Hot Stuff

Ugh, I can't eat that kind of spicy stuff

Azumanga Daioh Desktop Wallpaper

Sinking Feeling

Shueisha's Shonen Jump characters

Honestly, the situation in Japan where comics are released in weekly anthologies is a very abnormal one. Everyone has become accustomed to it and deals with it like it was nothing, but people overseas think that producing comics of this quality on a weekly basis is insane. ... Yeah, it really is insane.
- Naoki Urasawa

A bit more doom and gloom: More reports about the decline of the manga magazine industry. Simon Jones disagrees with the analysis that the industry's growing focus on its hardcore fans is the cause rather than a symptom of other causes.

Underpass

One of the most high profile books to come out of Komikon was magazine conglomerate Summit Media entering stepping into the world of Filipino comic book publishing (Oh sorry, I meant graphic novel), the largest company to make the move so far. The material for this foray is from a commercial standpoint a safe choice: Underpass is a modest horror anthology of four stories written by some of the more recognizable genre creators in the Philippines. Summit must be hoping that horror's popularity will translate into healthy sales. They certainly put considerable care into the packaging: This is a handsome square bound softcover volume printed on thick, glossy, and fully colored paper stock.

Horror fiction of course has a long literary tradition, and comics has its own rich history with the genre. But for mass appeal, horror is most successful in film. The genre is one of the more successful in Filipino cinema. The medium's nature of combining visual and temporal elements has an unmatched way of building terror that can't be easily replicated by comics. Not that it ever stopped the komiks industry from producing numerous horror titles during its heyday. The stories in this volume settle on being dark, creepy and disturbing. And despite the underpass metaphor, there's not much that overtly connects them beyond the genre itself.

The opening story Sim by Gerry Alanguilan is a straightforward tale of someone receiving a phone call from beyond, with predictably deadly results. His contribution is the one that sticks closest to horror films. Alanguilan possesses the cleanest, most direct, and easiest to follow art in the book. The story itself is slight.

Judas Kiss adopted from a story by David Hontiveros is plodding, literary, and didactic. It's the story of a man being haunted by the ghosts of his wife and brother, whom he murdered. It contains a twist ending that more experienced readers will see coming. The surreal imagery and day-glow secondary colors employed by artist Oliver Pulumbarit gives the impression that the protagonist is going through a really bad acid trip. This is the least successful story of the collection.

Katumbas, also by Hontiveros, is closer to fantasy-inspired superhero adventure of the Buffy or Trese kind. The story about a supernaturally empowered warrior battling demons and spirits is intriguing but feels incomplete as an episode of an ongoing series. The art supplied by Ian Sta. Maria is the slickest, most detailed, and most likely to appeal to mainstream tastes. But I need a bit more out of the narrative before I'm willing to commit.

Speaking of Trese, The Clinic, by Trese co-creators Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo is itself a shout out to one of their earlier stories. As the subject matter is about a supernaturally run clinic that performs illegal abortions (abortion is illegal in the Philippines) and collects the infant souls, this is no doubt the most unsettling and unpleasant story in the book.


Underpass is a solid effort. But I don't find the material within original or consequential enough to be a satisfactory reading experience. Mainly, it's because I'm pretty jaded to the old fashioned horror formula which relies on a "gotcha" ending for impact. And I find these kind of stories thuddingly moralistic. But this brand of entertainment should strongly appeal to local tastes, which might bring a few more readers back to the komiks medium.

Dead or Alive

Wizard Magazine

In his latest CBR column, Steven Grant lets loose his strongest indictment of the moribund state of superhero comics at Marvel and DC and their imitators. Unable to sell new properties to a largely disinterested fandom, many publishers are stuck in a holding pattern of continuously attempting to revive or reinvigorate a bloated lineup of decades-old properties that have become largely irrelevant to most of the present day audience:

For all the comic book philosophy of the superhero as the next stage of human evolution (really just a mutant iteration of the old "Fans are Slans" riff) creatively they've hit a dead end, save for the occasional irruption. The superhero genre may not be the Titanic, no icebergs in sight, but everyone's still just rearranging deck chairs now. That's how the companies want it, because they're no longer marketing creations. They're peddling brands. Branding is everything now, and it's almost always more profitable to cash in on a long-established brand than to create, develop and market a new one. The superhero as brand name might be with us until the end of time, now, but the superhero as expression of genuine creativity is pretty much dead.

Which is true only if you don't look beyond the confines of the direct market. As Noah Berlatsky points out, cast a wider net and it becomes apparent that superheroes continue to have massive popular appeal and media exposure: From Sailor Moon, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Twilight. I would also add for good measure the popular Avatar the Last Airbender and Harry Potter franchises, even though their fans are more likely to see them as belonging to the fantasy genre, as two Western examples. And manga is very much where it's at right now for readers looking for recent and exciting power fantasies. So there's more life in superheroes than what is found in the Big Two:

On the one hand, you might argue I guess that Steven's tendency not to see the super-heroes all around him is of a piece with the status quo among the big two; that is, if they could only start to think about super-hero stories in different ways, maybe they wouldn't be so perpetually shitty. Perhaps they could finally start telling stories somebody cared about, and maybe even come up with some new heroes that were different from the old heroes in ways which would allow them to appeal to a broader audience.

But really, I think that's too harsh on Steven and not sufficiently harsh on DC and Marvel. The truth is, DC and Marvel seem pretty thoroughly irredeemable. Steven was right; they're creatively D.O.A. They're going nowhere and changing nothing, and the chances of either of them ever coming up with an exciting, marketable new concepts is roughly the same as the chances of a monkey crawling out of my butt and handing me a power ring. So, yeah, I think it's important to recognize that super-heroes are still popular, but not because doing so will help DC and Marvel. On the contrary, I think it's important because, until you realize that super-heroes are doing just fine, you can't really understand how truly lame Marvel and DC are.

To give Steven the benefit of the doubt, he has demonstrated more openness in his definition of superheroes in the past, as he wrote in this review found in one of his columns:

Who says the Japanese don't do superhero comics? It surprises me how many manga, like X and SILENT MOBIUS, are thinly disguised superhero comics, and so is BASILISK, which glories in the simple plot of two Shogunate-era ninja clans whose chief members are all blessed with bizarre and idiosyncratic "techniques" (read: "superpowers) fight each other to the death for not much more reason than they're told to. Toss in heavy doses of sex/nudity, violence and weepy soul-searching, and voila! The best X-MEN story ever. And that's not a complaint; with its uncomplicated storytelling and extreme character explorations, it's growing on me.

My quibble with that statement is I don't believe those manga are "thinly disguised superhero comics". That's still too ethnocentric in its wording because it sounds like (Whether intentional or not) the Japanese were trying to sneak their own version of the superhero into the direct market underneath the radar of the corporate establishment. Most manga are made for their native audience. And while the Japanese don't use the same terminology as Americans, I would surmise that most professional mangaka have a pretty clear idea that they're producing fantasies for kids. And other than a few exceptions, they don't seem particularly keen on consciously paying homage to their American counterparts.

So I'm certain that Steven understands there's more to comics than the direct market or North America. But as a market veteran, this is the territory he knows best and what he rants about most in his columns. And that habit tends to produce certain blind spots. But as long as the reader understands the narrowness of his focus, it's impossible to deny the veracity of most of his arguments.

Emma Vol. 9

Emma volumes 8 and 9 collect several filler stories focussing on the secondary and minor characters of the comic. And I do mean minor. The first story of volume 9 deals with the Mölders household pet squirrel Theo getting lost in the woods for one night. And the last story is about three off-panel opera singers who sung in a The Barber of Seville performance that William and Eleanor attended. As these stories have no bearing on the main narrative of William and Emma's romance, they aren't exactly essential reading. But they still make for a compelling showcase of Kaoru Mori's considerable skills. The story of Theo demonstrates that Mori is just as capable of drawing nature as she is capturing the nuances of Victorian England. She manages to evoke Theo's isolation without unnecessarily anthropomorphizing the squirrel's behavior:


The story about Dorothea and Wilhelm pays careful attention to tiny details that adds up to a highly charged erotic tale about the married couple that deftly shifts between past and present:



A bit of their background revealed explains how much passion plays an essential part in their relationship, especially given Dorothea's flair for the dramatic:


In contrast, the last and longest story about one rising opera singer's unrequited longing towards his colleague is a rather sweet and funny tale about young love, and young people's dreams and ambitions. It has the most tenuous connection with the other stories in this volume:


The story of William and Hakim's first meeting in India is a reminder of the comic nature of their friendship, but is in itself a funny tale of how two boys from alien backgrounds manage to bond over sport. Their meeting pretty much defines their relationship from that point:


The story about two Haworth maids spending a day on a shopping trip is a nice slice of life look into the world of ordinary working women. For such a short story it feels meticulously researched:


Mori is not an artist who skimps on the backgrounds. They're essential to creating her authentic Victorian environments. Indeed, for a project like this, they are as important a character as the people who inhabit them:



Since these are additional stories, they basically serve to round out characters the reader is already familiar with. There are no major emotional climaxes, not counting Theo's tearful reunion with his owner. Just a lot of small character studies. But there is also an overwhelming sense of Mori's mania for the Victorian era. Having completed her main narrative, she's not yet ready to part with her beloved period. But this is an obsession not for something wholly imagined and fantastic, but for something grounded in a particular reality that is still foreign to her. This grants to all of Emma greater believability while still allowing the manga to be full of romance.

Star-Spangled Gal

Wonder Woman by Krishna

Smoker

Wonder Woman by Kate Beaton

The Salon

Some random thoughts on The Salon, which I enjoyed very much since its original webcomic incarnation. The post is a bit pedantic.


1) There is a clever conceit in The Salon for fine-art lovers to latch onto: That the experiments of the painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso are linked to the story's magical blue absinthe. There is an aesthetic contrast: Cubism is the first modern art movement to unambiguously reject the traditional notion that a painting is a metaphorical window into a world created by the artist using perspective techniques to produce the illusion of 3D space when seen from a single point of view. But the cubist depicts an object from multiple points of view, breaking-up and reassembling the object so that foreground, middle-ground, and background all coexist at the same depth, denying painting's illusory power. On the other hand, the blue absinthe that the main characters imbibe affirms that power by allowing them to literally step into the world of the painting being viewed. It's a fantastical notion similar to ideas used in children's literature and science fiction, and it's the kind of premise that comics were made to exploit. Fortunately Nick Bertozzi is up to the challenge. He doesn't actually establish a definite causal relationship between Cubism and the absinthe: Braque and Picasso's creativity are not particularly motivated by the absinthe. Nor do they emphatically reject it. Where he succeeds is in visually blending all the elements: He is equally adept at conveying both fantastical and abstract environments, as well as the more down to earth squalor of early twentieth century Montmartre. And he skillfully quotes from artists as diverse as Paul Gauguin to Picasso.


2) As the story progresses, the historically based elements play a more prominent role, particularly the Braque-Picasso and Gertrude-Leo-Alice relationships. Nevertheless the fantastical murder mystery frames the entire story and serves as a mcguffin that informs the characters motivations and behavior. But Bertozzi still conforms to the broad outlines of his cast's real world histories. For example, Braque and Picasso's artistic collaboration is transformed into a heroic team-up. While Leo Stein's disapproval of the romance between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is reinterpreted as cowardly and traitorous. Guillaume Apollonaire and Erik Satie are regulated to sidekick status. This is obviously not historically accurate. But the urgency arising from the mystery gives The Salon a manic energy that wouldn't be found in a more straightforward biography. The comic never finds a perfect balance between fantasy and history, and in the end the former becomes an afterthought as the story becomes more character driven.


3) An ongoing comic-related, and postmodern concern, is the undermining of the traditional hierarchy between high and low culture. This is most clearly and self-servingly attempted in causally connecting a Katzenjammer Kids strip as partial inspiration to a famous proto-Cubist Gertrude Stein portrait. But a more common technique is to lay bare the relationship between sexuality and fine-art: From Eadweard Muybridge's controversial nude photo-sequences (A kind of proto-comic), to Gauguin's nubile Tahitian girls, to art dealers selling erotic pictures on the side. Art serves to express and satiate sexual impulses. Mostly male impulses. If possible, wouldn't some people fuck a painted nude made real? This high/low blurring is embodied in Picasso. His "heroic" persona is linked to his tempestuous romances, his sexual peccadilloes, his love for cartoon art, his openness to the intellectual arguments of Braque, his own natural talent, curiosity, and obsessive attention to detail.


4) In contrast to the many pages devoted to formal Cubist theory, the influence of Primitivism on modern art receives little attention. There's a throwaway line of Picasso using African masks on his nudes, something Picasso actually denied. But Picasso was influenced by Gauguin's Tahitian nudes. Back then (And now) the art of so-called primitive cultures was seen as flat, geometric, abstract, symbolic, and possessing exaggerated proportions - qualities considered admirable in modern art. Primitive cultures were characterized as being more natural and sexually free. Gauguin is said to have described Tahiti as an earthly Arcadia. Most present day critics would consider those views as naive and distorted. The murderer is eventually revealed to be frankenstein-style recreation of Gauguin's Tahitian teenage mistress made from mixing paint and the blue absinthe: A dark mirror of Gauguin's passive figures. Bertozzi's critique of Gauguin's Primitivism isn't as extensive or thought-out as his examination of proto-Cubism. But Gauguin is nonetheless a larger than life figure here. So it's fitting that the thing that stops his monster is something created by Picasso, the heroic figure who has learned from the example of the master.

Trese: Mass Murders

A weakness of the first two volumes of Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's popular series Trese was the lack of any particularly clear direction in the comic. Sure the confluence of traditional Filipino legends with modern urban settings might sound clever at first. But despite the Filipino setting, Trese conceptually and visually still stuck a little too close to its Hollywood and mainstream roots to feel original. Its creators seemed to be randomly tossing ideas left and right from zombies to drag racing tikbalang to test what worked. And the character designs were a bit empty and cliched: Whether it was the wisecracking sidekicks the Kambal or the unflappable hero Alexandra Trese (This became something of a personal pet peeve: Who the f#@k wears a dark trench coat in Manila?) There was energy and potential, but for the most part the stories felt a little erratic.

Still, some very successful and long-lived serials began from similarly tentative beginnings. And if Trese turns out to be one of these, then the first eight stories will be looked back as early fan-pleasing efforts necessary to build the audience for the comic's survival. Much of this latest volume focuses on the laying the foundations for future world building. A great deal is revealed about the history of the Trese clan and Alexandra's own personal background. While not adding any depth to the character, this provides much needed context missing in the previous stories. The arc that introduces the nearly unstoppable ancient war god Talagbusao produces not only the series first truly compelling villain, but is also the first time that Trese effectively conveys a sense that there is a complex universe full of interconnected beings and interdependent relationships instead of just a haphazard menagerie of monsters for Alexandra to fight.

This is also the first volume where Kajo is fully comfortable with his black and white style. It can take awhile before an artist settles into a reliable shorthand for portraying his or her cast. His figures are less clumsily staged, and while backgrounds are not his forte, the former rough cross-hatching is replaced by fluid line work which is far better in evoking a setting and a particular mood:

And the choreographing of action scenes has become a lot more dynamic and economical:

All of this is a good start for a healthy run. Whether Trese becomes the Pinoy equivalent of Hellboy or just another also-ran will depend on how well its co-creators can build on the work found inside this volume.

From Japan with Foreboding

Anime adaptation of the Lucky Star yonkoma

People who enjoy their manga via translation are often incognizant of the very specific conditions which nurture the stories they read: Most of them have actually been around for some time before being exported to other countries. The result of reading what is essentially a backlog of material is that certain things might be slightly passe by the time they leave Japan. For example, while the traditional long-form serial is far from dead, it may have already peaked in Japan. Well-known scholar Frederik L. Schodt points to the changing trends in reading and demographic patterns that are having a significant effect on manga:

The big problem in Japan is that the bubble in the industry has definitely burst for both anime and manga. I think it's probably worse than many of the official statistics reveal. I was in Tokyo in May - and I go to Tokyo every year to watch trends - and the thing that drove the point home to me is that on the train, almost no one is reading manga. That's a huge, huge change from ten years ago, huge. On top of that, you have a new era in Japan where there's a declining population of young people, which is still the main readership and market for manga and anime. So publishers and producers of shows are confronting this very stark reality that fewer people are buying their products, and there are fewer people to buy their products. It's not only that they are buying less, but that there are fewer people to buy them! So no one knows what's going to happen yet.

Which is reinforced by Jason Thompson:

But for all their cultural clout, weekly manga, like newspaper strips and network television, is a fading medium. Except for Weekly Comic Bunch (which skews towards an aging readership anyway), all the existing weekly magazines in Japan are at least 20 years old; recent attempts like Comic Gumbo have been failures. Publishing a weekly manga magazine requires tremendous resources, and with the fragmentation of media, perhaps the generalist audience required to sustain these massive magazines is dwindling. Oddly, there are no weekly shojo manga magazines (although there are several biweekly ones), possibly a sign of shojo's smaller economic footprint; a few weekly shojo magazines were published in the 1960s but never caught on.

But on the other hand, this benefits yonkoma in much the same way that many American webcomics are gag strips that take advantage of the internet:

Yonkoma manga is easy to make, easy to read, and—surprisingly considering its low profile in the U.S.—very successful. While other manga magazines' circulations dwindle, yonkoma manga is the fastest growing area of the manga industry. Four-panel series such as Lucky Star are increasingly being adapted into animation and merchandise. There are many magazines devoted solely to four-panel manga. Online and cellphone manga is overwhelmingly four-panel-oriented, as it's the easiest type of manga to read on mobile devices, and some yonkoma webcomics, such as Hidekaz Himaruya's Hetalia Axis Powers, have even become hits and made it into the big time.

Anime adaptation of the Minami-ke yonkoma

What's the connection between the World Wide Web, Japan's aging population, and the growing fetish for kawaii schoolgirls? Is the nostalgic longing for fatherhood as youth and childhood become a more and more prized commodity really partly to blame? Is there perhaps a general cultural malaise at work here?

One thing for certain is that as Japan changes, so will the manga industry. A larger trend that neither writer mentions is that Japan as a nation might be developing a less American-centric view of the world even as Japanese publishers continue to sell to the American market. What kind of manga are going to be produced under the influence of these trends within the coming decades?

New Format, Same Combative Attitude

Over the past few years I've noticed smarter critical commentary on the Net, but it's scattered all over the place, buried in the usual mountain of frivolous, tepid, dimwitted, unreadable fanboy drivel. There's no single website you can visit and anticipate a range of interesting sensibilities on an equal footing, so one of my goals is to distill the best criticism and journalism we can into a single site. - Gary Groth

It's no secret that newspapers and magazines are suffering because so much of what they've traditionally done can be done on the web, faster and cheaper. We decided therefore to redesign the editorial and physical format of the magazine to take advantage of what print's best at -- upscale production values, longer prose, more permanent content -- and bring the Journal's mandate for criticism and commentary to the web with a vengeance. - Gary Groth

If the magazine's arrogance, whether a clever marketing ploy or come by honestly, wasn't much appreciated by publishers or talent, and often not even by most fans, it was the right approach, making THE COMICS JOURNAL indispensible reading for several years, and a bracing antidote to the sycophancy that by then increasingly earmarked other publications. Virtually nobody claimed to like the Journal, but virtually everyone read it.- Steven Grant

Among its reviewers the Journal has a contingent of solid, trust-worthy writers: Kent Worcester, Rich Kreiner, Shaenon Garrity, and Kristian Williams, but they tend to get drowned out by crankier and less-informed critics, writers who mistake abrasiveness for insight. The magazine’s review section does seem too diffuse and scattershot. I’m never quite sure why some books get reviewed and others don’t. There’s a lot of good critics on the web now – Rob Clough comes to mind right way. The most promising prospect for the next incarnation of the Journal is to recruit these writers (I know Clough has already signed on). - Jeet Heer

For me, I've been happiest with the Journal when it pursued other visions — Tom Crippen working out why super-heroes matter and why they don't, for example, or Dirk's marvelous shojo issue. The larger, bi-annual approach seems like an opportunity to go further down that road...I'd love, for example, to see what Kristy Valenti or Bill Randall would do if given carte blanche with an issue. Gary will always be the Journal, in some sense, but one of the things he's done right over the years, in my view, is to have the courage and the generosity to let other folks pursue their own idiosyncratic ideas and interests with his ink and his press. - Noah Berlatsky

Everything will be free. We’ll maintain an archival copy of the current website for our online subscribers — more on that soon, I promise — but the new site will have no “subscriber area” or special features that need a password to access - Dirk Deppey

Where Bold Stars Go To Die

We're All Grown Up Now

On the surface the Philippines retains a prudish attitude towards sex and public depictions of nudity. What this inevitably does is drive sexually-charged content behind its conservative facade. Since the 60s sexually oriented entertainment was labeled as "bomba" , and bomba komiks were sold on the sly. The Martial Law years initially saw a strict clampdown of the bomba genre, but this only led to a later resurgence of sexually oriented material now renamed "bold". But the bold movie genre continually faces pressure from the government body responsible for rating film and television, the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB), which oscillates between periods of prudery and leniency, depending on who's in charge of the agency and the presidential administration. They also have to deal with attacks from religious organizations who condemn them as immoral, particularly the powerful Catholic Church, and feminist groups criticizing the exploitative nature of many of these films.

Gerry Alanguilan is either sensing a possible backlash or simply covering his bases, because the afterward for his latest book Where Bold Stars Go To Die reads like a carefully considered preemptive defense:

"I think it's high time that people realize that comics has grown up in the last 20 years. People are making comics for adults now. Oh yeah, that's right. Comics are no longer just for kids, and to us in the comics industry, this is old news. This comic book is not for immature reading. That goes for children and adults with immature sensibilities.

The emotional and intellectual well being of children are the responsibility of the parents. It is their job to teach their children what they believe is wrong and what is right. That is not my job. My job is to write and draw stories, and to let myself go where that creativity takes me. That is my job as an artist. That is my reason for being. Do not pass that responsibility of raising your children to me, and to us artists as a whole..."

I personally think it's a bit embarrassing that this even has to be said at all.

WBSGTD is part comic, part pin-up gallery drawn by various Filipino comics artists. There is a mood throughout the entire book of arguing for a legitimate Filipino erotic comic art tradition, even drafting komiks legend Francisco V. Coching to make its case. But the 32 page story is a rather somber and all too earnest effort: A young man becomes fascinated with an 80s bold star who has since vanished into obscurity. It develops into such a powerful obsession that he somehow enters into some kind of collective unconscious where faded bold stars retain their youth and cavort in sun dappled forests. He then has an ecstatic encounter with a perfect vision of his idol. It feels like it's meant to be a beautiful, cathartic, even spiritual experience. But to me it just comes across as cliched as it sounds. If one of the goals is to show that it's OK for Filipinos to illustrate erotic subject matter, then the story succeeded. But there has to be much better ways of demonstrating that comics have grown up than telling this banal kind of juvenile wish fulfillment that ultimately cops out rather than deal with the emotional consequences of having sex with an actual person.

Even on the level of one callow youth's overblown crush on a media starlet, the story fails to connect because of the inability to observe the admonition "Show, don't tell." In the beginning, the protagonist's voice-over narration compares his object of desire to that of an angel. But the art isn't evocative enough to create the same impression. And when he finally meets her, she's physically indistinguishable from all the other pneumatically built bold stars inhabiting that spiritual plane. Even worse, she lacks any clear personality that could be accepted as remotely intriguing. There's nothing that differentiates her from the rest of the competition except the protagonist's declaration of her beauty.


The story art supplied by neophyte comics artist Arlanzandro C. Esmeña is of professional, if workmanlike, caliber. A lot of it looks photo referenced, particularly the likenesses of the bold stars. While this isn't as problematic for illustration work, it sometimes produces comics figures that appear flat, posed, and lifelessly static. Indeed the attention to accurate detail tends to inhibit the flow from panel to panel. The line work can be too tight and inorganic in places, particularly in continuously portraying natural-looking facial expressions. In contrast, the cover art he supplies has the grace and understated eroticism missing in the interior art. The pin-up art is mostly supplied by artists who draw in an American superhero vein. Two notable exceptions are Brice Beckham of Mr. Belvedere fame, and Arnold Arre who supplies pin-ups with cartoony, vaguely manga-style, lolicon figures. Not surprisingly the overall results are pretty, and emotionally removed from the subject.

20th Century Boys Vol. 3

It's great that Naoki Urasawa is finally receiving increased attention through Viz's Signature Line. Urasawa is what can be recommended to fans when they realize that they've finally outgrown Naruto*, but can't quiet let go of the idea of a riveting good old-fashioned boy's adventure. 20th Century Boys, concurrently being released with Pluto, is just the kind of cerebral action thriller to appeal to the reader's changing tastes. I suppose that in Japan both manga serials serve as a fond revisit to the past for a certain generation that remembers consuming the works of Tezuka and his contemporaries, but I guess nostalgia for the popular culture of one's youth is a common condition in all post-industrial societies. And manga has been around long enough in the West that there should now be a generation of readers who will be more receptive to Urasawa's charms if they haven't given-up on the comics medium.

The first two volumes of the series were devoted to setting-up the story. Kenji Endō spent a typical childhood hanging out with his friends, building their secret hide-outs, reading comics, watching TV, exploring their neighborhood, and making-up stories about saving the world by fighting evil. But the now-adult Kenji begins to notice a vast conspiracy building around him. By the end of volume two, Kenji fully realizes that a nefarious cult is enacting the idle fantasies for world domination that he and his boyhood friends once dreamed-up to pass the time many years ago. And one of his childhood acquaintances may be the leader of this fanatical cult simply known as "Our Friend".

Volume 3 is the first turning-point of the series - the hero hearing what someone else referred to as the call to adventure. The person who forces Kenji to confront this uncomfortable truth is almost a supernatural presence: A homeless old man whose ability to foresee the future has earned him the name Kamisama (God):


Kenji's initial reaction is to panic:


Followed by an all-night electric guitar session to steady his resolve:


Kenji's actions are built on character development of the previous volumes. Virtually all of his friends that he still maintains contact with have grown-up and now live fairly normal lives. Kenji himself barely remembers his early childhood and has taken over the family business of running a liquor store, which he is in the process of turning into a convenience store. He also acts as a parent to his missing sister's baby daughter Kanna. In short he lives an average, unassuming life. But of all his circle of friends, he still retains the highest reserves of youthful idealism. At one point he became a rebellious rock guitarist. And while he's given-up on his dreams of a successful musical career, it's his love for rock music that he returns to when he makes his choice to answer the call.

"Our Friend", on the other hand, behaves like a twisted version of Kenji's idealism. For as yet unknown reasons he (or she) refuses to let go of those infantile good vs. evil fantasies. He instead chooses to turn them into literal reality. To Kenji's (and the reader's) complete incredulity, he has somehow managed to raise a secret army of totally faithful followers whose membership reaches into the Japanese government. His organization has apparently succeeded in building such futuristic devices such as laser guns and giant robots. The incongruity between the mundane and the fantastic defines much of the overall mood of the volume: When Kenji directly confronts the organization, his look of utter disbelief at their crazy schemes is akin to the reaction of a muggle who has just stumbled into the Ministry of Magic.


Urasawa has managed to fashion his pet themes of childhood, memory, and identity into a sly critique of pop culture nostalgia. He both acknowledges its corrosive power and its capacity to inspire while simultaneously managing to flatter his more mature audience: Kenji is a gawky middle-aged man who possesses as much common sense as anyone, and he becomes increasingly terrified as the story progresses. Nonetheless evil must be vanquished and the world must be saved. So he plays his guitar solo, makes awkward attempts to recruit potential allies, and then sets out into the darkness. Cue the music.

While originally serialized like most commercial manga, 20th Century Boys is constructed as a single complex narrative that constantly transitions back and forth between several time periods. And this is a dialogue-heavy story. But Urasawa's drawings always manage to illustrate a large and varied cast of characters, even managing to distinguish, yet portray as similar, the same character from different time periods. His pacing is compulsive enough that it doesn't get bogged down by the dialogue. In fact it makes for a very compelling page turner.


At the end of the volume, a mysterious Yojimbo-like character named Shogun is introduced. As of yet he has no connection to the events happening to Kenji, but as acknowledgment of the serialized nature of manga and as a promise of future story developments, the character makes a humorous meta reference in the very last panel.
___
*Naruto being a stand-in for any shonen adventure. I could have just as easily mentioned Bleach.

Komikon 2009: Part 2

Bad Timing

Komikon was held at SM Megamall, which is far more centrally located and accessible than its usual site at UP Diliman. But it was also held at the same time as a mall-wide sale was taking place, filling the building to near capacity. While the shopping crowd mostly stayed away from the convention area, this made navigating the rest of the mall a nightmare. In addition, there were two other conventions taking place and using-up the rest of the available exhibition floor space.

One aspect of timing that could not be controlled was that the Komikon took place after the Manila area was hit by back to back typhoons. Gerry Alanguilan organized several Ebay auctions to help fellow artists and other typhoon victims. His efforts were extended to several live auctions at the Komikon. The pieces I did see sold anywhere from ₱1000-5000 (around $20-100).

Syeri Baet, Jonas Diego, Gerry Alanguilan auctioning off an ELMER slipcase

The Komikon was also held in conjunction with the first Philippine International Cartoons, Comics, and Animation (PICCA) Festival. More on the organizers of the event can be found in this article that's very much in the "go team comics" spirit. The only time the two events converged was the announcement of the winners of certain student cartooning contests. Apparently the next festival will be held in Quezon City. No word yet on the venue for the next Komikon.* The event was also the occasion for the launch of The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons written by the academic John A. Lent. He made an appearance at Komikon. This is the only book I'm aware of that sold out at Komikon. The author, who edits the International Journal of Comic Art, was there for a short Q&A session.

John A. Lent

Finally, the event put up a retrospective exhibition of the work of Francisco V. Coching and Alfredo P. Alcala at the far end of the hall. Most of the artwork displayed were reproductions obviously, but there were pages of what looked like original art, including samples of Voltar:


They don't draw like that anymore.

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*Update: the official site is conducting a poll on where and when to hold the next Komikon.

Update: The winners of the Komikon Awards have been posted. The biggest no-show at the event was best creator/best graphic novel winner Arnold Arre - creator of Martial Law Babies. The 2nd biggest overall winners were Mangaholix creators Groundbreakers Inc.

Komikon 2009: Part 1

If the Metro Comic Con is the unholy spawn of Comic Con International, then Komikon, held last Sunday, is the closest the Filipino comic industry has to an SPX. Ever since the collapse of the larger comic book publishers, original Filipino comics have been for the most part synonymous with "indie" comics: the entire industry is still relatively small and tightly-knit enough that the notion of "team comics" could sometimes be felt rearing its head in both events. But within that small community is a wide variety of styles, philosophies, and approaches. For the first time Komikon was held inside SM Megamall, like the MCC a few months back. But because Komikon is more focused on the comics medium, it only took about half the space of MCC. The atmosphere was more low key. The crowds were lighter, and the entrance fee was lower. The occasional cosplayer could sometimes be spotted wandering around the booths, but they were such a forlorn presence, and mostly congregated at the entrance of the convention hall. So there weren't too many photo opportunities. This suited me just fine, as I made far more purchases than I did at MCC.

In this post I'll survey the komiks industry as mirrored by the event.

Big Fish in a Little Pond

There were a number of heavily promoted releases this year. The most high profile of these was the book launch of the restored and compiled version of colonial-era adventure El Indio by Filipino komiks legend Francisco V. Coching. This restoration was a pet project of Gerry Alanguilan for the last five years, and is now being published by the educational organization Vibal Publishing. The story had to be restored from copies of the serialized pages as the original artwork was completely lost. I'm surprised that such a prestigious work is being published in softcover format. Come to think of it, all the books at the event were released as softcovers.

El Indio Booth

The other big release touted by the event organizers was the horror anthology Underpass: Featuring stories written by Alanguilan, Filipino novelist David Hontiveros, and Trese creator Budjette Tan. The book is being published by magazine giant Summit Media, which is why the book is getting a lot more publicity than usual.

Gerry Alanguilan was also releasing two self-published books of his own: The collected edition of ELMER, and a new book Where Bold Stars Go To Die, which is Illustrated by Arlanzandro C. Esmeña. The latter book deals with the brief period of popular skin flicks that were being produced in the Philippines during the eighties. The good news is that ELMER will also be sold at National Bookstore.

Jun Lofamia and Danny Acuña

And if Gerry wasn't spread-out thinly enough, he also contributes some art to a much anticipated graphic novel MAJARLICA: Bayan ng Agimat by Rod Rodriguez, Vincent "Jann" Galino and Danny Acuña. The subject matter and art style are a homage to the kind of mythologically-themed komiks stories that were a widely-read staple in the fifties.

I'm probably leaving someone out, but the other major book releases that drew a lot of attention at the con were the third Trese compilation, and 12 by popular comic strip creator Manix Abrera. I gave the first two Trese books a very mixed review, and I will eventually post reviews of these two at some point. As I mentioned, my pile of purchases was bigger this time around.

Manga Rules

While Komikon's most hyped products were softcovers aimed at the bookstore market (Some of them partnered with established publishing houses), the traditional comic book still exists after a fashion. Mango Comics continues to release a number of comics-centered magazines, including the girl-oriented Mango Jam. They've also revived a few classic superhero properties. Gilbert Monsanto's self publishing effort Sacred Mountain Publications focuses on superhero pamphlets: Its most high-profile project is the creator-owned superhero universe title Bayan Knights. Alamat Comics also publishes a number of Western-style titles. But the slickest and most popular periodical is the anthology-style title Mangaholix Presents created by the studio Groundbreakers Inc.

Mangaholix booth

While there were a few titles that looked like Western-style alt comics, most of the creators selling minis were clearly influenced by manga. Most of them also have an audience developed through a web presence: Kickbackers, M3 Studios, Camille N, Makurai, daMEAT, Meganon Comics, Silent Sanctum,and lambchild are a random sampling of manga-style artists who have deviantART accounts. They possess differing levels of talent, but their stylistic choices means they all labor in the collective shadow of the world's largest comics industry. Their professional futures aren't all assured. And I get the impression that almost all of them are unfortunately limited to the conventional shonen/shojo axis. But their youth, artistic development through online communities, and their fluency with comic conventions absorbed from a different culture, distinguish them from the more established creators raised on printed matter at Komikon.

Loop by Camille N.