Monthly Archives: April 2009

Manga Screening

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Footnote to our roundtable and especially Tom’s fine dissection of Helter Skelter‘s art.

I noted the lack of patterning in the book compared to other manga for women. I meant not the hand-drawn composition of Okazaki’s pages so much as large, flat areas of design. Like the pattern on the dress and tights in this image from Nana:

(Image nicked from Let’s Fall Asleep, a manga & comics blog for librarians.)

The patterns are typically screentones (though I imagine more studios are doing this with computers). Either way, they’re applied, not drawn. (Though at least one artist, Shizuka Nakano, draws with screentone specifically. ActuaBD has a couple of small samples.)

And you can get screentones for just about everything:

Limpid pool and doily patterns:
Clouds and trees:
City at night and magical feathers:

From the Beginners’ Pack at IC, Inc. Pollocky splotches, your family’s tartan, celestial fuzz of the kind that clouds your judgment when you see a really hot girl with bad morals? They’ve got it all.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates, etc., etc., etc.,

 


Oh, shut up.

Via Sullivan.

Drunk College Kids Speak

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I’m sitting outside the 2nd Cup at 2 in the morning and the McGill kids are coursing up and down the street, drunk as cats fed on bourbon. Two college girls are standing a few feet from me, chatting, and a young fellow lumbers out of the Cup and spills hot tea or coffee on the sidewalk, right near their feet.

“Ow!” one girl calls after him. “Ow! That burned me.”
The other girl says to her, and I have no idea why: “These things are going to happen. You can’t, fuck, you can’t take that on yourself.” I think she means her friend can’t blame herself

MR3 Part Too Late: the devil wears lancome

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Firstly, as a non-manga-reader undergoing continuing education in these blog series, I want to agree with Tom that the Okazaki’s artwork shocked and thrilled me at first glance. Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seen, and the thickish lines and largish facial features were much more relatable, for me, than the pin-thin perfect lines i’m used to seeing from our eastern brethren.

When manga characters elsewhere are composed so meticulously and in such delicate detail, it seems weird that their faces and bodies look all flat, whereas here, the flatness is right, cause they’re just shorthand sketches (I think it’s an important connection Tom makes to Andy Warhol: these characters strongly suggest 50s American gag and advertisement cartooning, which is a lot of why they felt so warmly familiar).

Of course, after the initial glow of recognition, Helter Skelter gave me the same problems I’ve had with most manga, namely the diffuculty of telling characters apart and the difficulty of distinguishing men from women. At first, I thought the makeup artist and the ingenue personal assistant turned sex slave turned hitwoman were different people, then I thought they were the same person, then at the end of the book I again thought that they were two people, and the makeup artist was in fact a man (reading Nana I learned to check for neck girth to determine a character’s sex, here that doesn’t work). But, I am still an outsider to the art form, and people have said my characters are hard to tell apart, so.

Like Noah and Tom, divasploitation doesn’t read as particularly feminist to me, or particularly new. Okazaki does a lot of telling-not-showing, in the form of the voiceovers, the quotations, and then the burning-tiger lsd scenes, that she’s getting at something bigger, deeper, more meta, but that part never really intrudes on the divasploitation enough to matter.

It’s funny, though, and probably telling of our different gender-coloured perspectives, that I had a different conviction from my co-utilitarians of where this awfully tired and predictable story was going.

Tom says, “Hana was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu.” Cause I was sure that the cop was just an expositional device and a looming threat, whereas Helter Skelter would really be Hana’s story, the old “innocent, better-than-that girl is tempted by shallow beauty & riches, almost succumbs, but manages to triumphantly turn her back on it in the end” (hence my title). I really thought that’s where the Lancome-loaning scene, in particular, was going. (“No, Hana! She’ll get you hooked on the devil makeup!”)

But even though Ririko does talk about harming other people because she has been harmed, and refers to Hana in that context, she never actually harms Hana in the same way that she herself had been harmed. The makeup scene is actually just about Ririko’s bait-and-switch affections; Hana never gets designer clothes or a makeover, let alone surgery (Ririko encourages her sister to get surgery, but it reads as misguided empathy rather than cruelty). She uses Hana for nonconsensual but mutually enjoyable sex slavery, and for inappropriate errands up to and including grevious assault, but she never tries to remake Hana in her own image.

But that’s exactly what our conquering hero, the detective, does to Ririko. He renames her (it’s interesting how men in literature who set out to objectify, remake and possess a woman often start with assigning her a new name… was Lolita the first or just the most famous example?), stalks her all over and announces they were feathers together in a past life, before (as Noah so powerfully pointed out) tearing down her whole life, ruining her body’s chances of survival, and leaving her no recourse.

He’s as bad as “Mom,” maybe worse, because he’s an outsider who gets to lecture smugly as he objectifies, rather than being down in the beauty trenches (“Mom” reveals offhand that she’s surgically generated herself, so she is harming Ririko exactly as she was harmed). This is a feminist parable?? (This isn’t really undone by the darkly happy-ending epilogue, which goes against all the established rules about the sinister abortion surgery.)

Sigh. I might as well conclude with some more clueless-outsider bitching about manga. Okazaki pays lip service to it’s-bad-to-starve-yourself-to-get-supermodel-thin, but then every default female character has the same figure as Ririko, minus the breast implants and a couple of inches of height. Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves? All the highschool girls we occasionally cut to, absorbing bad values from their fashion magazines, already look like fashion models (the only women with any fat on them, are the women whose fat is integral to the plot). That’s what happens when you draw a whole world in fashion illustration style, and that’s what all shonen and josei manga i’ve ever seen does.

Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms, which who-am-i-to-say are more fucked up than ours, but the good girl who has to be coerced is so not a turn-on for me. (That was one of my favourite things about Nana, even though it has the fashion-illustration crap in spades: it seemed to not share the above sexual hang-up at all. The good-girl-naif is actually shown to be pretty promiscuous in high school, and it’s just not a thing.)

MR3, part 2-c: Helter Skelter by Okazaki (cont.)

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meta-UPDATE:  I analyze Helter Skelter‘s art, with a helpful image bank of the work’s visual characteristics, right … about … here.
UPDATE:  Bill and Noah are agreed that the “To be continued” notice is a joke only. Ah well. The story still winds up in a very odd and unexpected place, the Asada-Ririko connection is not explained (as far as I could tell), and the story is apparently continuing full steam ahead even if the author never intended to tell more of it. So maybe we don’t have a fragment, but, uh, it ought to have been a fragment. Oh, never mind. 
UPDATE  2:  The dialogue in Helter Skelter is quite good, very much especially Ririko’s interview patter and the teen fans’ little exchanges. I have no idea who the translator is, but as well as being a public benefactor he/she has a good ear. 
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A couple of cleanup points.

Given that the plot of Helter Skelter leaves us unimpressed, it’s worth noting that we have only the first half of the book. The first half of a routine action movie, to take one example, might be all you needed to tell that the second half would also be routine. But Helter Skelter has some odd things going on in its story, and during the second half they might have led the book into territory that created an entirely new context for the elements that Noah and I found so trite. Or maybe not. But we are forming our judgments about the story and theme on the basis of a very large fragment, not a whole.
When I say “some odd things,” I mean two things: 1) the nutty police detective, and 2) Ririko’s sadomasochistic affair with her gofer, Hada. The roles of the detective (his name is Asada) and Hada seemed clear enough thru the first few chapters. Hada was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu. By chapter nine my assumptions had all been undermined. The cop wasn’t just a quirky Joe Sensitive with his own intuitive way of getting at a problem; apparently he and Ririko were supposed to share some sort of telepathic connection and to have known each other in past lives. Hada wasn’t just getting stepped on, she was also — how does one say? — getting into the relationship. This second point doesn’t receive a lot of airtime in the story, but stray captions and pieces of dialogue indicate that the erotic power games forced on her by Ririko added up to the best sex of Hada’s life.
To tell the truth, I don’t especially like either development and they don’t seem all that original. They strike me as baroque flourishes of the sort indy films over here use to tickle their audiences. But I didn’t see them coming, and the business with the detective certainly indicates that there’s a lot more we have to learn before we really have a line on Ririko.
The end of the first half, with Ririko still alive and beautiful years after her day was supposed to be done, points up a theme that is certainly present in the book but that I assumed was subsidiary. I mean the theme of the star as survivor who will do whatever it takes to stay on top and will not allow herself to be beaten. There’s a reason Mama chose Ririko for starmaking when there were so many other desperate, homely girls. Presumably, the reason is that Ririko just won’t quit, will not let herself sink. The theme is a perennial in star biographies and divasploitation, so seeing it here is not a surprise. But I assumed the main point was that the sinister beauty clinic had made Ririko and that the end of the story would come when Ririko and the clinic were both undone. Get to chapter 9 and those assumptions are in very poor shape.

Only One Can Wear the Pointy Ears

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My good friend Bryan alerted me to the existence of this, a 1967 attempt at a Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by the producer of the Batman TV show.

Basically, Diana Prince gets berated by her mother for not having a man, then she runs through a revolving wall, emerging as Wonder Woman who (to paraphrase the voice-over by the regular Batman announcer) “knows she has the strength of Hercules; knows she has the speed of Mercury, and *thinks* she has the beauty of Aphrodite!”

It’s certainly something completely different. And I did laugh a couple of times at the sheer unexpected snideness of it.

Ultimately, though, it’s hard for me to get behind it enthusiastically. Part of what was so much fun about the Batman TV series is that the target of the humor was the establishment; Batman and Robin are basically policemen/boy scouts; in all their humorless do-gooding, they’ve got the law and the powers-that-be on their side. The show was a masterpiece of having your cake and eating it too; you get to sneer at the ridiculous dated morality (refusing to drive through red light; refusing to hit women, etc. etc.) while still rooting for that morality to win. Batman’s the show where even cops could laugh at crime-fighting and even hippies could cheer for the establishment.

This Wonder Woman pilot, though…it tries to make fun of Wonder Woman the way that the Batman TV show made fun of Batman…but it’s just not as easy to get the balance right. The main problem is just that Wonder Woman is a woman…and as such she can’t be assimilated to the establishment the way Batman can. Instead, because she’s a women, she’s automatically marginal in certain ways. As a result, making fun of her doesn’t feel edgy or clever — it feels hackney and tired and dumb…and, yeah, sexist too. Jokes about aging unmarried daughters who are desperate for men; jokes about women’s vanity; jokes about women being incompetent…where have I heard *that* before?

For WW humor, I much prefer Darwyn Cooke’s pissed-off 2nd wave feminist version, which makes fun of WW for being overly sensitive and clueless, but also ridicules men for being venal and predictable and generally getting their asses kicked. Gender roles and wars of the sexes can be funny, and often are. But even when it’s written with some wit, I just don’t find sexism all that humorous.

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And as I’ve been pointing out at the end of each of these, this is the latest in a series of posts on post-Marston takes on WW. The whole series is here.

Gluey Tart: In the End

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In the End, by Pink Psycho (Heath & Nheira)
English version published February 2008 by Tokyopop Inc.

Should we all take a moment to chuckle about titling a manporn sort of book In the End? We probably should, shouldn’t we? Let’s do that, just to get it over with. Ha, ha, ha!

OK. Now.

There’s a children’s book I like called The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. It offers a series of facts about things, ending up with the fundamental truth, as it were. You know – my train is big. My train is fast. My train is filled with self-important Republicans from the suburbs, taking up two seats by spreading out their newspapers. But the important thing about my train is that it is late. No, not really. That’s a friend of mine – I live on the south side of Chicago, and Republicans are thin on the ground here. But you get the picture.

Is there a point to this? A manporn point? Well, yes, and thanks for asking. The important thing about this week’s manpornish manga, In the End, is Pink Psycho. Because the plot – oy, vey. Adolescent angst gone wild. The protagonist is so misunderstood, so miserable, woe is him, yadda, yadda. Well, look. I’m willing to cut it some plot slack, but you can either tolerate this kind of thing, or you can’t. High school angst entertains me, especially Goth-flavored. But it is what it is. Assuming that you are not in high school yourself, you probably need another reason to read the manga. Because we are not in deep yaoi water here – it’s not an “I didn’t notice there was no plot because I was distracted by the constant and inventive sex” situation. It’s more of a heavy yaoi-implied sort of thing. (Kissing and implied sex.)

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Looking at this manga, you might assume it was Japanese – the layouts aren’t as polished and effortless as one expects, and ditto the art, but it basically has the right look. It’s certainly trying. In the End was produced for Tokyopop in Germany in 2006, though, and didn’t get to Japan until the following year, when it was released to cell phones. I may be betraying an embarrassing lack of sophistication here (if such a thing is possible in a column about manporn), but – released to cell phones? Anyway.

There is something about the book, though, and that something is Pink Psycho. If you’re like me, you saw the author was “Pink Psycho” and you were filled yea to the brim with a deep and abiding curiosity. I’ll share my own process. “Pink Psycho. I find that vaguely annoying. Who the hell is that? An Australian/Indonesian/European manga group everyone else knows about but me? Is it a band? A band that does manga? Did somebody leave cookies in the kitchen?” There’s sort of an explanation in the back of the book. I mean, it’s an explanation in the sense that a Lean Cuisine is a meal. It offers you something but mostly leaves you craving substance. Although they do tell us Nheira is pronounced “Nahy-Ruh.” Thanks, guys. Also that they drew the manga and are maybe in a band that might be called Nheira. “What the hell?” I asked. Is it a floor wax? A dessert topping?

So I did what one does when confronted with a question like this. A burning question. A question with many vowels. (I mean, really, Nheira. The name has a one-to-one vowel-to-consonant ratio.) I went to the Internet (after I ate a cookie). And while it pains me to boil down so bold and sweeping a story into so blunt a statement, Pink Psycho – Heath and Nheira – is – are – a fluke. A couple of German teenagers who got a manga published.

It’s an interesting story. Or compelling. Or something. I find Nheira kind of fascinating. He wants to be an artist, a mangaka, a visual kei performer (singer, songwriter, lyricist). He moved to Japan to further his career, apparently losing Heath along the way. (Heath filled in the story and pictures in the manga and played bass in a short-lived band – and somebody does need to play the bass.) Nheira is pretty. Which is a good thing, since he mostly draws himself. Pretty, Goth pictures of Nheira. I’m OK with that, too, in an amused sort of way. He’s young, y’all. And you want a beautiful boy to moon over? Oh, yeah.

Heath might be pretty too; I don’t know. I couldn’t find out a lot about Heath. For instance, did he name himself after the bass player for XJapan? I mean, he had to, right? But maybe it’s a coincidence. Anyway, it looks like he still works for Tokyopop in Germany. I wish him well. It’s like he’s my distant cousin or something. What’s he up to? I wonder. I sure hope that gay-ish cartooning thing worked out for him.

OK. Back to Nheira. (It’s OK. I think Heath’s heard that before.) Shyly glancing up through brutally thick lashes? Check. Double-pierced pout? Check check. Tiny, skinny little thing, dressed in those exciting and confusing visual kei Goth rags? Mm hmmmmmm. Jailbait? I think so, or not far from it. I don’t know how authentically distressed he is, though. A guess? Not as distressed as Kaito, his In the End doppelganger. Nheira comes across as kind of sweet-n-shy in his interviews. Did I actually watch online interviews with Nheira? In languages I don’t speak? Well, only two. And they were short. (Oh, shut up.) But as far as being an actual adolescent, I think he’s the real deal. Or within spitting distance. I’d actually kind of prefer spitting distance, since I like them legal, even for fantasizing (that isn’t a universal preference – cough cough, Harry Potter porn, cough cough), but there’s something – I don’t know, cute? – about a manga romanticizing adolescent pretty boy angst that’s written by an adolescent pretty boy, angsting.

On to the art. Nheira needed more time to draw In the End. Which is another way of saying he wasn’t able to make everybody the same size. There are some might pretty panels, but that is the level we’re working at. I liked some of the panels enough to want to buy the manga, but unless money’s no object, you should probably look before making a commitment. Here’s a fun project, though. Go to his
DeviantArt gallery. Go on. I’ll wait. You’ll see LOTS of photos, and you’ll notice that, as I think I may have mentioned, he’s pretty. (Also? You might want to check out his profile, where you’ll find out fascinating personal information, like that his personal quote is “rip it off.” I have no idea. Maybe it’s a koan? And that he likes milk. That actually creeps me out.) There’s some lovely art, too. This is beautiful. So is this. I cannot actually contain my love for those two drawings. Love, love, love. Did you get that? Love.

OK; now, that’s what I’m saying, right? Did you notice he basically draws himself all the time? Huh, I said. I don’t know what it says about his development. Or his marketing acumen, possibly. Because I like to look at him, and – well, check out at the comments on the DeviantArt site. Or his Web site. Or his MySpace page.

Anyway. I got a little acquisitive and wanted to buy his dramatically titled art book, Liberty, Raised Out of Dirt (I mean, oh, my God – it’s fun to say that in a War of the Worlds newscaster voice, though) but not $50 plus shipping from Japan on eBay worth, it turned out. I probably would, if there were more of that Edo-print-looking stuff. Which, by the way, makes sense of the samurai mouth motif on the cover of In the End, which I’d already noticed and liked, although it doesn’t follow through as a stylistic trope in the manga (which is maybe for the best, although I do like to imagine the whole book drawn that way – adolescent angst takes a whole new twist with samurai mouth).
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I’m going to bring it back to Heath, in the end. (Get it?) He was banned from DeviantArt a few years ago. Oh, Heath. But his comments to Nheira remain. They don’t make a lot of sense after you run them through Babelfish (I didn’t! Oh, yes, I did), but they seem effusive. Also, they frequently end with little rows of hearts, which is just adorable. I will not spoil it by drawing any conclusions. I will leave you to draw your own.
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