been reading a hell of a lot, lately!
i've recently FINALLY gotten started on taking tezuka more seriously after a lifetime of light engagement and seeing his ideas as reinterpreted, recycled, or just plain regurgitated for many years. i've been pretty sure i'd love him for what feels like forever, and i'm finally starting to develop that affection with real engagement. i think that people often think of him as someone with superb ideas and a real verve for depth in storytelling, but i think that's maybe a bit of a mischaracterization given to a man whose attainment of what is essentially considered godhood seems to eclipse the proper noticing of any of his weaknesses.
tezuka's true strength is total indefatigability. he does not ever tire out, and when he begins to get even a little bored, he switches gears in story beats or into writing an entirely new story. he averaged over 7 pages of manga drawn
per day throughout his life, which becomes much more impressive when you realize for the first couple of decades that he wasn't exactly pumping books out. this is an output that, when considering its consistency and high quality, is probably correctly characterized as nearly beyond human. his cartooning skills are absolutely
(it was at this point my cat's incessant mewling at the ceiling went from "she's doing that thing where she sees something on the ceiling again" to "what the hell is on the ceiling")
oh shit!!! (i'm fine and my stuff is fine but there was a leak of some variety. had to take quick action and it's one of those rare instances i'm glad to be renting (my landlord actually responds quickly.... thank u god :pleadingemoji:)
whoops, well, anyway. uh. tezuka. the dude really is a completely exceptional person, but i'd say his strengths are more... pacing, dramatic irony, high concept action, etc. his stories are not what i'd call 'deep,' they tend more to gesture at a lot and do so very quickly. reading him feels almost like sprinting. his comics most remind me of a more manic, more socially conscientious carl barks. tezuka was actually a barks fan - beyond the extremely obvious influence in his art, he actually kept correspondence, had donald cameo in a comic, etc. this isn't to say that i think tezuka is a bad storyteller
by any stretch of the imagination, but he's best when tackling smaller scenarios and keeps his longform together by having them be strings of unique encounters. you get more of a chapter with him than you get out of a whole volume of most other people.
as i've read interviews, reviews, and historical information regarding the guy, i have to point out before continuing with some reviews: holy shit is he misunderstood, these days. almost all the adaptations of his work are bizarrely serious or depressive, even when the comic they're adapting has a gag every other page and moves at ten times the speed. i think he'd be really plum depressed to see how little fun people have remembering him, or how much they treat him as an untouchable figure. he's a pretty humble guy who worked real goddamn hard and made some outstanding, wonderful comics... but he's not the messiah.
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anyway, some reviews on some of his stuff i read, recently, as well as a few other things -
dororo (
1967-68, osamu tezuka)
one of tezuka's most fondly remembered works! easily within the top ten of those still talked about, but probably outside of his top 5. before you ask: "how meaningful can that possibly be for one person?" please keep in mind that he penned over 250 different comics. dororo is an action tale about a wandering warrior named hyakkimaru looking to regain his body parts, which were taken from him at birth by 42 different demons. it's also about his traveling companion, dororo, who is an impudent little rascal with his own sad past. i probably shouldn't undercut dororo's importance to the narrative, but it's a little bit more 'about' hyakkimaru.
the two characters are faced with a comically relentless onslaught of trauma and horror, but you hardly feel all that bogged down by it because of the superlatively ridiculous nature of our hero, who begins the story with swords for arms and can't kill someone without there being a slapstick panel of them screaming "yikes!" at their being stabbed. not to say this tanks the atmosphere by any stretch of the imagination, but it allows one to enjoy the otherworldly dread of yokai encounters and their profound spiritual allegory with a fair shake of levity. don't "get it?" tezuka has you covered - it's just damn fun, even for the basest of thinkers.
the ending happens almost out of the blue in such a way that makes me think tezuka just got bored with the project. he seemed to be aiming to try and top gegege no kitaro and all the risingly popular boys' comics of that time period, and i don't know if he really considered the attempt successful or not. it's easy to read as a high quality series of short stories, even though it promises fruition with its breadcrumbs and kind of just ends, instead. he probably should have just had the narrative disregard continuity and ditch a couple of gimmicks, the characters are very likable and so are the tales within.
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under the air (
1968-70, osamu tezuka)
a collection of short stories written by tezuka. in it, you'll see many of his common fixations! such as:
- staunch depiction of the evils of racism
- brutalized/marginalized animal people as allegories for [fill in any conceivable thing here]
- "shit about the atom bomb"
- defense of incest (and, really, any non-standard love)
- gags that break the fourth wall, incuding inserting a character that is just him
- more transformation fetishism than you can shake a stick at
you can also find this
and this
and also this
golly! you know, i'm really curious if the original text uses "the n-word." or whatever kana form the syllables for what would be used to say that. (ni-ga?). i actually read this one online but have a physical edition on the way, i'll at least find out if what they used for the localization. somehow, i imagine it isn't.... that. but i'm not sure it was wrong to use that, either. it's amazing to see someone who i think genuinely despises racism this much use golliwogs (even during the time period, especially with his love for keeping up with american social progress), but, to be fair, he also draws himself with a really ridiculous nose and tends to play up japanese racial characteristics to extremes, sometimes, too. trying to imagine a time where we give the artist the benefit of the doubt on something like this is sure hard, these days.
ANYWAY, these stories are great! their shared fixation is tragedy with a quick, ironic ending. perfect for a man who can whip up a narrative in no-time flat. quick and easy gratification with pretty consistently mature (if whimsical) storytelling. excellent as a first selection for someone wanting to read tezuka, you'll get a really good view of his strengths. tezuka is a little bit didactic, but he's also bold, brave, and somehow, also, really filled with humility. he's "moralizing," but he's a sweetie-pie willing to do whatever it takes to get you to even consider agreeing with his deeply humanist views. and if you don't, hey, i'm sure the comics are a joy, anyway.
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mw (
1976-78, osamu tezuka)
oh boy! tezuka doing gekiga! and god damn does he go over the top! rape, bestiality, child molestation, child murder, severe gaslighting, chemical warfare and associated mass death, mental deterioration, blasphemy, okama, more okama, graphic mutilation - i'm probably forgetting something. tezuka brings out every single big gun imaginable in this one, and while i can't say they're all handled with grace, they're all at least certainly handled with impact and a bizarrely prevailing empathy amongst all the obvious edge.
despite the above panel, this comic has very little humor for a tezuka work. gags are usually 5 or 10 pages apart, rather than 2-3 panels apart, which is remarkably restrained for a man whose compulsion to draw silly faces is without equal. his recurring silly-faced character, ban, does show up, and i assume his penis getting eaten is meant to be comedy. i can't imagine he doesn't think it's funny, anyway - i certainly thought it was funny.
mw (pronounced "mu" - which i assume is a language thing, given that 'mu' is a deeply buddhist concept, but "mw" is meant to be the vague initials for an american chemical weapon) is a narrative about a lot of things, but mostly the relationship between one catholic priest who wants to redeem himself and one devilish man whose redemption seems impossible. i'm sure that many reviews go on endlessly about the "deep examination of sociopathy and the nature of evil" - and this was nominated for an eisner that lost out to a taiyo matsumoto manga, so i'm sure the literary critique is both hyperbolically stuck-up and overtly abundant - but, in essence, this is a shock comic obsessed with cruelty.
not to say it doesn't present interesting situations or meaningful commentary on the human condition, but tezuka is less examining, more presenting (as always). character motives can be guessed at, but are never really fully explained, and the manga has a serious obsession with the abject frankness of a deeply wicked reality. tezuka's lack of assumption about the inner workings of his characters allows them to feel a lot more real - while one might argue they lack depth, we have an author with a clearly diverse set of lived experiences just channeling what he knows. i think his refusal to justify his villains - particularly in this instance - allows them to be more compassionately depicted and with this sting of truth to them.
sometimes, there is no way of rationalizing what someone is doing. and yet, they
do. people [verb] the shit out of life. "what if there was just, like, an extremely fucked up guy." - osamu tezuka. context is provided, evil is depicted, and yet condemnation and dismissal never arrive. it makes for a compelling read.
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apollo's song (
1970, osamu tezuka)
another one of tezuka's more serious and tragic works, apollo's song is about a boy born in mud, raised in shit, and built to suffer. the premise for this one is that said poor boy, who cannot find it within himself to love another, is approached by a god who declares he shall fall in love and have it stripped from him just before the point of its consummation for all eternity. a bit like, i guess, if alex from a clockwork orange were in some sort of recursive greek tragedy.
as the narrative progresses, we see our poor boy fall into numerous delusional states via a variety of methods, such as hypnotic suggestion, electroshock therapy, dreams, etc. each delusion brings about a deeply complex and immersive world that feels to him like another life. and with each new life, he finds himself learning to love a woman only for tragedy to separate them as they try to overcome adversity in the name of learning to love each other.
every time we're brought back to the real world, our boy makes a little bit of personal progress in overcoming his trauma. but the world won't leave him be, and his circumstances keep slipping back into more and more dire situations.
i think it's a little too easy to read this story as cynical, but i think that its remarkable sense of hope and persistence winds up overcoming its trappings. this is probably one of tezuka's better start-to-finish narratives, even if it does wind up being something of a short story compilation with how things play out. his endings are often a bit too abrupt to really "land," for me, but this one felt more than earned.
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dai dark (
q hayashida, 2019 - )
i recently read through all of
dorohedoro, which quickly became one of the most beloved things i have ever experienced in my entire life. absurd horror, existentialism, abstracted and twisted notions of memory and identity, and more than a fair shot of good buddies having some good fun. it was a manga that felt unusually easygoing, like i could just slip into its world and love life in spite of all of the toxic death coating every meter of it. a unique and delightful blend of the obscene and the adorable. it's something that i could probably begin a never-ending bloviating over, singing endlessly the many qualities of its beauty
so, dai dark had some big shoes to fill. unlike other reviews, here, it's ongoing - which means i'm only up to the third volume, at the moment. while it has already delivered on much of what i want, it's not been afraid to take its own steps to being something rather unique and with its own particular flavor to it.
despite having a similar relationship to gore and goofiness, dai dark drops the retrograde amnesia bit and picks up a bunch of bizarrely video gamey gimmicks. the main character can collect people's skeletons and upgrade his gear, he eventually gets a space craft that lets him travel from here to there, he adds members to his traveling group like they're a party in an rpg, etc. the tone is also a lot more consistently silly - while still owing much to its uncanny depictions of the unspeakable-in-polite-company, it's a lot more 'strictly fun' and committed to its characters enjoying themselves over their being in perpetual mortal terror.
the cast has already grown on me a lot and i'm deeply interested to see where it goes. i can't imagine someone who liked dorohedoro not at least enjoying this, and vice versa.
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girls' last tour (
tkmiz, 2014-18)
i really enjoyed the anime for this one, so i decided to go and give the manga a shot. it's only 6 volumes, so it's not particularly heavy reading for a series so lauded by the weird and depressed on the internet, and the anime only adapted up to volume 4, so i had a fair shake of narrative left to get through to see where its melancholic philosophies would drop it off. however, before getting to that point, my friends decided to subject me to learning about the author, tkmiz. he's, uh. he's... not doing so well, everybody...
D:>
you... you don't want to find the one this is from.
anyway, despite having just revealed what about the author i just did, i'm going to go ahead and say this: i do love the comic. and i'm sure a good part of that is because the author is (obviously) very sad and very lonely. the examination of these things that goes on in the comic - told through two girls exploring a desolate world and approaching concepts like "culture" and "memory" with their dead-eyed glaze and wondering what those things mean - approaches heights of meaning only told by someone who has genuinely suffered through the ten thousand hells of ennui brought about by consuming too much moe.
this may sound sardonic, but i really mean that - there's a certain plateau of thinking only reached by incredible yearning and a similarly incredible inability to consummate that yearning, and it's where every stoner dares trek courageously. the characters are - in classic moe fashion - "too" relatable. only rather than simply being a projection of one's desires, and the projection of emptiness just being an odious byproduct the author wishes to deny the existence of, the emptiness is something examined with acute awareness, which becomes the true substance.
achieved is a kind of bliss one only derives from those ephemeral, happy days spent in the quiet pleasure of the company of someone you love. its problem, maybe, is that it does kind of have a difficult time seeing anywhere past that point. it's a little *too* humble, and in being so, settles for answers that are ultimately the cause of its own misery. while i think the manga is unambiguously hopeful and may bring one to tears (i certainly bawled!), i'd like to see future work (i need to read shimeji simulation!) exceed the boundaries that girls last tour settles for stopping at.
also: this is the only time i have ever read/watched/listened to the work of a japanese person and felt a deep suspicion they're a stoner. in any other case, i assume weed is just too hard to get over there for anyone putting themselves out in the creative industry to risk a possession charge. while i lack any absolute confirmation, there's a bit in the manga where both characters get baked on what seem to obviously be marijuana cigarettes. i think that... confirms my suspicion. this is a stoner comic if i have ever read one.
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mobile suit gundam: the origin (
yasuhiko yoshikazu, 2000-10)
just plainly one of the best things that i've ever read. that's coming from both as personal as a standpoint is allowed to be and from as unbiased a perspective as you can believe a person would purport themselves to be coming from. this is a criminally beautiful work of art and unparalleled masterpiece and my very favorite gundam work, no question.
as i've been getting "seriously" into gundam in the last couple of years (following a lifetime of casual and occasional enjoyment), i've found myself with growing curiosities about the people behind it. following an initial interest in the most obvious man, tomino (who i came to love and still love), my curiosity became more and more fixed on yas, the character designer behind the original mobile suit gundam and recurring collaborator on various gundam works.
he was introduced to me as someone who 'didn't believe' in newtypes, and in that same introduction, i was to find out the man was a christian. how does someone who seems to consider themselves devout not believe in the miracle allegory in gundam, but still "believe in gundam?" i went on a sideways route of exploring him by reading some of his historical manga and other directorial work. his 'jesus' manga wound up being what an evangelical would likely consider more blasphemous than the last temptation of christ! no miracles, no resurrection, and the insertion of a wholly original character whose belief in those things impedes his love and adoration.
in that comic, we watch a man find his faith against all odds, all doubt, all secular reasoning. and we see that faith be suggested to only be true by nature of it defying those things. yas is no one of blind devotion and someone with a powerful love for history, and i think this shows in all of his 'historical' (often christian history) manga. and, so to does it show in gundam. the nature of this retelling being a retrospective that is allowed its own canon lets him work his own particular magic on the story, and the pull of destiny feels both breathtakingly wondrous and outright suffocating.
i found myself sympathizing with characters i'd have never found sympathetic, believing in the human beauty of an oft-considered monster like degwin zabi, weeping over the loss of a brutish idiot like sleggar. this manga took me for a ride, and yas' unparalleled artistic ability was only part of why. this is just a damned good read - whether it your very first gundam story or very last.
as is classic with yas, there's a fair amount of queerbaiting, and the tension between garma and char has never felt this thick. i do seriously wonder: yas, what is up with you and gay men? you seem to put them or the suggestion of them into everything. even your character in your jesus manga seems to be gay for jesus' feet. is your wife a beard? did you have an affair? were you once seduced by a lurid tart of a man? you can tell me. i'll keep it a secret. to anyone who hasn't watched it, i suggest going and checking out 'kaze to ki no uta,' an ova he adapted of a year 24 group mangaka's work. violently homosexual catholic boarding school shit - great for any fujoshi or fujoshi-aspiring.
i also really strongly suggest checking out the latest gundam movie,
cucuruz doan's island, which is very excellent and fits kind of ambiguously into "the origin" canon. it's not a direct adaptation of the old, banned episode, nor is it an adaptation of the manga series that split-off from the origin (which yas supervised, but didn't pen). it's its own thing and it's one of the best anime film i've seen in ages. i don't think he'd directed since, like... venus wars in the mid-eighties? please go see this movie, this man is a legend and i will weep for his death and it's wonderful he is getting to direct again after such a long, long time.
that said, somehow, i still like dorohedoro most out of everything i've read, lately. v__v i'm sorry, everyone. fucking love those goobers.
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also, i have read a bunch of witch hat atelier. looks gorgeous, feels sadly, deeply empty. bunch'a shonen tropes and way too much focus on the mechanics and doo-dads of its world rather than its facile characters who can't even match up to the tertiary cast members in your naruto or one piece or etc. this bitch is
badly in need of an editor.