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Monday, September 06, 2010 ( 9/06/2010 11:31:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THIS IS PART OF OUR JOB AS WELL, SIR!” A two-volume spin-off from a popular Japanese teleseries, Makoto Tateno’s Happy Boys (Doki Doki/DMP) followqs a quintet of young men who work at a butler café known as Lady Braganza. In Braganza, the all-male staff act like proper servants as they serve tea and cakes to their predominately female clientele. Within this rarefied setting, the ambience is just as important as the food, so three of our young “footmen” are trainees learning the ins-and-outs of being an old-fashioned manservant. That all five of these happy boys are regular guys away from their job sparks much of the series’ humor.Thus, in volume one’s first of four episodes (called “drips” to go with the tea motif), we’re shown our fivesome on the job, while the following episode takes us to the apartment where the boys share living quarters. Dorming together is a part of the job: as head butler Katano intones, “You’ll learn to respect each other” living in close quarters. At this point in the story, though, what they mainly do is get on each others’ nerves. Though the cover to the first volume displays all five footmen, the story focus is primarily on the three trainees: Shiva, Renjo and Ivory. (These are the names of their servant personas: each character has their own name used outside the café -- which can get a trifle confusing at first for the reader.) Of the three, Shiva (a.k.a. Kyoichi) struggles most to maintain his role, occasionally speaking in “common form” to the customers, but he’s also the most openhearted. His bespectacled roommate Ivory (Kosuka) is the most knowledgeable but has yet to achieve the proper deferential attitude for the job. Somewhere in between the two is light-haired Renjo (Junta), who claims to have once been the number one man at a “host club” (a bar where male servers attend the female customers). All three have been selected as trainees by the café’s invisible owner, who sees the potential that each has to become a great butler. Our trio knock against each other like Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, though in a pinch we know they’ll help each other out. In one episode, for instance, Shiva appears to be dating one of the café’s customers -- a definite no-no -- so the rest of our quintet follows him to a park rendezvous. In another, first footman Silk (Gen) is inadvertently seen by a customer as he rehearses a play in the park; he is subsequently suspended for this mishap. “We mustn’t disturb the dream for when they visit us,” head butler Katano solemnly states. If the idea of a café catering to upstairs/downstairs fantasies seems more than a little outré in “class-less” America, the struggles of starting and learning a new job, of getting along with contentious co-workers, crosses cultures. Tateno, first known in this country for yaoi manga like Yellow, handles this teen-rated material relatively straightly. The only explicitly gay bits in the book come from the poofy patissier Kitchi, who has an unrequited crush on Ivory and is presumably a carryover from the teleseries. All of the main characters are modeled after the actors who played them, and while some artists may get hamstrung by this choice, it doesn’t appear to hamper Tateno, who makes her young male heroes expressive if not always as visually distinct as they could be. As a workplace sit-dramedy, Happy Boys proves more entertaining than I know I expected it to be. If you told me beforehand that I’d be enjoying a comic with a setting devoted to celebrating the class differences of a thankfully bygone world, I’d have probably answered back with a condescending yeah right chuckle. Like the arrogantly brainy Ivory/Kosuka, I’ve still got a few things to learn. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Sunday, September 05, 2010 ( 9/05/2010 08:59:00 AM ) Bill S.  “CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE FOR OLD PROFESSORS!” Produced in collaboration with a non-profit advocacy group called Privacy Activism, Networked: Carabella on the Run (NBM) is a cautionary graphic novel about the ways we’ve so willingly abandoned our rights to privacy in the techno age. Scripted by Gerard Jones and illustrated by Mark Badger, the comic tells the tale of a blue-skinned college girl who’s an escapee from another dimension. She meets up with Nick Schumer, an engineer designing a new type of shoes, “perfect trainers,” that can gauge the wearer’s physical responses. After he inadvertently gets hold of some hairy technology from Carabella’s world, the hyper-inventive Nick juices up his prototype shoes so that they can connect to the world wide social networking web. Once a greedy venture capitalist latches onto Nick and his creation, the results could mean the world-wide enslavement of humankind.Author Jones builds this alarmist scenario comically: starting out with the small ways that social networking can provide information about ourselves to the world at large. When our initially camera-shy blue skinned girl gets her photo snapped at a party by a fellow student who puts it on a FaceSpace page, she gets a lot of unwanted attention from a group of female Star Wars fanatics. Later, when Nick sells his first batch of web-connected shoes, he has to face a group of p.o.ed customers who’ve had revealing upskirt shots posted on the web. This is all small-scale compared to the dangers faced by Carabella, Nick and friends once some creepy types from our heroine’s repressive dimension show up and join forces with the smarmy venture capitalist. Jones, a comics pro and pop historian who first became known with the parody spy series The Trouble with Girls, is skilled at keeping things lightly humorous without belying the seriousness of his themes. Written toward a young adult readership, Networked occasionally comes close to over-pushing his points, but aided by Badger’s crafty art -- capable of wittily quoting Kirby and the modernists in a single panel -- its core didacticism never overwhelms either plot or characters. In the world of Networked, the enemy of personal freedom is less our government and more avaricious moneymen (in collusion with the gummint, of course) looking for ways to mold a compliant consumer class. In its way, this book reads like a lighter updating of seventies era paranoid movie thrillers like The Conversation. Some story conflicts never lose their relevance -- unfortunately. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: modern comics # |Saturday, September 04, 2010 ( 9/04/2010 06:39:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: A disheveled looking Ziggy Stardust (a.k.a. Dusty):  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Wednesday, September 01, 2010 ( 9/01/2010 10:11:00 PM ) Bill S.  “YOU CAN EAT ME, BUT WE WILL NEVER BE ONE.” Having no prior exposure to the world of Yuna Kagesaki’s shojo comedy horror manga, Chibi Vampire, I initially wasn’t sure how newbie friendly Tokyopop’s new short story collection, Chibi Vampire: Airmail, would be. Turns out, though, that the package is slightly mislabeled: of the four short stories included in the book, only two directly connect to the Chibi series. The first two tales -- both of which hinge on multiple personalities -- have nary a vampire in ‘em.First item, “Reverse Babysitting,” is the kinkiest comedy in the set: in it, 10-year-old heroine Marino becomes mixed up with her 19-year-old neighbor Takuma when he inexplicably starts acting like an infant. Left to her own devices, she has to feed and change (!) the overgrown “infant” until he reverts to his young adult self. Sort of like that memorable Big Baby episode of C.S.I. only without any dead bodies or Gil Grissom being all detached and tolerant amidst the all-round perviness. The second tale, “Searching for My Beloved,” proves less broadly comic -- featuring, as it does, a ghost and a cannibalistic psycho killer. Centered on a fortuneteller, Carolina Haruko, who goes looking for a girl when a figure claiming to be her boyfriend asks for help finding the missing seventeen-year-old, the story is commendably dire. At times, however, Kagesaki’s art seems a shade too lighthearted to convey the full darkness. When we see the skull of a dead teenager, for instance, its eyes are oversized to match manga visual conventions. The two pieces that follow are respectively described as a “Chibi Vampire Side-Story” and a “Chibi Vampire Bonus Story,” though what the distinction is, I haven’t a clue. I found the first, “The Vampire of the West Woods,” to be the more effective: a platonic romance depicting the relationship between an okatu (manga culture’s term for fan-boy) vampire named Friedrich and an isolated nun named Sister Rosary. Because the Catholic Church has long been vampires’ nemesis, Friedrich tries to keep his undead status a secret, though, of course it’s revealed in the story much to Friedrich's dismay. The second, “Maki-Chan, the Helping Angel of Love,” is a straight comic romance with cameos by characters I presume are more prominent in the main series (one of ‘em, Fumio, “possesses demonic pheromones that seduce all men”). The story itself, however, proves rather to be thin. Series’ lead, Karin, has a cameo in this second entry, though her role is primarily one of observer. And it definitely must be noted: in both vampire pieces, we see no blood-sucking action. Instead, the focus is on the ways Kagesaki’s creatures live and blend in the mundane world. Reading these two outings, I think I have a glimpse of the appeal of Chibi Vampire’s appeal for its older teen girl readership, though. Her heroines are strong; her boys are immature or nerdy -- a reasonable grouping of your average teenage male in any country -- and her art is light without being overly flowery. Shojo comics for less sentimental older teens, in other words. So in the end, Chibi Vampire: Airmail provides a decent introduction to this popular shojo manga artist. Got to admit I don’t get the significance of the collection's subtitle, though . . . (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |( 9/01/2010 07:13:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Becky's been watching entries in Spike TV's original Hawaii 5-0 marathon, which got me happily recollecting this Radio Birdman tribute to Jack Lord and his helmet hair. Book 'em, Dano, Murder One! # | |
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