Arms and the Manga

In a recent column for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker writes about why many manga stories focus on a person’s arm turning into a monster or machine. The following is an excerpt from that column:

When you hold a manga in your hands to read it, your thumbs hover at the edges of your vision while your eyes are focused on the page. But there are so many manga stories about people whose arms turn into monsters or machines that you might want to stop and check what your fingers are up to.

In the popular manga Parasyte, teenage protagonist Shinichi must come to grips with the fact that a shape-shifting space alien has taken over his right arm. A major character in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service believes his arm to be inhabited by a space alien who speaks through an ever-present hand puppet. The title character of Vampire Hunter D has a mysterious entity living in his hand, with its face appearing in his palm. Relations between a person and a possessed limb are often antagonistic, and there is an episode in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure in which a demonically possessed arm actually tries to kill the man it is attached to.

But manga characters are just as likely to find their arms replaced by machinery, especially weapons. The main characters in the space opera Cobra and the medieval fantasy Berserk have metallic weapons where their left forearms should be. Young wizard Edward Elric has a mechanical arm (and leg) in Fullmetal Alchemist. The main characters in both Dororo and Madara have bodies made almost entirely of prosthetics, including weaponized arms. Further afield, the Final Fantasy VII video game and last year’s live-action movie Machine Girl prominently feature characters whose missing arms have been replaced by giant guns.

Japanese pop culture has no shortage of bizarre arm stories. The Daily Yomiuri recently asked some experts why.

“I think on the simplest character design level, it’s a way to give the main character a weapon or feature which is part of themselves–part of their own body,” Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide replied in an e-mail. “A martial artist’s strength, or (to use an American superhero example) Wolverine’s claws, are something which can never be taken away from them, unlike, say, a sword or a gun or a suit of armor. A ‘trademark weapon’ is an important part of the character, so why not make it part of the character?”

Andrew Cunningham, the English-language translator of Parasyte, wrote: “From a writer’s point of view, I think artificial arms represent both an attention-grabbing hook and a concept that helps drive the plot. You can use the arms to make heroes extraordinary, but also handicap them for dramatic tension.”

manga review: Gantz

In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker recently reviewed the manga “Gantz”. Here is an excerpt from Baker’s review:

“What a jerk.” I’m not sure whether I said the words out loud, but this was my first thought upon being introduced to Kei, the main point-of-view character of the manga series Gantz.

He’s a smug, self-centered high school kid standing on a subway platform and looking sideways at the other commuters, thinking disparaging thoughts about them. When a little old lady asks for directions, he deliberately misleads her just to make her go away. Kei is no Boy Scout.

“I may look stupid,” he thinks, “but to tell the truth I know I’m better than everyone else in the world.”

Masaru, a childhood friend whom Kei hasn’t seen in years, is a better specimen of humanity. By coincidence, he happens to be standing on the same platform, and when a drunk falls onto the tracks, Masaru leaps to his aid.

In a scene that establishes a significant motif, dozens of other people on the platform remain uninvolved–wringing their hands or looking the other way, but doing nothing to help.

Kei thinks it’s cool that he may get to see someone die, but when Masaru spots him and calls him by name, Kei is momentarily shamed into climbing down to help.

Seconds later, they are both dead, smashed to bloody pieces by a train just after heaving the drunk out of harm’s way.

But the story has just begun, as the pair find themselves not in heaven or hell, but in an unfurnished Tokyo apartment with several other people who have just died. One is a teenage girl who committed suicide in a bathtub, and who materializes before Kei’s goggling eyes in the nude.

manga review: Black Jack

In a recent review for Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker reviews “Black Jack”.  Here is an excerpt from his review:

A woman lies at death’s door, and only a mysterious surgeon named Black Jack can save her. But his services don’t come cheap. He refuses to begin the operation unless her grown son, with whom she has a strained relationship, agrees to pay 30 million yen.

This is a typical scene from one of the 26 stories collected in the first two volumes of Vertical, Inc.’s new English-language edition of Tezuka Osamu’s manga Black Jack, which initially ran in Shukan Shonen Champion magazine from 1973 to 1983. The doctor has stunning skills and shocking fees.

At first the patient’s son in this particular story goes wide-eyed and rigid at the price. But when the doctor quietly asks, “Can you pay?” the man begins to shout. “I will! Whatever it takes! If it takes my whole life!”

Black Jack smiles grimly. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” And with that, the story ends.

There’s plenty of medical melodrama in these tales, which feature frostbite, cancer, disfigurement, radiation burns, earthquakes, traffic accidents and severed limbs galore. But that’s just what’s happening on the surface. Many of the Black Jack stories have deeper layers.

Though he does the seemingly impossible–even transplanting a brain in one story–Black Jack also suffers from devastating failures, and in at least one tale he loses a patient whom he cared about deeply. The reader can never be sure how a particular operation is going to turn out.

Although he is widely condemned as greedy, he sometimes displays a softer side, helping in tragic cases for free.

Some of the stories are both sentimental and ghoulish, such as one in which a young sushi chef loses his arms–while on his way to his elderly mother’s house, where he was going to make her sushi for the first time.

The stories are often ambiguous or open-ended. In the story of the 30 million yen, it is not entirely clear what Black Jack is up to. Has he simply helped the man to recognize the preciousness his mother’s life? Or does he really intend to make him a debt slave for the rest of his days?

How you answer that question depends on your sense of his character, which is only gradually revealed. Also doled out in small doses is the story of his origin, including how he wound up with two different skin colors on his face. Two volumes in, there are still a few things I would like to know. Luckily, Volume 3 is due out in January.

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manga review: Feel 100%

Here is an excerpt of a recent manga review of the popular HK series “Feel 100%” by Tom Baker:

On the cover of the Hong Kong manga Feel 100 Percent, Jerry’s shirtlessness reveals his muscley torso, and his low-slung jeans reveal the waistband of his Dolce and Gabbana underwear. On the first inside pages, American Jerry’s handsome Chinese friend Lok keeps his jeans up with a big-buckled Armani belt, above which he wears an ostentatiously labeled Calvin Klein T-shirt.

The characters’ love of brand-name clothes is a trait they presumably share with their creator, Lau Wan Kit, who generously scatters names and logos such as Polo, Izod, DKNY, Benetton, Max Mara and Paul Smith throughout the text and pictures of this manga.

Actually, the book refers to itself with the Chinese word “manhua,” but the 1992-2007 series was manga enough to win the this year’s second annual International Manga Award, which was created by the Foreign Ministry.

The manga has been published in Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Korean, Indonesian and Italian, and now, thanks to a small British publisher called Bamboo Press, English-language readers finally can see what all the fuss is about.

Judging by the first volume (the second and third should be out in the near future), the series is a fantasy whose main audience must be heterosexual boys in their mid-teens. On top of being well coiffed and snazzy dressers, best friends Lok and Jerry are pick-up artists par excellence, enticing a parade of lovely ladies into their beds. They are also artists of a more literal sort, working together for an advertising company in a glamourous Hong Kong office and living in a beautifully maintained three-story house in the heart of that expensive city.

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Tezuka Gene: Light in the Darkness

In a recent column for Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker writes about the “Tezuka Gene: Light in the Darkness” show at Parco Department Store in Shibuya, Tokyo.

A crudely stitched scar slashing diagonally across his face makes Black Jack instantly recognizable. It’s easy to spot this Osamu Tezuka manga character at the “Tezuka Gene: Light in the Darkness” show at the Parco department store in Shibuya, Tokyo, even though he has been reimagined by several artists in different styles.

Tezuka (1928-1989) had his own distinctive style, but the early influence of Walt Disney animation remained clearly visible in it. Even when his material was dark and sinister, his characters were cute.

Present-day artist Kyotaro Aoki has taken Black Jack and characters from Tezuka’s Dororo, MW, Ode to Kirihito and other manga and changed their cartoon faces into lifelike pencil portraits, showing what they might look like in the real world.

While Aoki adds detail, Akihiro Soma (Concorde), strips it away, presenting Black Jack in a minimalist torn-paper collage resembling the work of American illustrator Eric Carle (known for his kids picture books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

An art collective known as Enlightenment takes the liberty of making Black Jack a woman, in a large painting in which the outlaw surgeon is partly hidden by drugs, money and other symbolic objects flying out of her billowing cape.

The group also painted an image inspired by MW in which two nude men embrace behind an ornate crucifix. In that convoluted manga story, a young terrorist genius uses his sexual magnetism to torment a Catholic priest (who earlier in life had been a gang member who kidnapped him), turning the older man into a pawn in an apocalyptic plot.

manga review: Cat Eyed Boy

In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker wrote:

“The story, characters and incidents mentioned in this publication are entirely fictional.” Thank heavens Viz Media decided to make this clear, even if only in tiny print on the copyright pages of the English-language version of Cat Eyed Boy, a collection of horror stories by Kazuo Umezu, a mangaka who is best known for his series The Drifting Classroom.

Just imagine how much more terrifying it would be to see the results of a mad scientist’s attempt at a brain transplant between a man and a leopard if such an event were real. Imagine the chill you would feel if the howling song of the shaggy, one-eyed creatures known as Tsunami Summoners really could bring doom to an entire town. Imagine how your heart would stop at the sight of a severed human leg coming to life and sprouting teeth.

Such are the types of creatures and incidents encountered by the Cat Eyed Boy, the nomadic hero of this series of stories. “Wherever I appear, something frightening happens,” he says, in one of several asides directed at readers.

The frightening events are rarely his fault, but he usually gets blamed for them. This is true even when he tries to help humans who are threatened by monsters. Once the danger passes, the people whom Cat Eyed Boy has saved turn against him.

Driven from town to town, he begins to profess that he does not care about helping humans, but his comments are no more true than Rick Blaine’s declaration in Casablanca that “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Cat Eyed Boy looks basically human–aside from clawlike nails and enormous feline eyes–but his lineage is a bit murky. In his origin story in Volume 1, we see dozens of grotesque supernatural beings gathering around a mountainside grotto at night to await the prophesied birth of a mighty cat goblin. (The similarities to a Christian nativity scene may not be entirely coincidental.)

Tokyo Game Show 2008 report

In a report on Tokyo Game Show, Daily Yomiuri’s Tom Baker writes about his experience at this year’s TGS2008.  Here is an excerpt:

Hunting calls for skill, stealth and patience. You may have to remain motionless for hours while waiting for your prey to come within range.

At least, that’s how it can be in the real world. In the case of video game fantasy Monster Hunter 3, the latest installment of Capcom’s wildly popular video game series, you’ll have to wait until the game’s official release date next year before you get your hands on it.

Even during its preview at the Tokyo Game Show, held on Oct. 9-12 at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba, waiting was the name of the game. When I visited the Monster Hunter display–decorated to look like a fishing pier, with a mutant armored shark hanging from a scaffold by its tail–the wait to play a sample of it was 90 minutes.

With at least 900 other games being exhibited by 209 companies, schools and other organizations, that was too long a wait for me, but I did glimpse enough of what one lucky player was doing to see that the nautical motif related to an episode of the game in which players must confront a blue, four-legged undersea dragon that swims and twists as gracefully as an eel.

If I wasn’t able to hunt monsters, I did the next best thing and built a monster of my own. I did this by test-playing the recently released Spore from Electronic Arts.

In this cute, clever and fun personal computer game, you get try your hand at intelligent design by guiding the evolution of an imaginary creature. When I stepped up to the screen, the creature was a skinny green thing with an ankylosaurus’ clubbed tail and big, blinking eyes on the ends of stalks.

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manga review: CVN 73

In a recent manga review by Tom Baker for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker reviewed “CVN 73″.  Here is an excerpt from that article:

For 10 years, the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, was the home port of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. But the Kitty Hawk sailed away from Japan for what was probably the last time in May of this year, replaced by the USS George Washington, which arrived in Yokosuka in September.

The Kitty Hawk is the U.S. Navy’s last conventionally powered aircraft carrier. The George Washington is nuclear powered.

This distinction makes some people uneasy, and there have been protests against the deployment of the George Washington in Japan.

In an effort to get started on the right foot, the navy’s public relations campaign includes a manga that puts a human face on the aircraft carrier. The face belongs to Petty Officer Third Class Jack Ohara, a fictional character who is newly assigned to the carrier as it sets sail for Japan.

The book, titled CVN 73 after the ship’s hull number, does not address nuclear safety directly, instead subtly implying that it is a non-issue by having the crew go about their business without any apparent concern on the topic. The real focus is on the day-to-day lives of Jack and his crewmates.

According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, 30,000 copies have been printed, mostly in Japanese. Both the Japanese and the English editions can be downloaded for free at www.cnfj.navy.mil/Manga.html.

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Game over? Not yet: Japan’s video game industry appears vibrant despite a crisis of confidence

Daily Yomiuri’s Tom Baker wrote the following article on the Tokyo Game show.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

The world is more impressed with Japan’s video game industry than the industry is with itself. That, at least, is the idea one could get when attending the 2008 Tokyo Game Show, held on Oct. 9-12 at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba.

The event, featuring 209 exhibiting entities and attended by more than 194,000 people over its four days, kicked off with a speech by Yoichi Wada, president and representative director of video game company Square Enix Co., who is also chairman of the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, which is the main organizer of the Tokyo Game Show.

“The game industry in Japan is very fiscally fit,” Wada said, adding that Japanese video game companies probably have the best balance sheets in the world.

But he also said Japan has lost its position as the leader of the world’s video game industry.

While he suggested some “abstract” changes in the hierarchical organization of the Japanese industry, he also gave concrete reasons for Japan’s seeming decline in the field.

One is that while Japanese companies, most notably Sony and Nintendo, dominate the console-making side of the business, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii and DS consoles are facing significant U.S. competition from Microsoft’s Xbox console.

This is happening at a time when hardware makers have lost their position as the “hub of the industry,” Wada said, as the center of gravity has shifted to software.

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[manga] manga review: Good-Bye

In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker wrote, “Yoshihiro Tatsumi was still in his 30s when he wrote and drew the nine short manga stories collected in Good-Bye, but three of those stories are about 60-year-old men who feel that their lives are over. Retirement offers them nothing to look forward to, and their careers leave them with nothing to look back on. For some, financial woes, health problems and flagging sexual ability magnify the aimlessness they all feel. “A worthless life,” as one puts it.”

“Welcome to Tatsumi’s aggressively bleak world. To judge by his work currently in print in English–The Push Man, a collection of manga from 1969; Abandon the Old in Tokyo, featuring works from 1970; and now Good-Bye, with selections from 1971 and 1972–hopelessness and frustration are major preoccupations. Not only do his characters suffer loneliness and physical hardship, but they are usually bereft of purpose and have their pride trampled into the dirt before their stories are over. There’s no point in reading such depressing stuff unless it is done very well.”

“And Tatsumi does it excellently.”

“Almost any of his stories could be summarized as a list of bad things happening to unlucky people. But he presents them with more complexity than that, especially in this volume’s story “Life is So Sad,” about a bar hostess who remains faithful to an unworthy boyfriend during his four-year prison term. The way the story ends, on the eve of the convict’s release, raises questions about why she has done what she has done and what she hopes to achieve by it that are likely to linger in your mind long after you’ve put the book aside.”

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