As I hope at least some of you have noticed, Bill Randall has kindly agreed to join us as a blogger here at the Hooded Utilitarian. Bill has been a fixture in the Comics Journal for a good while now; he’s written a column called “Lost in Translation”, reviewing untranslated manga. He’s a great writer and a smart critic of all sorts of media, and I’m thrilled to have him aboard. His first post (on censorship) is here
Nana of Stage and Screen
So I saw the first live-action Nana movie (based on the manga by Ai Yazawa.) For those who haven’t heard me natter on endlessly about this series already, the story focuses on two young women, both named Nana, who move to Tokyo. One Nana is brooding, tough and streetwise; she’s trying to make it as a punk-rock singer. The other Nana (nicknamed Hachi) is sweet, ditzy, and often shallow and aimless; she comes to the city to be with her boyfriend. The two women become roommates and best friends, and the story follows their efforts to find true happiness and the travails of an ever-expanding circle of friends and acquaintances. It’s one of my favorite comics of any genre, and one of the best soap-operas in any medium.
There are definitely some glitches in translating the manga to screen. Most notably, when you read the manga, you don’t have to hear, or much think about, what the music of Trapnest and Blast actually sounds like. In the movie, alas, you have a soundtrack…and are thereby forced to realize that the supposedly amazing, original rock music actually sounds, way, way too much like Whitney Houston fronting the Foo Fighters. J-pop…erk.
It’s also simply impossible to fit six or so volumes of manga into two hours of running time; you have to cut something, which means that Yazawa’s finely balanced characterizations must, of necessity, go out of whack. The major casualty here is Shoji, Hachi’s boyfriend. He simply doesn’t get enough screentime, and so he ends up much less sympathetic, and much more callous, than he seems in the manga. It’s not entirely flubbed; the actor who portrays him seems genuinely distraught when he hurts Hachi, for instance, and there is a scene where Jun (Hachi’s friend) points out to her that Shouji had some legitimate grievances. But you don’t get to feel or see quite as clearly how selfish Hachi can be as you do in the manga.
Finally, of course, you lose Yazawa’s mavelous art. The movie is certainly competently, and even nicely, shot — the scenes with Nana and Ren in various bathtubs are especially sensual and romantic — but in terms of technical mastery, nothing in the movie really matches Yazawa’s impeccable design or beautiful drawing.
Still, overall, these are pretty minor quibbles. In fact, the extent to which the movie captures the spirit of the manga is pretty miraculous. Whoever wrote the script (and from some of Yazawa’s comments, I don’t think Yazawa was that closely involved) obviously read the manga with great care. The cuts are overall very smart, and the weaving in of the complicated backstory thorugh flashbacks and exposition is remarkably well done. For example, cutting out Hachi’s pre-Shoji boyfriend is a fine idea; it was one of the least involving parts of the story, and dumping it is a good way to shelve a bunch of useless plot all at once. On the other hand, the writers transpose but are careful to keep a quick kiss between Nana and Hachi — a moment that is, I think, an important, if not obvious, emotional touchstone for the series. Indeed, if anything, the romantic, platonic-but-only-just nature of the love between the Nanas is even more foregrounded in the movie than in the book. I’m sure it’s in the manga, but I completely didn’t remember that Hachi actually tells Nana that she sees her as a boyfriend…and I love in the movie, as in the book, the scene where Hachi falls asleep with her head on Nana’s shoulder while the two wait for Shoji to finish work. (And there are two separate scenes in the movies where a scarf is exchanged; once between Nana and her boyfriend Ren; once between Nana and Hachi — and these are clearly meant to be parallel.)
As for the casting…it’s fantastic. Mika Nakashima as Nana is stunningly sexy — the film opens with her talking, um, tongue-in-cheek about orgasms, and…well, it’s definitely a fan-yourself moment. Throughout the film she’s alternately cool and vulnerable; chewing Hachi out for being a dope one minute and letting her rest her head on her shoulder the next. (Also, Nakashima is very nearly as skinny as Ai Yazawa’s drawing of the character, which is sort of a wonder in itself). Aoi Miyazaki as Hachi is perfect too; all bubbly and self-absorbed, but considerate and sweet too if you can just get her to notice you. Ren (Ryuhei Matsuda) is great as well; he seems tough and swaggering, but you look a little closer and you realize that he’s actually a bit doughy — not really all that. He is obviously in no way worthy of Nana . This is true in the manga as well, and in some ways makes him more sympathetic; especially as he seems to realize it himself. Other characters are around less, but they all are well played; a burbly, air-headed, frequently intoxicated Nobu is particularly good.
So as far as live-action comics adaptations go this has to be the best I’ve seen (always excepting the 60s Adam West Batman movie, of course.) If you like the manga, I’d absolutely recommend seeing this…and if you’re wondering whether to start in on the series, renting this would be a good, cheap way to figure out whether you’d be likely to enjoy it. There’s a second movie already out that I’m looking forward to seeing as well.
Article 1.75
Noah has invited me to join him and Tom at this blog; I’m chuffed. But I have some real life stuff to take care of. My other blog is on hiatus until December.
Hmmm.
Well, since that one’s mostly an archive, here I’ll just join the conversation. (I won’t be a Heavy Hitter for a few months at least, but I’ll do my best.)
Figure 1. The Heavy Hitter.
So. Censorship. Here’s a take:
The last supercomic I followed, Sandman finishing up (gothy cloaks are capes– do people still read it?), had Neil Gaiman, who’s joined Frank Miller et al. all the time for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. They say they fight censorship. But I think, aesthetically, censorship’s usually a good thing. Constraints spur invention. An OuLiPian/OuBaPian idea, sure, but I think it plays out.
Manga, for one, benefited from strict obscenity laws. Especially in the 70s, these comics screamed sex & violence, but had to bend over backwards, usually with ropes, to skirt the law. Baroque visual codes sprouted for all manner of filth. Low Symbolism for the gutterminded, more interesting by half.
Those manga (barely) support a political reading. The obscenity law, from the 1907 Criminal Code, was part of Japan’s dash to fit in the Western world. Before that, popular woodblock prints teemed with smut. And political censorship often fosters great art: Czech film before ’68 and early 5th Generation Chinese film come to mind. So too samizdat’s energies, and ever and always poetry (save John Wilmot).
But the Comics Code episode strikes me as simple capitulation. A weak industry got whipped. No one in comics had much to say, anyway (“I cut off her head,” oh, please). In the other American example, Hollwood and the Hays Code from ’34 on, an industry self-censored for commercial purposes. Filmmakers still pushed the boundaries, with elaborate codes and subtexts. Comics creators, not so much. The Hays Code was dropped in ’68; the Comics Code wasn’t revised until ’71, and again in ’89.
Now, in a post-Crumb, anything-goes American industry, censorship’s still the cause celebre. The CBLDF’s a one-issue fund. It does good in the world, but mainly for unwitting red-state retailers carrying comics showing First Amendment genitals. Again, these are industry (read: industrial) issues, about keeping markets open. I can’t think of a single case in which the CBLDF helped a creator fight editor & publisher for self-expression’s sake.
Meanwhile, I can think of dozens whose intellectual property rights have been trampled. That issue seems more important in comics than censorship. Of course, too few people ever talk about that with movie deals on the line.
Update from Noah: This post is in part a response to this one
Seduction of the Corrupt
I have an essay up on Culture 11 about Jeff Parker, kids comics, and the general idiocy of super-hero comics for adults.
In the last twenty-five years or so, though, the Code’s influence has waned sharply, and superhero comics have marched from G, past PG, to at least PG-13 — and some particularly unpleasant PG-13 at that. In DC’s 1988 Killing Joke, Batgirl — Batgirl, mind you — is shot in the stomach, turning her into a paraplegic, and then the Joker strips her and takes nudie pictures to show to her father. (When Alan Moore, the writer, spoke to editor Len Wein to ask if this plot point was okay, Wein reportedly responded, “Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.”) In 2004’s Identity Crisis, Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man — of the Elongated Man, mind you — was raped. And then she was murdered. Oh, yeah, and she was pregnant at the time. Meanwhile, over at Marvel, one of their most successful projects has been Marvel Zombies, a group of miniseries and one-shots set on an alternate world where all the superheroes are turned into undead monsters who eat every civilian on earth. While we were in a comic shop, my son saw one of these uplifting tales on the shelf and asked, with mild concern, “Daddy, why do all the superheroes look scary on that cover?” “Oh,” I said. “That. We’re leaving now.”
Hop on over and read the whole thing as they say in the business.
Back yet? Okay. So I was talking about this piece a little with my friend Bert Stabler, and he asked me if I thought the Comics Code had been a good thing, inasmuch as it for years it forced comics to keep to G (or at least PG) content.
I had to stop and think about that for a bit. Ultimately, I decided that I don’t believe the Comics Code was positive…in fact, it seems to me that the reason we have adult storylines inappropriately and (most often) idiotically grafted onto super-hero comics is because of the Comics Code. Before the Code, it seems like a much greater range of comics genres were viable (horror and crime, for example.) The Code made these more or less impossible to sustain, so that all was left were the genres that were aimed at kids (super-heroes and stuff like Archie, basically.) There was still a demand for more mature material, though, especially as comics audiences aged. So you end up with a situation where the majority of comics fans are committed to the super-hero genre, and at the same time they demand more mature material. And so you get a goofy character clearly invented for kids — like, say, Batgirl — being brutally crippled and sexually assaulted, or spitting out obscenities, or whatever. Which really, to me, seems much more unpleasant than some bloody decapitation in a horror comic that’s straightforwardly intended for an older audience.
So I guess to me the Comics Code actually seems to me to be a good example of why censorship can have unintended and unfortunate consequences. I suspect that if it the Code had never existed, super-heroes would still be much more clearly for kids. And (despite my love of Watchmen) I think that would overall be a good thing.
I’d be curious what other folks think, though. I’m not incredibly conversant with all the ins and outs of Code history, so it’d be interesting to hear from folks with a bit more of a background, if any cared to comment.
Sub-Claremont Hackery
So probably my favorite part of the brouhaha over my dislike of 100 Bullets was that I got in a flamewar with mediocre mainstream scripter Mark Waid. Here’s our back and forth:
Mark:
I, on the other hand, unlike Ross, am happy to just flat-out insult, because this kind of nonsense blogpost, shat out by a self-styled guardian of culture who thinks “mediums” is the plural of “medium,” is largely a waste of electrons and does nothing to elevate any sort of discourse. If there were a FailBlog.org site for reviews, this would lead the list.The only fair yardstick against which any work of art can be measured is how well it accomplished whatever the hell it set out to accomplish. Every critic’s mileage will vary, but the critics who tend to be worth listening to are the ones who demonstrate, at the very least, enough critical acumen to be able to tell the difference between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson. Particularly when Dave Johnson’s signature is about the size of a matchbook.
Me:
Holy crap. Mark Waid cares enough to post. Hey Mark! I was just reading some of your amazingly mediocre efforts on Justice League. You are the last person whose opinion about writing I would take…I may even keep using “mediums” as the plural just to distance myself from your lameness. Cheers!
Mark then went over to Heidi’s comments to say:
Wow. Just left a reply on the guy’s blog because, as a friend of Dave’s, I was pissed–but I realize now that was a waste of time. He’s just another yutz with a keyboard. But I hope he enjoys the little moment in the sun we’ve given him!
I posted a link to my follow-up post on Heidi’s comments, prompting the following exchange
:
Mark:
“Hey all. I’ve got a follow up post here:”Or, to put it another way, “HEY!!!! LOOK AT ME, EVERYBODY!!!!!!”
I repeat: I hope this halfwit is enjoying his moment in the sun, since it’s probably the only one he’ll ever get. C’mon, everybody…let the baby have his bottle. Move along. Nothin’ to see here.
Me:
Hey Mark! I’m on my tenth or eleventh Internet brouhaha at this point, actually. But, yes, I’m enjoying the moment, as I hope you’ve enjoyed your run of sub-Claremont hackery. Really, seeing you pop up and offer aesthetic opinions is like that old Dr. Johnson joke about the dog walking on hind legs…you don’t do it especially well, but it’s surprising to see you do it at all.
It’s probably wrong to have enjoyed that quite so much…but so it goes.
Anyway, I thought that as long as I’d raised the issue, I should maybe go back and reread something of Waid’s and see if it was as tedious as I (vaguely) remembered. The one entire book of his I”ve got lying around is “Justice League: Midsummer Nightmare”, written with Fabian Nicieza. I bought it because it’s a prequel of sorts to the Grant Morrison run on JLA. I didn’t remember it as being especially good, but I thought I’d give it another whirl.
Or try to. I had to give up; it’s largely unreadable. The initial idea (everybody on earth is getting super-powers) is okay, but the execution is phenomenally dreary. In an intro, Grant Morrison praises this book for turning its back on the bad-old-nastiness of dark gritty comics from the 80s and 90s, and ushering a new silver age full of fun! and excitement! In fact, though, this isn’t Dark Age, or Silver Age, but a Color-of-Lukewarm-Porridge Age. This is where bits and pieces of comic stories past come to die; zombified tropes wander about, robbed of all meaning and purpose, dumbly watching their own brains leach through their fingers. The putative plot is that Dr. Destiny has brainwashed the JLA, making them forget that they are heroes. This is an excuse to have Wally West (the Flash) be late to stuff (the irony!); to make Diane Prince/Wonder Woman be the head of a girl’s school (does that even qualify as irony?); to have Batman’s parents resurrected (again) before he relives the tragedy of their death (again), and to have the Martian Manhunter lose his family (again). Meanwhile, Kyle Rainer (Green Lantern) is a comic book writer and we get an extended running gag about his being behind deadline — because we have never, ever, in a comic book, seen a story about a comic book writer being harassed by his editor. No, really, we haven’t. Oh, yes, and towards the end, all the super-heroes have to confront their Deepest Fears. It’s so Jungian.
The worst part isn’t so much the inanity, though, as the utter joylessness of the exercise. I’m not a huge Chris Claremont fan, but his X-Men stories are just miles better than this. I remember, for example, one sequence where Jean Grey has been kidnapped while wearing a cocktail dress; she’s trying to tear it so she can run — so Wolverine volunteers to help and slashes it off at mini-skirt length. I think she says “Not so flaming short!” and Wolverine looks exceedingly smug. Not great art, or anything, but you get the sense that Claremont is paying attention to the characters — he’s noticed what Jean is wearing, and has a good enough sense of her and of Wolverine to be able to have them interact around a throw-away detail. It’s cute and a little sexy and I still remember it some 20 years after I first read the thing.
All the interaction in this story, on the other hand, seem leadenly smug; Flash and Green Lantern joshing like teens on a B-grade sit-com (“Big doings gang! Scoop any answers!”), the de rigeur Justice League everybody-burbling-on-about-how-wonderful-everybody-else-is, the insufferable, ritualized, repeated moments of self-actualization (Diana: How can I trust you Mr. Kent?” Superman: You know you can. You know.”) We’ve still got the over-the-top angst of Marvel team books (The Manhunter’s wife and daughter killed again right before his eyes purely to give somebody — anybody– an amped up tragic backstory, would be repulsive if it weren’t so tediously predictable), but we’ve dumped the soap-opera trappings — flirting, personal tension — which made it possible, occasionally, to care about the characters. It’s the worst of all worlds; melodrama with mannequins.
You look at something like this, and you really say, it’s all over for super-heroes isn’t it? They’ve completely lost all purpose or point. We should have just stopped after this…but instead we’ve got another ten years of dragging the same hollowed out characters through the same stupid paces. Super-hero comics have entered their second infancy; drooling, befouling themselves, cackling toothlessly, passing in and out of half-formed, repetitive dreams. This comic reeks of stale bedpans, decay, and a hopeless, numbing idiocy.
I should talk about the art now, I guess…but I don’t think I have the heart. In fact, I think I’m going to have to maybe stop writing about mainstream titles for at least a while; it’s just too depressing. I don’t know how Tucker does it every week. You’re a stronger man than me, my friend.
Update: Mark Waid takes another swing at me on Newsarama:
No one was really interested in rebutting his critique because no one took it seriously. If I were to go into a long rant about how much I hated British Invasion music based largely on the argument that the Rolling Stones sucked–and then I played clips of the Beatles to back up my point–my credibility would be eye-rollingly weak, and it would be pretty embarrassing to watch me get all huffy that no one was willing to listen to anything else I had to say on the subject. You want a rebuttal? Here’s a rebuttal: why should anyone waste their time arguing the finer points of art with a guy who can’t distinguish between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson?
It’s not that he had a momentary brain-blip; it’s not that he got the two confused. It’s that he literally cannot tell the difference between two professional artists, even when they have signed their work. Failblog.org stuff. That’s the story, and that’s what got everyone’s attention.
Mark Waid,
Sub-Claremont HackMe:
Mark; you seem to have read my post on our flame-war, and were at least moderately amused. Given that, I can’t really continue to slang you, much as I am tempted. It’s been fun, and maybe we’ll get a chance to do it again some time. In the meantime, good luck to you.
Christian Counter-Counter-Clockwise-Culture
I’m kind of interested in this new conservative website Culture 11, mostly because they are paying me to write for them occasionally, but partly because they seem interested in engaging with non-like-minded folks like me.
Anyway, I just found an article on Christian music and politics that I thought was kind of interesting. It’s by a fellow named Matthew Stokes, and it read in part:
Do we want artists who oppose, say, the Iraq War with a Christian conscience? I’m not opposed to songs in that vein, actually, but find me a Christian artist who opposes the war without falling back on Moveon.org platitudes and is willing to acknowledge that terrorism in the present age is a real issue. Of course I want Christian artists willing to shine “the light of God on the darkness of racism,” but let’s make sure that it doesn’t turn in to white guilt lectures or typical academic claptrap. And by all means, speak the truth about the realities of poverty and corruption, but let’s always make sure that the facts are straight and we aren’t engaging in class warfare and we aren’t resorting to the State as the solution to these problems. And for heaven’s sake, if Spencer wants to reference Steve Earle, fine, but Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger? I admit they were great songwriters, but let’s avoid the apologists for Stalin and, in Seeger’s case, Hitler. Seriously. And while we’re at it, so what if kids hear that MLK was an adulterer – he was. Does that discount his work? Not in the least; he was a marvelous Christian leader in many, many respects. But if we’re talking about Christians and social change, Charles Wesley and William Wilberforce did a far better job of holding up both the Gospel and the issue of social reforms. And since when is “social Gospel” a slur? I always thought activist Christians had embraced the term. I’ve got a stack of books suggesting that they have and continue to do so.
Anyway, I wrote an (anonymous) response in comments which I’d reproduce here for both of my readers who look at my non-comics related posts….
I’m not a fan of your politics, but I think your general point is correct; there is no engagement without politics of some sort. On the other hand, though music may have politics, it isn’t itself politics — at times here you sound like you want position papers. The radio is not, and shouldn’t be, the Heritage Foundation.
Pete Seeger apologized for Hitler? I’d like to see the link on that, then. And he has since repudiated Stalin, I think quite sincerely.
Merle Haggard is a sometimes (though not always) thoughtful and Christian songwriter who certainly isn’t a leftist Democrat. I don’t think he’s an especial fan of the war, though his songs about it tend to be somewhat elliptical.
Still, the parts of the music industry that are most obsessed with politics at the moment are probably rap and metal. Rap’s a good place to go for discussions of race that aren’t about white guilt or academic claptrap. They tend to be about practical matters, like police harassment, poverty, educational disparities, stuff like that. There’s also black nationalism — which is not at all Democratic Party line, and which (as I think Eugene Genovese tends to point out) is in fact quite conservative in certain ways. Not least in the subordinate position often reserved for women, unfortunately.
And a lot of metal, of course, is quite pro-war — though not, perhaps, exactly in the manner that you’d wish. (There is a fair bit of Christian metal too, incidentally. Mortification is a band that’s pretty good.)
Martian vs. Fanboy
I posted about Brad Meltzer’s Justice League recently, so I thought I’d go back and reread some of the Grant Morrison run on the title and see how that holds up.
The first volume, “New World Order” — in which the JLA fights a bunch of evil, shape-shifting super-powered Martians — is uneven. The big strike against it is the drawing. Even by mainstream standards, Howard Porter is a shockingly bad artist. I think he’s trying to be influenced by manga, maybe, but jeez, what a disaster. It looks like someone vomited slick primary colors all over a bunch of spastic mannikins. And that’s not even mentioning the layout; all overlapping panels, slapped down almost at random. Really, who gave this guy a job? Blech.
Grant Morrison’s script is a lot better than that, though it has its troubles too. Basically, there’s a certain amount of “hooooo-boy, the League is sure cool isn’t it?” which grows awfully tedious awfully quickly. In that vein, too, there’s a certain amount of telling-not-showing how awesome everyone is. Batman talks at one point about what a tactical genius the Martian Manhunter is, for example, but there’s not really anything in the comic — or indeed, in any comic I’ve seen — that backs that up. Flash mutters to himself about the need to come up with some super-clever tactic to defeat his super-fast, military genius opponent… but in the end he subdues the bad guy by running really fast and hitting him. Also the plot doesn’t entirely hang together. When did the Manhunter switch places with the bad guy, anyway? And why are none of the super-heroes affected by the Martian mind-control? And having character after character realize that they’re fighting Martians (who can be defeated with fire) is a little clunky. And the last scenes, in which the people of earth are inspired by Superman to fight the Martians by lighting pieces of paper and holding them over their heads and looking really serious, as if the entire world has been transformed into one multi-ethnic Rush concert…well, it’s not Morrison’s best moment, let’s say.
Still, it’s not all bad. Morrison is clearly having a ton of fun with the Batman-as-snarky-unstoppable-force, sneering at all the wimpy super-powered whiners around him. This reached a reductio ad absurdum in All Star Batman and Robin, of course, but when it’s played slightly more subtly, as here, it can be entertaining. The panel where Bats wanders in dragging a heap of Martians behind him as Green Lantern (the Kyle Rainer one) mutters, ”only four, Batman? you’re slowing down.” is probably my favorite bit in the book…followed closely by Aquaman declaring, “the sea is my responsibility!” and Wonder Woman immediately informing him that he’s a pompous blowhard.
The thing is, though, that they’re all kind of pompous blowhards. Morrison’s JLA is, by design, invincible — they’re more super than super, more cosmic than the cosmos, they’re just undefeatably, unstoppably awesome. The series is over-inflated; so pumped up it’s ready to pop. There’s certainly a kind of enjoyment in it; it’s fun to see sparks flying and non-stop action and bombastic titanicness. But you lose something too — it’s hard for the heroes to really seem all that heroic, basically. For example, Metamorpho (who I guess was in the previous incarnation of the team) sacrifice’s himself in a desperate effort to save Nuclon and some girl with ice powers; you get to really see him sweat doing it, too — in the way the Lee/Ditko/Romero Spider-Man would really sweat. He’s falling from outer space and trying to make teflon coating, but he can’t figure out how the polymer chains works. He seems like he doesn’t have all the answers, and it makes him extremely sympathetic.
Morrison’s core JLA team, on the other hand, is always not just triumphant but triumphal. Whether it’s Kyle nattering on about how amazing Wonder Woman is, or everybody talking about how great Superman is, the self-congratulation floats about as thickly as locker-room miasma. It’s this insular, clubhouse aura that is the bane of super-hero comics today; Morrison’s super-heroes are, basically, super-fans. You can see why this appeals to the real life super-fans, of course. And you can also see why everyone else on earth was indecently eager to side with the Martians.