Category: Recommendations

Manga With Disabled People

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This is a list I made for a “Diversity” panel at Sydney OzComic-Con in 2023. It stars manga/anime that has people with disabilities, and I tried to make them as diverse as possible and from a wide variety of genres.

Perfect World

A realistic romance manga about a girl who had a crush on the cool basketball captain in high school, though she never confessed her love. As adults, they meet again, but he is now a paraplegic in a wheelchair due to a traffic accident at university. Love blooms, but there are many challenges to dating a paraplegic who has bedsores, gets random fevers, and cannot go to the toilet without a catheter, not to mention disapproving parents of the able-bodied. Here is a story that remains realistic about the challenges of a romance with a paraplegic, right down to the spells of depression the paraplegic about being a burden to his girlfriend (later wife and mother of their adopted child). A story about how being paraplegic is tough, but ultimately just another problem/challenge to manage in life.

Real

A sports manga about wheelchair basketball, by the same creator as the legendary basketball manga “Slam Dunk”. This story does skimp on the difficulties and social barriers to being a wheelchair basket baller in Japan, but is primarily a sports manga that is focused on the sport rather than the fact that the characters are in wheelchairs. It’s nice to see a sports manga that just happens to be about a paralympic sport.

Full Metal Alchemist

A super-popular action adventure manga/anime about Edward Eldric, an action-hero alchemist who happens to be an amputee missing an arm and a leg. He uses advanced prosthetics so people tend to forget he’s an amputee, but there are many instances where his prosthetics break mid-battle and he is left helpless on the floor. Despite being one of the most powerful alchemists around, the only thing Edward can’t transmute is his arm/leg back.

The Ranking of Kings

The anime is the better version of this story, which is about Bochi the deaf-mute prince of a fairy-tale kingdom where kings are judged by their sword-fighting prowess. Bochi starts off weak deaf-mute, but ends up as a powerful level 99 swordsman who is still a deaf-mute, and makes many friends along the way through his journey. The best thing about this story is that while he acquired his deaf-mute status because of magic cast on him by another, the story does not try to solve hi deaf-mute status through magic.

A Silent Voice

This manga is very hard to read at first, because the main character is the bully of a hearing-impaired girl. This story is as much about the dynamics of bullying among young, dumb kids as it is about the troubles of being hearing-impaired, and it’s important to point out that the MC is not a sadistic sociopath. Instead, he is an immature kid from a poor, chaotic family who can’t figure out that when he is bullying the hearing-impaired girl, his classmates are laughing AT him, not with him. They do nothing to stop him though, until one joke goes too far and the entire class turns on him. HE is now the target, and all the people he thought were his friends turned out not to be. Years later, he has matured and is filled with regret, and finds the hearing-impaired girl to make amends.

With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child

A real-life story that was originally written to explain to Japanese society that Autism is, this is a fantastic look into what it’s like to be a parents of an autistic child in Japan and goes into great detail in explaining how autistic people see the world. This is both enlightening and entertaining.

I Hear the Sunspot

A light BL manga about a broke college kid who gets a job transcribing class notes for a super-hot hearing-impaired classmate. This turns into a cute male-male romance, but a lot focuses on the way people constantly make assumptions about disabled guy’s hearing AND his sexuality. It’s pretty breath-taking how people can say and do thoughtless things, whether it’s from jealousy, ignorance, or general cluelessness.

Famous Women: Rumiko Takahashi

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For Women’s History Month, I’m going to give a blanket recommendation to the work of a remarkable female manga artist (Japanese comic artist), one whose work was paramount in starting the manga/anime movement in the west. Her name is Rumiko Takahashi, and for those in the community, she needs no real introduction. I first started reading her first published work “Urusei Yatsura” (Those Obnoxious Aliens) at the age of three, and since then has followed her through “Maison Ikkoku”, “Ranma 1/2”, “Inuyasha”, and her various short stories in “Rumic World”. I haven’t been following her latest work “Rin-ne”, but the aim of this post is to chart her influence on me as a manga artist.

 


 

Rumiko is somewhat unique in the manga publishing world. She’s a best-selling female manga artist who draws mostly for a male audience (though she has female fans too), and she draws in a gender-neutral style that nonetheless is skilled, expressive and interesting. Above all that, she started off in the genre of comedy, which is never easy to do. She’s since branched out into horror, dramady, action-adventure and small-scale domestic drama, but she’s flexible and malleable enough that I don’t doubt she’ll go on to tackle other genres. Overall, her work is highly-recognisable and has a very strong sense of personality – you’ll always be able to pick a Rumiko Takahashi story at a glance.

 


 

I also have to mention her female characters. As a manga artist who started in the 70s in a magazine aimed at teenage boys, I imagine she must have gotten her fair share of pressure from the editors to make her female characters sexually-appealing. There’s no doubt Rumiko’s women are that, but they’re also slyly subversive in their personalities and the way they’re depicted. For a country that is known for its shy, submissive women (at least in manga and anime), Takahashi’s women are frequently loud, violent and filled with character flaws. All of them are as interesting as her male characters, and while everyone’s character defects are played for laughs, it’s wonderful to see such gender parity – and they’ve been depicted that way right from the start.

 


 

All in all, Rumiko Takahashi has a unique voice, one that has remained unique and recognisable for the past thirty years (and counting). If you haven’t read her work, you really should. If being the world’s best-selling female comic book artist doesn’t convince you, then being a wonderful comic book artist certainly should.

 


 

I have a list of her work here, many of which have been translated into English. My #1 pick for the uninitiated would be “Maison Ikkoku”, since it’s a more down-to-earth story about a poor ronin (failed university student) who is trying to win the heart of a young widow. Conversely, you may try her more zany comedies, like the slapstick earthling-meets-alien “Urusei Yatsura,” or the gender-bending martial arts comedy “Ranma 1/2.” Those who prefer action-adventure and medieval Japan can read “Inuyasha”, or “Mermaid Forest if you like horror. Her short stories in “Rumic World” is also one of my favourites.

 


Recommendation: Skip Beat!

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I’ve been plowing through the inks for “Small Shen”, seeing that this is the last leg of the book. I hope to get at least all 60 pages done by the end of June, which is a bit of a stretch, but I think I can do it!! Such is the life of rushing deadlines.

I realise I haven’t recommended something for a while, so this week I’ll be writing a recommendation for a popular shoujo manga: Skip Beat!

 
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Skip Beat!
(28+ volumes)

I haven’t read Skip Beat! for a while, but I can still remember the totally fun reading experience I had with this series. I only had one afternoon to read it, and I literally speed-read through my friend’s collection. I think I only got up to volume 20, but I would have read more, if more was available at the time.

 

Plot
Skip Beat! follows the story of 16 year-old Kyoko Mogami, who has always been in love with her childhood friend Shotaro Fuwa. While they were growing up, Kyoko acted as Sho’s doormat and gopher, though Shotaro felt no feelings for her, and only thought of her as his slave. Eventually, Sho has Kyoko move to Tokyo so she can slave away as his housekeeper assistant while he pursues a career in showbiz. Sho has some success, though he soon grows arrogant, and Kyoko one day overhears him telling his manager what a boring and plain girl Kyoko is… thus sparking a falling out between Sho and Kyoko that can only be described as “epic”.

Kyoko realises that Sho never cared for her to begin with, and the confrontation between the two causes Sho to throw her out of his house. In retaliation, Kyoko decides to take revenge on Sho, by getting a make-over and climbing the showbiz ladder herself. Her ultimate goal being revenge, she eventually meets another movie star called Tsuruga Ren, who eventually falls in love with her. As their relationship progresses, Kyoko starts to learn more about herself, and to develop a sense of purpose and self outside her initial goals of revenge.

 

Why I recommend this story
I think I’ve made Skip Beat! sound darker than it really is. This actually is a comedy series with streaks of drama and romance, and instead of the usual earnest angst that characterises such stories, this goes for laughs instead if dark moments. In the demographics stake, Skip Beat! falls firmly into the “shoujo romance” category, but with one glaring difference – this one takes the usual shoujo tropes of doormat heroine and distant love interest, and subverts them in a wicked way.

There’s been other shoujo stories such as Kare Kano and Fruit Baskets that also subvert the typical shoujo heroine, but this one out-does in the other two in its gleeful depiction of Kyoko’s darker moments. In fact, this can be said of all the other characters that appear in the series – all of them have a lot more to them than initially meets the eye, especially when it comes to negative traits. That’s not to say they’re two-faced or unlikeable. Most of the characters are adorable, despite their selfishness and pettiness – this is one manga that actually celebrates the way the characters revel in their bad behaviour, whereas another manga would punish them for the same transgressions.

Is it right for a character to be driven entirely by revenge? The story is subtle in the way that Kyoko eventually comes to realise that she really does enjoy showbiz, and that she can have a career outside her single-minded pursuit of Sho’s demise. That’s not to say that this manga has a realistic take on Japanese show-biz – this is pure character dramady, with show-biz as a backdrop, and the creator even freely admits she barely knows anything about actualy show business.

Not that it matters much. Skip Beat! is funny, is charming, and never takes itself too seriously. If you’re looking for something light-hearted with a sweet and upbeat heroine who only has the one flaw of being hilariously nasty about the guy who betrayed her, then this is your book. It’s wonderful to see Kyoko’s negative traits in full-force, because you rarely see such things handled in such a well-balanced and funny way in shoujo.

Recommendation: Tuesdays With Morrie

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Hi folks. This week I managed to get an iPhone 4S, which was replete with battery problems, until it turned out that it wasn’t the fault of the iPhone. No sooner have I gotten it fixed, then I had problems with my new laptop overheating… I am just plagued with tech problems all this week! Somehow I managed to finish pencilling Chapter 3 of Small Shen, as well as some of Chapter 4, so it’s not all bad news. I hope to finish the Chapter 4 pencils by early March, so I can get started on the inks and onto the middle of the book.

Apart from that, this week I was also fully into… Linsanity!! Somehow, even with all the tech problems, I still managed to watch all the videos of Jeremy Lin’s game-winning streak on Youtube. I was tempted to recommend Linsanity for this week’s recommendation, but pulled back because I’m hardly an expert on the NBA – everything I learned about basketball I learned from Slam Dunk. I may not feel confident discussing basketball, but everyone is getting behind his inspirational story, and the flood of feel-good vibes is leading me to recommend a pretty famous self-help book: Tuesdays with Morrie.

 
tuesdayswithmorrie

Tuesdays With Morrie
(2002, Mitch Albom)

You may already have heard of this book – it was a massive bestseller back in the day, and a friend of mine recommended it to me. It’s one of those books that isn’t hard to read, is accessible, and most of all, is such a quick and uplifting read that you absolutely cannot say no to it.

 

Plot
Tuesdays With Morrie is a non-fiction book written by Mitch Albom, a former sports journalist who has fond memories of one of his university professors, the titular Morrie. Mitch’s life and career was just coasting along when he heard that his former professor was in the grips of a terminal illness, and only had a few months to live. Morrie taught Mitch (and many other students) a lot about life when he was younger, so he decides to visit Morrie regularly in his last month, to document the man’s ideas, beliefs and teachings. What resulted from these trips was the best-selling, life-affirming, “self-help” book Tuesdays With Morrie.

 

 

Why I Recommend this Book
I hesitate to call this book a “self-help” book, because while I like self-help books, this one goes a little bit further than this. It hasn’t got any bullet-point checklists, any motivational mantras or any “life plans”. It is written in the simple manner of a story, where the writer (Mitch Albom) explains his brief-but-memorable history with Morrie, discovers years later that his professor dying of a terminal illness, and then goes off to chat with Morrie every Tuesday until his death. That’s it. It’s not written in a way that’s meant to be bombastic or emotional. It’s simply the words of a very wise man, who has lived a great life and inspired many people.

It’s also not a particularly long book, which can only be a good thing. These days, if you recommend a “great and inspiring” book to someone and it happens to be more than an inch thick, people will sigh and look like they’re on the verge of being hit on the head with the likes of War and Peace. It seems that people want inspiring things to read, but don’t want to work too hard to absorb those words of wisdom, even though 30 years ago they may have wanted to. It seems that a few things have changed since then, but what hasn’t changed is that everyone still wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die. Well, reading Tuesdays With Morrie won’t kill you or even kill much of your time, but it may certainly offer a few pearls of wisdom, if not an inspirational story along the lines of Linsanity.

There’s not much more that I can say about this book, except for an anecdote from a few years back. An acquaintance of mine once asked me for a book recommendaton, saying that she wanted to read something “meaningful”. I asked her to be specific, and she said “no fiction”. I pressed her on her interests, and she said she didn’t want to read anything about history, religion, spirituality, sociology, psychology, science, philosophy, anthropology, or anything that ends with a -logy. But, she wanted to read something “meaningful”. Well, guess what I recommended? Tuesdays With Morrie is a book that manages to fill that tiny void beautifully.