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 What I'm Looking At, Late October 09
Written by Park Cooper
Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, v5
Viz Signature
Oh, Naoki Urasawa, is there anything you won't draw? 20th Century Boys is a very strange manga. I almost typed COMIC...Because that's how strange it is. When a bunch of kids were young, they had a secret club. In the clubhouse, there was a little story they wrote about how the club, at the end of 1999, would rise up and stop the end of the world. Years later, grown up, they notice that certain terrorist acts are happening-- which are exactly like the signs that their little fantasy foretold would signal the end of the world. Someone who read that book-- one of the friends? One of their childhood enemies?--read that little story, and decided somehow to make it come true. In volume 5, we get a really good idea who exactly is behind all the bombings, and the plague that's started killing off sizable numbers of the world's population... because it's the end of 1999, and the end of the world is here. A giant robot (no, seriously, I'm serious) is spreading the plague through Tokyo, and it's up to the grown-up Friends to destroy it. And then... we STOP that story, and we pick up 15 years later... in 2014. The world is getting more and more fascist... by fighting the end of the world, did the Friends actually play right into the hands of someone's master plan? It sure as heck feels like it. ...I'm torn about 20th Century Boys. It feels like The Little Rascals meets Watchmen with (as of the second half of volume 5) a little bit of Half Life 2 or Deus Ex, all drawn by the guy who did Monster (now on SyFy!). What the heck? I'd read volume 6 to see what happens next... and yet, I don't actually want to go back to the previous 4 volumes. A surprisingly Western-feeling story from Viz Signature.
(The Strongest Bride on Earth) Sumomomo, Momomo v2
Yen Press
Okay, I'm still interested. Although most Americans can't handle the truth regarding the level at which Japan finds panty shots and other related elements of the World's Strongest Bride's attempts to make herself sexually appealing for her legalistic fiancee delightfully amusing (it does help a little that those attempts always fail horribly), this title continues to make me chuckle repeatedly while reading it. Always in spite of myself, mind you, but it does. In this volume, for example, the Bride and her new rival from another family are getting really samurai-old-school-talking amongst themselves... meanwhile, both of them are ignoring their love interest, Koushi, who's wriggling like mad in order not to be eaten by the sea serpent/eels he's dangling over (he fails, of course. They bite the heck out of him). See what I mean? Stupid. Juvenile. Yet amusing. Again, in spite of myself, I must say that I would read volume 3 if it came to my house.
Samurai Executioner v4 and v8
Dark Horse
How good does Samurai Executioner continue to be? Very, very good. So good I'll review it even though no one sent it to me-- I merely checked it out from the library. Therefore it is solely pride, not duty, that leads me to comment on S.E. once again. Pride, I say, that a human being can write this well. As is my wont, I also read some of the best stories to Barbara, who also was, in turn, awed by the power of Dear Old Samurai Executioner's Creative Team (extra kudos to the writer, in my opinion, Kazuo Koike). In volume 4, Yamada, our executioner associate proposes marriage. Can you believe it? He also makes a very kind gesture to a condemned female prisoner... uh, those are two different stories, though. Learn of the horrors that happen when the government experiments with cancelling executions to save money. Enjoy volume 8's story about why a man can't just become the masked spirit of justice in a city just because he has the power and the authority, and contemplate what it says about superhero comics (completely coincidentally-- I don't think Kazuo Koike was thinking of Batman when he wrote it. I think). Read how, also in volume 8, Yamada shames a killer into killing himself, just through a few well-chosen words about honor. BECAUSE YAMADA-SAMA IS HARDCORE. Believe it. Read it.
Toxic Planet
Yen Press
Okay, this takes a little explaining. Toxic Planet is apparently French in origin. It is not, by my definition, manga. The artwork is more of a western comic strip style, as it is indeed a comic strip, probably a webcomic, since it's in full color inside. Here's the concept: in the near future, industrial pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks, even indoors. (Well, grandma likes to leave hers off indoors sometimes when the air purifier is running, but the others find this to be a sick and unhealthy idea.) The point is to show the extreme to which the culture is headed, an "oh well, what can you do, that's just the way things are" mentality about trees being something you read about in museums and so forth. The problem is that there's not much character development or even any other source of humor-- every page works this one concept of environmental black humor, and it gets preachy after two pages. Still, Yen sent it to me, and the other MangaLife reviewer felt like "it's not manga," but I felt like, what an American manga publisher chooses to publish in the field of sequential storytelling is arguably worthy of note, if nothing else. Still, while I got all the way through Toxic Planet, it wasn't exactly fun, although, again, that's more the fault of the high concept the creator decided to go with than the art or the translation. Toxic Planet is about 140 pages for 12.99.
Cirque du Freak v3: Tunnels of Blood
Yen Press
Well, good news, bad news. The good news is that this volume of Cirque (coming really soon to theaters in the form of a very garish-looking live-action movie) is the best yet. The bad news is, that only puts it at "solidly better-than-average teen vampire fare." On one hand, that means that by volume 7, if the improvement continues at the exact same rate, it'll become the best sequentially-told teen vampire story ever published. On the other hand, one has a feeling that it'll level off somewhere before we get to that lofty height. Still, I'm enjoying the series as far as it goes. The story of Darren Shan, who happens to have the same name as the author, the cocky and fairly clever young half-vampire, continues as his mentor decides it's time to leave the Cirque du Freak for a while and learn the rules of being a vampire in the urban world some more. Darren's pal Evra the snake-boy comes too. Darren also gets a human girlfriend-- which is a problem when another monster threat imperils the city they're in. Can Darren save his friends and friendships... thereby ending his zero-for-two history in that department? You'll have to read it to find out... While still a little hokey sometimes, the manga of Cirque du Freak is slowly getting to be a better and better read... indeed, I cannot imagine myself getting nearly as much out of reading the prose series this is based upon (especially now that I'm seeing ads for the movie). It doesn't quite feel like a manga as far as the writing and pacing... but MUST EVERYTHING feel like manga? Manga, in general, has its own moments of hokeyness too, especially in the vampires-for-teens field... This is entertaining enough that I feel that the target audience will probably welcome it gladly.
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