Pop Culture Gadabout
Saturday, May 15, 2010
      ( 5/15/2010 06:29:00 PM ) Bill S.  


WEEKEND PET PIC: Ziggy Stardust's just dried off from a bath, so now he's out getting Dusty in the backyard.


THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."
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      ( 5/15/2010 07:44:00 AM ) Bill S.  


“IT’S KIND OF PATHETIC TO KEEP READING MANGA FOREVER.” Back in my wasted youth -- not long after I got out of college with a very unhelpful master’s degree in English -- I spend some time as the sole employee/manager of a small used book store. We didn’t have a ton of customers, and the bulk of folk who walked in were either looking for westerns or Harlequin Romances, but it was still a great place for a book fiend like myself. The pay sucked, of course, but I got a lot of reading and writing time in.

When I first heard of Seimu Yoshizaki’s manga series, Kingyo Used Books (Viz Signature), I knew I had to latch onto a copy. A series celebrating the simple joys of holding an old print book in your hand, of rediscovering great books, sounded like just the thing. One look at the cover -- bright and leggy bookstore manager Natsuki perched on a ladder before ceiling high bookshelves -- and I was instantly charmed.

The paperbacks for sale at out title shop turn out to be more specialized than the long gone little Book Worm in Bloomington, Illinois, was. Entirely devoted to manga collections, the stock in Kingyo reflects the broad history of Japanese comics. Each chapter in the series’ first volume, then, is devoted to different customers and their individual manga loves. This can range from a twenty-something urban professional recollecting his schoolboy faves to an obsessed fan of a fifties detective series who dresses like his hero. In one chapter, a struggling young art student happens on the shop and is overwhelmed by the vision of abundant creativity within it. “All of these countless volumes,” she thinks, “compared to that, I’m just a single insignificant person.”

If some of these chapters work more as vignettes than as fully realized short stories, the cumulative effect is more successful. Writer/artist Yoshizaki is considering the effect that well-made comic art can have on the reader. While the bulk of the series considered in the first volume naturally turn out to be Japanese produced, she also has space to consider foreign comics -- as in a chapter devoted to a Japanese visitor to France who discovers the beauty of Jean Giraud’s magnificent western Blueberry. “What do you know,” he says as he pages through an album of La Piste des Sioux. “Here, there. It’s all the same. We’re all humans on the same planet.”

Through it all, Natuski functions as a listener/observer to each customer’s moments of discovery; in the first volume, at least, we don’t get much sense of her as a character, though we are provided glimpses of her pint-sized grandfather (who owns the shop) and Shiba-San, who hangs in the back of the shop and functions “kind of like the store’s troll.” As Natsuki explains, “He’s got a neurosis about people saying bad stuff about manga.” Shiba-San also has a thing for Natsuki that he’s unable to openly express, which, if nothing else, serves to show that socially inept geeky fanboys aren’t just restricted to the U.S. of A.

If the themes within Kingyo prove anything but deep (Art can change your life! The love of a good story can bind us together! Don’t toss your old comic books!), the artist presents it all with an openhearted love for her chosen mode of storytelling that should appeal to seasoned manga readers and newcomers alike. For the latter, the first volume includes an appendix providing a little bit of the history and context for many of the series discussed in the book. Reading it, I was reminded that I’ve yet to sample Akira Toriyama’s popular children’s series, Dr. Slump, and wish that Mitushiro Kawashima’s detective series Billy Puck were available. (The images that we see have a real Tintin vibe to ‘em.) Yoshizaki’s art is welcoming, and her characters are visually appealing: cute without slipping over into cutesy.

Only point I’d note -- as the onetime sole employee of the Book Worm -- is that we’re never shown Natsuki dusting Kingyo’s shelves. One thing I’ll carry to this day from my time in the biz: used books get very dusty. Say what you will about the power of old books to take us away, when you embark on the trip, don't forget to bring a handkerchief.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

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Wednesday, May 12, 2010
      ( 5/12/2010 10:34:00 PM ) Bill S.  


MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: It's the slap happy video to New Order's "True Faith." Great song:


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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
      ( 5/11/2010 07:21:00 AM ) Bill S.  


“I HAVE TO SECURE A PEACEFUL LIFE AT THIS SCHOOL BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.” The initials in Tachibana Higuchi’s Portrait of M & N (Tokyopop) serve more than one purpose in this teen-rated romantic manga. At the first level, they connect to the names of the series’ fragilely attractive protagonists, 15-year-olds Mitsuru Abe and Natsuhiko Amakusa. At another, they refer to our leads’ primary characteristic: Mitsuru is a masochist, while Natushiko is a narcissist. These two ”lost lambs” come to a new high school with a strong desire to appear normal: not an easy task when they both have a tendency to forget about everybody else around them once they fugue into their particular manias.

Natsuhiko, who wears eyeglasses just to hinder himself from accidentally catching sight of his handsome reflection, for instance, when caught off guard starts openly mooning over his sparkling mirrored self (“You are the only friend,” he tells his image, “the only friend for me.”) Mitsuru, after inadvertently getting elbowed in the face, starts to plead with Natsuhiko to hurt her more: “Your elbow, so sharp,” she tells him in a heart punctuate word balloon, “hit me again, torment me.”

But lest you think that Portrait of M & N is a high school updating of The Story of O, the focus of Higuchi’s romance is not on our two leads’ succumbing to their individual fetishes. Rather it is on their desperate desire to overcome them. Both obsessions, we quickly learn, have developed as a result of the way they were parented as younger children -- Natsuhiko, for instance, was so overprotected and isolated from other kids that his only companion became himself -- and if these psychological explanations seem more than a little facile, they do work to make the characters more relatable to an adolescent. Take away the diagnosable component, and you’re left with your basic high school dilemma: how do I fit in the ultra-judgmental high school world?

Higuchi, who draws herself with a pig head in the little comic author interludes interspersed through the first volume, renders this in typical shojo manga, with perhaps a few more explanatory notes (“Standard of beauty = himself” she plasters at one point on our hero’s torso) than are necessary. As a plotter, she has a good sense for the tentative romantic build, though: as our twosome’s nascent relationship starts to develop, it’s left up in the air as to whether this’ll become a true teen romance or just a case of dysfunctional bonding. “I shouldn’t depend on his kindness anymore,” the bruised Mitsuru thinks early in the book. “I have to become more independent.” But, of course, we know that this resolution won’t last.

In America -- where the big comics-related news has been the recent announcement that a (gasp!) gay character may be introduced to the conservative Archie comics cast -- it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream publishers greenlighting a series like this. The trick, in this book, is in the way that Higuchi unapologetically presents her two character’s abnormal behavior without either overexposing or downplaying it. These are teenagers, after all, at an age when anything that might interfere with the way their classmates perceive ‘em is a big deal. When a classmate shows up to blackmail our heroine into becoming his girlfriend, it’s clear that at some point in this six-volume series, their big secret’s gonna be blown. By the end of the first volume, I suspect most shojo readers’ll be eager to see just how that ultimately plays out.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



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