Overthinking Things 12/5/10

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Fashion, Fighting and Literature: Hana no Asuka-gumi

Sometimes, the power of a series is in the details. The subtle moments, the deft stroke of a brush or subtle camera-work,  the sound of a voice catching at just the right moment.

In Hana no Asuka-gumi, the power of the series is in the grand scheme, the wide-angle view of a world that, whether it truly exists or not, will never be seen by those unaware of its existence.

We all know that in every great city, in every country, there is an underworld organization that runs the illicit businesses humans require. But what if there was, behind even that, another world, an even more obscure world, of gangs and drugs and phone texting competitions and boy bands – a world that extends through middle and high schools country-wide?

In Hana no Asuka-gumi, Asuka is both part of and an outsider to a pervasive underground organization that runs all the girl gangs of Tokyo. “Gumi” here means gang, so the translation can be “Asuka of the Flowers Gang.” However, the “Hana no” is most often translated as “Magnficent” as in the “Hana no Nijuuyo-nen Gumi,” the “Magnificent 49ers” the name used to loosely identify the mothers of girls’ manga in Japan. It would not be out of the pale to translate the series “The Magnificent Asuka Gang.”

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Utilitarian Review 12/4/10

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On HU

We started this week with Domingos Isabelinho’s discussion of Aristophane’s The Zabime Sisters.

Stephanie Folse reviewed the first issue of Elfquest in preparation for rereading the entire series.

I argued that the manga blogosphere has done a poor job in reviewing Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream.

James Romberger talked about conflicts between Alex Toth and Joe Kubert which led to the loss of what may have been one of Toth’s major stories.

Vom Marlowe discussed how manga criticism works, why it works that way, and where to find it.

And finally I revealed the best superhero movie ever.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader, I review Nicki Minaj’s new album.

The fact that Minaj channels Helen Reddy with a straight face on a hip-hop album seems like a good indication that she’s lost her way in spectacular fashion. It’s easy to see this as a desperate and misguided effort to reach a mainstream audience—and it clearly is that. But at the same time, the album’s rudderlessness seems like part and parcel of Minaj’s persona. With a flow that hops from Barbie cuteness to Rasta declamation to a faux British accent to sped-up Tourette’s, Minaj has always been about spastic incoherence, and one of her most acclaimed performances is deliberately and gloriously bipolar. In her verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” she switches back and forth between a flirtatious little-girl coo and a fierce, ranting growl, using the alternation to create an escalating momentum so massive it makes the other rappers on the track—Jay-Z and Rick Ross—sound positively precious.

Other Links

I mentioned the both of these in comments, but:

Melinda Beasi and Michelle Smith have a lovely discussion of Paradise Kiss here.

And Matt Seneca’s appreciation of Rob Liefield is great.

The Best Superhero Movie Ever

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This originally appeared over at Splice Today.
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So what’s the best superhero movie of all time? Perhaps you love Dark Knight because Heath Ledger is dead now and Morgan Freeman taught us about the dangers of surveillance technology. Or you may love Spider-Man because it drips with pathos and daddy issues. Or maybe you like Robert Downey, Jr.’s charm in Iron Man, or, if you’re old school, Christopher Reeve’s charm in Superman. Or maybe you’re just cranky enough that when someone asks you “What’s the best superhero movie ever?” you answer with a waggish sneer, “There are no best superhero movies ever!”

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The cycle of criticism

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There has been a recent discussion of the nature of manga criticism and where it can be found (and if it can be found).  I have maintained that, yes, it does exist and can be found, whereas others have other views.  As part of that discussion, I want to explain part of the issues as I see them, in finding the criticism and where it happens and how, and decided that instead of cramming it into a comment (not doable), I would take the time and do as full an explanation as I can.
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Toth vs. Kubert

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by James Romberger

In “Man of Rock,” Bill Schelly’s recent biography of Joe Kubert, the well-respected graphic novelist and former DC editor says that he and Alex Toth knew each other well from “way, way back” in the 1940s when they were teenaged cartoonists. Kubert is two years older than Toth, which may have seemed like a lot to them then. He says that at sixteen Toth worked “like a dog–his intensity overwhelming.” While I don’t get the sense that Kubert and Toth were ever especially close as friends, they shared studios and social contacts, and both artists worked for early DC editor Sheldon Mayer. A talented artist in his own right, Mayer was a volatile editor. Toth recalled that Mayer tore up one of his early stories. Kubert says that he saw Mayer “verbally rip a guy apart…and take original pages and fling them right across the room,” but notes that he was not treated in this way, perhaps because he was “bigger.”

Both artists claim Mayer as a key formative influence. In later years when Kubert acheived editorial positions, his relationship with Toth changed as it became one of management and labor. Toth’s efforts for editor Kubert on two stories appears to be the key to their mutual disaffection. Neither party understood the other’s motivations, but as a result, a major Toth work was rejected to be lost to posterity, their friendship ended and in later years Kubert was criticized by Toth. Kubert’s own accounts of their conflicts are inconsistent.

At St. John in 1954 Toth drew a 5 page story for editor Kubert’s title Tor Vol. 1 #3. Danny Dreams was done in a fertile period of discovery for Toth, contemporaneous with his early masterpiece The Crushed Gardenia, as he was formulating his mature pared-down style. Kubert says in a letter printed in 1999 in Toth: Black and White that the story was “drawn close to printed page size—beautiful tight artwork,” but in an interview done in 2006 for Alter Ego Kubert says he was “shocked” and “disappointed” with the work when he first saw it. Perhaps because the original art was so small, or maybe because its simplicity at that time was not what the more detail-oriented Kubert expected, he mistook the economy of line that marks Toth’s great later work for laziness. Or, perhaps it was because Toth omits the folds of most of the ears of the characters in Danny Dreams and draws them as empty curved shapes.

Danny Dreams: flat ears, small art. Tones by Bill Black.

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Criticizing the Critics: Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream

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Over the last couple of months, I’ve written five lengthy posts about A Drunken Dream Fantagraphics’ collection of stories by the great shojo manga-ka Moto Hagio. I’ve spent so much time on this book for a number of reasons. Hagio is a central figure in the history of shojo, a genre in which I’m interested. Matt Thorn, the volume’s editor and translator, is one of the most important manga critics around,so anything he does is worth thinking about carefully. And, finally, this is meant to be the first in a series of reissues of classic shojo tales by Fantagraphics. That’s an exceedingly worthwhile project, and I wanted to draw attention to it.

To finish up my series, I thought I’d look briefly at what other critics have said about A Drunken Dream.

I certainly haven’t been alone in seeing this book as important. Deb Aoki at About.com gave it 4.5 stars and said it was “a long overdue glimpse into Hagio’s 40-year career. Melinda Beasi picked it as her book of the week, calling it gorgeous. David Welsh in a discussion of the best manga of the year similarly, if more somberly, commented that on best of the year lists, “Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (Fantagraphics) didn’t seem to make much of an impression outside of dedicated manga readers, which is disappointing to me as a dedicated manga reader.”

So…many stars, pick of the week, should be on best of lists. Check, check…check! Sounds good! Long awaited collection by a manga master, critics love it — there must be a lot of juicy articles out there discussing why the book is so wonderful, right? Right?

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Elfquest Re-read: Issue #1 and Youthful Fannishness

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I was introduced to Elfquest about 1980 in Bobbie’s Books, the local used bookstore which doubled as Bryan, TX’s only comic store at the time. I wandered over to the wall racks holding comics near the register, and started poking through them.  I owned all of three comics at the time, purchased as some sort of three-pack from a local bookstore that had recently folded. There was one Disney comic, a forgettable superhero comic, and one science fiction horror comic sandwiched between them that weirded me the hell out. All I remember is one panel of some sort of bubbly goo, found on a distant planet by the protagonists. It unsettled me enough that I hid the comic underneath a pile of stuff in my room, and would occasionally pull it out to look at it when I’d screwed my courage up–I remember a distinct feeling of nausea when reading it. Why it was packaged with a Disney comic, I’ll never know.

Anyway, it’s a wonder that I was looking at the comics rack at all. I remember even then not really liking the mainstream superhero art styles of the 1970s (still don’t!). But the owner of the store noticed me, handed me Elfquest #1, and said, “You want to read this.”

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