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Friday, May 01, 2009 ( 5/01/2009 11:26:00 AM ) Bill S.  "EVEN THE ATTICS OF THE RICH ARE COMFORTABLE AND SPACIOUS." An Eisner Award nominee for 2009, Kazuo Umezu's Cat Eyed Boy is a gleefully disturbing horror manga about the shifting boundaries between human and monstrous. Its title hero is a small boy with pointed ears and cat-shaped eyes that allow him to see in the dark. This look is enough to get him shunned by both humans and demons (the latter consider his human physiognomy "too extreme"), so our protagonist moves from home to home, taking up hidden residence in the attics of each home he selects. "The residents don't have a clue that I'm living here," he tells the reader, adding that "Wherever I appear, something frightening happens."Though he's forced to scrounge for food and shelter -- and his schoolboy outfit has holes in it -- Cat Eyed Boy (we're never given another name) proves a remarkably cheerful creature. Following the residents of the houses he has chosen as his temporary shelter, he watches their stories unfold, occasionally intervening to stave off catastrophe but just as often letting the horrifying events run their course. The first volume of Umezu's 2006 series, published by Viz Media, is a meaty 536-page tome featuring five stories, though it should be noted that the last tale, "The Band of A Hundred Monsters," carries on into concluding Volume Two. In each piece, at least one unfortunate human is victimized by a hideous creature, though in most cases we don't feel too badly about it since the victim is not exactly a paragon of virtue. In "One-Legged Monster of Oudai," for instance, a young boy with an unhealthy fixation on catching and pinning insects to a specimen board ("When I pierce them like this," he states, "I get such a rush.") is warned by a one-legged mountain demon to cease this practice and "apologize to the insects" else he "suffer a terrible death." The kid doesn't listen, of course, so the O-LM enacts some EC-styled vengeance on the little sadist by forcing him to experience the same death he's inflicted on his bugs. To expedite this, the hopping demon takes over Cat Eyed Boy's body with a nail that burrows under our hero's skin and travels to his stomach. When our hero attempts to get the nail removed by an "eccentric doctor," the possessed Boy spits poison in the unfortunate physician's face. The first volume's centerpiece is "The Tsunami Summoners," which tells the story of the Boy's birth and early years in a village by the Mountains of Omine. Born to mountain demons, the young "Nekomata" (cat goblin) is cast away by the community of grotesques for not looking sufficiently demonic. He's adopted by a village spinster named Mimi, but the rest of the villagers refuse to have anything to do with him. When our hero learns that a group of demons capable of bringing a tsunami down on the village are gathering in strength, Cat Eyed Boy attempts to warn the humans. But his demon-like appearance interferes with their ability to hear his message; even his adopted mother turns away from him and ultimately falls victim to the tsunami. "Even I betrayed Cat Eyed Boy in the end," she thinks as the waters overpower her. "This is my punishment." As with Umezu's post-Apocalyptic horror classic, The Drifting Classroom (also nominated for an Eisner), Umezu illustrates his tales with a boyish love of cartoonish overstatement. Nobody reacts quietly in an Umezu horror tale, and who can blame 'em, when the monsters he creates look like something Basil Wolverton might've cast aside as being too excessive. At first, the artist's typical page layouts (four tiers with two or three panels in a tier) may strike some readers as being overly old-fashioned, though it soon becomes apparent that Umezu is using this cramped and conservative construction to add impact to the moments when his monsters go berserk. Cat Eyed Boy is given an "Older Teen" rating by Viz Signature in its English-language edition, though there are times when it appears to be aimed at a younger, if no less blood-thirsty, audience. The young hero/observer regularly breaks the wall to speak to the reader, occasionally threatening to spend time in the reader's home. At one point, our childish lead pisses on a regenerating corpse through the attic floor; in another, he gives an injured mad scientist diarrhea medication instead of something to help with his wound. In such moments, you can imagine a pre-teen reader (Sho from The Drifting Classroom, for instance) snickering at Cat Eyed Boy's antics. As a horror manga, Cat Eyed Boy is free-wheeling, over-the-top and inventive, if considerably less gripping than Classroom -- primarily because we never truly worry about the safety of our title lead as we do the plucky protagonist of Uzemu's futuristic survival story. Bound and caged, for instance, the Boy digs a tunnel to freedom with his mouth, spitting out dirt as he goes. "Only I could pull this off," he tells the reader. "I'm different from your average human." Now that's an understatement. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Wednesday, April 29, 2009 ( 4/29/2009 09:06:00 AM ) Bill S. BC REDEC Following a recent alliance with the Technorati website, Blogcritics has undergone a major face change this week. As one of the site's volunteer book editors, I've spent a lotta time over the last day or so, playing with the site's new template as Technorati's techies have worked to iron out the kinds of bugs that seem to merrily proliferate whenever you make a major platform change like this. In the end, I think all the hassles'll be worth it: the new site looks real purty and is nicely navigatible . . . But, hey, where'd my BC link graphic go? # | ( 4/29/2009 08:37:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Heard an Oasis song in the background of last night's N.C.I.S.*, so I went paging through their videos this a.m. Found this 'un from the most recent album: think I need to pick up that disc. *Am I the only one who finds the idea of an N.C.I.S. soundtrack album of modern rock tracks somewhat off? # | Monday, April 27, 2009 ( 4/27/2009 08:21:00 AM ) Bill S. "DO YOU WANT SPENDING MONEY?" Spent part of the weekend going over some scanned copies of the Quality Comics' forties comic book series, The Barker and discovered an intriguing balck-and-white ad on the inside front cover of the Spring '49 issue (number eleven). The advert was for Stephen Credit Sales, which was promoting a line of "Popular Patriotic and Religious Mottoes" for young would-be door-to-door salesmen. The young entrepeneur was shipped a package of forty "beautiful glittering mottoes" that he or she was expected to sell for 35 cents apiece. "If you sell, 25, you keep $2.50," the ad promised. "If you sell all 40, you keep $4.00." The ad was none-too-surprisingly vague on the specifics of the financial transaction, though it assured the reader that "No money is needed in advance" and "You do not pay shipping costs or split your commission." Four mottoes were on display -- all of a religious theme (e.g., "Love One Another As I Have Loved You," "A Child's Prayer") -- so we're not shown any of the patriotic pieces. (Unless, of course, the idea is that to be devoutly Christian is to automatically be a Good American.) I can see kids across the post-war country, writing to Stephen for their first pack of forty, wandering around the neighborhood, trying to sell these cheesy little cards or perhaps taking 'em to a Sunday family dinner and trying to wheedle their grandparents into buying the lot. I'm betting Stephen got a goodly amount of returns. What first caught my eye in this ad, incidentally, was the mailing address for Stephen Credit Sales: Normal, Illinois, my hometown for close to forty years. Googled the company name and the only ref I found to it was on a link to one of Scott Shaw!'s "Oddball Comics" pages for a 1958 issue of Action Comics. The ad ran for at least nine years, but by the time I got to Normal in the late sixties, the company does not appear to have still been around. Those "glittering" religious and patriotic mottoes just weren't selling the way they useta, I guess . . . # | Sunday, April 26, 2009 ( 4/26/2009 07:58:00 AM ) Bill S. "ME AND MY RADIO TRUCKIN' INTO THE NIGHT." Ashes to Ashes wrapped up its first season on BBC-America last night. A decent season-ender -- with stuck-in-the-eighties Alex attempting to prevent the death of her parents by car bomb and learning some appalling truths about that life-changing event. The ep made good use of its Bowie theme and had an effective appearance by the sinister Pierrot figure, though my favorite musical tribute moment came when our heroine attempts to destroy a car at a gay pride parade under the mistaken a belief that this is the vehicle that will be used to kill her parents. The song used is Tom Robinson's "2-4-6-8 Motorway," and there's a funny moment where thuggish copper Ray complains to Alex about the fact that such a "manly" song was performed by "a poof." Very in character. I read that the series' second season has just started airing in England, so hopefully we Americans'll get to see it sometime this summer. While the show has never matched the unnerving disorientation of its superior predecessor, Life on Mars, its central dilemma remains strong enough to keep us wondering how the writers'll reconcile it, given what we already know from Mars. Too, Phil Glenister's scene-holding Gene Hunt remains a treat to watch. It's his world; all the rest are merely players . . . or is that "constructs"? # | |
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