YKK Part I: Warm Apocalypse

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That’s Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, not the zipper empire from Niigata. AKA Yokohama Shopping Trip or Quiet Country Cafe.

We’re doing a roundtable on a random manga, so I suggested this sleepy work by Hitoshi ASHINANO. It ran every month from 1994 to 2006 in Afternoon, winning that monthly men’s comics magazine’s new talent award. So technically it’s a “seinen” manga, a label that won’t get you very far.

You can read the all 14 volumes on gray-area scanlation sites like Spectrum Nexus.

I’ve seen it widely praised: Jog, Dirk, and Derik Badman have all recommended it while noting how quiet it is. All three say it’s “contemplative”, though I’d say Badman’s “serene” is more to the point. Little happens; nobody’s around; a cute android runs a coffee shop. There’s an old guy whose face seems pinned to the back of his neck, and he helps her out by giving her watermelons and taking her to a doctor when lightning hits her. Yokohama, a port city of some 3.6 million people long ago sucked into Tokyo’s agglomeration, becomes a laid-back country hamlet.

It’s a light work, mostly atmosphere. You can read the first volume faster than my summary.

Downtown Yokohama, now with trees.

Since I’m writing under a tornado watch warning, I want to talk apocalypse. YKK posits that something happened, implying but not saying global warming. Ocean levels have risen, coffee’s hard to come by, and humanity’s in decline. (Also, the Japanese Wiki says it was global warming, which is good enough for me.)

In this, YKK‘s a recent entry in a long line of destruction. Japan’s been blowing itself up in pop culture since it happened in real life; lately, the rest of the world’s gotten in on the act. Nuclear fears have given way to ecological: When the Wind Blows replaced by The Day After Tomorrow. (I much prefer the former.) Sometimes it’s an excuse for zombies, or worse yet, sermons, but they always claw at the same part of the brain as weatherfolk do to keep us terrified.

Ashinano uses it as an excuse to get rid of all the people. In other hands it would be a Derrik Jensen fantasy: you caused global warming, so nature will punish you. But in YKK it’s really nostalgia: simpler days, country living, not so many people. In this, it taps into that stereotypically Japanese feeling for the old rural hometown. If 1 in 4 people live in Tokyo, then that’s a lot of nostalgia. With it comes a sentimental feeling for natural places, which has resulted in some great poetry and postcard photos if not land-use policy.

I find it reactionary. Compared to other manga like Hanashippanashi (TCJ #280), which deals with the tensions between a feel for nature and actually living in Japan, YKK feels like a retreat. It’s a fantasy of a return to simpler times and does away with urban complexities with a flood.

So while I love the feelings it evokes, the warmth of certain small towns, of getting tipsy at the town meeting, it’s a far cry from Hot, Flat, and Crowded. So it’s a little hard for me to take.

(Incidentally, mentioning Derrik Jensen, I should recommend Leonard Rifas’ review of his graphic novel with Stephanie McMillan in TCJ #295– a great review of an apparently terrible book. And Xavier Guilbert’s interview with Hanashippanashi‘s author.)

It’s not Guy Penrod

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Now that it’s warming up, going out makes sense. On the town last Friday with some friends, the one that’s a priest introduced me to the U2charist. Statement from the church of origin:

I … floated the idea of a service in which all the music, from hymns to “service music” (like the Gloria or Kyrie) would be by U2, and a number of parishioners in different generations were really excited. So we built a team to design the liturgy and choose the music, and to ask questions like, How do we get the sound loud enough? and How do we play the music? a DJ? A CD? Powerpoint? We chose powerpoint since we figured we’d want the lyrics visible and for people to be hands-free for dancing and clapping if possible.

What the hell? I have a soft spot for Christian death metal but this is beyond the pale. I’m still not convinced it’s real.

Powersploitation

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So a friend lent me a copy of the Essential Luke Cage Powerman phonebook. I was pretty hopeful; I’ve watched a fair bit of blaxploitation over the last couple of years; I think it’s a pretty interesting genre, and one which seemed like it should have the potential to make for interesting comics. Or, you know, at the very least, clueless white comics guys writing about gritty urban race drama seemed like it might make for a few good laughs.

There are a couple of laughs, I guess. Mr. Fish has to be one of the least propitious villain names in the history of comicdom, for example. But overall, the thing is simply unreadable. Even skimming it, as I did, was a serious chore. Don McGregor, the writer on much of the early part of the volume, has a weakness for portentous, purple prose ” “The wide sidewalks wait to receive his body. Before the new workday, the bright red that gives blood its vibrant message of life will have turned a dull brown.” Panel after panel of that. I guess it’s supposed to be gritty, but it just sounds like he’s a 15-year old copying clueless hacks copying Dashiell Hammett.

Things improve somewhat when Marv Wolfman takes over the title…it stops being excruciating to read and just becomes dull. McGregor tried, and failed, to make use of pulp grit and the comic’s ostensible gheto setting. Wolfman settles for hacking out standard super-hero adventures, with Cage fighting one boring villain after another.

And lord, the art is horrible. I’ve argued at various points in the past that mainstream comics art has dropped off a cliff in recent years; this volume seems designed to make me eat my words. Frank Robbins and Lee Elias are the main artists in the run, and there’s just nothing to like about either of them. Bizarrely distorted faces, awkward poses, an utter lack of style or design sense; it’s just page after page of ugly, mediocre dreck. A few of the fill-in artists (Sal Buscema, Bob Brown) are somewhat better, but none of the drawing is what you’d call enjoyable until John Byrne (with Chris Claremont in tow) comes in for the last two issues. Not that John Byrne is my favorite artist or anything, but in comparison — well, this volume makes quite clear why he was hailed in some quarters as a demi-god.

As I’ve said before, comics today know too well who their audience is; they pander remorselessly to the addicted fanboys who just want to see continuity clusterfucks and the banal defacement/updating of characters from their childhoods. They’re incestuous and insular and completely uninterested in a broader audience. Power-Man has the exact opposite problem; it’s creators seem to have no idea who their audience is. Who is reading this? And for what purpose? In theory, you’d assume it was an effort to reach out to a black audience…or at least to a white audience interested in the accoutrements of black culture. In practice, the title is too timid to even gesture in the direction of the kind of seedy viciousness, or racial consciousness, which made blaxploitation so appealing. Instead, you’ve just got a standard issue super-title with a second string hero and a rotating series of disengaged, second-string artists, presumably dispatched by an editorial office that had no idea what to do with the title.

On second thought, maybe Powerman does presage the mainstreams current aesthetic difficulties. Marvel at this point was trying to reach out to a new audience — and this series painfully demonstrates how ill-equipped they were to do so. Multiply that failure by another twenty or thirty years, and maybe you end up where we are now.

Recently on the Hooded Utilitarian…

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Just as a recap in case folks missed it:

I wrote a long series of posts on Wonder Woman’s various incarnations.

Tom posted a great essay about what superman’s superness means, partially in response to my essay about All Star Superman,

Miriam talked about Rogue of the X-Men as feminist icon.

Bill talks about why adaptations based on manga are better than the original manga itself.

Next week, if all goes well: a roundtable on the gentle post-apocalypse manga YKK; Power-Man, Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Nana #15, and who knows what else….

Little Man Dynamite; or, NYT Meets TNT !!

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If you want some more Jonathan Krohn, he’s right here. My special little guy has got his own New York Times profile; the fucking Style section, but still.

The kid’s from the Atlanta suburbs, his mom’s a Jew but went Baptist a while back, neither his mom or dad is much for firebreathing on political subjects. JK has been home schooled since sixth grade, which isn’t such a long time, and he would appear to be smart as hell. He’s studying Arabic because “it’s important to talk with our allies in their language.” He’s been in a lot of Christian youth theater productions.

One disappointment: his book, Define Conservative, is a vanity publication. Still, he hustled up a lot of media contacts to promote the thing.

A caveat: the article describes JK’s delivery at CPAC as “electrifying.” Bullshit. It was polished, which is impressive in a kid. But it was suited to a 50-year-old man in a sweater vest. The effect was more quaint than anything.
Bonus for continuity freaks: the photo that runs with the article shows a book by the regrettable Michael Medved right next to JK’s computer screen. 
Moment that will be quoted more than any other:

He still has the zeal of a missionary. His voice rising to a wobbly squeak, he grabs any opening to press the cause. “Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in my lifetime,” he said.

Mr. Krohn buried his face in his hands. “Oh, Jonathan,” he sighed

A point that this and the photo raise: How consistently does JK remember that he is in fact 14 and not 50?

Rush Fever

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Noah has caught it. So has John Cornyn, junior senator from Texas. Cornyn is circulating a petition that says shame on Obama’s White House for plotting to put Rush in the spotlight. It’s “an outrage,” it “reeks of hypocrisy,” White House staff should not be involved in politics (what?).

I saw one of Cornyn’s ads and he looked like a sweetheart, like a big, sleepy John Connally after a painless gelding; the commercial‘s centerpiece was the big man trotting along on horseback with a cowboy hat atop his silver hair. I’m ready to bet he’s a doll, but I have yet to hear anyone say he’s intelligent.  In fact the wind-up to his petition suffers from a lethally targeted case of foot in mouth:

His staff should apologize to the American people for supporting these tactics and diverting attention to the hard work that needs to be done to get America’s economy back on track.

Please, diverting attention from the hard work. Not to. Otherwise your petition has no point.  

Thank God No One Thought of This

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Bong Crosby, a loathsome alt band and retro lounge act.

… apparently there is a Bong Crosby out there, but he’s safely sequestered in Austin, Texas, and very probably does not make music. Instead he does breakdancing or something, and it looks like he may be quite good at it.