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If I could live the life of one manga artist, I would be Kazuo Umezu. If I could live a second, I would be
Hiroyuki Takei. Takei's manga,
Shaman King and
Ultimo, have never been as popular as his
Shonen Jump contemporaries
Bleach,
Naruto and
One Piece. But his work is, in many ways, deeper and more interesting, with a humor that few other artists match. Why are you the one manga artist I'd love to get drunk with, Takei? Let me count the ways.
1. He's a self-referential pop culture satirist.
Takei's interests are legion.
Shaman King could be interpreted as a religion-infused riff off of
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, the first manga to popularize the idea of heroes with invisible spirit buddies. He's a fan of Western artists like Jamie Hewlett, Mike Mignola and Tony Daniel, as well as Japanese artists like Osamu Tezuka and Hiroaki Samura.
Shaman King contains visual references to Ren & Stimpy, J-pop bands and
Bollywood film star Rajnikanth.
Takei's sense of pop-culture irony is well-developed—what other manga artist would pose for his official
SHONEN JUMP USA photo shoot wearing a kimono and wielding a samurai sword? In a casual conversation during the same visit to the U.S., he confessed to loving Quentin Tarantino's samurai-violence-packed
Kill Bill (Takei: "But it wasn't so popular in Japan, most people didn't get it.") In the same way that Tarantino plays with Asian pop culture, Takei helps himself to Western pop. This spirit infuses
Ultimo, his collaboration with Stan Lee, in which Lee himself appears as a character (under the name "Dr. Dunstan"). And it infuses the
Shaman King scene in which Takei, fully aware that the oldschool
Shonen Jump slogan was "friendship, perseverance, victory" (as explained by Frederik Schodt in his great book
Dreamland Japan), pays tribute to this tagline. As the heroes look back on how far they have come, and what they have endured, the words "FRIENDSHIP", "PERSEVERANCE" and "VICTORY" flash over a montage of flashback scenes, taking up most of a two-page spread.
2. He's had an interesting career.
Some manga artists, like Eiichiro Oda (
One Piece), become stars when they're barely out of their teens. But others, like Takei, don't make it into the big time until they're in their twenties or even older. According to an interview in
SHONEN JUMP, he was 20 years old and had already his first kid when he decided he wanted to become a manga artist. After working as an assistant to Charlie Nozawa (
Super Mario Adventures) and Nobuhiro Watsuki (
Rurouni Kenshin), Takei finally debuted with
Butsu Zone around the age of 25. Of course, a manga artist's life is notoriously hard on their interpersonal relationships. "Once a week, I make it a point to go out with my family," Takei told
SHONEN JUMP. "But unfortunately, all the other days, my kids hardly ever see my face. It's not good…" One wonders whether Takei has more family time now that he draws 30 pages a month for
Jump Square and
Ultra Jump, monthly magazines, rather than the
Weekly Shonen Jump 80-pages-a-month meat-grinder he worked in during
Butsu Zone and
Shaman King. One also wonders whether the relationship between Yoh and his fiancee/wife Anna in
Shaman King, in which she continually cracks the whip and forces him to work his lazy ass so he can become strong enough to win the shaman tournament (and incidentally set them up with an awesome home-based business), is based on Takei's own home life. (Takei described Yoh and Anna as "quite an ideal relationship.")
3. He's fascinated with religion.
All of Takei's major series, except for
Jûki Ningen Jumbor, have a religious/spiritual element. His debut manga,
Butsu Zone ("Buddha Zone," as in the Buddhist chant "Namu Amida Butsu"), involves a young kid who's actually a Bodhisattva, with the power to sprout one thousand arms, and do a ton of other stuff, to protect the girl who will be the future Miroku Buddha. His longest series,
Shaman King, is practically all based on religion, starting from its core concept that, once every 500 years, all the shamans & wonder-workers on Earth compete for a chance to commune with the Great Spirit (god) and change the direction of humankind. "Does that mean that when saviors like Jesus and Buddha changed the world, they were Shaman Kings too?" a character speculates in the second volume, and as the series goes on, the cascade of thinly-disguised Buddhist, Christian, Hebrew, Shinto and animistic wizard-priests makes Takei's intentions all the more obvious. (So that would mean that the Shaman King from 2500 years ago was Buddha, the Shaman King from 2000 years ago was Jesus, and the Shaman King from 1500 years ago would be…hmm…it all makes sense!) Even in
Ultimo, which originated from Stan Lee's very Western idea of a good robot vs. an evil robot, Takei slips in a set of characters based on the Buddhist concepts of sin and virtue. And while Takei obviously enjoys toying with sensitive religious issues, he doesn't do it obliviously like, say,
O-Parts Hunter in which concepts like the Antichrist and the Cabala are jumbled together in a way almost too stupid to be offensive.
4. He loves cars and robots.
"Robots or superheroes: which is your favorite?" I asked Takei at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. His answer: "Robots, a thousand times robots!" A fan of toys and model kits, Takei got his wish to draw crazy giant robots in
Ultimo and
Jûki Ningen Jumbor, in which the robots are based on power shovels, drills and other construction equipment. Even in
Shaman King, the spirits of the various shamans take on a more and more robotic, sleek appearance as the series go on, and the Archangels—the robotic spirits of the Christian-themed X-Laws—eventually take on the form of particularly badass cars. (Could that have been the outcome of Takei's desire, expressed in another interview, to draw a manga about "supercars"?) And who can forget Blockman, the lego-themed shaman in
Shaman King?
5. He's got blue-collar roots (or can fake 'em).
After finishing
Shaman King, Takei took a long break and then began
Jûki Ningen Jumbor, a series about heroic construction workers in an imaginary world who pilot giant construction/fighting robots. The heroes of Jumbor weren't the first Takei characters to wear tank tops and sweat it out in the hot sun: Bokuto no Ryu, the motorcycle-riding thug-with-a-heart-of-gold in
Shaman King, also does all kinds of manual labor and bemoans the high cost of housing while trying to carve out a place for himself and his ragtag band of friends. Like Ryu's modified banchô (gang boss) character design, it all consciously harkens back to an earlier age of manga, the '70s (Tarantino's favorite decade), when Japan—and the typical manga reader—was less comfortably middle-class and insulated from these professions. It's all about sweat and effort, about work and machismo…and with machismo comes…
6. He's not afraid of shonen-manga gayness.
Actually, nowadays, no successful manga artist can afford to be: once Naruto and Sasuke kissed at the beginning of
Naruto, it was like the
Shonen Jump management opened the floodgates and said "DRAW ALL THE MAN-ON-MAN DOJINSHI YOU LIKE! JUST BUY OUR STUFF!" Of course, this has nothing to do with actual interest in real-life homosexual issues and everything to do with
yaoi innuendo, but who cares? What's clear is that Takei jumps right into the pool and thinks it's all hilarious. There's Bokuto no Ryu's homophilic machismo and his crush on pretty-boy Lyserg Diethel. There's the scene in
Ultimo where the hero, Yamato, strips down to his boxers and considers planting a kiss on Ultimo's rosy lips to wake the boy robot out of a shutdown trance, not to mention the storyline when it's revealed that Yamato's sensitive best friend, Rune, was actually a girl in love with Yamato in a past life.
And of course there's the scene in
Shaman King when rival hero Ren steps out of the bath and everyone is awed by the sparkling light emanating from, er, his groin. (I feel I should mention at this point that my affection for Takei is strictly artist-to-artist. Or at least, no more so than a Judd Apatow bromance.)
7. He's obviously a stoner.
Japanese marijuana laws are much stricter than the U.S., so I wouldn't expect Takei to admit smoking up, even if he didn't write for a children's magazine. Maybe I'm projecting—but what else explains that "Yoh," the name of
Shaman King's hero, means "leaf," and he is continually drawn with pot-leaf designs as part of his costume ensemble? Viz erased a lot of these in the English edition; in keeping with the more major cuts in the
Shaman King anime, they also censored a lot of character names, such as Peyote (the Mexican shaman) and Morphina (the spirit companion of Lyserg Diethel, a British shaman who's the son of a thinly disguised Sherlock Holmes, that famous morphine addict). The ending of
Shaman King, in which the grown-up heroes end up looking like a bunch of long-haired hippies in flower-print clothes, also suggests that Takei has some sympathy for the subculture, even if he doesn't partake in the act.
8. He's a perfectionist who cares about his work.
I wasn't sure about this at first, because Takei's manga artist career has had its ups and downs.
Shaman King, his longest-running and most successful series, got off to a strong start but seemed to veer off tracks towards the end of its run. Around volume 20, the detail level in the artwork drops dramatically, Furthermore, the direction of the story wavered. A typical
shonen tournament manga is all about the fighting, but in the later volumes of
Shaman King, entire fights are skipped over or take place offscreen. The heroes realize that their enemy, the 1000-year-old shaman Hao, may be unbeatable by force alone, so the plot shifts away from battles and towards unexpected betrayals, character relationships, and clever (and confusing) schemes—rather than mere fighting techniques—by which the heroes will save the world from Hao's reign of terror. Then, it all ends suddenly, in 2004, with a notoriously abrupt ending taking place on the eve of the final battle. Had Takei missed his deadlines? Given up? Gone off the rails?
Then, in 2009, Shueisha released a new edition of
Shaman King, the "Kanzenban" complete edition with Takei's original intended ending. Takei and Shueisha were unforthcoming about the reasons for the change, but after reading the new ending (incidentally, drawn with greater detail than the sluggish later chapters of the
Shaman King magazine serialization), it's possible that someone at Shueisha had objected to it, and that Takei had ended the manga prematurely rather than compromise.
Shaman King has an unusual ending for a
shonen manga, but its transcendental climax is not too different from Katsuhiro Otomo's
Akira, or for many American comics about beings with ultimate power. One thing is for sure: it's a great ending, and much better than any number of manga which drag on thousands of pages after the spirit has gone out of them.
Given Takei's slower output after the end of
Shaman King, and his recent resurrection as the artist of Stan Lee's
Ultimo, it'd be easy to see
Ultimo as a sort of punishment for Takei—put the out-of-work artist at work on the dubious American tie-in with the author of
Ravage 2099. After reading
Ultimo and the true ending of
Shaman King, I reject this interpretation. Takei, with his self-referential love of Western (and Eastern) pop culture, is the perfect person to work on
Ultimo, and the result is a much better and funnier manga than any other mangaka/superhero project I can think of (for example, Kia Asamiya and Yoshinori Natsume's tedious
Batman comics). And the complete edition of
Shaman King, although it still has its flaws and funky bits, establishes it as a four-star manga. VIZ has been releasing
Ultimo in
SHONEN JUMP magazine, although worrisomely, based on advance solicitation copy, the scheduled VIZ edition of
Shaman King seems to be the original incomplete ending and not the corrected edition. I can only hope that VIZ releases the full ending of
Shaman King and treats readers to the best edition of a modern classic manga. And anything else Takei releases, I'll be buying.
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
