A couple of quick notes, first. Loyal Las Vegas Weekly readers will recognize the first two as longer versions of reviews that ran in my comics column there (so feel free to skip ‘em if you’ve already read ‘em).
And yes, I know Phoenix is super old, but I got it for a birthday present earlier in the month, so I’ve included a review here, although something tells me that anyone who’s interested in manga and the work of Osamu Tezuka has probably already read it.
Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs Vol. 1
Viz Media
Almost as if to prove there's a manga series covering every conceivable topic of interest comes Inubaka, a rom-com set in a Tokyo pet store, grafting details of dog-raising onto a story we’ve seen over and over to make it seem fresh.
I think the title literally translates into "dog-stupid," but the subtitle and references within the book make it sound more like "dog-crazy." But then, the only Japanese I know is what I've gleaned from manga and anime, so I’m hardly an expert on the subject.
Whether it's stupid or crazy, though, it would seem to apply to our 18-year-old protagonist Suguri.
She and her mutt Lupin are on their way to Tokyo when they meet handsome 26-year-old Teppei and his purebred dog at a highway rest stop. The two dogs hit it off with one another embarrassingly well, on account of their both being in heat and neither of them being fixed or spayed (Teppei was actually on his way to breed his dog with another, equally purebred one).
With their dog-driven meet-cute out of the way, Suguri ends up living at Teppei's place and working in his pet store Woofles, caring for the puppies there.
Artist Yukiya Sakuragi's storytelling is pretty standard—although there are more dog pee and dog poop jokes than most other manga, for obvious reasons—but the art is well worth a look.
Sakuragi's human characters are all abstracted and stripped down in their designs, but the dogs themselves are rendered photo-realistically, so that the cuteness of the various puppies is that of real puppies, rather than the exaggerated cartooniness usually associated with Japanese pop art.
King City Vol. 1
Tokyopop
Joe is a young spy who has just returned to King City after training to become a “Cat Master.” His partner in crime is Earthling J.J. Catingsworth III, or "Cat" for short, a very special feline that can do or become just about anything, so long as Joe gives him the right injection from the right syringe first.
Cat can gobble up a key and cough up an exact duplicate (the "copy cat" function); he can function as a periscope (though the eye-hole leaves something to be desired); or he can become a parachute, gun or stealth skateboard. He even performs autopsies (complete with written reports) and can do two crossword puzzles at the same time (his tail is, naturally, prehensile).
They're the heroes of artist Brandon Graham's magnum opus named after the city they operate in.
Joe's spy pal is Pete, who wears a Dumb Donald-like hat/mask at all times and does dirty jobs for a crime syndicate involved in the sketchy alien porn business.
Joe's ex-girlfriend is Anna, who's fond of puns and vandalism, and her current boyfriend is Max, a veteran of the Korean zombie wars who's addicted to deadly new drug chalk.
There's a story tying them all together, one which involves cannibal businessmen, ninja street gang the Owls and one seriously tough old man, but as enjoyable as all that it is, it's the little things that make Graham's urban action series so much fun.
Graham's art is of a world fusion style, drawing on manga, European sci-fi comics and graffiti art to end up as something that looks like a mix of America's Paul Pope and Britain's Jamie Hewlett. And like both of those artists, Graham is just as much a designer and dreamer as he is a comic book artist, leading to a fully realized world with inventive clothes, technology, drinks, restaurant dishes, weapons and vending machines.
Graham's city isn't a terribly realistic one. It feels exactly like a city invented by a single artist bursting with cool ideas—a secret hostel for spy gangs here, a yeti working a counter there—but there's nothing at all wrong with that. King City is a hell of a place to visit. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone who enjoys Scott Pilgrim, Sharknife, Peng or awesomeness in general.
Pantheon High Vol. 1: Demigods & Debutantes
Tokyopop
I wish I could say that this book is like Clash of the Titans meets Mean Girls. Not simply because that sounds like the kind of pithy declaration that’s likely to get a critic blurbed on the back of an upcoming volume, but also because I’d really like to read a long-form comic story that’s like Clash of the Titans meets Mean Girls.
Despite the promising premise—the children of gods and goddesses attending high school together—this isn’t really that book. Not that it isn’t and enjoyable read in its own right.
Of course, I’m pretty much the target audience of this book. I like comic books. I like manga-style comic art. I like mythology. And I like stupid teen comedy movies and high school TV dramas.
So writer Paul Benjamin’s and artists Steven and Megumi Cummings are certainly speaking my language here. Pantheon High, home of the Fighting Chimeras, is the school where the kids of Greek, Norse, Egyptian and Japanese gods and goddesses go to get educated in subjects like combat and “mythstory.”
Our lead characters fall rather neatly in line to Breakfast Club like types. There’s Grace, the overachieving nerdy daughter of Tyr; Aziza, the super-popular alpha female dauther of Ra; Yukio, the popular son of Japanese luck goddess Benten; and Griffin, the dark, brooding son of Hades.
Each has a power or skill of some sort inherited from their parents, as do the rest of the student body, several of which have embarked on an evil plan to steal all of the kids’ souls and add their powers to their own to become full-ichored gods or some such.
After a chapter or two introducing us to the players, the rest of the volume is devoted to the good godlings fighting the bad godlings and trying to foil their plot, which comes to involve spiked ambrosia, the school’s mascot chimera and the giant world serpent Jormungandr.
Keeping all the characters, their bloodlines, powers and alliances can be a bit tricky (I didn’t notice until too late that there are very helpful footnotes at the end), and the various character designs seem more like a Western pastiche of manga tropes than actual manga (Pantheon High is one of Tokyopop’s not-really-manga manga books).
One drawback manga-like American comics have that actual manga doesn’t is that the reader can become much less forgiving with it. For example, when I read a limp joke or tired pop culture reference in a real manga, I can usually just excuse it as something that got lost in translation; here, there’s no excuse. Same with “fan service.” Seeing Supergirl’s panties in a DC Comic always irritates me, but when I see even more uneccessarry panty shots in a manga, it never bothers me much; I just assume it’s a Japanese thing. Again, in an American manga-style comic book, it seems more exploitive simply because I can’t blame cultural differences.
(Above: A gratuitous panty shot from Pantheon High. Click on it to see a bigger version, pervert.)
This drawback seemed less and less of a drawback as I read on though, and I gradually got wrapped up in the plot and the characters, enough so that I’ll probably check Vol. 2 out.
(Above: The World Serpent is pretty bad-ass. The Cummings sure can draw giant snake monsters. Again, just click to see it in a size more befitting its girth)
Phoenix Vol. 2: A Tale of the Future
Viz Media
I always figured that Osamu Tezuka’s “god of manga” nickname was more a show of respect for his influence on his country’s comics and cartoon output and not, you know, literal. And then I read something of his, and it becomes apparent at some point that there’s nothing figurative about the title at all—Tezuka is quite literally a god.
Case in point, Phoenix, Tezuka’s late ‘60s series with a scope as as big as the universe itself. This volume alone, which is only 1/12th of the story (each volume can be read alone, but combine to tell a greater story), spans billions of years and takes as its setting the smallest parts of atoms, the cosmos itself, the human mind, an alien planet and just about everywhere in between, with the mythical phoenix our tour guide.
We open in the year 3404 A.D., a rather traditional looking vision of the future, with crowded, underground metropolises, ray guns, space colonization, flying cars and so forth. Most of life on earth has become extinct on account of nuclear wars, and the few million human beings who remain have retreated into one of five giant cities, each ruled by a computer.
When the computers lead to one more war, the fate of life on earth falls into the hands of our troubled hero Masato, who, over the millennia takes on a more familiar name. In the last third of the book or so, the story seems less like an apocalyptic cautionary tale and more like a work of staggering ambition and downright shocking subject matter. To say much more would be to risk stealing some of the power from the work.
Tezuka tends to recycle his character designs, and Masato and his rival Roc fall fairly squarely into his standard dashing young man design, and there’s also a fairly standard looking Tezuka girl and big-nosed scientist.
But even if a few of the faces look familiar—as does the general vision of the 35th Century—Tezuka proves once again that he can draw anything, first in a scene that involves a sort of futuristic Noah’s Arc of test tube-grown animals and, later, in a long sequence depicting the entire history of evolution on Earth, including a tangent into an alternate cycle of evolution involving slugs as the dominate species on earth.
And the title character, the phoenix itself, is a pretty brilliant creation, one that easily slides from an avian to a human form from panel to panel.
And then there’s this bravura sequence, which looks up at a meeting of pissed-off city officials, slowly circling around their meeting table and showing them all in low angle for several pages, until Roc is called away to the phone on this page:
(Click on the images from Phoenix for bigger versions). For several pages we’ve seen panels exactly like the first one on this page, and, as we follow Roc out of the meeting, Tezuka gradually rights the perspective, while leading readers’ eyes in a gentle spiral. Wow.
Or how about this one, showing animals abandoning the sea for dry land, with each level of panel representing a stage of evolution:
Even simpler panel arrangements contain innovatively staged images, like the top panel on this page, depicting a dinosaur. Tezuka shows us it’s incredible bulk, but he does so using only one panel, and in a rather unexpected way…
And, finally, there’s this page, showing several different animals species. The panel that really amazed me was the second panel of birds. Man, that is a lot of birds to individually draw.
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