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Saturday, May 08, 2004 ( 5/08/2004 03:17:00 PM ) Bill S. SIXTY MINUTE MANGA – (Episode Thirteen: wherein our intrepid manga explorer ventures into familiar territory: super-powered teens!) Picked up the debut entry of Katsu Aki's Psychic Academy on impulse when I was shopping a couple of months ago at Peoria's Metropolis Comics. I'd come into the shop as an out-of-town browser, so I was looking for books that I hadn't seen in my usual runs. Academy was on the New Releases wall, and for some reason (perhaps it was the wine colored background on the cover; perhaps it was goofy looking rabbit peering over the shoulders of the series' cloaked hero) it leaped out at me. Despite my misgivings on the subject matter (Just what we all need, huh? Another comic series about super youth at a training school!), I bought the book. Just had to learn the story behind that bunny rabbit. . .  Aki's series centers around Ai Shiomi, a new student to Psychic Academy, who has transferred to the ultra-exclusive school after a blood donation revealed he had an "aura." In Academy's near future world, a growing number of youths have started developing psychic abilities – which are characterized by a personal aura that's attuned to earth, air, water or some other thematic element. With most psychic youth, this ability manifests itself early in childhood, but Ai's aura has only become discernible in adolescence. He comes to school, consequently, profoundly unaccustomed to the idea of having powers – while his new peers have had years to grow into them.To make matters even more discomforting for our hero, his celebrity brother Zero teaches at the academy and is lauded throughout the land as the Vanquisher of the Dark Overlord. (We aren't given any details in the first volume on what this vanquishing might've entailed, but we know it was something heroic.) Zero has the habit of effusively hugging his younger brother whenever he sees him, an act that's guaranteed to embarrass the adolescent Ai. Most of the first volume concerns itself with Ai's entry into the new school – a world that he still doesn't believe he deserves to inhabit. ("Here you are trying to deal with the pressure of the Aura World. . .and you're the new kid at a new school," brother Zero notes at one point.) Becoming part of the Academy student body definitely puts you in a different class: "You will be one of the elite," Ai's father says when the boy expresses his qualms about changing schools. In a way, Ai isn't much different from the welfare-class hero of The O.C. once he's been transplanted to moneyed Orange County. (Bet we never see Ai in a muscle tee, though.) Unlike the student body at Xavier's School for Gifted Youth, being on the class rolls at Psychic Academy is a mark of status – doubtless because of that vanquishing business. And also unlike the mutant kids of the Marvel Universe, Aki's teen characters are much more flagrantly hormonal. (Tokyopop rates the book Age 13+, incidentally.) Poor Ai is regularly portrayed as overwhelmed by the ultra-buxom coeds at the school: good girl Orina and bodacious tough girl Mew. ("It's hard to breathe, she's gotten so sexy," he thinks about Orina at one point.) Aki frequently renders both teengirls in teasingly provocative positions - taking a bath, getting dressed, et al – and has three separate scenes in volume one where one of their fulsome breasts is accidentally fondled. (In one memorable instance, they even make a "squish" sound.) Small wonder that Ai's foreign roommate Telda is shown experiencing a nosebleed at the thought of Mew. "Attention from her would be the sweetest torture indeed," he awkwardly states. Is the writer/artist playing with his characters' teenaged horniness, working to be titillating or trying to have it both ways? Can't quite tell on the basis of just one volume, though I have my suspicions. And that goofy looking rabbit, well, he turns out to be a mysteriously fantastic creature. The only inhabitant in the school’s rabbit hutch to resemble a pink-cheeked stuffed animal, he latches onto Ai first time he sees the kid – "You're the uncut gem, you are!" he states telepathically – and demands to be called Master Boo. A comic mentor, Boo's words are written by translater/adapters Jan Scott Frazier & Nathan Johnson in unrefined slanglish. It's unclear from the first book if the bun'll prove a positive or negative influence: in this volume, he encourages Ai to leave school grounds without permission, where the boy runs into an older Slitherin-y psychic named Tanja. Still, Johnson plainly has a good time doing Boo's dialog. As for the art: well, upthrust boobs aside, Aki tends to make his teen characters appear younger than their age – naïve young hero Ai, in particular – a familiar look to those who think that all manga art looks alike. Angst-ridden Ai is rendered with so many teardrops on his head, it's a wonder he's able to keep his hair dry. Aki's compositions are pretty clear-cut, though the moments when characters display their psychic powers are a bit confusing, in part because the nature of these powers is intentionally kept murky. (At one point, our hero attends a lecture on auras that thoroughly confuses the freshman psychic.) And though we know eventually that agents of the Dark Overlord will come into the picture, the few brief moments of combat in the first book are primarily designed to show Ai's developing abilities. A skirmish between our hero and Mew (bedecked in a gym outfit that's pure – to use a Dirk Deppeyism – pervert suit) is the high point here: packed with plenty of posturing and swirling auras. Hanged if I know precisely what's going in this fracas (it seems to involve Ai mainly learning how to dodge Mew's cast auras), but it sure looks dynamic. My sense is that Aki has more interest in his teen leads' character dynamics than he is their big psychic battles. He gets lots of squirmy mileage out of his protagonist's embarrassed reactions to Zero's shows of affection, for instance, and we wind up learning more about how each boy and girl feels about each other than we do their auras. For many teen readers, I'm betting that's the bigger draw of Psychic Academy, anyway. That and the sight of Mew in her gym suit. . . # | Friday, May 07, 2004 ( 5/07/2004 08:08:00 PM ) Bill S. "WITH HIS LIQUOR AND DRUGS AND HIS FLESH MACHINE" – Okay, so I was willing to not get too bent out of shape when Royal Caribbean Cruises started utilizing "Lust for Life" as the soundtrack to a montage of pasty white baby boomers having a grand old time on their summer vacay – it's a great song and all that. But, seeing the cruiseline's newest ad, featuring a grade school girl who apparently is familiar with the Greatest Hits of Iggy Pop, I really have to wonder if we haven't reached some irreversible spoilage point on this whole Western Civilization Thing. . . # | ( 5/07/2004 04:35:00 PM ) Bill S. "TRA LA, IT'S MAY, THE LUSTY MONTH OF MAY" – A busy day at work and on the "creative writing" front, but I had to pop in and note that Ken Lowery, that onetime ragin' fucker, has seemingly grown twitter-pated in the fresh Spring air. Check out his cuddly new blog! UPDATE: Never mind. . . # | Thursday, May 06, 2004 ( 5/06/2004 08:23:00 AM ) Bill S. "WHEN I HOLD YOU IN MY HANDS/AND I FEEL MY FINGER ON YOUR TRIGGER. . ." – A few random bullets from the pop culture blogosphere:
# | Wednesday, May 05, 2004 ( 5/05/2004 10:53:00 AM ) Bill S.  FANG-TASTIC – The blurb on the cover to the DVD release of Horror of Dracula strikes the right cheesy Famous Monsters of Filmland note. "Christopher Lee's fang-tastic first ever performance as the Lord of the Undead," it trumpets alongside the requisite graphic of the man himself holding a suitably buxom victim in his arms.Recently reissued as part of a Hammer Horror collection (which also contains Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Mummy and Taste the Blood of Dracula – but, alas, no Curse of the Werewolf), Horror is the first pic in the British horror film company's long-running Drac series. Along with Curse of Frankenstein, the company's gory remake of Mary Shelley's novel, it ushered in a new brand of monster cinema when it was first released. Colorful and bloody, with brazen full-bodice sexuality, Hammer films were the late fifties' answer to a franchise of monster movies that looked pretty staid at the time. In their day, the Hammers provided a demarcation line for young horror movie fans: between those who thought the films' new relative explicitness were just what the genre needed to keep vital and those who felt the movies a poor substitute for the early moodier black-and-white Universal monster pics. These days, of course, those trendmaking Hammers look a tad musty themselves: their colorful use of well-placed grue is pretty restrained compared to the buckets o' blood flung about in modern movies, while the acting of established thespians like Peter Cushing (who early had appeared as Osric in Lawrence Olivier's filmization of Hamlet) and Michael Gough (the British Whit Bissell) has a whiff of old-time staginess to it. And though a pic like Horror still looks great – the studio made wonderfully evocative use of deep rich color, particularly in Dracula's castle – it remains a comparatively low-budget affair. This shows in scenes like the climactic battle between Cushing's Van Helsing and Lee's Dracula, which just doesn't come across as dynamic as you'd hope. Or the moment (much more obvious in the DVD than in regular network broadcasting or videotape) when a sultry vampiress' breath can be briefly seen on what must've been a chilly set. That noted, Horror of Dracula remains a primo example of solid B-picture making. Hammer's primary strategy was to emphasize blood-and-thunder storytelling over the more atmospheric imagery of directors like Tod Browning and James Whale, and it stood 'em in good stead through years of costumed horror pics. House screenwriter Jimmy Sangster took the source material and tweaked it in intriguing ways – making Cushing's Frankenstein in Curse an unrepentant blackguard, for instance – and you can see this approach in the company's first Dracflick. Though they followed the general outline of Bram Stoker's original novel, Sangster and director Terrence Fisher worked to surprise audience members overly familiar with the story. Thus, Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen), who serves as our introduction to Castle Dracula, is presented not as a naïf (as he is in Stoker's book and the Bela Lugosi movie) but as someone who already knows what Dracula is. When Dracula leaves his castle to stalk Harker's fiancé, it's not to London but to another European city, Carlstadt, which turns out to be a half a day's hearse ride from the vampire's home turf. Warner gets this detail wrong, amusingly, on the DVD box text, incorrectly noting that Dracula shows up in London – an understandable error to make since a.) that's the way the original novel worked and b.) most of the actors, including the mittle-European villagers, speak with British accents. But what about Christopher Lee's "first ever" performance as the Count? Simply put, he carries the film, so effectively that you feel his presence even when he's not onscreen. Unlike Lugosi, who played the vampire as a Valentino-esque lover, Lee's sire is a pure force of masculine will: his imposing height and bass voice (which for some strange reason, was rarely used in the Hammer sequels) are utilized to maximum effect. And in the middle of the film, when Dracula comes in the night to seduce and vampirize two different female victims, you accept every heavy breasted sigh. Lee's Drac is a vicious bastard (you know he beats his vampire lovers), but he's an attractive vicious bastard. Cushing's Van Helsing (who alternately is called "Helsing" in the film) is suitably authoritative, but I find his amoral Frankenstein more fun to watch. He definitely wields a mean stake, though. Unlike so many vampire pics, the act of staking clearly takes a strong forearm (remember that Buffy ep where Willow dispatched a vamp with a sharpened number two pencil?) and more than one hammering. Director Fisher knew that dispatching vampires was exertive work more than a calling, and his staging of the story's second big vampire slaying – the second death of the once innocent Lucy Holmwood – emphasizes that fact. In Hammer's heroes, you can also see the roots of Sean Connery's teeth-gritting James Bond; when Cushing's fearless vampire hunter leaps and slides across a table to bring down a light-shielding curtain in his final fight with Drac, you can't help flashing on Bond sliding across the floor of Fort Knox, reaching for that big ol' wire to electrocute the imposing Odd Job. In short: an enjoyable DVD and my favorite of the early Hammers (Curse of Frankenstein shows its budgetary limitations more clearly, while the studio's remake of The Mummy is kinda plodding). And as with the current Universal Legacy DVD packs, I'm hoping that the upcoming Van Helsing renews enough interest in this type of material to spark future DVD sets. Keep your candlesticks crossed. . . # | Tuesday, May 04, 2004 ( 5/04/2004 10:43:00 AM ) Bill S. "MOTHER SUPERIOR JUMP THE GUN" – Some quick bullet pointiness from the world o' pop culture:
# | Monday, May 03, 2004 ( 5/03/2004 12:03:00 PM ) Bill S. SIZE MATTERS – Sean Collins, in his guise as Bookstore Guy, notes the growth of manga titles and also ponders the way graphic novels get shelved: "I'm not actually sure if this is company-wide or simply how our staffers have organized things, but the dividing line between what gets shelved with manga and what gets shelved with non-manga is simply one of format and size." I noticed the same thing (as has Steve Pheley in his spiffy new Gutterninja blog) back when Oni issued its digest-sized Courtney Crumrin GNs. Recently, I nearly passed over the first volume of Viz's new full-sized Nausicaa edition, simply because it'd been shelved away from the digest-sized manga. But looking at the gorgeous and detailed art (which at times evokes Moebius) in that series, I'd sure hate to see it shrunk down to the size of yer average Tokyopop pb. Our local Barnes & Noble has two sets of manga shelves, incidentally: one alongside the rest of the graphic novels, the second in the Young Readers section of the store. The latter seems to be a better source for long-running series titles like GTO, while the former appears more focused on the flavor of the month. Don't know if that's intentional or not. . . # | ( 5/03/2004 08:51:00 AM ) Bill S. KEEPING THE SPRING IN SPRINGFIELD – With the news that the cast of The Simpsons has reached a new contractual agreement, fans of the series can relax once more. Even if the show isn't as surprising as it once could be (last night's Homer As Superhero ep, for instance, trod ground that'd been more efficiently covered in a third the time as a "Treehouse of Horror" entry), it still remains one of the greatest sitcoms ever. If pressed, however, I'd opine that this season's run of King of the Hill has it over present-day Simpsons. A more conservative show (in every sense of that word), it takes advantage of its Arlenites in ways that'd be inconceivable to the chroniclers of Springfield's First Family. The results – like last night's priceless offering placing spudboy Bobby Hill on the Tom Landry Middle School academic team thanx to his encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture trivia – can often be more precisely telling than the more broadly drawn satire on The Simpsons. Bottom lining it, though, that Sunday back-to-back of King followed by Simpsons is still the funniest hour on network television. # | Sunday, May 02, 2004 ( 5/02/2004 12:47:00 PM ) Bill S.  "WHY DON'T I LIKE YOU MORE THAN CHARLIE BROWN?" – First time we see good ol' Charlie Brown, in the opening volume of The Complete Peanuts ($28.95, Fantagraphics Books), it's in a fairly unfamiliar pose: walking down the sidewalk, arms a-swingin', big ol' smile on his round face. Not a queasy half smile, not an eyes-shut, lost-to-the-world-around-me smile – just a happy li'l folk's smile.He'd grow out of that grin, of course, and one of the pleasures of the first volume in this ambitious book series reprinting cartoonist Charles Schulz's landmark comic strip in its entirety (starting with 1950-52) lies in watching him "mature" into the more familiar emotionally battered everyman we all know and love. In the first strips of 1950, he's clearly meant to be younger than either Shermy or Patty, the two kids he'll eventually push out of the limelight: he's not yet in school nor tall enough to meet either of his co-stars eye-to-eye. Yet thanks to the kind of aging process only seen in comic strips and soap operas, Chuck quickly catches up to the other two, where he'll remain for the duration of the strip's forty-plus years. The same process occurs with other characters in the series: Schroeder, Lucy and her younger brother Linus are all introduced in turn as babies in volume one, though the first two rapidly sprout to become peers (toy piano genius and "Miss Fussbudget of 1952," respectively) with other neighborhood kids. Linus would take a little longer to age, which may be the real reason he never could abandon that security blanket. Even Snoopy, the final major figure from these early years, is more puppy than full-grown beagle dog. We're not privy to his inner thoughts 'til 1952. But if the comic melancholy that characterizes "Peanuts" at its peak hasn't fully flowered in volume one, all the basic elements are there: Schulz's elegantly frugal inking style and stylized vision of children's bodies (which exaggerates their heads to, in part, emphasize their thoughtfulness), his unsentimental take on childhood fears and aspirations, his clear-eyed understanding of the volatile nature of kids' relationships. Second strip into the book, Patty, strolling along that selfsame sidewalk, stops momentarily to slug Charlie Brown for no discernible reason. CB himself indulges in violence and tantrums for thoroughly petty reasons in these early strips; he's also an inveterate jokester, who ends many a daily strip being chased by his victim. "It's risky, but I get my laughs," he tells the reader As a reader born the same year that Schulz's strip debuted, my first experience with the early "Peanuts" was through small Fawcett paperback collections. A lot of the strips in this book never saw reprinting in those early paperbacks, presumably because the artist's vision of his kids had already developed to the point where their jokes were incompatible with their more established characters. In one early strip, for instance, Charlie Brown comes upon a drawing of himself rendered on a neighborhood fence. "That's not me at all!" he proclaims, and he fixes the caricature by affixing a big grin to its face. By the 1960's, our hero wouldn't have dreamed of altering that image: he just would've sighed and accepted it as one more random humiliation in a world packed with 'em. The "Peanuts" gang may have had some limited growing up to do, but as a newspaper strip cartoonist, Schulz was in control of his medium from the get-go. These fifty-year-old strips remain funny – something you definitely can't say about many other strips from the same era (or, indeed, last week's "Cathy"). In a way, they seem fresher than the strips from the nineties, and not just because we're discovering many of the established strip routines for the first time (first time Charlie Brown gets a football moved away from him, it's not even done intentionally – or by Lucy). No, what helps to keep 'em fresh are Schulz's vision of childhood as a battleground and his sense of timing (influenced by comedian Jack Benny, David Michaelis notes in a supplementary biographical essay, and though I'd never recognized that fact before, it makes instant sense to me) impeccable. A lot of cartoonists have labored to replicate Schulz's voice, but they never quite get it. It's not saying anything surprising to note that Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" is one of the singular achievements of comic strip art. But it is worth noting – after years of overexposure, diminishing return animated adaptations and Butternut bread commercials – that the strip can still be an unabashed joy to read. Next volume in Fantagraphics' reprint series is scheduled for autumn of this year. I'd start saving my pennies now. . . # | |
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