, as the central character. There are mobsters and yokels and utterly bizarre ailments and illnesses, and a masterfully-told story about a comic artist who, forced by illness to suspend his wildly popular story on a cliffhanger, hopes for just a few more hours to resume the series and satisfy his audience. It's a wonderful collection, and one your bookshelf should have, just like the rest of the series. Highly recommended.

Pluto volume 5

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Pluto volume five (Viz, 2009).



I'm behind again, but not too far! Naoki Urasawa's Pluto has been blowing my mind all year long. The sixth volume (of seven collected editions) should be in American stores this week and I believe the conclusion is due in January. If you have not been reading this, you are missing one of the two or three best comics of the year, and you would do well to hop on now so that you can enjoy the mayhem as it wraps up next year with everybody else.

Now, if you haven't been following along, Pluto is a contemporary adaptation of a 1960s Astro Boy story called "The Greatest Robot in the World," in which some unseen force starts wiping out the planet's most powerful robots. Several years previously, most of them saw combat during a war in the Middle East that saw the region devastated and a hated dictator in UN custody. Now working civilian jobs and beloved by the public, the robots and human scientists must discover what force is targeting them before it's too late...

Pluto is structured like a murder mystery and much of the action follows Gesicht, an indestructible humanoid who works as a police detective for Europol. Gesicht's chief concern is that a robot has found a way to violate its prime directive against killing humans, because whatever this thing that's attacking robots might be, it's leaving a trail of corpses in its wake as well. Simultaneously, Gesicht is targeted by a hate group that's out to avenge a human death that the detective once caused himself in the course of an investigation, and has found a willing patsy: the dead man's brother.

Urusawa has really mastered a style of slow-burn storytelling where every revelation and development feels like a kick in the stomach. There's a overpowering sense of doom on every page, with a situation that just gets worse and worse. He's crafted such vibrant, sympathetic characters in his story that I found myself turning pages frantically in worry, particularly when two of the robots, Hercules and Epsilon, meet on a clifftop, preparing to confront their enemy.

It's a stunning mix of genres which will appeal to fans of literary SF or detective fiction as well as traditional action comics. Gesicht's storyline, for example, reminds me of the novels of Isaac Asimov that starred Elijah Bailey and his robot partner Olivaw. Urusawa tells his story beautifully and the artwork is just amazing. He's clearly one of the major talents working in modern comics, and I highly recommend you check out his work.

The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (Abrams ComicArts, 2009).



So everybody reading this knows of Tezuka, right? A longtime favorite, since back in the days when I was glancing through all those lovely untranslated editions of Vampire and Cyborg Big X that I couldn't afford some twenty-odd years back at a shop in Doraville called Nippon Daido, he was the first Japanese comic artist to kick the medium screaming out of its four-panel gag origins and into something long-lasting and meaningful. He wasn't perfect; he was mercurial and prone to leave series uncompleted once he'd met his contractual commitment, and even within an otherwise structured series, he'd become bored and restless and prone to tilt the narrative in wild, unexpected directions. But nobody, nobody in the medium could pull it off as well as him, and nobody designed a world where both humanity and technology could be so equally treated with love and optimism, even in works that explored our darkest possibilities. He's called the god of manga for good reason: not one American would be reading any were it not for his pioneering work.

I've had the huge pleasure of speaking with this book's author, Helen McCarthy, a few times at Anime Weekend Atlanta, and she'd agree that it's possible to go a little too overboard with the praise, and that it needs to be tempered just a little. Tezuka was a rotten businessman, and a good twenty years atop the sales charts probably left him a little complacent, and an easy target for the iconoclasts who started pushing Japanese comics in new directions in the late sixties.

Much brilliant work was still ahead of him, of course: Black Jack, a little more than a third of which is now available in the US thanks to Vertical, and Ayako, which they're said to be releasing next year, would be developed in reaction to a belief among younger artists that Tezuka was past his prime and relying on old glories and character designs. In the late seventies, he even had the indignity of temporarily losing the rights to his iconic Astro Boy, requiring the creation of a substitute character, the terrifically-named Jetter Mars, for a new project.

In all, his was an amazing, restless career, the work of an artist constantly adapting to the marketplace on one hand, and forging new paths with the other. McCarthy's lovely coffeetable biography, packaged with a short documentary DVD, is the first English-language bio of one of the comic medium's most influential and important figures. Like Mark Evanier's 2008 biography of Jack Kirby - brought to you by the same publishers - it's heavily, copiously illustrated and will leave any reader desperately wanting to know more. Yet focusing, as I tend to, on Tezuka's comics and films leaves me in danger of overlooking all of the material on Tezuka's personal life. Again, McCarthy really brings a lot of fascinating material to light, with facts about his studies and his legacy, and pages of photos of the artist, in his always-present glasses and beret, always hard at work being Japan's ambassador of comics.

I must say that the overwhelming bulk of the material in this book was completely new to me, a tidal wave of series only briefly seen mentioned in Tezuka's woefully incomplete Wikipedia listing, and much of it sounds completely fascinating. Thanks to this book, you can add quite a few more comics to my already long wish list of series that Vertical or Viz or DMP or Dark Horse or somebody needs to issue in English. Does somebody want to bring out Barbara or Rainbow Parakeet in the next year or two so's I can buy them?

Like the Kirby book, I do think the book is somewhat lacking for the absence of a really comprehensive Tezuka bibliography, the sort of thing that rolls on for endless detail-packed pages of minutiae and facts about exactly which issues of which anthology featured these stories in the first place, but I concede this is the sort of specialist interest not really suited to the work. All of the gorgeous art, reproduced so lovingly, and the tantalizing hints about series we've not yet seen in English just leave me hungry for more about Tezuka: more details, more facts, and more comics. Very highly recommended.

Swallowing the Earth

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Swallowing the Earth (DMP, 2009).



Slowly but surely, American audiences are getting a better, broader view of Osamu Tezuka's remarkable body of comics work. Over the past twelve months, Vertical has been releasing two of his well-known series, Dororo (across three volumes) and Black Jack (five of a planned seventeen available). In June, another publisher, Digital Manga Press, released their first Tezuka collection. It's an omnibus edition of Swallowing the Earth, a serial I had not known of until they announced it. It originally appeared in a fifteen-month run in the pages of Big Comic in 1968-69, and apparently marked Tezuka's first attempt at storytelling for older readers. The result is a sprawling, wild and very satisfying 500-page read.

Our principal hero in this story is a guy named Gohonmatsu Seki, a blue-collar lug who can consume his weight in liquor, and isn't happy unless he's doing so, and who has no time or patience for ladies. Twenty-five years earlier, during the war, his father and a fellow soldier named Adachigahara crossed paths with an impossibly beautiful woman called Zephyrus. When this voluptuous beauty queen shows up in Japan not having aged a day, Adachigahara, now a successful business tycoon, enlists the younger Seki to investigate her.

What Gohonmatsu uncovers is a massive international conspiracy with a number of look-alikes of Zephyrus, working from a base of operations somewhere in the South Pacific, on an island home to the ruins of the ancient civilization of Moo. The story lurches oddly from one set piece to another, incorporating everything from strange factories in the American southwest to wince-inducingly dated depictions of booga-booga natives on lost islands. Gohonmatsu, a lowbrow everyman uncomfortably thrown into the James Bond role, is incredibly out of his depth, but his adventures are so bizarre and so captivating that readers will be swept along with him.

I just had a ball reading this, and can't imagine how much fun it must have been to watch it unfold in Big Comic, when any month could bring readers a group of new characters in a new setting, wondering how it will relate to the main story. There are wild subplots and fascinating diversions and it's just incredibly easy to get completely sucked in to this story. Swallowing the Earth was not on my list of top five most wanted Tezuka comics, but I'm very glad that DMP released it, and I hope it's successful enough for them to bring us some more from his library before too long. Recommended for teens and older.

Black Jack volume 4

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Black Jack vol. four (Vertical, 2009).



I haven't written anything about Osamu Tezuka in a little while (but stay tuned to my Reprint This! blog for more about him next month), and while I've elected against reviewing every book in a series, I did want to mention, for those six or seven of you out there who haven't signed on to the medical mysteries of Black Jack that Vertical is up to the fifth of their planned seventeen-volume series. Book five is due to ship to US stores in a week or so, but, eternally behind, I just finished the fourth collection and wanted to tell you how fun it is.

Vertical and Diamond have concluded their three-book run of variant, hardcover editions, and so now they're all paperbacks only. Book three, incidentally, included a wonderful little essay detailing the original publication history of the series and details of the twelve episodes of Black Jack that Tezuka declined to ever reprint, so trainspotters out there like myself definitely need to pick that one up. From the fourth book, it's paperback-only editions, each one reprinting more than a dozen episodes. You get the expected wonderful mix of artwork that rockets from vibrant and exaggerated to extremely detailed, unpredictable stories that take an already wild premise and run in crazy directions with it, and one of my favorite characters in comics: a self-assured, unbelievably talented, stoic but all-too-human doctor pitting his skills against far-out diseases and all-too common beauracracy and corporate greed. Sometimes it seems the done-in-one episodic nature feels a little constricting, but Tezuka was so darn talented that he could even have characters break the fourth wall and remind their fellows that this isn't a serial and they only have eight pages to finish, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

I realize I'm not saying much about Black Jack that hasn't already been said, but these really are some of the best comics ever, and your bookshelf is demanding them. Vertical definitely deserves your support for this wonderful series of releases, and I hope the market stays strong to keep it going 'til the end. Very highly recommended.

Apollo's Song

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Apollo's Song (Vertical, 2007).



Since Vertical has been doing such a wonderful job repackaging some of Osamu Tezuka's more familiar comics in the last year or so, I decided to give some of their earlier efforts a try. Naturally, I would love to own them all, and wish I had the disposable income to get everything they've released, but for now, I just settled on Apollo's Song, a done-in-one omnibus edition of a strange serial that Tezuka penned in 1970 for the magazine Shonen King.

Over 500-plus pages, we follow the story of a young sociopath called Shogo, whose unhappy upbringing has made him violently enraged by anybody expressing love, and who takes out his wrath on animals. The court sentences him to a facility where he's given electroshock treatment, and hallucinates that he's been sent, helpless, to appear before a love goddess who has her own sentence on him. From there, Shogo drifts to other lives in other pasts or worlds where he can learn a lesson or two about being true to his emotions, and understanding what loss really means.

It's a very strange, but very engrossing story. Somehow, Shogo becomes a sympathetic character despite everything he's done, and the worlds where Tezuka dumps the kid are fascinating. Oddest of all is an island where Shogo and a photographer are stranded, alongside a menagerie of intelligent animals who have their own surprising take on discretion while mating... sort of a reverse elephant's graveyard.

I liked this a lot, and was completely taken by each of the new worlds Shogo is sent. The artwork is terrific and constantly surprising, both in concept and execution - a graveyard in the future story is a complete stunner - and there's so much going on under the surface that any reader will find a great deal of subtext to reconsider. On the other hand, I was displeased that Vertical flipped the artwork to read English-direction. Happily, they've stopped this practice. Although possibly not the very best first choice for your Tezuka library, this comes recommended for older readers.

Pluto volume one

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Pluto volume one (Viz, 2009).



Well, here's a book that's so darn good, there's not a hat size to fit it. In this spectacular SF crime story by Naoki Urusawa, a Europol detective named Gesicht looks into the connection between the murder, in Dusseldorf, of a man campaigning to preserve the laws giving robots equal treatment under worldwide law, and the destruction of the beloved Mont Blanc, a powerful mechanoid who worked for the Swiss forestry service.

It's an expansion of a classic Astro Boy serial by Osamu Tezuka from the mid-1950s called "The Greatest Robot on Earth," only Urusawa, best known to American readers for his slow-burning thriller Monster, expands the narrative and shits the focus to other characters. It results in something incredibly compelling and very beautiful.

Pluto has run in monthly chunks in Japan's Big Comic Original since 2003, and apparently just concluded. From what I understand, Viz plans to follow the Japanese publishing model and collect this story in seven digests, the first five of which are planned for this year. I am completely sold and am getting the lot; Urusawa invokes dread and fear like nobody's business, and I'll be biting my lip until volume two shows up. Highly recommended.

Nether World and Black Jack vol. 2

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, reviews of Nether World # 1 (Studio 407, 2009) and Black Jack volume two (Vertical, 2008).



Studio 407 seems to have been launched with a heady mix of ideas and aspirations, but if the first issue of Nether World is any indicator, these aspirations have more to do with motion picture royalties than making good comics. Chad Jones' story is not necessarily a bad one, if a little familiar - all life signs have vanished from a remote outpost, so a battalion of astronauts from all walks of life are ordered to investigate - and there's a satisfying twist which will leave readers curious what will happen next.

The problem is that Jones seems more interested in how his story will play as a feature film than as a comic. As the first twelve or thirteen minutes of a movie, this material might be passable, but in a comic book it is dull as can be imagined, just endless pages of good looking folks in form-fitting suits developing their characters by discussing their fears. If it's that important to get into his characters' heads before the plot starts, Jones could definitely find several lessons in the short-form work of, say, Alan Moore in how to make memorable characters that the reader cares about far more quickly than this. R.B. Silva's artwork is not at all bad, and I liked his design work, but he's up against an awful wall trying to make the first twenty pages of this comic in any way visually interesting, because it's just panel after panel of talking heads.

I'm curious about the comic's intent and target in light of what I've written. Perhaps it's too cynical to call the book out as nothing more than "something for Hollywood to option," but a comic has to work within its own confines, as a work that uses its medium well to tell a story that is first and foremost a comic. Nether World might well make a terrific movie, and I've no objection to the plot that Jones and Silva have developed, but what's seen here, in this format is deeply flawed to the point of being useless. Not recommended.

A copy of this title was provided for the purpose of review.



In light of the above, it's interesting to consider how Osamu Tezuka developed his supporting characters. Each weekly episode of Black Jack ran for only 16-20 pages, but each contained a memorable cast of background players, each of whom is present because they serve a function to the plot, and readers will remember them naturally as they recall each episode's storyline.

I love the strange morality in each Black Jack installment, where our titular hero is the only person who can be allowed the sin of greed. Anybody else who would put their pocketbook over the needs of the sick is shown to be wrong, but Dr. Black Jack can get away with anything, and sits in a strange poistion of ethical judgement over all others. Even when he's shown up by a blind acupuncturist who doesn't charge for his services, our hero just has to wait for the other guy to make a potentially fatal mistake.

The three-hundred-odd pages in the hardcover edition of this book, only available in comic stores serviced by the thrice-damned monopoly that is Diamond, includes an otherwise unavailable story featuring Black Jack's recurring nemesis Dr. Kiriko. Watching the stories unfold and finding the solution to the latest strange and desperate situation is one of the best treats available in comics today. Highly recommended, of course.

Dororo and Girls With Slingshots

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Dororo vol. 3 (Vertical, 2008) and Girls With Slingshots (self-published, 2007).



It's not long since we last saw Hyakkimaru and Dororo, hunting evil spirits and getting on the bad side of samurai and thieves, but their demon-killing mission hasn't changed much. They have a lengthy adventure involving a lunatic obsessed with sharks, and there is a demon in a lake in another... and no sooner did I get over that last little quibble with the off-putting occasional moments of anachronistic comedy and embrace this little work of genius wholeheartedly - around the time that Hyakkimaru finds a breathtakingly novel way to bring down a charging horse - than it ended. Apparently, Osamu Tezuka was contracted to provide a year's worth of episodes, and once finished, he had other projects to jump into. The story goes that he always intended to return to this one, in much the same way he would draw a few months' worth of Phoenix episodes every couple of years, but never found the time. So it reaches an ending, but the overall quest is never concluded. In sum, it might be a bit much to call this a masterpiece, but it's an exceptional series and every comic lover needs all three volumes on their bookshelf. Next up: Black Jack!



I'm such a fickle lover of webcomics. I guess that if I can't get the darn thing to appear as one of my three (three!!) strips in My Yahoo, it eventually falls off my radar. At least four times this year, I've slapped my head with the shock realisation that I haven't looked at Subnormality in ages. Heaven only knows how many webcomics, their bookmarks stored on a long abandoned browser, I have completely forgotten about.

I mention that because it's reasonable to note my fair-weather fandom about things that I want to love, but something about the delivery medium prevents me from committing to. I need to have something to carry around, to read at lunch, or while kicked back on my couch. So since Danielle Corsetto's delightful Girls With Slingshots has been one of those periodic every-once-in-a-while interests, on the strength of its bawdy humor, bizarre situations and great artwork, I was pleased to buy a collected edition of the first 200 strips... just as soon as I remembered, after many months, to stop by the site and see what was new with the grouchy Hazel and her free-spirited best pal Jamie.

Corsetto did a fabulous job in compiling material for the book. Apart from the strips, there are fifty pages of additional features, ranging from examples of the high school antecedent of GWS to ads and commissioned art of the characters. Obviously, webcomickers have a tough time ahead in convincing buyers to shell out for collected editions; after all, the material is freely available on their website, and stacks of bonuses like this might be necessary to make people pony up. But heck, this is exactly the sort of thing I want to see in every collected edition; I can't stand bare-bones efforts like you see from Marvel or Vertigo these days.

Anyway, this is the first in a projected series of GWS editions, and I certainly hope it continues. You can sample the comic at its website and you can read an interview with Corsetto at Comicon and I happily recommend this collection for mature readers.

(Now, can we get Jeph Jacques to start cranking out some Questionable Content books... pretty please?)

(Originally posted October 15, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Defenders and Dororo

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Essential Defenders volume four (Marvel, 2008) and Dororo volume two (Vertical, 2008).



This is very iffy stuff. This is late-seventies Defenders, scripted almost entirely by Ed Hannigan, who's got some pretty good ideas, but his artists are really conspiring against him. Most of the art here is provided by the period's agonizing superhero bores Herb Trimpe and Don Perlin, both of whom have studied the right playbooks, but don't know what to do with them. You can see, for instance, that Trimpe knows that a good Kirby pose involves someone pointing in shock just beyond the camera, but he doesn't know how to make the frame energetic or involving in any way. There's a nice sequence of stories where the Sub-Mariner and Black Panther get aggravated with each other, leading to war between Atlantis and Wakanda, and there's a huge storyline about a war in another dimension against a foe called "The Unnameable," so called because you instantly fall under its control upon learning its name. Another big skirmish in Asgard sees some pretender to Hela's throne bring up a big, army-crushing, locomotive mountain which just rumbles across the battlefield.

But with art as uninspiring and dull as this, and with enough boring Earth-based subplots to counter the wild ideas, this really did become a slog. The superhero Nighthawk literally spends almost three years fighting a tax evasion complaint, and the embarassingly dumb villain the Mandrill, with his army of gun-toting chicks in bathing suits, shows up every three issues or so. It was kind of nice to fill in the holes of the old collection of these I had in middle school, but this is about as far from "essential" as the law will allow. Recommended only for 70s Marvel fans.



Now, this on the other hand: you know, I've mentioned Dororo before (follow the Tezuka tag below), and I had a long day at work and can't do this justice right now. These are damn good comics, full of wild medieval swordsplay, bizarre technology and freaktastic demons, done by one of the medium's real geniuses about forty years ago, and it kicks the crap out of practically anything else you can buy today. It's admittedly slight, with no greater goal than to entertain, but wow, it does that in spades. There's only one more volume of this to come, and I'm going to miss it.

(Originally posted August 26, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Swingin' Sixties Edition, with Tezuka and Kirby

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Dororo (Vertical, 2008) and Essential Thor volume 2 (Marvel, 2005).



Dororo was first published over twelve months in the pages of Shonen Sunday from 1967-68. The strip didn't reach a proper concluding episode by the time its creator, Osamu Tezuka, wrapped up his one-year commitment and went off to do other things, but it inspired a successful cartoon adaptation and was recently made into a live-action film. Vertical released the first English edition of the comic in April.

I can't give this quite the emphatic recommendation that I had hoped to. That's not to say this wonderful story by Tezuka is at all bad; it concerns a swordsman named Hyakkimaru and his associate, a young little thief calling himself Dororo, who travel through a strange, timelost medieval Japan on a quest to slay 48 demons. Because of a deal made by his evil father, Hyakkimaru was born a misshapen, helpless thing without a face, organs or limbs, kept alive by magic and willpower, and given prosthetics by the kindly doctor who raised him. The death of each demon restores one of the body parts he was born without. It's an odd mix of allegory and adventure fiction.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and was pleased to see another mad appearance of the "face tumors" that the great Tezuka would also use in an installment of Black Jack, although played a little differently here.

Unfortunately though, the translator's periodic use of modern slang and phrases which weren't in use when this serial was first published forty years ago really takes the reader out of the story. I think this is fantastic and can't wait for more collections - there are apparently just two more to come, completing the original serial - but I also can't help but believe that this was just one edit away from being truly perfect. It also makes me worry whether Vertical's translation of Black Jack will be accurate.




This, on the other hand, this I can recommend completely.

As a kid, I didn't have much interest in the late 70s Thor. It felt old-fashioned and wordy. Now, adult reasoning tells us that proper Lee and Kirby Thor from the 60s must be good stuff, because, you know, it's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby but their Thor comic is perhaps overshadowed by the period's other, more merchandised material, and it was rarely reprinted. So I'd never actually seen the real stuff before now. I was advised to start with the second collection, as it took a dozen or so issues for the team to find their feet. But if what's in the first book is even half as good as what's in the second, I'll concede that this is even better than the duo's Fantastic Four at its peak.

Holy anna, I can't tell you how fun this book was. It is a complete blast from cover to cover, one great big serial of wildly over-the-top mayhem. There's one sequence where some armed robbers burst in to a restaurant where Hercules is trying to eat, and he beats the hell out of most of them, chases the others outside, and incapacitates their getaway car by hurling a street lamp at the tires and separating the car's undercarriage from the rest of it.

Best of all is Thor himself, who's certainly old-fashioned and wordy, but man, nobody trash-talks like this guy. Even when Odin the All-Father gets annoyed at him for some familial slight and saps half his strength, he still tells his opponents in no uncertain terms just how unbelievable a beatdown they're about to suffer, and then delivers.

The artwork is uniformly amazing from cover to cover. It's certainly true that Kirby's work would have been better served with Joe Sinnott or Dick Ayers on inks than Vince Colletta, but I was never taken out of the reading experience because of sloppy linework or shortcuts. Whether it's the grandeur of Asgard or the deck of some spaceship in the "Black Galaxy," there's always something completely amazing to catch your attention, and surprises galore. I was familiar with Ego, the Living Planet from the 1980s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but its first appearance is still completely eye-popping.

Neatly, each issue of Thor teamed a 16-page lead story set in the contemporary Marvel Universe with an ongoing 5-page serial called Tales of Asgard, in which Thor and his warrior pals have an earlier set of adventures. It's in these that we meet this enormous, overweight braggart called Volstagg. I remember as a kid thinking this guy was the stupidest thing in comics, but in Lee and Kirby's hands, he's actually completely hilarious.

There are currently three Essential collections of Thor - 500-ish pages for $17 - with a fourth on the way next year which should, if I understand it, wrap up the Lee and Kirby days. I've got book three on order at my local comic shop, and so should you. The best superhero book of the sixties? Quite possibly!

(Originally posted June 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Black Jack: Two Fisted Surgeon

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I was telling you about Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack last month. This is the second and last volume of translations that Viz made available in that hybrid sorta-digest form they used to use. I got this from the same "buy one get three free sale" I mentioned; I've certainly no objection to spending $4 on almost 200 pages of Tezuka.

Volume two has more of the same utterly outlandish and captivating medical mysteries, but it also features an amazing story called "Assembly-Line Care" which, thirty years later, is every bit as important today. Our health care system has been manipulated and screwed with by greedy businessmen for an awfully long time. Highly recommended on many levels.

(Originally posted August 12 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)