Monthly Archives: March 2009

Wedge Issues

Posted on by

Like “high concept,” the term gets thrown around a lot. Used precisely, “wedge issue” refers to an issue that opens a wedge between a given party and loosely committed or uncommitted voters. The bill to create a homeland security department (this is going back a ways) contains a provision that’s unfair to unionized employees. If you’re a Democrat, it’s awfully tough to be against the unions. So the Democrat votes against the bill. He’s been wedged!

If you’re a Republican, it’s awfully tough to be against Rush Limbaugh. If you’re not a Republican, it’s awfully tough to tolerate Rush Limbaugh. Fill in the rest.
Limbaugh could recognize how he’s being used and minimize the damage to what is supposedly his own side. Obviously, he doesn’t want to. He’s selfish. But this is the man so many Republicans have admired for so long.
UPDATE:  Ross Douthat spends a few paragraphs explaining how it might not always be a bad thing that a conservative voices anti-Rush thoughts. To a non-conservative, two points jump out:  1)  Rush picks a lot of fights with other conservatives, and 2)  he doesn’t try to start ideas, he tries to stop them. He’s the orthodoxy police. Douthat is reduced to sounding like a Soviet reformer: oh, for “some space in which to experiment a little.” 
From reading the Douthat post and about Frum’s dust-up, it sounds like Rush slaps but no one is allowed to slap back. He can say you’re wrong; if you say he’s wrong, you’re a traitor. How did a movement ever wind up like this? Seeing the conservatives put up with Rush is like watching a grown man pick his nose. It’s disgusting and surprising and you wonder how he can think it’s normal. 

New Favorite Phrase

Posted on by

Via Sullivan. Some Brit columnist is gumming up a fuss because the Obamas didn’t show PM Gordon Brown and his wife a good time. Michelle gave the Brown kids toy models of Marine One, which is the helicopter the president flies around in. The choice makes the columnist angry:

It’s not as though anyone needs reminding that Barack Obama is President or that he has his own helicopter. Short of giving the boys Action Man models of her own husband smiting the evil forces of neoconservatism, Mrs Obama’s gesture could not have been more solipsistic or more inherently dismissive of Mrs Brown.

We must not be inherently dismissive of Mrs. Brown.

wonder woman aftershocks

Posted on by

So, I guess to commemorate Noah’s recent posts, a new Wonder Woman animated straight-to-dvd movie came out. Also, Kate Beaton drew Wonder Woman. I like the seated figure best, both for her speech balloon and her tree-trunk legs.

I’ve gushed about Kate Beaton’s art before, but I’m still amazed how, with such fast-spare lines and zero tones or line-weight variation, she creates the impression that WW’s breasts have weight, and that her swimsuit is supporting that weight. Which very few superhero artists can do (the fact that very few superhero artists have breasts, is, I’m sure, completely unrelated).

How Come That Guy Looks LIke Everybody Else

Posted on by

A few weeks back I posted about the first handful of issues of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. I’ve now read the whole thing (basically; I missed an issue in the middle, I think.)

There are spoilers here, so be warned if that’s a concern.

I don’t think my assessment of it really altered that much. I still found Pia Guerra’s art really bland and boring. Someone who could have delivered on the cheesecake that the book was obviously pretty eager to provide (supposed-to-be-sexy pirates, supposed-to-be-sexy ninjas, supposed-to-be-sexy quasi nuns, etc., etc.) would have added a lot to the story.

Still, if I read the whole thing, I obviously found something to enjoy. There are a lot of nice touches along the way; I liked Ampersand (the capuchin monkey) escaping the ninja by peeing in her face, for example. I liked the way that the escape from the cannibals in New Guinea was completely elided; you see one scene from it and then you cut away and only ever hear about it again in casual back-references. More importantly, Agent 355, the secret society ass-kicker who shepherds Yorick across the world and back, is a pretty great character. I’m not sol overall on Vaughn’s efforts at confronting gender, but 355 is certainly his best effort in that regard — she’s totally butch and tough, but every so often we get these femme accoutrements, like her knitting, or (right at the end) trading her gun away for a dress…or the fact that she has a long term unrequited crush on Yorick (the titular last man). The way she and Yorick grow closer over the five years they’re together is really nicely done; Agent 355 picks up on Yorick’s escape techniques; Yorick learns about fighting from her; both of them gain a shared past and an appreciation for each other’s tics and habits (for instance, Yorick knows that 355 sews when she’s feeling horny — a tidbit of information that takes on additional meaning when we learn that what she’s sewing is his going away present. And 355’s ambivalent relationship to her own violence — she starts out by being reticent, moves through being willing to shoot a young child (though Vaughn cheats here by having her gun misfire) and ends with her seeming to, at least potentially, try to renounce killing.

But though it has its moments, overall the series feels shallow and deeply untrustworthy. Mostly its the plot; the constant, gratuitous cliff-hangers, and the revved up action-drama just never end. At one point Alison Mann (a scientist who travels with Yorick and 355) curses about the fact that someone seems to be pointing at her every hour or so. It’s funny because it’s true; the action throughout the run all seems gratuitous, unmotivated, and ultimately tiresome. Vaughn wants to dish up action and danger every issue, but he doesn’t have the pulp smarts to tie them together in a compelling overarching narrative, nor to come up with really interesting opponents or situations. So you’re stuck with a lot of women pointing guns at each other for no particular reason and endless semi-ironic coincidences. There’s a moment where two astronauts attack each other for a couple of panels and then decide that, oh, yeah, they’re not really mad at each other at all. A lot of the comic feels like that; just action for action’s sake.

You can really see Vaughn’s pulp limitations in his villains, incidentally. They are all boring and cliched as fuck. We’ve got evil scientist, we’ve got crazed man-hating feminists, we’ve got nutso John Birch government hating psychos — who cares?

When he does try for depth or explanation, the results are often even worse. In explaining why all the men died, for example, we get an explanation based on pseudomystical Jungian gobbledygook tied to a series of soap opera revelations (with Dr. Mann playing the Luke Skywalker “oh, no, it’s my father!” role.) Character after character gets a very-special-backstory issue (you know the ones; kaleidoscope of images from their pasts show you the Key to Their Souls). The absolute worst of these — and it is very bad indeed — is that of Yorick himself. Some secret agent ties him up and offers him kinky S&M sex, then almost drowns him. But it’s all an intervention, you see, to help him overcome his death wish. Because he’s just that important that a secret society needs stage his elaborate sexual fantasies for him.

He is that important, of course. He’s the last man on earth! Vaughn talked in his recent TCJ interview about how Y started off as a kind of Penthouse fantasy — the story of the last guy on earth wandering around screwing willing, horny wenches. Vaughn was, of course, saying he had moved away from that, in particular by having Yorick be faithful (for the most part) to Beth, his girlfriend who he’s running across the world to find.

The thing is, though, that male continence in the face of plenty isn’t the opposite of a sexual fantasy. It’s a sexual fantasy, period. Having lots of opportunities to sleep with beautiful women and refusing is a fantasy of sexual and moral potency. The book, moreover, is Yorick’s story; all the men on earth are dead, but we’ve still got to hear about the quest for manhood of one self-absorbed guy. It’s like all the competition was killed just so that SNAG Yorick could get some “manly scars” and have the strength to not fall apart when his girlfriend dumps him. You can almost see the whole thing as Yorick’s apocalyptic rejection fantasy; Beth dumps him over the phone, and so he imagine a world where all the other men are dead (that’ll show her!) and he gets a long submerged romance with a super secret agent…who is tragically killed just before their relationships is consummated. 355’s murder at the hands of Alter, a really stupid Israeli villain, moments after she tells Yorick her real name, perfectly mirrors the manipulative moment at the beginning of the series when the apocalypse occurs right after Yorick asks his girlfriend to marry him. Yorick’s supposed to have grown up over the five years, but the series itself is in the same familiar masculine place, where it’s better to destroy the world than pledge your love.

Luckily for Yorick, the cards are stacked in his favor. He doesn’t have to do emotional intimacy. Instead, he can grow old as the wise, tragic figure, father of the world (via actual fatherhood, and through cloning) who never knew true love himself, dispensing crotchety knowledge to his younger selves. The last issue, which shows Yorick’s sad future and effectively mythologizes him, is a towering pile of monkey shit. The last page, with the word “Alas” scrawled over it, seems to sum up the series; it’s all about “poor Yorick,” a long rationale for a final sentimental male self-pity party.

Having said that…I certainly wish that mainstream comics looked more like this in general. I mean, for all its faults, this is competent genre literature, which reaches out effectively to a broad science-fiction/adventure audience. It’s weaknesses (sit-com repetition, easy sentimentality, cliched cliffhangers) feel more like those of television, say, than the insular clusterfuckery of super-hero comics. The art isn’t as good, but overall I liked this more than All Star Superman. If I’m going to read about the noblest man on earth, I’m happy to have it be somebody other than Clark Kent.

What Is Super?

Posted on by

Noah was looking over All-Star Superman here, and he suggested I post one of my old Superman columns from TCJ. I chose this one, which is a Strunk-and-White attempt to talk about Superman’s meaning. Everybody agrees he has one; I wanted to pin it down and say it straight out. The idea was to talk about heady things while keeping the prose simple. At points the approach becomes jokey, because I think a lot of cultural argumentation sounds silly if you don’t dress it up. I love the stuff, though, and I take my view of Superman seriously. It’s just that, because the subject is so heady, I think any conclusions are especially subject to tricks of consciousness and outlook. When I describe our consciousness, it’s easy to end up describing my consciousness.


So how does Superman make sense to me? I see him as being more an idea than a character. Life in the modern world provokes irritating questions: What good are arms and legs when electricity does all the work and I don’t even know what electricity is?  Things like that. Superman is the answer, not a good answer but we’ll take what we can get. Anyone’s mind has a good deal of lint and crap floating about; Superman is one of the odd little tunes humming around in the skull of modern civilization. He’s there because every day we’re reminded that modern life doesn’t always make a good fit for our brains. 

Noah was explaining how Wonder Woman started as one particular man‘s whack-off fantasy; once the guy wasn’t around, nobody knew what to make of her, and she’s been a whole lot of nothing ever since. Superman has a similar problem, though turned inside out. Everybody gets him, but almost on the level of abstraction. He’s accepted as a necessary concept for making the modern universe seem like it makes sense. But people feel very little for him as a character. Noah and, in Comments, Cole More Odell were talking about all the fuss made over Superman in All-Star. You’d think, given Superman’s degree of fame, that a little fuss about him wouldn’t be a problem. But somehow it is. Talking him up doesn’t work; the praise always has a kazoo sound.

My explanation is that Superman doesn’t matter to us the way we think he matters. He’s a big handsome man with a cape. He heads the longest-running superhero title in history. So, when we dig up important feelings about him, we go looking for feelings about heroism, about Superman’s  absolute wonderfulness as an individual. But he doesn’t matter to us as a hero; he matters to us as a placeholder. He’s a mental stand-in for the answer to a question that we ask every day without ever knowing what the question is. So we can’t get him out of our heads.
Okay, but who’s “we”? Fair enough.
Final note: I changed the lead’s wind-up because the original had a plaintive sound. UPDATE: In Comments, Noah remarks that he posted about the essay when it came out and that he didn’t entirely like the piece. Actually, that was the reason I changed the lead. I think the original had an air to it that suggested I was talking about something sad and dear. That wasn’t the meaning I wanted at all. To compare, the original lead finished up like this: “Without him the universe is not the same place; it just doesn’t look the same, we don’t feel at home.” The new version is right below!
And now:
“Big Red Feet, Mighty Chest”

I got an e-mail with the subject line “Be Superman in Bed.” I knew what they meant. You could say “Play Pool Like Superman”; I would understand that too. Superman would play pool as fast and as well as possible, and everything would be a blur that stood in for the idea of a performance of that sort. Superman is an abstraction that exists because of other abstractions. He exists because of ideas like most, fastest, best. There is some simple grid of measurement underlying our sense of the universe, and Superman exists to represent its top mark. Without him the dashboard doesn’t make sense; we’re lost.

            During the 1980s, New York City began sticking big decal daisies in the windows of abandoned buildings in the South Bronx; the idea was that this way people on the commuter trains wouldn’t be so depressed at what they saw. Superman is the plastic daisy our minds have stuck on the universe. But he’s not there to brighten the place, just keep it from overwhelming us. To switch metaphors, he’s like the little man-figure drawn next to the dinosaur to show us how big dinosaurs were. Superman is the human-scale figure in our mental diagram of reality. But somehow he’s been rigged. No matter what he stands next to, that thing also becomes human scale: not just the dinosaur but also icebergs, moons, galaxies, giant robots—the universe. Superman keeps the universe our size. We need him, but we know he’s a lie; if the universe actually were our size, our stand-in wouldn’t need obviously nonhuman qualities (flight, planet-juggling ability). There wouldn’t be any need for superhuman, just human; there wouldn’t be any need for super.

It’s hard to love an abstraction. A being who is there just to represent the top mark on a universal dial—such a character is hard to warm up to. When DC assembled four writing stars for the landmark milestone Action Comics #850, what the stars gave us was an apology. Supergirl was sulking and had to be persuaded that her cousin was not a stuffy jerk. Which misses the point, because Superman has a fine temperament and a lovely smile. It’s not a question of him personally being cold. I saw him on the cover of a kids’ book of math problems, or possibly it was a display ad for an insurance company. But he was taking off into the air and looking delighted about it, and why not? The reaction was perfectly right for him. He’s agreeable and fun loving; that’s not the whole of his personality, but the stuff is in there. It’s there along with all the other qualities the best sort of personality would have.  You can assume the presence of all of them, whatever they are; they’re implied, and any of them can surface. If Superman flies off looking keen and determined, that suits him too. So the problem isn’t so much that Superman himself is pompous, either in his icon form or as a continuing-story character. It’s that, as a character, he seems like an afterthought to himself. Everything about him is derived in such a straight line from the central premise—this man is super—that there’s not much point to experiencing him.

            In the end, there’s nothing I can prove about Superman. This column may sound like an argument, but really I’m just sorting through my personal lifetime of exposure to a concept. All lines of thought here trace back to the same root: the impression made on me by reading about and hearing about him and by living in a Superman-inhabited world. Personally, I don’t believe Superman’s big, extra dimension is mythic in a Joseph Campbell or world-faiths way.  But I can’t argue against the idea because I’ve never heard the arguments for it. There’s no denying his name is Kal-El, which must be Hebrew for something, and a father sent him to earth. Like Moses he was given up by his parents and raised in exile. The conclusions fall into place and can be cited without sweating the details. I guess there’s something in them, but I’m not sure what. My own background is both nonreligious and without much grounding in literary studies.

I thought I might get the religious-mythic case out of a book I read just recently. But no. It mentioned the familiar items, threw in some newcomers, some others, then argued for a link between Lex Luthor and Aleister Crowley. The book pointed out that Luthor and Crowley look like each other. But they also look like Fred Mertz, so what happens if you’re writing about I Love Lucy? It was all clue picking, Paul-is-dead stuff, and I came away feeling silly and off base. I’d been looking for a treatise and the book had been done for the author’s self-entertainment. It wouldn’t be laying out any arguments.

            I will say that Christianity and Judaism don’t look very super. Elements of their story show up in Superman, but not the defining elements. Christ is most himself when he is nailed up on a cross; Superman, of course, tends to be robust. The Jews are special because God gave them a contract that says they’re special. Whereas being super is biological, in some complicated way that involves ultra-solar emissions; it’s not a contractual status. If you look at how Superman’s story has developed, you could make a good case for Jewish inflections. Rules and precedent come to structure his world, and we hear a lot about the Kandoran exile. On the other hand, you could also say that all the legal clutter was American in spirit, given the way America conducts politics and business.  (Come to think of it, Captain America is very good about paperwork, or he was in a story Busiek wrote for The Avengers a few years back. Of course, Captain America later led a revolt against the government and his head was blown off, so one can debate these things various ways.)

I define “super” as being able to do anything a hypothetical person might want to do with a hypothetical body. Forty or so years ago my brother explained Superman to me. Thinking back to that moment, I ask myself what super would look like to a five-year-old. The above answer feels right; in fact, when I got it, I felt like I’d been reaching around in the air and finally touched something, a hard piece of furniture, and maybe a floor was underneath me someplace. Being super isn’t just being powerful or mighty, and it’s not being able to do anything you personally might want to do (such as scream at people or take things from them). It’s being able to do anything a person might want to do, and the person referred to is strictly man as biological unit, a repertoire of physical and mental attributes: strength, hearing, speed, eyesight, precision, mental quickness. Given that you have arms and legs and can run out of breath and you cut your knee yesterday, what do you want existence to be like? Superman is the answer. When he stops being the answer to that particular question, he stops being of interest. Spider-Man can stick to walls just because his creators say he can. Superman couldn’t. The writers might say Superman could use superfast friction on the part of his palms and soles to attach himself to the wall, and under a given set of circumstances he might do so, but just saying he could stick to the wall because he was super would kill the character.

Michael L. Fleisher put it well in his Original Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes: “Superman’s powers are, by and large, extraordinary magnifications of ordinary human abilities.” The encyclopedia, in tracing through all the Superman stories, shows how his powers developed in straight lines: strong, stronger, superstrong. His heat vision and x-ray vision aren’t oddballs thrown into the mix. They grow out of his being able to see very well; he can see so well that walls get out of the way. I would quibble with one word in the Flesher quote. He says the powers are “extraordinary.” I would go for “limitless.” If you can do anything, which is my view of being super, it makes perfect sense for your powers to keep opening out and out and out, a never-ending demonstration of a principle. The sight of Superman throwing planets isn’t reductio ad absurdum, a corner lazy writers paint themselves into. It’s the point. That’s the sight we want.

            Now, to get very fine, throwing planets is not in itself a classic indulgence. It’s not something you lie back and fantasize about on summer days. Superman isn’t there to live out our fantasies. Having Superman eat a store’s worth of ice cream isn’t any more fun than having him sort a warehouse of mail. In fact it’s less fun, because we don’t want him to be self-indulgent; we want Superman keeping the world on track. Half the time he’s doing something you yourself would not want to do. But when he performs one of his feats, he’s making a point on our behalf: that the universe is still our size. Existence is so built to our scale. With the ice cream or the letters or the forest turned into boards or the billion tons of coal mined in one day, what counts is the blur of hands and the sight of the masses of material being processed, and Superman’s face stationed there with its hard-jawed grin, floating above the activity. The Superman titles spent a lot of years entertaining kids with industrial processes rendered in the dumbest way possible, as one guy working very hard.

  That’s a strange form of entertainment, when you think about it. It’s so specialized it’s freakish. All other superheroes tend to fight, but for Superman fighting is beside the point. By definition, by being super, he is the best of whatever comparison he finds himself in. If he is one of two large men, he is the best—that is, strongest—of the two of them. Starting in the 1970s, when the Marvel way became dominant, the writers have marched up a series of angry bald entities to fight Superman. They’re big fellows, and their anatomies look like jungle gyms made from bowling balls that were welded to other bowling balls. The characters are meant to be scary, but they’re dull. If they could really fight Superman, he wouldn’t be Superman. He would have slipped his job description and become a blob. Instead it’s the opponents who become pointless, a lot of heavy-breathing noise (Galactic Golem, Doomsday) made over a promise we don’t believe in and don’t want fulfilled.

Superman did start out as a fighter, but after a half decade he was branching out into high-speed assembly of dinosaur bones. Pretty soon the fights had reduced themselves to rounds of  “light taps” received by men wearing hats. Superman had found his vocation. He did things like read all the Metropolis municipal archives at once, or transport industrial sites. In 1951 he started with the making of coal into diamonds. (My source for these activities is Fleisher’s Original Encyclopedia. If you ever want a Superman overview, volume 3 is great.) Superman’s role in life is to engage in fussy interventions with immediate physical reality. He’s always imitating a factory or contriving workaround physical setups that depend on him as lynchpin: plug that volcano with that iceberg! He’s like someone stuck fishing rings out of sewer grates, one after the other, endlessly. The saving grace is that he’s super, so the work is never a sweat. Lois Lane watches Superman at work in Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” What she remarks on is his finesse. For a superhero, Superman is a lot like a golf pro.  He has to do things just so, and his triumph is that he can. But we’re all in the same boat. Modern life is mainly a series of contrived situations that we have to fit ourselves to and learn to manipulate: the alphabet, tax law, pill caps. Superman can fit himself to any and master them within seconds. He’s endlessly versatile, and it turns out that’s the key aspect of being super. Even as kids, we begin to suspect that lifting things doesn’t give you as much power as figuring out how to load a stapler or drive a car. If you live in modern society, Superman is your ideal self, or the ideal of that part of yourself suited to modern society.

Those blurry, superfast hands sorting machine parts could be called a kid’s version of industrial activity. But really, they’re my version of industrial activity. I don’t understand how machines work or how soda gets put into millions of bottles. I guess I could, if I thought about it, but in very rough outline and without any direct reference to my own experience. It’s all very abstract. To tell the truth, I couldn’t survive in a world that was simple enough for my immediate experience to anchor me, one where I could walk to the blacksmith’s and get some idea of how he banged horseshoes into shape. I need modern comforts. But, psychologically, modern life is uncomfortable. Enough people have remarked on the problems. Humanity has become so powerful over the past few centuries, but take us one by one and our choices are not really that broad, our knowledge isn’t that great. We don’t feel free, but we don’t feel like we have a place; we’re just hemmed in. We’re kings of creation, but we tend to be sitting around in offices and trying to figure out what happened to us—how did life become this? Huge swathes of existence feel like they’re not there or they’re not as described, like they’re ghosts of themselves. Being a peasant never allowed for great range of activity, but at least nobody was telling you that it did. A peasant could understand his situation, and he knew what his body was for. Whereas, for most of us, the relation between our spine and our hip is a very abstract matter.

            Superman is so powerful, but his existence keeps being turned sideways, equivocated upon, redefined away from what it’s supposed to be. Being a person turns out to be such a provisional, unreal state, at least if Superman really is our stand-in. I’m talking about his great years, the Weisinger period of the late 1950s and the 1960s. When Superman was selling his most copies, he was getting switched around and bounced through versions of himself, worked like variations on a theme. He was a baby or an old man or there were two of him. Batman had done a lot of the same stunts during the 1950s, but they worked better and longer for Superman. Add the Superman robots and it’s like personal identity becomes a devalued concept, starts wearing thin. Having the cape and the chest, or the glasses and the tie, turns out to guarantee nothing.

            There’s my Superman. He’s modernity. It’s what he stands for, and he grows directly out of it. He’s the odd doodle our collective mind drew when the second-by-second experience of modern existence, the way modernity feels, became impossible to ignore. “Super,” the category he embodies, represents the new dimension added to existence by technological development. The most extreme transformations in our physical environment are now produced by means we find unreal and abstract, that feel like they have nothing to do with us; he’s there to bridge the gap.

Like modern existence, he’s best in theory and becomes tenuous and overcomplicated in practice. We think of him as a pair of vast shoulders and a proud set of boots straddling the universe. But when stories have to be told about Superman he becomes an exercise in crosscutting rules or in the spinning off of versions of himself. Or simply in helplessness: Krypton is going to explode all over again and there’s nothing he can do.

            Finally, I’d like to note that reading Superman stories, taking in all that Silver Age lore about the rules of his existence, was my kiddie version of modernity—my starter kit, really. He helped get me ready to function as a member of a modern society. During my Superman years I learned to read, and I got a taste of what modern existence is all about. He explained the world to me. Superman dealt with people wearing suits and ties or engineer’s caps or baker’s aprons. I was five or six or seven and reading about adults out in their world, interacting with each other, and adults are the ones who know. (I remember that, even though Curt Swan was better, I found the old Wayne Boring stories in the annuals more official. They were old-fashioned, which was good: it meant they came from before I was alive.) What I learned about, aside from the absolute safety of everyone from everything because of Superman’s activities, was the central place of technical knowledge. Superman was the most important being ever, and his powers were governed by rules that we had to learn and understand; in fact you couldn’t imagine the powers without the rules. When I was reading Superman, I was getting ready for a lifetime of user manuals and tax forms.

All right, I’m bitter. And I suppose by now I’ve gone beyond a reader’s decent tolerance for fancy views about pop culture. Superman is such a huge fact in our media environment that looking straight at him is unsafe. It throws you into metaconsciousness.

            But at least I have deposed my psyche. Nothing above can be proved, but take it all together and you have some sense being made out of one life spent in the same universe as Superman.

Mangafication II: Osen

Posted on by

Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked.

Then I tried to answer the question, using mangafied Hitler and others from East Press.

Today, a related question: why do adaptations from manga not suck? Or, why do I always seem to prefer not the manga when given a choice? (Short answer: “You suck!”)

Someday I’ll write this all about the Urusei Yatsura TV series and movies, where the math’s Mamoru Oshii > Rumiko Takahashi. Also, Noah’s touched on this with regards to Nana the movie, though I think I’m more okay with Jpop than he is.

Today, Osen, where the math’s TV series > manga. Also, TV series ? manga.

The TV show ran for 10 episodes from April 2008. Kikuchi Shouta’s manga’s still going, with a small chunk scanlated by Kotonoha (my source for quotes).

I saw the show first. On paper, it was made for me: mostly about food, with long, erotic closeups of food. Good food. And fetching actors making said food. Food drama, like, “Oh no! We have run out of the traditional rice straw we use to cook our rice!” The final two episodes hinge on whether or not the makers of the traditional hunk of smoked fish using only the most traditional, labor-intensive methods will survive this modern world. Just the thing to watch on your cel phone.

Aoi Yu plays the lead like a traditional Miyazaki heroine, Kiki or one of the Totoro kids, only with a drinking problem. She talks to the food and pities the tea leaves when they get stewed. Whoever did the music plays it like a Miyazaki soundtrack. It’s all bright and good, and the food O Lord the food. Miyazaki’s food always looks like painted hunks of foam.

But here’s Osen with a scoopful of miso that looks like a fried chicken leg:

I swear I’d eat that whole scoopful right there on the floor.

So the show’s fun, with a nice Jpop theme song, cartoony performances, and eye-candy videography. The televisual equivalent of all-you-can-eat sushi, where the food’s kind of crap but you eat a ton and it reminds you of good sushi you’ve had so you don’t care. Finding out it had a manga source was no surprise, though the source was.

For one reason why, see the first image in this post. TV Osen’s getting trashed with the local toughs; manga Osen’s falling out of her kimono after a long night of getting trashed. (Both Osens like getting trashed, and the show usually starts with a hangover.) She’s got her best drunk-hither look on, and is basically a flirt. Also, her kimono does a poor job of containment.

Kikuchi draws her as an überbabe. Not that an überbabe in manga’s a surprise, but that it seemed so different from the TV series, where Osen’s sexlessly married to the restaurant while her mom, the former proprietress, carries on with eligible seniors.

Kikuchi’s one of those manga artists with quite accomplished, detailed art. He clearly values design for its own sake: his most striking pages are full- or double-page splashes, and note the patterning in this sample. But he also stays on model too faithfully. For instance, Seiji, the head chef, has one expression in every panel. Kikuchi draws it from multiple angles, but the guy’s a statue.

When I read manga like this, it feels like a lot of work to fill in the blanks. You’ve got his line, the character designs, and the story, but very little life in the characters themselves. He doesn’t have to be Milt Gross, but there’s a nonthreatening emptiness at its heart (contrasted with, say, an apophatic art’s very threatening heart).

Which is probably why it works so well as a TV show. Its characters are also drawn in broad strokes– Seiji’s got a spare expression. But they’re incarnated by a person, and watching the actors chew the scenery is most of the fun. Manga Osen’s überbabe perfection– she does bascially everything, and well– is a little easier to swallow when displayed by an actress who looks like she’d die if she ever actually drank a cup of booze.

Or maybe it’s just the food. You can’t eat drawings of food. Photos win every time.