Category Archives: Blog

Mangafication II: Osen

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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.

More Krohn

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Wrote about the little guy here. Now for an interview he gave right after his CPAC talk. The kid is just a trip. “A principled conservatism.” Gets a bit faltery when he has to explain the principles  (something about “for, uh, the people”). A couple of other vague moments, but otherwise seems as poised as a little gadget designed to to give off social noises in front of a microphone for 3 minutes.

All right, the interview, done with Ana Marie Cox and her cellphone, I guess. 
“‘Fun’? I play golf. I do play golf.” And the banjo, now and then. Says his birthday was Sunday, so now he’s 14.
UPDATE:  In his CPAC talk, the standout line was that conservatism is the egg, party is only the shell. But take away the shell, and an egg is mainly goo.  

Limbaugh Slaps

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The Republicans just got whacked hard by the voters. They have to show everyone they’re not a bunch of clowns. So what does Limbaugh do? He bitch slaps the new chairman of the party. In public. He could have straightened out Steele by telephone. But Limbaugh wanted everybody to see him dressing down the one man now in charge of the Republican Party.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.
I guess.  Frum describes rational calculation, selfish but rational. But I can see Limbaugh playing out his little feud on sheer reflex.  If you can push someone around, push him around — that seems to be the wingnuts’ ruling principle. These people are programmed to glom onto attention and self-importance.
Obviously, the feud is good news for the country. In a best case, the wingnuts drop the Republican Party and it breaks apart. In a medium case, the party gets maued-maued over and over and comes across as a crippled entity. In a worst case — there is no worst case.
UPDATE: Via Andrew Sullivan, a funny bit by a guy named Christopher Orr over at The New Republic. Rare to find a liberal who can do clever stuff with words.

I would like to clarify a comment I made yesterday that has caused me untold heartache and remorse. When I described Rush Limbaugh as the “clown prince of the GOP” I intended my words to be understood entirely as a compliment. Mr. Limbaugh is self-evidently royalty in the deepest, most God-given sense of the word–yet he is still approachable, a wise and kindly jester beloved by children and animals. Not like those Kennedys.

I am filled with shame that my words may have been misunderstood, or worse, twisted by those jealous of Mr. Limbaugh. I have been unable to eat or sleep or laugh or enjoy prescription medication, and the hours that my unintended calumny was allowed to stand will weigh heavily on my conscience in the years to come. So let me set the record straight: I formally retract, for the record and without exception, any negative implication that might be inferred from anything I have said about Mr. Limbaugh, and from anything I might say at any time in the future. Indeed, I strongly recommend such “pretractions” to anyone who worries they might inadvertently slander Mr. Limbaugh–especially, though not exclusively, those who hope to work in Republican politics in the next several years.

Rush Limbaugh is the physical embodiment of otherwise irreconcilable gifts: puppies and war eagles, moonbeams and space-based lasers, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Eddie Murphy pre-Golden Child. He is chocolate cake, bacon, and a stiff shot of rye rolled into one, but not fattening. He is a leader not only of his party and this nation, but of the entire Milky Way, which spins reverently about his lordly axis. He is the alpha and omega, the ne plus ultra, the capo di tutti capi. He is America, minus any of the bad stuff.

Forgive me for ever implying otherwise.

—Christopher Orr

TCJ #296

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As Tom noted, The Comics Journal 296 is now available. Bill has a review of Gene Kannenberg’s 500 Essential Graphic Novels and shorter reviews of Aya of Yop City;Souvlaki Circus and Katja Tukiainen Works, Tom has a short review of Neil Gaiman: Prince of Stories and of The DC Vault; I’ve got a long review of a Garfield anthology and Garfield without Garfield, and short reviews of Metamorpho: Year One, Scud the Disposable Assassin, and Meatcake 17. Also Bill and I contributed to the best of 2008 feature. So lots of Hooded goodness….

Ain’t That the Way of It

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Garfield Minus Garfield voices a fundamental truth, again.

I was inspired to do the link by Noah’s review, in the latest Comics Journal, of a big Garfield book and a collection of Garfield Minus Garfield. As you know, a guy named Jim Davis creates (or oversees production of) Garfield and has done so for decades. Lately, a character named Dan Walsh has taken to Photoshopping out Garfield from the strips and then posting the results. Basically, what we see is the strip’s human character talking to himself, and it’s hilarious and sad. 
Noah brings in Jorge Louis Borges, and the two of them nail it:

The point is that the genius here is Davis’ — and it also isn’t. Borges has a short essay in which he argues that Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was greater than anything either could have done alone. “[F]rom the lucky conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and an English eccentric who explores Spanish and Oriental texts… emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither of them.” Something like that seems to have happened here as well. Davis is an aesthetically dicey mainstream cartoonist; Walsh is a wannabe rock-and-roller who never hit it big. Together, though, they are, as Borges said, an extraordinary poet. Erase Garfield and you are left with a Davis who is just the same, only funnier.