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In the interest of embracing reality like a friend, instead of trying to keep it at bay with swears,
This Ship Is Totally Sinking has to admit that, sometimes, we cheat on super-hero comics. We cheat on super-hero comics like the devil himself. Not one of those "oh, I'll just hop off the wagon and mix some whiskey with my milk," but a full-on "let's see if I can't get arrested by Thursday night" style bender. It's at those moments when, like any tear-stained hobo hoping the custody case goes his way, we stumble blindly into the manga section of any major chain store in hopes of finding the joy of comics in a black and white paperback, kindly priced around the ten dollar mark. By the time we've made our way to the cash register, our eyes so reddened with the tears of an adulterer we can barely make out the total—it's just a confusing exchange that always ends in us telling the clerk what our PIN number is—"look, I need this…just punch it in for me, I'm so scared, you didn't see this."
My name is Tucker, and I read manga. Here are some of the titles that I'll keep buying until the numbers run out. Daddy's sick. He needs his medicine.
Nana, by Ai Yazawa
It took a few volumes of
Nana for me to accept what my body already knew, but didn't want to admit. I like a good soap opera about young Japanese girls, one of whom is trying to make it in the music business and the other just trying to have a decent relationship with a guy who won't cheat on her. Look, it doesn't make sense to me either. Soap opera, young girl in love stories, musicians—that's three things that pretty much define what I find completely repellent. (That and
Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer, which is the only movie, except for
The Hunt For Red October, that I've never been able to finish watching.) It would be easiest to label
Nana as being worth reading solely on the basis of Ai Yazawa, who, if she's not one of the most underrated of cartoonists, it's only because I can't read Japanese and none of the works of art criticism dealing with her brilliance have been translated into my mother tongue. In other words, yes,
Nana is worth looking at for the skill that Yazawa puts into drawing—the moment in a recent volume where a character has just collapsed against the door that's separating him from the woman he loves, but can't be with—that's one of the strongest, most emotionally resonant drawings I've seen this year. There's a lot of filler—pages of sketched purses or jewelry, but when Yazawa wants to crush me with the weight of emotional despondence that's afflicting her characters, she does it in a few panels, a few pages. She can fill up the gaps with whatever she likes.
It would be disingenuous to pretend the only reason I'm in love with a soap opera is because of the art, though--that's not all that makes
Nana work. What's gotten to me about this series, as it progresses (volume 12 is the most recent release in the US) is how Yazawa has played with the notion of who these characters are, and she's seamlessly manipulated how the reader feels about them. A guy who, early on, earned my ire for cheating on, and then breaking the heart of, one of the main characters has become one of the few to find and maintain a strong, relatively mature relationship. He's struggled and stuck it out, and I find myself actively interested in him—whereas not too long ago, I really wanted to see him run over by a truck. I imagine I'm not the only reader out there who wonders how long I have to watch Yasu—the moral and emotional core of one of the bands the story focuses on—holding back his feelings for the woman he spends the run of the series dancing around. I know I'm not the only one who hates, with a burning, festering hate, Takumi—the slimy, terrible guy that keeps figuring out ways to string along his attachment to the story. More than any of that though, I'm just excited to have found a comic, a manga, a whatever you want to call it, that I've
got to have, the day it's available. I can't remember the last time I felt that way about
Justice League.
Parasyte, by Hitoshi Iwaki
Parasyte has been published in an English translation before—according to reports I've heard from smarter manga fans than I, the current series being published by Del Rey far surpasses that one. That being said, it's taken a considerable amount of self-control not to just head over to Amazon and finish off the series in the previously published volumes. From a pure "action" standpoint, the detail and construction of the "pitching" sequence in a recent volume—where the main character kills a deformed alien who's been slaughtering its way through multiple police officers by throwing a rock from the roof of a far-away skyscraper—is drawn in such a way that it achieves that weird kind of exhilaration I usually only attribute to a well-shot car chase in an action movie.
While the claim might be made that certain aspects of
Parasyte's addictively simple plot are unoriginal, its presentation and the story's unrelenting, unforgiving tone are not often seen. The main relationship that forms the core of the book—between a boy and the parasitic alien that's taken over the entirety of his hand, as well as part of his heart—isn't, in any way, mistakable for a friendship or buddy cop comparison. The alien, an emotionless creature willing to do absolutely anything to protect its life, is only interested in the boy as far as it needs him to stay alive and sane enough to hide it from discovery, whereas the boy is just that: foolish, young, and more than a little frightened that he's been put in the incredibly lonely position of being the only human being who knows that the world is being colonized. While I've got my own petty concerns that
Parasyte "won't end well," that's less a reflection on this particular series, and more of a general disappointment in most high-concept comics that have ended up petering out when they don't have anywhere else to go after they hit the sweet, sweet middle of a good story. Whatever happens in the upcoming volumes of
Parasyte, I wouldn't trade the immense pleasure I've found in the first four volumes currently available.
Now you'll have to excuse me. I've got to get a shower and burn these clothes—Green Arrow's coming over, and he's a jealous minx.
Image credits:
Nana interior image from Nana volume 12, ©2008 Ai Yazawa
Parasyte interior images from Parasyte volume 3, ©2008 Hitoshi Iwaki
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
