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Wednesday, January 07, 2009 ( 1/07/2009 06:14:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Here's a no-frills video of Cheap Trick (Rick Nielsen makes funny faces!) doing "Voices." Man, I still love this band: # | Tuesday, January 06, 2009 ( 1/06/2009 06:34:00 AM ) Bill S. GOOD FENCES: Spent much of my weekend outside, away from the computer, tearing down and putting up bamboo fencing. Our backyard is walled in with a faux adobe edifice for two-thirds of the way; the west side, however, is blocked off with six-foot bamboo fence. It works to shield the back from the sometimes punishing winds that come down off Mt. Graham and also provides a break from the desert sun for our small vegetable garden. The previous fencing had been put up two years earlier by the couple who lived here before us –- and it was looking pretty weather-beaten. Even a medium-sized wind would get parts of it flapping, and there were breaks in it that our younger dog Kyan very quickly discovered. I decided to try reinforcing our new fence by sandwiching the top between strips of chicken wire: the more flexible wiring, I hoped, would suit the curve of the yard and yet be sturdy enough to withstand the wind. Wound up pricking the tips of my fingers a lot with the wire -- making it difficult to keyboard Sunday night -- but we'll see if it was worth it. Last summer during monsoon season we watched a dust devil drop into our yard and lift the lawn furniture in a mad swirl. The Arizona desert cares little for property values. But for now, at least, our good fencing looks really spiffy . . . # | Sunday, January 04, 2009 ( 1/04/2009 06:30:00 PM ) Bill S.  "DAD, I'M COMIN' TO SEE YOU!" To begin with the "x" in Hunter x Hunter does not appear to be spoken aloud -- as either "ex" or as "times," which is how I first read it. But from the way, the voice artist playing Gon reads each "x"-strewn chapter ("Encounter x Hesitation x Departure," for instance) on the first boxed set of HxH's anime series, the letter in the title of Yoshihiro Togashi's manga-turned-anime series is just a place marker between the two "Hunters."So now that we've gotten that important matter out of the way, let's take a look at the boxed set collecting the first fifteen episodes of the ten-year-old anime series based on Toshihiro Togashi's still-ongoing manga series. Released by Viz Media, the three-disc set is primarily devoted to introducing the quartet of characters who take up the opening credits. The central figure, the one peering out at us through the die-cut "x" on the front of the box set, is a young village boy named Gon Freecss. A skillful fisherman with a pole and line capable of supporting his own body weight, Gon also possesses a preternatural affinity with the creatures of the woods, particularly the large hybrid creatures called fox/bears. Gon lives with his sad-eyed Aunt Mita and believes he is an orphan, but, none-too-surprisingly, it turns out that his father Ging really is alive. Gon's old man is a Hunter, perhaps the "greatest Hunter in the entire world;" true to his profession, he travels the world in pursuit of "mysteries and hidden treasures." Once Gon learns that his father is out in the world plying his dangerous trade, he vows to find him. Best way to do that, he figures, is to himself become a Hunter. The primary story path of the first fifteen eps, then, is of young Gon making his way from his isolated village to Dulle Island, where the Hunter Exam is conducted, and beginning the grueling series of tests designed to weed out unworthy applicants. Along the way, he hooks up with three other would-be Hunters, each with his own reason for wanting to pass the exam: Leorio, the oldest, claims to only be in it for the money, though this mercenary claim later proves to be untrue; blond Kurapika wishes to become a Hunter so he can avenge the death of his family at the hands of bandits called the Phantom Troupe; while lavender-haired skater-boi Killua is striving to make up for the misdeeds of his own family of professional assassins. Of the four, the most dynamic character proves to be hot-tempered Leorio, who frequently is used as comic relief in the series. Both Kurapika and Killua come across as equally grim, though the former does get off an occasional wisecrack at Leorio's expense. Our hero Gon is open and altruistic, if more than a bit boyishly reckless: his ability to commune with "magical beasts" is a sign that he has it in him to become prime Hunter. "More than anything," we're told, "a good Hunter is loved by animals." The quartet's examination begins before they even reach Dulle Island, but, once there, they meet many of the competing applicants. Foremost among these are Hisoka the magician, a kill-crazy Joker type who wields a deadly deck of playing cards, and Tonpa, a perpetual candidate who delights in undermining his fellow contestants. The candidates are subjected to a series of grueling and mind-taxing tests (in the most lighthearted one, they're told to make sushi, a dish only one of them has even seen). The first boxed set concludes with our heroes still in the midst of Phase Three of the exam, matching wits with a group of hardened criminals who've been charged with preventing them from climbing down a tower within a prescribed time limit. At some point, presumably, our foursome will be complete their exams, though since we're never told how many phases there are, the testing could continue through a whole other set. Hunter X Hunter's animation -- as is typical for teleseries anime -- is limited, though some of the imagery can be quite evocative. Though its characters are rendered fairly seriously, in a few instances you can see manga visual conventions sneaking into the work -- as when Leoria gets a softball-sized lump on his head or angry Kurapika temporarily becomes more cartoonish. As with most Western dubs of Japanese 'toons, the young boys in the series are primarily dubbed by actresses (Gon, for instance, is done by Elinor Holt), though blustery Leorio is amusingly vocalized by Jonathan Love. As a series lead, Gon is a mite bland, particularly when placed against his more colorful peers. If he's meant to be a gateway for younger viewers, the Viz set rates the series as suitable for "Older Teens," though I've gotta admit that nothing in the first fifteen episodes struck me as too intense for a PG-13 viewership. Viz's boxed set doesn't offer much in the way of extras: a few promos for their upcoming DVD sets, an ad for Shonen Jump magazine and their line of paperbacks, plus a series of storyboards that didn't show up all that well on my twentieth century 26-inch teevee screen. No explanation anywhere on how that "x" got in the title, though. I guess if you have to ask, you don't deserve knowing . . . # | Saturday, January 03, 2009 ( 1/03/2009 10:53:00 PM ) Bill S. RUBBER SNAKES: Watched an old Hammer film this a.m. that I'd been saving since it was broadcast Halloween on TCM, The Gorgon, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I'd long heard that this '64 offering is a weaker entry in the Hammer canon, and, after viewing it, I can see why. Despite the presence of two usually reliable horror actors (and house director Terence Fisher), you never get a sense that anybody in the movie actually believes in its monster. Every time Lee or Richard Pasco, as the poor chump who falls in love with cursed heroine Barbara Shelley, outlined a piece of the Gorgon myth for us ignorant viewers, it never really connected to what we were watching on-screen.  Part of the blame can be placed on John Gilling's script, which is pretty damn parsimonious in its explanations behind Shelley's transformations from blond Germanic ingenue into hideous beastie. And when she finally appears as a full Gorgon in the movie's finale, the wobbling rubber snakes on top of her head blow it altogether. (Made me wish that Ray Harryhausen - who worked for Hammer three years later on One Million Years B.C. - had been brought in for two or three minutes of his inimitable stop-motion work. Remember his Medusa from Clash of the Titans?) But lame effect aside, the primary lesson of The Gorgon remains more basic: if you don't build your monster up with sufficient conviction, it really doesn't matter what the heck they look like when they finally show their ugly mug . . .# | Friday, January 02, 2009 ( 1/02/2009 11:34:00 PM ) Bill S.  "NURTURE OVER NATURE, M'BOY! GOKU'S NOT JUST AN EARTHLING . . . HE'S THE BEST DANG EARTHLING I KNOW! Though many manga and anime lovers have long been ahead of me on this 'un, I've only just recently started to get into "the greatest fighting manga ever!" - Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball Z. A popular "All Ages" series, Toriyama's Dragon Ball books, have been divided into two sections for American audiences: the first, simply called Dragon Ball comprises sixteen volumes of story; the second, which has the "Z" attached to it, follows the series characters from volumes seventeen through forty-two. The break makes some conceptual sense as the first volume of Z opens with its hero, Son Goku, five years older than he was in the first books, though, in reality, the change in titles was more a marketing decision than anything. Viz Media reportedly imposed the title change on the series to match that of a then-running anime adaptation.Initially packaged in the States in a tankobon format - the Japanese term for those digest-sized paperbacks you see in the manga sections of your chain bookstores - both the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z books are presently being reissued by Viz in a hefty 5-½ x 8-¼ " pb format called VizBig Editions. Each volume collects three of the tankobon collections, a bargain at the bookstore price of $17.99 when you consider that single digest-sized books have an asking price of $7.95. With an eye toward sharp shopping, I recently picked up the first volume of Z and found myself enjoying the opening volley of this fighting manga. Series creator Toriyama has been a major influence on younger manga creators, most notably Naruto's Mahashi Kishimoto and One Piece's Eiichiro Oda (he's even done a collaboration with the latter), and you can see this in his high-energy action scenes, in particular. The hero of Z is Son Goku, a wild-haired martial artist who is capable of producing energy blasts and riding through the air on a cloud. When the second series opens, Goku has withdrawn from hero-ing to raise his four-year-old child Son Gohan and enjoy wedded bliss with the outspoken Chi-Chi. But the appearance of an alien named Raditz forces our hero into once more training to don the mantle of world-saving good guy. Raditz (whose name I kept reading as "Radish") is one of the last surviving members of a race of galactic plunderers called the Saiyan: he's also - in a piece of character revelation largely meaningless to someone who hasn't read the first sixteen Dragonballs - Goku's brother. The monkey tail that used to be a part of his body is a sign of his alien birth; Son Gohan also has such a tail. Our hero, then, was originally sent to Earth to conquer it, but a childhood incident of blunt head trauma turned him from a murderous destroyer of worlds into a good guy. He rejects Raditz's offer to return to the business of planet sacking and vows to protect his adopted planet ("Get the heck off my planet!" he tells his long-lost bro). In response, Raditz kidnaps Goku's son. Much fighting follows, of course. Goku is rescued - with the aid of a pointy-eared archenemy named Piccolo - but the battle alerts two stronger Saiyans to Son Goku's presence on Earth. As they begin the year-long process of traveling to our planet, Piccolo takes the four-year-old Gohan away to school him in the art of combat, while Gohan's father travels to the underworld for even more intensive martial arts training by a round and jovial demon named Kami-Sama, the Lord of the Worlds. Their training takes up most of the second volume in this series, as Gohan's friends and former allies sit on the sidelines and fret about the impending invasion. Since I didn't have a clue as to who most of these characters were, I was grateful to Toriyama for providing a two-page spread at the beginning of the book, describing his cast, though I have no doubt that when one of them falls in volume three's first big fight with the Saiyans, the moment has more impact to Dragon Ball aficionados than it did me. Still, Toriyama establishes his core three characters - father, son and demon former frenemy - so quickly and distinctly that they carried me through this VizBig collection. The training sequences, in particular, prove much more entertaining than usual scenes of this ilk: Piccolo's hardnosed handling of monkey-tailed innocent Gohan's survival training is especially effective. Toriyama's art should appeal to those who enjoy the cartoonish work in a more current manga series like One Piece, though it also reminds me in places of Golden Age American comic book artists like Bill Everett, especially in his forties work on the Submariner: Dragon Ball's demon figures wouldn't look out of place in Marvel Mystery Comics' Atlantis. For all that some fuddy-duddy comic book readers may moan about the way that traditional manga may look, the fact remains that you can see a visual lineage between an action series like this (which debuted in 1984) and the slam-bang Golden Age fight comics between Submariner and the Human Torch. VizBig's edition is advertised as containing new color artwork and "updated" content. In the case of the first, two chapters have been colorized, though outside of our learning that Piccolo is green, the new color doesn't add much. As far as I can determine, the primary updating has consisted of a few panels redrawn to eliminate images of characters giving each other the finger. (Clearly, Japanese publishers have a different take on "All Ages" comics than American.) It doesn't significantly hamper the story, even if the perpetual adolescent in me misses the casual obscenity. Tried to figure out which panels were censored, but I couldn't do it. Viz is also reissuing the first Dragon Ball books in their new hefty format: a good way for latecomers like me to catch up on this seminal manga series. On the basis of this first omnibus, I've already been won over by Toriyama's appealing mash-up of emotion- and action-packed battle sequences with whimsical fantasy. The "Greatest Battle Manga Ever"? Maybe. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Thursday, January 01, 2009 ( 1/01/2009 04:47:00 PM ) Bill S. "I FEEL UP AND I FEEL GROOVY." Let's take a gander at this classic by the long-lost Lords of the New Church, "Russian Roulette": # | |
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