Miscellaneous Manga Musings
Looks like a couple of my favorite comic pundits have manga on the
brain. Sean Collins (by the way, happy belated blogoversary,
Sean!) is
blogging
about Battle Royale again, and links to me several
times in the process. I can't remember what I told Sean about
fanservice, but I don't think I'd ever dismiss the scene he describes
as
just fanservice. (I can't remember if I've read that
scene or not; I gave up on the
BR manga after I read the
translated prose novel from Viz. After that, the manga seemed
much too exaggerated and silly for me to take seriously. And I
haven't watched the movie yet, but I suspect the novel would still come
out winning the
Battle Royale battle royale.) I'm
fairly sensitive to fanservice (some would say
too sensitive)
whether it occurs in Japanese or American comics. In my mind,
fanservice
is base pandering, and it's distracting whether it occurs in
Battle
Royale, Bloodstream,
or
Birds
of Prey.
EDIT: I went back and checked the scene Sean was referring
to (it's in
BR vol. 5, the last I bought). Sean,
that's not Shuuya's mom's bare ass! She's wearing pants!!
(Check the pages before and after that double-page spread to
confirm.) Yeah, the pants are awfully form-fitting, but that shot
hardly seems that bad. For one thing, the scene uses a downward
camera angle (instead of the upward angle artists like Ed Benes
prefer); also, the mom's top partly covers her, um, ass. If you
think this is fanservice...whoo boy. I've got a copy of
Love
Hina I could send to really toughen you up.
Meanwhile, over in the Grotesque Rampage forum, Matt Maxwell reads
Gyo
vol. 1 and
reports
back with his thoughts, which leads to an interesting discussion
about the conventions of (and assumptions about) manga. It also
spawns a separate thread in which Johanna Draper Carlson asks, "
What
is Horror?" (Hmm. If only there were a comics blogger
knowledgeable about the horror genre who could stop by and help us out.)
Finally,
Dave
Intermittent is intrigued by the ape-shit insane premise of
Apocalypse
Meow, a manga which "recasts the Vietnam War as a conflict
between bunnies and cats." He links to the
online
Japanese language version of the strip (which
Shawn
Fumo first found) and it does look nice. Reminds me of a
European painted graphic novel more than your usual manga series.
Unfortunately, ADV Manga is publishing the book in black-and-white, so
it'll lose some of its distinctive appeal. Still, if the reviews
are good, I may have to check this out.
