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Saturday, November 21, 2009 ( 11/21/2009 10:24:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's a photo of Xander Cat, taken by one of our recent visiting guests and stolen by yours truly off of Tammy's Facebook photo page.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 11/21/2009 07:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  “ALL I EVER DID WAS WANDER AIMLESSLY AMONG THE EVER-SHRINKING STARS.” Though the title of This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (Tokyopop) contains an echo of Asano’s young adult manga What A Wonderful World!, the two series have very different intentions. The latter is an angst-y slice-of-life look at urban young struggling to find their place in a bullying world; the former (at least in its first volume) is a more lighthearted story about young girl aliens discovering planet Earth for the first time.Adapted from an animé teleseries by Gainax, with art by Ashita Morimi, the manga centers on two young boys who take in a pair of aliens who arrive on our planet as shafts of light. (“It’s not normal for a light resembling a shooting star to turn into a girl,” one of them reasonably notes.) Taking the bodies of attractive young girls (“So strange, having a body like this,” the ultra-busty elder alien Hikari says at one point), they become part of the two boys’ social and family circle even as we know their presence on the planet is the harbinger of dire occurrences in the near future. First time that Takeru and Ryou, our two heroes, meet Hikari (whose name means “light” in Japanese), the former winds up having to defend her from a monstrous creature that suddenly appears as he’s motorbiking her home. Takeru’s hand inexplicably transforms into a “sword thing” that he uses to slay the beast, but this is the only moment of such action that we see in the first volume. The bulk of the book is devoted to Hikari and her sister Akari (“brightness”) wreaking comic and emotional havoc in the lives of the two boys. When Takeru, for instance, takes Hikari back to his uncle’s house so she’ll have a place to stay, the boy’s cousin Mari quickly becomes jealous of the developing relationship. Takeru, who’s too dense to see that Mari has a thing for him, teases the waiflike girl for not having as shapely a body as Hikari -- then is puzzled when she kicks him and stomps off. Both alien girls come off innocent and unconstrained by modesty: the “mature” rated manga has more than its share of nudity, typically featuring the naïve Hikari as she happily embraces an embarrassed Takeru or shows up unexpectedly in bed with him. All fairly mild, particularly as rendered by artist Ashita Morimi, who depicts each girl with brightly big-eyed ingenuousness, though I can’t help wandering how these moments were portrayed in the original animé. One of the more amusing aspects of the story lies in the fact that -- unlike most Aliens Among Us stories -- nobody bothers to hide the fact that the two girls are not of this Earth. Takeru and Ryou openly admit it to family and friends, who accept, deny or offhandedly joke about it. “Situations like this always have a beautiful girl in them as a matter of default,” one of Takeru’s school chums observes. “Not like a gray-skinned or tentacled creature either.” Despite its moments of sexual and relational comedy, volume one concludes on an ominous note: the image of dead fish washing up on the shores of the beach. “I’ve seen this before,” younger alien Akari says. “No, I’ve seen a more horrible version of this.” No doubt we’ll be seeing more of the ugly side of this beautiful world in future books. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Wednesday, November 18, 2009 ( 11/18/2009 06:14:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: It's a caper video, featuring the Shins and their song "Australia"! # | Monday, November 16, 2009 ( 11/16/2009 06:44:00 AM ) Bill S. WARTS AND ALL: Say what you will about political lightning rod Ted Rall: the man’s not afraid of coming off like a dick. In The Year of Loving Dangerously (NBM), abetted by Spanish artist Pablo G. Callejo (Bluesman), the provocateur political cartoonist takes us back to 1984, the year a young Rall got his ass evicted and expelled from Columbia. To stave off homelessness, the young Rall sponged off a series of young New York women while pretending to be an up-and-coming yuppie. Portrait of the Artist as a Manipulative Stud Boy. Rall isn’t the first autobiographical comics writer to depict himself as an ass, of course -- back in the nineties, Dennis P. Eichorn produced a series of entertaining walks on the low-life side for Fantagraphics entitled Real Stuff -- though, perhaps he’s the most susceptible to cheap shots, given his propensity for pissing off his ideological opponents. For Rall to produce such a bleeding-warts-and-all graphic novel is either an act of bravery or the reflection of a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Maybe both. Rall’s narrative can get muddy in its chronology -- it starts out with our hero showering in the morning after one of his trysts and later shows us how he lost both his dorm space and his place as a student at Columbia – but its themes remain constant. The ways that poverty “makes every act an economic transaction,” the way that self-prostitution undermines you capacity for pleasure. “It was impossible to assess whether I actually liked her,” Ralls says, as he reflects on one such dalliance. “The experience had been queered by the inconvenient fact that I was desperate.” In between his romps between the sheets, Rall offers up slices of life in Reagan Era America: the struggles to find an affordable place to life in NYC, a disastrous Massachusetts road trip, an anti-Reagan protest on the Washington Mall that concludes with our man with a threesome, work as a trader trainee for Bear Stearns, a Dead Kennedys concert, the workings behind a subway token scam plus the inevitable naked geezer on the subway. Callejo’s painted art, a far cry from the proto-punk stylings Rall uses on his political cartoons, captures the milieu wonderfully and even manages to convey the varying degrees of dismay Rall’s young self feels over the way his life is going. He keeps the political proselytizing to a minimum. Though it wouldn’t be true to his character to avoid anti-Reaganomics rants altogether, Rall doesn’t shy from taking his own level of responsibility: “None of them could have fucked me up if I hadn’t let them,” he says early of his -- and with that admission, I found myself liking the dickish Rall more than I initially expected to. Year of Loving Dangerously is a strong addition to the growing field of graphic memoirs. Labels: art comics # | |
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