Category Archives: Roundtables

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.

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

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It looks clear that I liked Helter Skelter more than Noah or Bill did. (Me here, Noah here, Bill’s first here and second here.) Apparently, the big difference is the art. Noah and I agree the fake beauty/diva-bitch material is pretty tired; Bill is more indulgent toward it, but a good deal less enthusiastic about the book than I am. At any rate, Bill tells us that “the art lacks the patchwork quilt of pattern common in girls’ and women’s comics.” That surprises me. From what I see, patterning runs thru the book like an electric current; maybe manga art delivers more of a jolt to newcomers. But before I get tangled in cheesy metaphor, I’d better back up and address my subject as a whole.
I want to write about Okazaki’s artwork and especially her page design. In my last post I talked about the high probability that she intended Helter Skelter to be a visual blast on the order of the sonic blast delivered by the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” Everything is taken to a high pitch, hysterically high. The epigraph sets the tone: “A word before we start: laughter and screams sound very much alike.” 
The book, according to my theory, is supposed to be a shocker but one that doesn’t count on a simple bludgeoning of the audience to get results. To quote myself, it’s “an example of high-style assault, of art that uses velocity, technical skill, and shock to impose itself on the audience. You have to be very good to pull it off, and Okazaki does.” What do I mean by all that?
I mean those pages move fast and they take a lot of hairpin curves. I’m talking about layout and page design here. The eye isn’t wafted from panel to panel; the eye has to hang on like hell. On a given page, the eye will go thru zigzags and ups and downs and bounce its way from the top of the page to the bottom, and then on to the next page and the one after.
But when I say the eye has to hang on, it’s more like the eye doesn’t have a choice. Do a middling job of roller-coaster page design and it’s easy enough to look away. Do a first-rate job, one where all the panels and visual elements lock together, and looking away gets ruled out. The reader is in for the ride and it’s a blast. At the same time, Okazaki varies the eye’s pace: the densest page will have panels that open up some space, a little here, a little there, sometimes an unexpected gulf of sky in the page’s upper left or right. But then the gulfs create offbeat page balances that also pull the eye. Okazaki lets up, but then she’s right back at you.
Let me underline a point. There are different kinds of speed in comics. Most manga, from what I hear, features biggish panels and smallish word balloons and therefore moves at a good clip. The speed achieved in Helter Skelter is different because it involves so much eye movement per page. You never float, you zip. And you’re intruded upon; in a way, you’re interfered with — your eye gets runs ragged and there’s nothing you can do about it. Not that that’s a bad thing, or at least not here.
Underlining a second point: this isn’t just a case of speed metal play it fast, play it loud, and run down whoever’s in front of you [Noah says a lot of speed metal is highly crafted. Ah well]. Without Okazaki’s high degree of technical skill, the pages would be reader repellent. The Beatles’s “Helter Skelter” is similar. That is one loud, fast fucker, but it’s also a highly designed fucker. I’m no music expert, but anyone can hear the song’s variations in texture.
Moving on. I mentioned that the eye gets intruded on in Helter Skelter. Visually, it’s a bitchy sort of work, bitchy toward the reader. You’re always getting jabbed and needled. Here we get into the patterning mentioned above, into visual texture.  Helter Skelter works with right angles and straight lines, with grids and needles. There’s a shortage of gentle curves; the only softness in the book comes from the round, blurry street lights that surface in the smaller city-at-night panels. Mainly, the book’s curves get yanked into long stringy lines or segregated as pure circles, banks of them to go with the banks of squares and rectangles. These banks, the gatherings of hard-edged geometric shapes, keep popping up in different sizes and configurations thru the book. When I was talking about electricity up above, they’re what I had in mind. It’s not just a matter of shape, of course. Black and white are played for high contrast, crowded together in checker patterns. 
Finally, I have to agree with Noah that Okazaki is good at drawing bodies (well, he cited Ririko’s body only, but I’ll extend matters a bit) and not so good at faces [Wait, he says he does like her faces! Well, that’s his problem]. In fact I would say her faces are not good enough; at their worst, they remind me of a drawing I once saw of a shoe that Andy Warhol did as a young freelancer.
All right, some examples of what I mean. Let’s start with Okazaki’s visual repertoire. 
String:
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Grid and needles:
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Circles and grid:
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High-contrast black and white:
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 The whole visual scheme condensed (we even have the stringy lines, what with the way the tower curves):
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Now layout. An example of a very dense circuit:
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And it’s only one part of the page. Take a look:
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That page is high density, even by the book’s standards. Here’s a medium-density page:
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And down a notch (notice the low-freight middle panel; the lack of detail allows the page to move):
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And now opened a lot wider. It’s also a good example of the missing-calligraphy factor. With the calligraphy there, that central panel’s void would lighten the page, not empty it:
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And, by the book’s standards, pretty damn wide. You’ve still got the dense grids to liven up and anchor the page:
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Now some bad caricature. Dig these shoe faces:
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But it’s not like Okazaki is a page engineer who doesn’t know how to draw. Buildings, bodies, etc., are great. And though she doesn’t go in for heavy detail, she has a knack for the right detail. My example is this dream corridor. A weirdly configured hallway is not the most original item in a dream sequence, but I like the way Okazaki gets this one on paper. The image appears just twice in a very busy book, but she’s taken the trouble to rig the details so that perspective gets thrown off in a few different ways:
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All right, e-frigging-nough. I’m out of here.

Diana Sue

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In comments a couple days back I was encouraged to check out Bluefall’s series on Wonder Woman When Wondy Was Awesome. I didn’t read the whole thing, I must admit, but I poked about a bit here and there, and did read through her post on the book League of One, which I read and reviewed earlier myself here.

Bluefall’s certainly an entertaining writer and an attentive reader. She makes a strong (though to me, not convincing) case for League of One being something other than a complete piece of crap. For example, she has a nice point about WW’s attentiveness to relationships:

Diana’s plans, on the other hand, rely entirely on the League’s greatest strength, on her assumption that her friends will look out for each other. She’s able to defeat J’onn and Kyle because they trust her; she gets Clark out of the picture by forcing him to rescue their friends. She’s able to launch the League into space in the first place because she knows they’ll be okay. He plan succeeds because she sees things in terms of relationships and reactions, rather than individual physical traits.

For me, unfortunately, this is largely vitiated by the fact that all the relationships in the book are both unbelievable and vapid; it’s not especially impressive to be able to parse interpersonal dynamics when all your interpersonal dynamics basically consist of bland corporate boy scouts declaring allegiance to one another (except for Batman, who, you know, is dark because he uses reverse psychology.) Not even bluefall’s quixotic insistence on referring to them all by their first names can convince me that these badly painted figurines have any inner lives not imposed by front office dictat. Still, I guess the book should get points for the earnestness with which it attempts to move the corpses about in a lifelike manner.

What I mainly took away from reading these posts is that bluefall really likes Wonder Woman (or “Diana”.) That’s a big part of how she reacts to WW comics, it looks like. That is, she knows she likes WW, and she judges the comics to some extent on how well they live up to her image of what Wonder Woman should be. For instance, in talking about John Byrne’s run, she commented that she liked the way that Byrne made Diana as powerful as she should be relative to other characters in the DC universe.

I think this is maybe part of the reason some of my posts have rubbed some WW fans the wrong way. Because, the thing is, I really couldn’t give a pile of kangaroo-horse poop (to cite a creature indigenous to Paradise Island in Marston’s run) about whether WW is as powerful as she should be, or about whether she’s as noble as she should be, or whether she behaves in character, or out of character, or is depowered and dressed in white, or whatever. I love the original Marston/Peter run, which I think is one of the few truly idiosyncratic works of art to come out of the super-hero genre. And it’s fun to see other creators try (and largely fail) to deal with the bizarre thing Marston and Peter created. But I don’t care if creators get her “right” except insofar as they tell a story that seems worth reading. If you can tell a good story making WW able to push planets around, that’s fine; if you can tell a good story making her only slightly stronger than Etta Candy, that’s fine too (Marston probably did both of those things at some point.) If you want to make her impulsive and eager to hit people and that works, cool; if you want to make her preach peace and love and you can get that to work, more power to you (I suspect Marston did both of those things as well.) I don’t like most of the WW stories I’ve read by folks other than Marston because they’re boring and dumb, not because WW isn’t sufficiently noble or iconic or whatever. In short, I’m not a fan in the usual sense; at least not of the character.

I don’t necessarily have anything against fans…or even against fan fiction, which is where this kind of investment in a character abstracted from a particular story tends to lead. I haven’t read a ton of fan fiction, but there is some of it I like quite a bit. Some of it I really don’t want to look at, but that’s just personal preference, not an aesthetic line in the sand.

Still, I think super-hero comics do run into a problem with the fan-base…that problem being that there isn’t in fact a canon. The WW bluefall likes isn’t the Marston/Peter WW, which is old and embarrassing and weird. It’s not really the Silver Age WW either, which was embarrassing in different ways; nor is it really the modern day WW, who, after all, bluefall tends to judge against an ideal, and often to find wanting (the swimsuit, for example, would be ditched if bluefall had her way.) And I think that’s all fairly typical; the ideal WW that fans enthuse about is…an ideal; it’s not an actual character or version of the character, but rather some platonic vision of the way the character would be if the perfect writer wrote her, or, I guess, if she were real.

The thing is, when you unmoor the character from any actual creative team, you drift into one of two problems. On the one hand, you end up with stories written by folks who don’t care about the character and don’t really have any idea what to do with her…and WW has certainly had that happen to her over the years. On the other hand, though, you can also end up with stories that are just devoted to showing how wonderful the character is…and WW has had her share of those, too. In fact, that seems to be the whole point of “League of One”; it’s aggrandizing fan scruff for WW fans who want to be assured that WW is just the awesomest there is. See, she beats the whole Justice League! And she beats a big bad dragon because she’s so much purer than everyone, even Superman! She’s so good and brave and awesome, just like WW should be! (Bluefall does object slightly because the script intimates that Superman could actually beat WW in a fair fight, which bluefall feels is wrong because, I guess, nobody can beat WW, damn it. But since WW beats Superman by trickery anyway, bluefall is willing to let it pass.)

In short, with no agreed upon canon,there’s a strong tendency for the character to drift towards that bane of fan-fiction, the Mary Sue. Wikipedia has a good definition:

Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as “Mary Sues” is that they are too ostentatious for the audience’s taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the “Mary Sue” character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an “author’s pet”.

Mary Sues are, as I said, usually created by fans…but everyone writing WW is pretty much just a fan at this point, the original creators being long, long gone and their concept in most respects abandoned. In any case, there’s a self-conscious reiteration of, well, wonderfulness in League of One that is extremely tiresome, and which is a consistent though less discussed aspect of super-hero decadence. At its core, League of One isn’t all that different from Marvel Zombies. The second is characterized by desperate desecration, the first by desperate consecration. But both are more interested in the act of burnishing/befouling the icon than they are with telling a story. (Which, come to think of it, is what I said about All Star Superman, now that I think about it. And, of course, I was right then too!)
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Incidentally, this post is part of a series on WW’s post-Marston iterations. The entire series is called Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle and you can see all the relevant posts here.

Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part 3

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This is the third in our roundtable on Kyoko Okazaki’s classic 90s mana Helter Skelter. Bill’s appreciative opening discussion is here; Tom’s enthusiastic post is here. Which leaves me being the sole irritating voice of cantankerousness (unless Miriam, up tomorrow, also has a more skeptical take.)

I should first say that as we were working this roundtable out, Bill commented a couple of times that he’s not as familiar with the background and intellectual milieu of Okazaki and her manga as he likes to be when he writes about an artist. That kind of cracked me up…because, good lord does Bill know more what he’s talking about here (or just in general really) than I do. I’ve read some manga at this point, and I’m definitely fascinated with Japan and its history but…the state of feminism and/or the fashion industry and/or body image in Japan in the 90s? I mean, I know nothing.

Not that I’ve let that stop me before. And, having expressed all those caveats, I do have to say that even though I don’t know the world that Kyoko Okazaki is coming out of, the manga she’s written is awfully familiar. Admittedly, it’s not much like other shojo stories I’ve read — it’s not girly or sweet or frilly; there’s little interest in clothing design (kind of ironic (and probably intentionally so) for a comic about fashion); there isn’t a lot of patterning or intense detail work. Instead, Okazaki draws outlines filled with mostly white space — it looks like the inks for a color comic book, rather than the fully realized art for a black and white one. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of width variation either, though (as Bill notes) the lines are certainly mobile, especially when she renders faces. Overall the effect if of energy and expression surrounding a blank; the world she creates seems more like a mask placed atop a hollow. I can’t say her style transports me, exactly — the lack of contrast and variation ends up being a little monotonous and prevents anything from really popping…though when it does it can be striking:

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That’s a creepy image; the elegant line follows the frankly sexual contour, but also frankly flat; those lips look like they crawled onto her face and died. She captures a repulsion at artifice and beauty; a sense of a gorgeous surface covering decay. So…yeah, I definitely appreciate her skill, and the care with which she has matched her visual style with her themes.

(Part of the reason her work looks so different from shojo is, a commenter notes, because it’s not shojo, but josei. See what I mean about not knowing what I’m talking about?)

Unfortunately, as I said, while the art is distinctive, the themes themselves, and how she handles them narratively, aren’t nearly as idiosyncratic. Basically, this is pretty much divasploitation (to coin a phrase), all about admiring/deploring/getting off on the personal idiosyncracies, tragedies and sexual peccadilloes of a fabulous larger-than-life female icon. It reads like Valley of the Dolls, or a Paul Verhoeven film — shocked disapprobation concealing a knowing leer, and vice versa, in a gleeful orgy of camp hypocrisy. On the one hand, the manga wants to satirize the shallow celebrity culture of beauty and fame, suggesting that the model agencies use the glands of children (an old sci-fi staple) to transform ugly girls into perfect starlets…until the treatment fades and outer decay starts to mirror inner corruption. And yet, even as it gestures at exploding the beauty myth, it revels in it; Ririko (the main character, pictured above) is in fact, fantastically attractive with an otherworldly beauty that allows her to virtually mesmerize those around her. On the strength of her mystical attractiveness, she seduces her (seemingly straight) make-up artist Hada-chan and Hada’s boyfriend both, using them for sado-masochistic thrills and eventually sending them off to toss acid on the face of a romantic rival. Ririko keeps saying that these acts of despotic eroticism are pleasureless or boring…but surely these disavowals serve only to intensify the verisimilitude of the S&M for the reader’s voyeuristic consumption. The whole thing just seems tawdry and overdetermined — the manga fashionista equivalent of an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”

Bill argues that Helter Skelter’s jaded take on celebrity was unusual in Japan, and that the exposure of the corrupt underbelly of the fashion industry was at the time a feminist statement. That may well be, but…the book is very, very hard to read as a feminist statement in our cultural context. It’s true that Ririko is a powerful woman of a sort…but she’s corrupt and cruel, and moreover, her body is actually falling apart form the plastic surgery. The horror movie imagery, and Ririko’s monstrous fascination and cruelty, ties the book, in my mind at least, to horror movies like Carrie, with their not-especially-feminist anxieties about female bodies and female power.

Not that Ririko (or Carrie, for that matter) is wholly unsympathetic; her backstory is sad, and you can see why she wanted to be rich and famous. But object of pity isn’t any more liberating than object of (even admiringly pleasurable) loathing. Moreover, the moral center of the manga is a man — a police detective who is trying to shut down the evil plastic surgeon. The detective is smart and determined and he sacrifices his career to end the surgery; he is presented as admirable and clever; certainly nobody in the manga ever makes any explict case that he’s a creepy shithead. And yet, to this reader, at least, a creepy shithead is what he manifestly appears to be; he essentially stalks Ririko, muttering about their deep connection and past lives and blah-blah-blah; his efforts to shut down the clinic doom the women who need repeated treatments to keep from decaying. The book, though, as I said, seems firmly on his side; the tragedy of the abandoned, decaying women is presented as one of those things, or maybe even their fault. Certainly, the crime is never laid at his doorstep; he’s just the good patriarch, out doing his duty by saving women from themselves…or, you know, not saving them. Who really cares? He made his superiors angry at him, damn it. What more do you want from him?

If I encountered this in the U.S., in other words, I’d assume it was technically accomplished, intellectually shaky, duplicitous exploitation schlock, using “big issues” as a cover for titillating sleaze and gore, and hypocritcally sneering at the marginalized groups it fetishizes. Not as good as I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45, better than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Basic Instinct. I’m willing to accept on Bill’s say-so that in context it was a pioneering auteurish blow for feminism — but I don’t think that’s how it translates.

MR3, part 2: Helter Skelter by Okazaki

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MR3 stands for Manga Roundtable 3. We did one on Manga: What Is the Point?, another on YKK by Ashinano. Now it’s our third and we’re doing Helter Skelter by Okazaki. Bill did a free translation of the title and came up with his own freehand version of the title, namely “Blistered Fingers,” which I like better. But since I find the work a bit alien and baffling, I’m going to keep things simple and stick with the original title. It’s a clue and I need clues.

I admire Helter Skelter a lot. As lines on paper, it’s exceptional. As words, well, maybe not so much. But the comic’s layout, drawing, and use of black and white are beyond admirable. All right, not the faces, and good caricature would have been useful for this work. There’s still a lot to look at.

Bill and I talked a bit about how trite I find the book’s theme (look at that hot girl! her values are terrible!). The thing is, I’m willing to buy the theme because it comes with the package. That’s how much I like everything else about the book. I see Helter Skelter as an example of high-style assault, of art that uses velocity, technical skill, and shock to impose itself on the audience. You have to be very good to pull it off, and Okazaki does. I think that even though I read the book, naturally, in translation. The words chosen were not her own, and her high-design pages had to function after having a fleet of prominent design elements — I mean the calligraphy — ripped out and replaced by little piles of English words.

Okay, about Helter Skelter as an exercise in style and shock. In Comments to his post, Bill made this point:

The title’s just “Helter Skelter” transliterated in the phonetic characters used for foreign words. It’s the same as the song.

So Okazaki didn’t use some Japanese word similar in meaning to “helter skelter.” She meant the song title. I would guess she wanted her book to have the same feel as the song; it’s not so much that the Beatles song states some theme or connects to some event that she wants to reference. She’s just telling us that reading her comic will be like experiencing the Beatles song. So, if that is the idea, she’s making a bold claim.

I imagine the comic as being a sensation when it came out. This is all guesswork, but Okazaki appears to have been popular and to have been very distinctive, maybe out of step with most other manga artists aiming at the same audience. I take her audience to have been teenage girls, since Helter Skelter was serialized in a teen-girl magazine 20s-chick magazine. [my thanks to Xavier for the correction. I’ll note here that Bill says the magazine in question has a fashion bent] According to Helter Skelter, and most other sources, teen girls young women who care a lot about celebrities and fashion tend to be on the lookout for sensational new events and personalities to get excited about.

Helter Skelter may have been meant to hit them like a bomb, the way the song hits listeners. The sex scenes (in a kids magazine? no! but those scenes are still, what is the word, a bit nasty), the carving up of bodies, the characters’ default bitchiness and cruelty, the wild surrealism (Bill references it as “the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over”), the way the plot veers at the end … and all this was for kids [no! girls in their 20s].

Another shocker, for the audience in question, would be the theme. Here I’m taking Bill’s word. From the ’70s on we’ve heard a lot about the hellishness of messing with your body so you can look like a model. Bill says the case is a bit different in Japan and that Okazaki’s theme in Helter Skelter was something new for her readers.

The sell-your-soul/vanity-vs-natural theme is all thru Helter Skelter, over and over. Subtle it ain’t, and I don’t see Okazaki adding anything to the idea; if you’ve read a few magazine articles in your life, you’ve probably come across what she has to say. In a way, Helter Skelter is like the world’s most badass Ugly Betty episode.

Still, being the world’s most badass anything isn’t easy. Okazaki did it thru using powerful skills in subtly aggressive, unnerving ways. Which means that now I’m going to talk about her artwork. Or I will tomorrow … hope you tune in.

Update: Noah’s take is here

Update 2: Noah and I agree about the story’s triteness, anyway. A Helter Skelter haiku:

Look at that hot girl.
Her values are terrible.
Keep looking at her!

Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part I

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Our latest rountable, the subject of which you can read in Book-Off without paying or just find the scanlation on the web. I recommend the first.

Kyoko Okazaki, still recovering from the car wreck that ended her career, plastered “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on one of her books. It wasn’t Pink, the work that made her name, which features a girl who buys brand goods in her favorite color by selling her body. It wasn’t her last book Helter Skelter either, though the Stooges would fit it better than the Beatles.

Helter Skelter, serialized in FEEL YOUNG in 1995 & 96, follows Ririko, a model and “talent,” as the Japanese call their starlets (without irony). You get new models like sushi on the kaiten. They pose, pout, squeal. The lucky ones marry their managers; the unlucky are disappeared on their expiration date. Everything’s managed by a paternalistic network of talent agencies. It’s quite efficient, as if Hollywood applied kaizen, Toyota’s art of continuous improvement. Starlets assembled by robotic arm.

The story’s part TMZ, part theater of cruelty, as Ririko goes from spoiled brat to unhinged maniac. She rebels against her manager, seduces her makeup artist, breaks things. Her fall starts in three deft pages, when she finds a bruise near her hairline. Jump to Tokyo Tower scraping clouds while she screams; then the broadcast needles on top of a TV studio, echoes of the surgeon’s needles that can no longer freshen up her plastic body.

Things get arch and ragged. The melodrama occasionally seems telegraphed to this jaded member of a media culture. Fame’s Faustian, yes, and the odd subplot with a detective/stalker seems grafted on. He’s stalking Ririko because something’s amiss at her plastic surgeon’s, with hints of Fruit Chan’s 2004 movie Dumplings if not its logical conclusion. An opening and almost-closing page do what they have to: frame Ririko’s story with materialistic girls nattering over the fashion magazines she used to rule.

What they don’t do is prepare you for the off-the-rail moments, like the what-the-hell coda. Or the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over. Or Ririko’s kinky sadism, a WTF smack in the face for the jaded.

Or, most of all, the signature. Okazaki’s an auteur, this is her handwriting. The art reminds that she worked as a fashion illustrator. Her line’s lively and precise: Ririko’s body, for instance, seems plastic yet inhabited. Compare most manga’s art, lifelessly stamped out on an assembly line to fill those 23 volumes in 3 years.

And Helter Skelter feels like a very personal work. If it were “about” celebrity, then it would be seriously dated by real-life stars’ ever bizarre meltdowns. If it were just groundbreaking, it would look weak, since latecomers always finish the excavation. Since it’s about whatever on earth goes on inside Kyoko Okazaki, it’s still fresh. Rather like Iggy Pop, slathered in burning wax, no pants, reminding all the youngsters they have no idea what punk is right before the saxophone (the saxphone!) kicks in.

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Dovetail! Seemed appropriate to listen to Ringo Shiina while writing this, because she’s the anti-Ririko in just about every way. Then I found out that Shiina recently did the music for the movie Sakuran, adapted from a Moyoco Anno manga. Anno was Okazaki’s assistant, and helped prepare Helter Skelter for publication.

Update (by Noah): Tom’s contribution to the roundtable is here; Noah’s is here.