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Saturday, July 10, 2010 ( 7/10/2010 12:48:00 PM ) Bill S.  “THOSE PRIME MINISTERS ARE ALL THE SAME. WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT THEM?” There are times you can really fall down the rabbit hole pondering the sexual politics in shojo manga -- and Eiki Eiki’s Millennium Prime Minister (DMP) is one of ‘em. A comic romance set in the Japanese political world, the series is about the country’s youngest p.m., 25-year-old Kanata Okazaki, and his stalker-y attraction for the 16-year-old redheaded schoolgirl Minori Nagashima. How does a 25-year-old get to be Japan’s prime minister? “It is the New Millennium,” Kanata says, which is all the explanation we’re provided.Kanta runs into the redheaded schoolgirl the day they both ditch their respective responsibilities for game time at the arcade. After she defeats him at a game, the impetuous p.m. is instantly smitten. “You have great hair,” he tells her. “Curly and permed, soft to the touch.” He then announces that she’s going to be his wife. Young Minori doesn’t know what to make of this, of course. Though the young prime minister is a dreamy type with his own fan club of star struck young girls, there’s still that nine-year age difference to consider. More than once in the first volume, one of Kanato’s acquaintances asks him if he’s a pedophile, and while this is pretty much treated as a joke, it’s pretty clear that the guy’s a control freak. Using his connections, he gets a story planted in the press showing the two of them “patronage dating” (a helpful footnote tells us Westerners that this is a reference to “schoolgirl prostitution”), with Minori going by the public name of “Schoolgirl A.” To manage the scandal that he himself has helped to create, he tells the media that she’s his fiancé. Minori’s parents turn out to be thrilled at the thought of their daughter being a First Lady: “If she doesn’t want to, we’ll make her marry you,” they say. Ignoring the potentially creepy overtones, Minori’s parents send her off to live in the prime minister’s mansion (“Don’t worry,” he reassures them, “we won’t consummate anything until after we’re married!”) where our high schooler has to survive among a world of political types. Chief among these is the jealous 18-year-old senior aide Sai, a boy genius with a serious crush on Kanata who starts pranking Minori as soon as she moves into the place. Just two years older than our heroine, he’s prized for his organizational savvy, but as soon as he starts acting out, he’s called bratty. On Kanata’s side, the attraction that he feels toward our heroine seems to be largely platonic: at one point, we’re led to believe that he’s going to make a serious play for her, but it turns out that all that he wants to do is brush her hair. Still, Minori rightly chafes at all his machinations. “Like always, I’m at the mercy of this guy’s games,” she tells the reader as the p.m. hovers over with a brush in hand. There are times, though, when our gal finds herself admiring the guy’s basic hotness in spite of herself. Eiki Eiki, primarily known for yaoi (boy love) manga, nonchalantly skips through this potentially offensive nonsense by keeping her heroine prickly enough to prevent her being a passive victim. Her characters are expressively comic without going over the top -- most of the time, anyway -- and Minori’s overall reactions to her outlandish situations are generally more amusing than distressed. First volume is primarily devoted to introducing the set-up and the characters (also in the supporting cast: a political reporter and a special police agent attached to the p.m. -- both of whom have their own takes on the situation), though the writer/artist, whose grandfather was himself once Japan’s prime minister, promises more political material in volumes to come. That’s as maybe, but I’m still thinking that Millennium Prime Minister’s big draw will remain its provocative Manipulative Male/Resistive Girl relationship. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Thursday, July 08, 2010 ( 7/08/2010 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S.  “PERHAPS OUR GUEST WOULD BE MORE RESPECTFUL IF HE SAW HOTSHOT IN ACTION!” Though author Ian Fleming’s name appears below the title of “Nightbird (Titan Books), the latest collection of James Bond newspaper strips from the 1970’s, the fact is that it’s less a byline than it is a brand name -- like Walt Disney -- at this point. Though the earliest Bond strips were devoted to adapting Fleming’s spy novels into comics, at this stage in the game the story work was in the hands of solid British comics pro Jim Lawrence. Nightbird contains three Bond tales (plus a snippet of an uncompleted one for the fanatics) from 1976-77, more than a decade after Fleming’s death. All three full stories fit comfortably within the James Bond world, however, even if two of ‘em strain credulity almost as much as the movie version of Moonraker.Opening tale, “Hot-Shot,” is arguably the most successful in this set. It even features the return appearance by one of 007’s first egomaniacal antagonists. (Though the story’s intro acts as if there is a big reveal, in actuality, one of the bad guy’s henchmen speaks his name three days into the continuity.) The still-current storyline features the evildoer’s attempt to foment Middle Eastern unrest by using a heat ray to down a plane carrying the U.S. Secretary of State and blaming it on Palestinian Arabs. Our hero hooks up with a shapely Palestinian agent who’s main role is to get kidnapped and dangled over a tank full of sharks. In the best 007 tradition, the story ends with Bond victoriously holding the girl and promising to “delve into certain aspects of the Palestine situation.” Some things remain evergreen. The remaining two entries, the title story and “Ape of Diamonds,” prove less believable even by the loose standards of double-oh storytelling. In the title tale, a criminal mastermind engineers fake alien abductions to enact revenge on the lab responsible for his Phantom of the Opera disfigurements. Why fake aliens? Because . . . um . . . I don’t know? In the last, a villain uses a large gorilla to capture an OPEC mover and shaker, leaving the reader to wonder whether scripter Lawrence had been watching an old Monogram horror flick the night before he started outlining this rascal. Though he struggles to provide a convincing explanation for the super-smart beast’s abilities to pull off the kidnapping, we never really believe it. If the last story proves fairly silly, Lawrence and artist Yasolav Horak (with a brief guest stint by “Modesty Blaise” artist Neville Colvin) never give into the urge to wink at the reader. The Bond strips were clearly aimed at a less prudish readership than you’d get in the U.S. The violence is fairly straightforward (in the ape story, for instance, we see a woman get tossed from a hotel window without -- as in the movie Diamonds Are Forever -- landing in a pool), while the Bond Girls aren’t afraid to appear topless on-panel. The character of Bond is true to Fleming, while Horak’s penwork captures the more serious version of the character beautifully. Even at their most contrived, these resurrected strips remain a treat for fans -- certainly more fun to experience than the “funny” version of Casino Royale. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic comic strips # |Wednesday, July 07, 2010 ( 7/07/2010 06:15:00 PM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Why don't I have this New Pornographers album yet? # | Sunday, July 04, 2010 ( 7/04/2010 07:49:00 PM ) Bill S.  “THERE’S A MAGIC THAT EVEN ANGELS AND DEMONS DON’T KNOW ABOUT.” Looking at the cover to Matoko Tateno’s Angelic Runes (DMP) you’d never guess that it was a fantasy series where innocent villagers get their eyes burned out by monsters and two -- not one, but two -- childbirths end with the death of the mother. Yet so it is: rated 16+ for a young adult readership, the manga series follows Sowil, a handsome and heroic young mage who wanders the rustic lands looking for his father. As the first book opens, he happens upon a village where the frightened inhabitants are attempting to bury two children alive.The two little kids, twins named Erudite (Eru) and Allueh (Allu), are thought by the panicky villagers to be cursed. Though premature burial seems a bit extreme, you can understand why the townees look at them with suspicion. Each big-eyed child is an oracle, one speaking in the voice of angels, the other with the voice of devils. Even Sowil finds the sight of these two fresh-faced innocents spouting the words of otherworldly entities somewhat disconcerting. Despite this, our hero takes the two on his quest, and whenever he arrives at a fork in the road, he asks them both which path to take. “For some reason, you are a complete mystery to us,” the otherworldly voices say of our hero, which doesn’t prevent ‘em from giving him directions, of course. Along the way our hero uses his mysterious mastery of the Elder Runes to defeat sand worms, a basilisk, a creature that’s deceived an impressionable young girl into falling in love with it, plus a shape-shifting enemy named Loft who has an “overwhelming grudge” against Sowil’s father for some unexplained reason. Sowil’s abilities to best mythological beasties with his arcane knowledge appear rather limitless -- in this, he’s rather like Marvel’s Doctor Strange in his facility with magicks concocted by the writer to suit the situation. The mysteries in Runes lie more in the nature of each episode’s antagonist, typically misread by the unsophisticated countryfolk, and in the sometimes deceptive messages given to him by both demons and angels. As a manga artist best known for series featuring pretty boy heroes (and, frequently, love ‘tween pretty boy heroes), Tateno visually downplays the horror, focusing instead on her attractive predominately male characters. (Is it me or does Sowil’s propensity for large collars make him look rather disco?) This approach should be appealing to fans of soapish gothic lite, a growing audience these days, even if the first book’s naïve love-struck girl surrogate only sticks around for one chapter. With its wanderer hero, frontier setting, and cast of monster antagonists, think of Angelic Runes as a less butch, if diverting, variation on Vampire Hunter D -- without the overflowing bodices, of course. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # | |
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