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Saturday, August 01, 2009 ( 8/01/2009 09:50:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Kyan Pup investigating something in the backyard.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 8/01/2009 08:35:00 AM ) Bill S.  "ALL I DID WAS TELL HIM TO HANG IN THERE." Mention the word "shinigami" to many American manga readers, and the first thing that'll likely come to mind is Ryuk, the grinning demonic death god from Ohba and Obata's Death Note. Yet the title lead in Asuka Izumi's supernatural shojo series, Ballad of a Shinigami (CMX), is a much less malevolent creation. A "white shinigami" who alternately goes by the name Momo or her designated number A-100100, Momo typically appears to comfort humans on the brink of despair or death.Accompanied by a talking bat-winged cat named Daniel and carrying a scythe much like the traditional Western image of Death, her basic task on Earth is to provide humans with a reason to keep on living. It's not as if she's necessarily doing 'em a favor -- "Living is a much harder course to travel than dying," she tells her familiar Daniel at one point -- but it is her role in the cosmic scheme of things. Though Daniel calls her a "busybody" for her atypical shinigami behavior, it's clear she's meant to stand apart from the other death demons. Where the others are bedecked in dark gray cloaks, Momo appears in white, looking girlishly large-eyed and innocent. She's like a benevolent mirror to the manga/anime vengeance creature Hell Girl; where the latter's appearance always portends death and dire happenings for the humans she visits, Momo saves her visitants. Based on a series of young adult novels by K-She Hasegawa, Ballad of a Shinigami was adapted in 2006 into older teen shojo format that will ultimately comprise three volumes in CMX's reprint paperback series. Per Hasegawa's brief afterword, the decision to do Shinigami as a shojo (girl's) series was not something he pitched to his publisher, though the series' "sad but sweet" tone seems suited to Izumi's flowery art. First volume in the series, which was recently released by CMX in the U.S., features four stories, all wrapped around Momo's attempts at helping out a young despondent human. The short opening "prologue" quickly establishes the basic direction the stories will take. In it, our heroine appears before a suicidal girl who is beating herself up because the last words she said to a sick friend were angry ones. Momo brings a last comforting message from the now-dead friend to the young girl, prompting her to turn away from self-destruction. "Ending your life like that," the death demon also tells her, won't reunite her with her friend. "It will only make you a shinigami like us." When the young girl asks Momo if that is how she became a white shinigami, we're told that the shinigami remembers nothing of her former life. Whether that's true is perhaps answered in a later volume. Rated "Teen Plus" for "mild violence and suggestive situations," Ballad offers a take on its subject quite different from the pulpish Death Note. Though the stories may have darkly violent elements -- in one episode, for instance, a young boy starts seeing shinigami after he's witness to his abusive father's violent murder of his mother -- their overriding tone is more melancholy and ultimately hopeful. In this light, the manga can be seen as a counterpoint to more sensationalistic dark fantasies like Note or Hell Girl. Be interesting to see if it garners a comparable reading audience. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Thursday, July 30, 2009 ( 7/30/2009 09:43:00 AM ) Bill S.  "HE'S A POOK." One of the first of his extended sci-fi meditations on the culture of addiction that would ultimately lead to his elegantly despairing A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick's Now Wait for Last Year centers on a "tempogogic" drug that seriously screws around with its users' time sense. Set in a future where Earth has gotten itself enmeshed in a losing intergalactic war, the book focuses on a husband and wife, Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife Katharine, who've taken JJ-180, a highly addictive drug that was developed by somebody (stories vary as to who) as a weapon in the war. Said drug may or may not -- as with other Dick works, the line between reality and hallucination quickly grows murky -- take its users into the past or future, though its long-term use ultimately destroys the addict's mind and body.Our book's protagonist, Sweetscent, is given the drug surreptitiously by his already addicted wife, so he understandably spends much of the novel swinging between murderous anger and empathy toward Kathy. In a canon that features beaucoup unsympathetic female characters, Katharine Sweetscent has to be one of Dick's most difficult: when the book opens, we already see her engaged in shrewish conflict with her husband, whose role as primary surgeon to one of the wealthiest men in the world is insufficiently profitable to her, though when the doctor rises to take care of Gino Molinari, the Machiavellian elected leader of Terra's unified planetary culture, she suddenly turns antagonistic toward his elevated stature. When the woman becomes an instant addict to JJ-180, it's inevitable that she slip a capsule into her husband's drink. Not only does it fit the conflictual relationship between the two ('Well, that's marriage these days," one character sardonically notes, "legalized hate."), it's what addicts do. They work to bring everyone around them into their world of addiction. Though we're with Katharine when she first ingests the dangerous JJ-180, the main focus of Last Year remains on her husband both before and after his drug-induced temporal adventures. Dick's creation of a world at war proves as timely now as it did in 1966, especially in his depiction of the political milieu where Eric has landed. Molinari (a.k.a. the Mole) is a particularly inspired creation. In an era where artificial organs (artiforgs) keep the well to do alive in seeming perpetuity, the Mole refuses to have anything artificial put in his body. A catalog of somatic complaints and sudden illnesses, Molinari uses his ravaged body as a tool to manipulate negotiations with both sides in the war. As such, the very nature of his regular parade of medical issues becomes murky, while the appearance of a seemingly robust and healthy Mole on the scene complicates matters even further. Is he a robotic creation? A JJ-180 traveler from some alternate Terran future? If you're expecting a clear-cut answer to those questions, then you don't know Dick. The book's final chapters, where Sweetscent seemingly travels through several alternate time streams, are particularly befuddling. And yet, for all its mucking around with sinister war-time machinations and temporal paradoxes, the gist of Now Wait for Last Year remains Sweetscent's ongoing emotional struggles dealing with a mentally ill, drug-addicted spouse. Dick remains brutally unsentimental in his delineation of these struggles; though his protagonist is correctly called a "good man" by a sentient taxicab, he's also capable of appalling fantasies about escaping his damaged spouse. It's an unfortunate dynamic that many addicts' partners know, one that the writer believably and empathically captures in the pages of this seeming piece of sci-fi pulp. Now Wait for Last Year is the third of five novels reprinted in the Library of America's Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s (The other four: Martian Time-Slip; Dr. Bloodmoney; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; and Scanner Darkly.) Where both Time-Slip and Bloodmoney feature a large cast of individually rendered California neurotics, the focus in Last Year is tighter, more constricted. While some readers may take issue with the book's final parts, this still remains a must-read for lovers of bracingly disturbing speculative fiction. Labels: classic sci-fi # |Wednesday, July 29, 2009 ( 7/29/2009 07:33:00 AM ) Bill S. "I REALLY WANT TO HAVE THAT LOVE STORY." In a medium where the default approach when it comes to treating plus-sized Americans is to take the lead of the size-positive remake of Hairspray and have her preside over a Dance Your Ass Off competition, the idea behind Fox's new reality series More to Love is downright subversive. The average American woman, we're told, is a size 14; the average female reality show contestant is a size two. Yet despite the endless commercial pressure and media messages, plenty of Big Beautiful Women (a.k.a. BBWs) manage to sustain long and successful relationships -- what about a show for them? A commendable idea, at least on paper. More is a BBW variation on The Bachelor. In it, bear-like real estate investor Luke Conley invites twenty full-figured "girls" (he can't stop calling 'em "girls," even though series hostess Emme keeps utilizing the word "ladies") to your basic reality show mansion, where he starts culling 'em down to pick the Girl of His Dreams. The BBWs generally range within the upper 100s to the lower 200s -- what those in the size acceptance movement refer to mid-sized -- and are physically quite stunning. You can clearly see Luke is enthralled at the sight of each and every one of these lovely fat women, and, watching 'em get introduced to him one at a time in the show's first twenty minutes, you can understand why. With a few What Not to Wear exceptions, these women have been packaged to look glamorous and self-confident -- even if they're all quiveringly insecure inside. But this wouldn't be Fox or reality television if More didn't have its share of creepy and vaguely dishonest moments. Foremost is the show's central idea, which repeatedly gets hammered at us throughout the opening episode: based on their experiences, these women are certain that this show is their "last ditch effort" at finding True Love. Again and again, we're told through contestant voiceover that they've "never been on a date before," and when we do hear that a one of the women has apparently been in an actual relationship in the past, it's clear the relationship was a psychologically abusive one. "The guy was embarrassed because of my size," she tells Luke, to which the man thankfully notes that the guy didn't deserve to be with her. As with so many of these reality shows, More does the teary talking into the camera bit so much that you half-wish someone would run in from off camera and throw a bucket of water on the interviewed. Watching Melissa, one of the show's zaftig California girls, weepily state that this contest is her "one chance" at finding a partner who'd accept her as she was, both my wife and I shouted at the set, "No, it isn't!" Even when the show advertises that it's about average American women, it repeatedly hammers that point that true love for the average-sized is as scarce as a diet that works. Too, one more than occasion, our man Luke comes across more than a little opportunistic on the show, nudging one contestant into kissing him so he won't have to think about the five women he has to eliminate that night from the competition, reveling in the sensation as he's sandwiched between two BBLovelies on a love seat. Having been to my share of fat acceptance social events, I can't deny that such doggish behavior occurs, but, still, this is our Prince Charming? One point the opening episode never quite addresses is the disparity between life as a BBW and life as a fat man. Though Luke occasionally makes some noises about knowing what it's like to be rejected for his own 300-plus pound size, we never get the sense that his girth has been as corrosive to his self-esteem as it has for the "girls." "I'm a big man," he tells us from the outset, "I enjoy being a man of large stature." It's a primordial man thing, he adds. Yet while a few of the women on the show state that they've come to terms with the fact that they'll never be a size two, it's clear that none of 'em are as secure as the bachelor they're pursuing. If they were, they probably wouldn't be on this series. Labels: teleseries # | |
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