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rainsometimesEdit: WHOOPS I totally forgot to include Dororo!
Domu: A Child's Dream by Katsuhiro Otomo
This is another manga I first read way back in the 1990s: several years before Akira, in fact. It's set in the current day (that is, Japan in the 1980s, when it was written) and takes place in an ordinary modern apartment complex, where the investigation of an apparent suicide leads to discoveries of a perpetrator with strong psychic powers (possession and telekinetics) who murders other tenants for the heck of it, seeing it all as a funny game. The only one who can stop him may be the five-year-old girl in the same housing complex who is also telekinetic. (I remember she came across as a fairly realistic-feeling little girl under the circumstances, at times inscrutable but in the way young children can all feel inscrutable to adults. The battle is fierce and there's lots of mayhem and death before the story ends.
Not being set in a Neo-Tokyo, the art felt more mundane and more grounded than the one in Akira, though Otomo's ability to convey a grandness of scale and an associated feeling of awe is still in place. There's certainly a bleakness to the story, as the tenants in the complex didn't lead very cheery lives to start with, and the presence of a murderous maniac doesn't help things. All in all I remember I found it much more impressive as a piece of comic art than depressing in terms of story content (and it's not like everything goes wrong in the story, either!).
Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Set in the Sengoku or Warring States period, this dark, strange and in some ways oddly wonderful manga is one of Tezuka's least predictable and most... perhaps poetic is the right word for it. It's actually a shonen, believe it or not. The swordsman Hyakkimaru has a past that sounds like it comes from a myth or legend, travelling to defeat supernatural creatures and thus, bit by bit, win back the parts of his body that were denied him from birth through no fault of his. (He's got prosthetics in the meanwhile.) Then he runs into the little thief Dororo, and they eventually end up travelling together. There is lots of war and injustices and other suffering: the anger against the upper classes who treat the poor as dirt is very strong. There are also demonic plots to uncover and counter. Eventually Hyakkimaru's father, a powerful man who is the source of his miseries, comes into the picture too.
The story meanders a fair bit, the characters aren't always wise or sympathetic, but it's still one of Tezuka's most moving works for me - not as strong as Buddha or the best of The Phoenix, but having its own wild charm.
A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
The massive one-volume comic A Drifting Life is Tatsumi's own account of how he came to write and draw manga as a kid and his early years as a mangaka, focusing in particular on the birth and heyday of the gekiga genre where he played a key part. We also see many of his friends/colleagues/rivals in the scene, get to learn about the mechanics of Japanese comics publishing back then; we see the strong influence of movies on Tatsumi and other mangaka; and continuous references to Osamu Tezuka.
The artwork is flipped to read left-to-right; speaking only of myself, I think that was actually a wise thing to do in this case. Like most manga readers these days, I have little trouble reading right-to-left, yet for such a long one-volume work I suspect the Western reading orientation eased the flow of the story and increased the pleasure of sinking into it.
But to tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure why I like this story so much. I mean, I read a review pointing out several problems with it, and I couldn't say it was wrong. Tatsumi really does have a problem when it comes to female characters, and for an autobiographical comic, he doesn't really show us all that much about who he is. He's not terribly vulnerable, and his account of the comics scene of the day is arguably self-serving.
And yet I really enjoyed reading this story! Well, I suppose when you're interested in comics, there's always an extra thrill at seeing them taken seriously in themselves, their development a major part of the story. More than that, though, A Drifting Life also conveys a strong sense of place and time of Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period I haven't seen much from previously: I found the setting quite engrossing. Also, Tatsumi's cartoony art style is a pleasure to look at for me (I know, personal taste and all); and the story, while having a fair bit of disillusionment, is nowhere near as bleak and grim as the other works by Tatsumi I've seen translated.
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio
This gorgeous, oversized hardcover collection presents stories of varied length from different points in Hagio's career: the earliest one is from 1970, the latest from 2007. They appear in chronological order.
The art is beautiful, with many of the stories drawn in fine, elegant lines giving a near-ethereal feeling of yearning, though that is often tempered by a sense of sober reflection in the characters. The stories deal with romance, the longing for true individuality, a search for identity; bonds between children and parents in both good and bad ways, and more. For me the true break-out stories were "Hanshin" and "Iguana Girl".
Now, I'd read "Hanshin" before, as it was first published in English in a shojo-themed issue of The Comics Journal which I bought. And each and every time I read "Hanshin", this story of a pair of conjoined twin sisters manages to make me cry. When I got this volume I planned to skip it since I'd read it before, but somehow I fell into re-reading it again - and dammit, still crying! Either I'm just the most easily manipulated sap ever (I admit this is a strong possibility) or Hagio's short story is just that powerful, and so deftly told it doesn't matter you know what will happen.
"Iguana Girl" (pictured above) was new to me, though, and stuck with me for days. In this story a mother is repulsed from the first moment she sees her newborn daughter: to her, the daughter does not look human but like a human-sized iguana. Only she sees her that way, at first; but as the perspective shifts from her to the daughter, we learn the girl from early childhood also thinks of herself as nothing but an iguana. And that is also how the artwork presents her. An absolutely adorable-looking anthropomoprhic iguana, mind you, but still very different from the humans around her. A haunting and in some ways heart-breaking story, though the ending felt heartwarming and hopeful.
**********************************
Favourite characters
Daigoro Ogami (Lone Wolf & Cub)
Domu: A Child's Dream by Katsuhiro Otomo
This is another manga I first read way back in the 1990s: several years before Akira, in fact. It's set in the current day (that is, Japan in the 1980s, when it was written) and takes place in an ordinary modern apartment complex, where the investigation of an apparent suicide leads to discoveries of a perpetrator with strong psychic powers (possession and telekinetics) who murders other tenants for the heck of it, seeing it all as a funny game. The only one who can stop him may be the five-year-old girl in the same housing complex who is also telekinetic. (I remember she came across as a fairly realistic-feeling little girl under the circumstances, at times inscrutable but in the way young children can all feel inscrutable to adults. The battle is fierce and there's lots of mayhem and death before the story ends.
Not being set in a Neo-Tokyo, the art felt more mundane and more grounded than the one in Akira, though Otomo's ability to convey a grandness of scale and an associated feeling of awe is still in place. There's certainly a bleakness to the story, as the tenants in the complex didn't lead very cheery lives to start with, and the presence of a murderous maniac doesn't help things. All in all I remember I found it much more impressive as a piece of comic art than depressing in terms of story content (and it's not like everything goes wrong in the story, either!).
Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
Set in the Sengoku or Warring States period, this dark, strange and in some ways oddly wonderful manga is one of Tezuka's least predictable and most... perhaps poetic is the right word for it. It's actually a shonen, believe it or not. The swordsman Hyakkimaru has a past that sounds like it comes from a myth or legend, travelling to defeat supernatural creatures and thus, bit by bit, win back the parts of his body that were denied him from birth through no fault of his. (He's got prosthetics in the meanwhile.) Then he runs into the little thief Dororo, and they eventually end up travelling together. There is lots of war and injustices and other suffering: the anger against the upper classes who treat the poor as dirt is very strong. There are also demonic plots to uncover and counter. Eventually Hyakkimaru's father, a powerful man who is the source of his miseries, comes into the picture too.
The story meanders a fair bit, the characters aren't always wise or sympathetic, but it's still one of Tezuka's most moving works for me - not as strong as Buddha or the best of The Phoenix, but having its own wild charm.
A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
The massive one-volume comic A Drifting Life is Tatsumi's own account of how he came to write and draw manga as a kid and his early years as a mangaka, focusing in particular on the birth and heyday of the gekiga genre where he played a key part. We also see many of his friends/colleagues/rivals in the scene, get to learn about the mechanics of Japanese comics publishing back then; we see the strong influence of movies on Tatsumi and other mangaka; and continuous references to Osamu Tezuka.
The artwork is flipped to read left-to-right; speaking only of myself, I think that was actually a wise thing to do in this case. Like most manga readers these days, I have little trouble reading right-to-left, yet for such a long one-volume work I suspect the Western reading orientation eased the flow of the story and increased the pleasure of sinking into it.
But to tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure why I like this story so much. I mean, I read a review pointing out several problems with it, and I couldn't say it was wrong. Tatsumi really does have a problem when it comes to female characters, and for an autobiographical comic, he doesn't really show us all that much about who he is. He's not terribly vulnerable, and his account of the comics scene of the day is arguably self-serving.
And yet I really enjoyed reading this story! Well, I suppose when you're interested in comics, there's always an extra thrill at seeing them taken seriously in themselves, their development a major part of the story. More than that, though, A Drifting Life also conveys a strong sense of place and time of Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period I haven't seen much from previously: I found the setting quite engrossing. Also, Tatsumi's cartoony art style is a pleasure to look at for me (I know, personal taste and all); and the story, while having a fair bit of disillusionment, is nowhere near as bleak and grim as the other works by Tatsumi I've seen translated.
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio
This gorgeous, oversized hardcover collection presents stories of varied length from different points in Hagio's career: the earliest one is from 1970, the latest from 2007. They appear in chronological order.
The art is beautiful, with many of the stories drawn in fine, elegant lines giving a near-ethereal feeling of yearning, though that is often tempered by a sense of sober reflection in the characters. The stories deal with romance, the longing for true individuality, a search for identity; bonds between children and parents in both good and bad ways, and more. For me the true break-out stories were "Hanshin" and "Iguana Girl".
Now, I'd read "Hanshin" before, as it was first published in English in a shojo-themed issue of The Comics Journal which I bought. And each and every time I read "Hanshin", this story of a pair of conjoined twin sisters manages to make me cry. When I got this volume I planned to skip it since I'd read it before, but somehow I fell into re-reading it again - and dammit, still crying! Either I'm just the most easily manipulated sap ever (I admit this is a strong possibility) or Hagio's short story is just that powerful, and so deftly told it doesn't matter you know what will happen.
"Iguana Girl" (pictured above) was new to me, though, and stuck with me for days. In this story a mother is repulsed from the first moment she sees her newborn daughter: to her, the daughter does not look human but like a human-sized iguana. Only she sees her that way, at first; but as the perspective shifts from her to the daughter, we learn the girl from early childhood also thinks of herself as nothing but an iguana. And that is also how the artwork presents her. An absolutely adorable-looking anthropomoprhic iguana, mind you, but still very different from the humans around her. A haunting and in some ways heart-breaking story, though the ending felt heartwarming and hopeful.
**********************************
Favourite characters
Daigoro Ogami (Lone Wolf & Cub)