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Saturday, May 01, 2010 ( 5/01/2010 08:30:00 AM ) Bill S.  “GOD, SOMETIMES I REALLY HATE BEING A KID.” Those superhero fans who found the new movie Kick-Ass a bit too rough might get a kick out of Inui Sekhiko’s Ratman (Tokyopop), a comic manga about a fifteen-year-old superhero fanboy who dreams of becoming super-powerful — only to learn to his dismay that he’s received his new powers from the wrong side.Set in a world where superheroes are “churned out regularly” and promoted like corporate sponsored sports stars, the series centers on Shuto Katsuragi, a high schooler whose short stature regularly gets him mistaken for a middle schooler. Wannabe Shuto diligently follows the celebrity supertypes, and he seemingly gets his shot at joining their ranks when he’s kidnapped by a goofy gang of miming minions called Jackies and brought to the Abyss, home to the evil organization Jackal. There he sees a pretty blond classmate, Mirea Mizushima, being held captive by a cleavage-baring villainess (who we immediately realize looks like an older version of Mirea). Why has the organization bothered to kidnap two helpless high school kids? “Since when has evil needed a reason to commit evil deeds?” our hero is told, though it all goes deeper than that. Passed an “easy-to-use transformation device” called the Append Gear by his seeming would-be rescuer, Shuto dons the device and becomes a fang-faced creature named Ratman. Unfortunately, his doing so binds him to the nefarious Jackal organization, and he is soon sent out to do its evil bidding. First on the agenda, breaking into the mansion headquarters of the Hero Association, who houses another classmate of Shuto’s, the kick-ass (sorry, there’s no other adjective) daughter of the association president, Rio Kizaki. Rio herself yearns to become a super-type, but is held back by her overprotective father. Though Ratman looks like something that might have been created back in the days when Marvel Comics was heavily swiping from Alien, Sekihiko primarily plays this shonen manga for campy comedy. When the statuesque Jackal leader too broadly starts gloating over her wicknedness, she’s chastised for getting “too maniacal;” after our hero undergoes his first transformation into Ratman, he’s greeted with a banner and confetti. The Jackies prove particularly comical, following Shuto into the school setting where they’re largely unnoticed, they’re a grinning parody of the disposable henchman — even as they prove to be more appealing than their mercenary Hero Association adversaries. As an artist, Sekihiko is not above engaging in the occasional dose of “fan service” (manga-ese for gratuitous imagery, often of the t-&-a variety), though he’s more fun when he plays with old school superhero comics imagery. I especially enjoyed the two servants protecting the Hero Association hq: one looks like a threatening matriarch out of Kirby’s Fourth World series, the other like a Marvel Comics blaxploitation rip-off. It’s clear where Sekihiko, the author of an earler comic con set series entitled Comic Party, cut his comics fanboy teeth. (First published at Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Friday, April 30, 2010 ( 4/30/2010 05:58:00 PM ) Bill S. “ARIZONA, TAKE OFF YOUR HOBO SHOES.” Been thinking at lot about the controversy surrounding our new home state this week: hard not to, of course, when a certain level of embarrassment about Arizona’s draconian “reasonable suspicion” immigration law has us wondering whether we lit in the right state after moving from the Midwest two-and-a-half years ago. It’s been bad enough watching a Republican-led state legislature steadily drain money from social and behavioral health services -- an area where I’ve devoted most of my working life -- to see it now become a late-nite talkshow symbol of reactive intolerance is out-and-out depressing. I can understand some of the fear-slash-anger fueling this measure, of course. Watch the teevee news for any length of time out of Tucson or Phoenix, and you get battered by reports of violence linked to Mexican drug gangs. (Tusconian Dirk Deppey describes some recent incidents.) But so much of this violence has less to do with the immigration issue than it does the illegal drug culture -- and the two issues have become so mushed together through politically fueled fear of Those People that it’s become impossible for many folks to separate ‘em. For me, the big problem with the new measure lies in its focus -- which remains on the immigrants but not the people who profit from their exploitation. Make no mistake: in this state, there’s a large economy supported on the backs of illegals: not just coyotes or drug lords, but fast food concerns, agribusinesses, the hotel industry, anybody who hires an undocumented immigrant to do the grunt work. Working with low-income families in Southern Arizona over the past two years, I had the occasion to visit a mother with a boyfriend (and father of her children) who was an illegal. He was one of a group of guys who crossed the border to work in the fields for months at a time until he was picked up and transported back down South, then a few weeks later, he’d sneak back to his job and family. The life that this man was able to provide his wife and kids was, frankly, shitty. They lived in a battered trailer located in an area outside of town known by the locals as “Little Mexico.” Largely inhabited by migrant workers, Little Mexico was no small part of the region’s economy, though it sure wasn’t anything you’d see acknowledged in the tourist brochures alongside, say, the Rex Allen Museum. And from what I can see, the ongoing use and abuse of undocumented workers is so much a part of the Grand Canyon State that any attempt at stopping and identifying suspected illegals is a bandaid solution at best -- and an invitation to racist abuse at worst. At this particularly blighted point in our political history, though, I’m not really expecting members from either party to actually stand up and attempt to address the real underlying issue in our newish home state. There’s still too much money to made through calculated misdirection, in a bill that has the appearance of making Arizonans safer by pandering to the broadest kind of scapegoating. # | Wednesday, April 28, 2010 ( 4/28/2010 06:03:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Devo in the desert. What more do ya need? # | Sunday, April 25, 2010 ( 4/25/2010 10:38:00 AM ) Bill S.  ”IT’S A PITY THE SHADOW OF DEATH IS ON HIS FACE.” Set in 184 A.D., “a period of decadence and moral laxity” in China, Yunosuke Yoshinaga’s Rampage (CMX) is a violent “mature”-rated manga fantasy taken from a classic tale from Chinese literature, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As a work of historical fiction, Kingdoms has apparently fueled a variety of manga and manhua adaptations over the years, though as your typically culturally blinkered Westerner, I’m forced to primarily take the story at face value. As a result, I initially found some of the background machinations a trifle confusing where I suspect those who know the original legends won’t. (So the founder of the Way of Peace sect incites an army that’s responsible for the rape and pillage of the country’s villages? The Way of Peace is strange, indeed.) But as long as the manga kept its focus on its disreputable young hero, Zhang Fei, I was able to stick with it.First volume in the series opens on a stakes establishing sequence as the young wanderer Zhang enters a village that’s been decimated by the Yellow Turban Army, the group of rebels doing more harm than good in its battle against the corrupt Han Dynasty. Starving young Zhang digs through the rubble, looking for some sustenance when he’s captured by Guan Ya, a giant of a man who is second in command in a volunteer army protecting the people from the Yellow Turbans. Zhang (who at times reminds me of Matthew Broderick’s character in Ladyhawk) wheedles his way into the army, though he’s far from the ideal soldier. It’s only after he attempts to protect a little girl from a group of thuggish Turbans that his no-account ways are changed for good. Shot with an arrow to this throat, he falls before the entrance to a cave inhabited by a group of sorcerers. They revive our hero, providing him with a snake spear, which transforms him into a mighty warrior -- but at what cost? Each time he uses it, the spear takes over his mind, turning him into a killing machine with scant regard for which side he’s supposed to be defending. “If the spear continues to take over your mind,” Lie Bei, leader of the volunteer arms tells him late in the first volume, “you’ll soon lose your five senses and memory permanently.” But Liu Bei, we quickly learn, has a secret, too. A young girl who our hero first spots bathing her shapely self under a mountain waterfall, she’d doing the male drag thing as head of the volunteer army. Guan Yu is in on the deception, but when our hero reveals that he knows what’s up, he’s tossed into a dungeon and threatened with execution. Fortunately, Liu Bei also has a connection to the Xian wizards who gave Zhang the sinister snake spear, so she ultimately relents. “I strongly suggest you live your remaining years as peacefully as possible,” she advises the young man, but we know already from the book’s cover -- a blood-sprayed Zhang leaping into an unseen fray -- that this is pretty darn unlikely. Yoshinaga’s art is especially strong during the bloody battle scenes. If some of his characters look a mite too fresh-faced to be ancient Chinese battle vets, the clean line work at least makes Liu Bei’s deception believable. The moment that inappropriately lingers in my mind, though, is a panel following a brief confrontation between Zhang and Liu where the latter uses a crimson pearl given to her by the wizards to temporarily drive the spear’s avatar from Zhang’s body. Our boy passes out face down on Liu’s lap, as she sits there peacefully with her robe half open and revealing her cleavage. I’m guessing that this moment wasn’t dramatized quite like this in the original work . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # | |
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