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 MangaLife Round-Table: Guilty Pleasures
Written by Barb Lien-Cooper
Here is how this works. Barb has started (yet another) a feature, a round-table. We helped finish it, listing at least one manga or anime that’s a bit of a guilty pleasure, and sometimes why. More is better but I’ll settle for one each if enough of you do it. Then it will become an item for our backlog. So please do it. And the last one, too, about anime music.
—P
Guilty Pleasures in Manga and Anime
Before manga and anime became super-popular, you had to go through a lot of dross to find worthwhile works. Sometimes, you’d find something that wasn’t all that good per se, but you enjoyed it anyway.
The first manga that I read that comfortably goes on that list of guilty pleasures was Caravan Kidd. You simply couldn’t get much manga back when Kidd was published. There was Rumiko Takahashi’s work, Ah My Goddess, You’re Under Arrest, and Gunsmith Cats. Oh, and if you looked around and really scoured the cheap bins, you could find the original Lone Wolf and Cub comics done up as semi-flimsies. That was about it. So, I was sort of pleased whenever I could find Caravan Kidd around the cheap bins. Oh, I will totally admit, it’s not anything to write home about. The art is busy and old school funny. The plot is complicated, but not engrossing. But, as a very derivative Star Wars wanna-be, it still had its charms. The main charm was it was funny. If I looked at Caravan Kidd now, I’d probably be embarrassed by it, but as one of the first mangas I actually took the time to hunt down all by myself (way back in the early 1990s), it still holds a certain place in my heart.
The next manga that I can honestly call a guilty pleasure is a “gothic shoujo” (i.e. a horror manga, but one designed to appeal to girls who like to be scared) called The Bride of Deimos. I have seven volumes of it over on my bookshelf, which tells you something right there. Bride, in some ways, is totally ridiculous. The art is flowery and very 1970s. The plot is just nuts. Deimos, after having an affair with his sister(Greek gods are like that), decides he has to find a kind of pseudo-reincarnation of her to put her soul back into. He discovers a schoolgirl, who he immediately starts crushing on. Almost immediately forgetting his sister lover, Deimos decides it would be so much more fun just to torment anyone who even comes close to his new lady love. Bad things happen to bad people in this manga. It’s a sometimes violent, sometimes even a little sick making, not terribly well written series. Yet, I stand up for it. I do so because it’s a genuinely imaginative, sick, twisted little tale with a strangely moralistic streak in it. There are ten more volumes of Bride of Deimos out there (it was suspended as far as American publication went after volume 7). That saddens me just a little. It’s an unusual manga and I’d like to see how it ends. Then again, I’m a sucker for supernaturally based horror of any kind from Asia, so I’m a tad prejudiced towards any manga horror title.
I can also list Tuxedo Gin on my guilty pleasures list. The reasons I can’t just come out and say I like it are as follows:
1/ It’s very slight. Funny, but slight.
2/ It’s a one-joke concept. Handsome boy with a crush dies and returns to earth as his beloved’s pet penguin. Yes, pet penguin.
3/ It’s pretty well-worn territory of the type that hasn’t been fresh since P-chan in Ranma ½.
Yet, I bought most of the series. As to why, I just thought it was sweet. I liked the characters. I wanted to read a manga with a pretty much guaranteed happy ending. And I liked how funny Gin’s animal friends were (I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you that they just don’t talk, they actually quip!).
Finally, on the manga list, I have to put Those Who Hunt Elves—-or as we call it in my household, Those Who Strip Elves. A bunch of stock characters get thrown into another dimension where, in order to return, they need a kind of mysterious, mystical map sort of thing. The one joke concept is that the parts of the map can only be found by stripping elves naked. Unfortunately for our protagonists, there are a lot more elves than map fragments. So, basically it’s just like Inu-Yasha looking for those pesky sacred jewel shards, only played for laughs and really only just a little fan service. The stories are silly (in the anime, they’re even sillier), such as the one about the cute bear cub who poops toilet paper! As to why I like this silly series. Maybe I’m just impressed that a series about stripping other characters nude is never to risqué, never too much over PG in storytelling or art, never too much T and A. Or maybe, and this is closer to the truth, I’m a sucker for a screwball comedy.
As to guilty pleasure anime, I have two.
Ghost Sweeper Megumi: I saw this anime at the San Diego Comic Convention a year or two before anime exploded on the scene and I thought it was incredibly witty. Oh, sure, it was just your standard chick monster slayer plot with lots of battles and things getting destroyed, but the script had some real joie de vivre to it, so I promised myself I’d see it again someday. I did so a few years back. The art direction was crude, the animation wasn’t up to snuff, and my husband and I fastforwarded through a lot of the fights towards the end. Yet, we enjoyed it almost as much as the first time we saw it. It came down to the writing and voice work. It still had the ability to make me laugh.
The Devil Lady: I cannot believe sometimes that I like this anime. It’s kinda crude, kinda visceral, kinda T and A oriented, kinda…the only word is vile. Yet, I liked it. The story, about a model possessed by a demon, would never run Witch Hunter Robin any competition in the subtle, atmospheric horror department. But the stories were really watchable. I’d say engrossing, except they’re weren’t long-term memorable, exactly. It’s just, when I was watching them, I was totally into them. Until the last DVD, that is. That’s the volume that my husband and I called the “Devil Lady Go Down the Hole” volume. The story tanked—-and she really did go down the hole. But there was just enough to the series that, for whatever reason, I remember it with fondness.
David Rasmussen:
Ah, so yes boys and girls… even animes can “Jump the Shark”!
I can’t say any of my so called “guilty pleasures” are in fact guilty but for one reason or another I just have a spot for these titles these days and like flipping through them from time to time (or maybe one day… cough cough… write a new lesbian erotica fan fic around).
Oh My Goddess! & You’re Under Arrest!
The first is my favorite from Dark Horse (that I am always looking to pick up new volumes of), and the second… well… one of my many sources of confrontation and disagreement with Dark Horse over as I constantly complain about them never doing right by this title.
Aria
Speaking of titles that never seem to be done justice to… hmm… I have to start dropping hints to Realbuzz Studios about picking up manga for their company, like inspiring girl meets brave new world light hearted adventure and joy to read title Aria.
Goofyfoot Gurl
Original first 5 out of 5 Realbuzz Studios title, I still have to get Volumes 2 to 4 (doing that soon) but it’s a little guilty pleasure of mine (though it is totally guilt free).
Blue Eyes
Yes, it’s erotica (but I review erotica on a regular basis so that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows my work background)! The first title I reviewed which proved not all titles with women sporting humongous breasts has to be stupidly done (a common thread in a majority of titles of the “genre”). Still have to pick up the pace and get back to reviewing it soon (like with Volume 3 for instance).
Small Favors
From Colleen Coover (to date the only person in Adult Erotica titles I ever interviewed), there’s just something extra special about this rare gem of a Lesbian Erotica read. Wish they’d hurry and put out Volume 3 already (and Colleen Coover goes and puts out her latest One Shot release).
Nancy Drew
From little known Papercutz. I just got three more books mooched for review so I’m looking forward to checking them out. (I don’t know, but there’s something endearing about a Nancy Drew comic even though I wasn’t totally sold on my first review).
Gold Digger
I have to get back on track reviewing the title, especially since I’m counting down to #100 soon review-wise! I’ve been with it since the “Golden Age” of reviews I did sometime back, one of my favorite 5 out of 5 titles.
Ninja High School
Another 5 out of 5 fave with the closest thing I have to a close associate in the manga industry (Ben Dunn, who has allowed me to interview him several times over the years)! Just celebrated it’s 150th issue last year (moving on to 175).
Right now I’m looking into a few new “guilty pleasures”.
4 Girlfriends (heaven forbid if this is actually the next step in lesbian erotica titles as I haven’t reviewed anything on that front in months on end, and finally I broke down and did my first Yaoi review last month… sigh)
Star Trek Year 4 (before I see Star Trek the Abrams movie)
And my personal favorite guilty pleasure… launching my own erotica manga later this year! (Why? Well… self promotion, of course, isn’t that guilty of something?)
Athena and Alethea Nibley:
“Guilty pleasures” has been interesting topic for us since one day someone suggested to us that anime was a guilty pleasure of ours, and when we said it wasn’t he started to explain what a guilty pleasure was, as if we didn’t know. The point is, we watch most of our anime proudly, without feeling any kind of guilt or embarrassment, until someone comes along and says, “You like that?” Then we get indignant for a while and convince ourselves that that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
But there are two things we might consider to be guilty pleasures.
The first one is Eyeshield21, which is only sort of a guilty pleasure. See, there are a few people (maybe just one person) we know who insist that the only reason we don’t care for sports is that we haven’t watched enough of them to understand how awesome they really are. But the reason we haven’t watched a lot of sports is that they’re just not the kind of thing that can hold our attention (probably for the same reason we have a hard time with movies that have too many action sequences). And so we tell them we despise sports, because those people make us angry. So, being self-proclaimed haters of sports, it’s a little hard to come out and say, “Dude, Eyeshield21 is awesome! I love it with all my heart!” Okay, so we don’t love it with all our of either of our hearts, but we do like it a lot. It just goes to show that when sports have more character interaction than just ramming each other, they hold our interest a lot better. It also has a lot of the things we love in an anime, like people working together for a common goal, and not giving up when things get hard, and blah blah sappy sappy blah. And Hiruma is the best.
Speaking of sappy, our other guilty pleasure is Yu-Gi-Oh. We know it’s not the dub’s fault that this is the sappiest thing we’ve ever seen ever, because we saw something of it in Japanese, and it was still sappy. But it somehow is able to manage all that sap in such an intriguing story, but we can’t help but say, “What happens next!?” and then be forced to not change the channel. And then there was the one scene where the girl was playing (I don’t remember her name) and pulls the Shining Friendship card, and says, “I hope this card is as strong as our friendship, because then it would be the strongest card in the world.” And we’re like, “You’re kidding me, right?” at the same time tears are streaming down our cheeks because we’re so touched. How does it do that?
James Hanrahan:
A guilty pleasure eh? Something I like that others might take me to task for?
Well I like SuperRobots, particularly the "Robot Romance Trilogy" of Tadao Nagahama and the robots of Go Nagai. The properties were designed to be toyetic but Tadao Nagahama managed to inject star crossed romances and Go Nagai tossed in some pretty gruesome action. The shows were over the top with just plain craziness and if there were manga available, then they were even MORE over the top. The robots themselves were practically super heroes and people often spoke of them as though they had their own personalities.
These shows were crudely animated and pretty much just had a "monster of the week" type plot, but they had a big impact on me and I am glad to finally be able to find outlets to finally own these shows.
Oddly, I don't really care for the genres that branched out from the SuperRobot genre; "Real Robots" like Gundam, where the robots are military ordinance, or "Yusha" shows where the robots are like big transforming toys and piloted by happy, brave little children.
I guess in manga my guilty pleasure is continuing to collect manga that have been discontinued over here or trying to find older manga collections via international auctions. I mean all that stuff is old, right? And if it got discontinued over here it must suck, right? Or so people would think. So I guess I would be looked down on for wasting my time collecting these things. So: guilty pleasure there.
In my personal experience, when discussing my likes and dislikes, I most often encounter people who tend to come into two groups:
1. People who rave about some shonen or shojo thing while discounting everything else
2. People who are looking for a deep artistic merit in their manga that they can point at and say that manga are not just funnybooks for kids and nerds from a foreign country nor are they just the shojo or shonen books that the first group is "squeeing" about.
Scattered among these two groups I have had the misfortune (several times) to mention things I particularly like and have heard back from people:
1. But that's old! I can't stand that old stuff. That's before my time.
2. Robots? Really? (specifically anime)
3. Wasn't that cancelled? (specifically manga)
In the face of that, I consider most of my tastes to be guilty pleasures, things others would not consider cool or hip or proper.
Series licensed in the US that I have continued to get through international auctions: Cyborg 009, Cromartie High school, 3×3 Eyes, Club 9 (series ended but last volume not collected), What's Michael, Cannon God eXaXXion, Duck Prince, Eat Man, Lum/Urusei Yatsura, Yotsuba (I'm not holding my breath on this one, I like it too much to wait), Patlabor, Cosmo Police Justy (never collected as a volume in the U.S.), Steam Detectives, My Sassy Girl, Legend of Kamui, Ultra Brothers Monogatari (released here as 'Battle of the Ultra Brothers", never collected), Fist of the North Star, Fist of the Blue Sky, City Hunter.
Most of them are old VIZ publications, some from when they published comic books.
Park Cooper:
Huh, Barb took Tuxedo Gin so I can’t say that...
I guess I’ll say Mars, just because it’s so not what one would think a guy would read, but it was pretty compelling somehow...
I’ll say Gold Digger, although David said it... Gold Digger is just so... never-ending... I mean, storylines end... but... it just never... it’s all the same thing all the time. Some threat shows up, Team Gina are the only ones in the universe who can fix it, it just goes on and on, Team Gina outwits the bad guys a billion times over, but then evil has one more trick up its sleeve a billion times over... and then finally Team Gina outwits evil a billion times PLUS ONE! In your FACE, evil! Annnnd then it almost immediately starts all over again in the exact same way with some other sort of threat. And it’s silly. And... sort of randy. And THAT’s silly. It’s like if Chris Claremont drew cheesecake manga. AND YET... I seem to own quite a bit of the early stuff. All bought from Half-Price Books, it’s true, but... Sigh. Is it still a guilty pleasure if you swore off it a year or two ago? I suppose so, since I listed Mars, which has been over for some time...
I suppose I could list Othello, but I gave up on it... it’s not really enough of a guilt nor a pleasure...
I suppose there’s manga of xxxHolic, but it seems somewhat less guilty now that I enjoy the anime so much...
I can’t really think of any anime series that are guilty pleasures...
I guess I could list Oh My Goddess as a now-given-up-on guilty pleasure... It just got too same-y. One day you wake up and realize that these characters are sort of... already living happily-ever-after, and you can let them carry on with it without needing to watch them do so...
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