Tag: manga

Recommendation: Zashiki Onna

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I just got started on the pencils for chapters 3-4 of Small Shen, and this will probably take up a large chunk of my time for the next month or so. I also made some headway on my story for the Peter Pan anthology that the Bento creators are putting together – I wrote the whole story, which is 10 pages in total (including title page), and called We are the Pickwicks. You’ll get to read the story eventually, so I’ll keep mum on what it’s about.

The other piece of news is… I finally got the Store section up! It’s an Amazon Store at the moment, mostly for American/Canadian buyers; but for the International people, I’m also setting up a Book Depository Store, since that online store has Free International Shipping! The setup process is more complex than Amazon’s, so hopefully I’ll get that store up in the next few weeks.

 
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Zashiki Onna (manga)
(1993, Mochizuki Minetaro)

This week I’m recommending a one-shot manga called Zashiki Onna, which is a horror manga that is light on gore but heavy on the creepiness. Against all that is holy, I am linking to a pirated manga site, because sadly it’s the only way to read this manga in english (for now anyway).

This short, 1-volume horror manga is created by Mochizuki Minetaro, the same guy who created Dragon Head. Those reading manga in the early days of TOKYOPOP may remember this dark story about people trapped in a long dark tunnel, victims of what appears to have been an earthquake. This is an earlier work from him, written in a time where hardly anyone has heard of “stalking”. Perhaps that’s why it’s rather obscure – apart from the short length, it’s also a fairly old manga. But it’s a good one.

 

Plot
Hiroshi Mori is a typical young man in college – living in a cheap rental apartment and fantasising about a girl he likes. All was fine, until one night when he hears a persistent banging on his neighbour’s door. He pokes his head outside to see what’s going on, which was a very bad move – it was a tall, creepy woman with long black hair, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying old shopping bags. She insists that she was looking for his neighbour, but he claims to know nothing and leaves. The next night she is back again, and it slowly becomes clear that she has shifted her attention from his neighbour… to him.

 

Why I Recommend this Manga
It’s short, and it’s creepy. If you like your horror weird and spooky, as opposed to gross and gore-splattered, this is the manga for you. It depends on what you find creepy, and in my case, gore doesn’t scare me at all – and sadly (for me), gore is the more common approach to horror in Japanese manga. Just look at my attitude to typical (and prolific) Japanese horror masters: Junji Ito of Uzumaki fame, and Kazuo Umezu of Drifting Classroom. These two manga artists are horror staples who have been around for decades, but their style largely relies on spilling blood, and distorted people doing black-shadows-on-typical-“horror”-face, something I can’t stand. Modern horror stories tend to use a cutesy artstyle, which doesn’t sit well with me either. Which is why Zashiki Onna is such a “pleasant” surprise – it’s style is ugly-realistic, but with dramatic lighting that’s entirely suited to the storyline. I feel safe recommending this to any kind of horror fan, as opposed to just manga-reading horror fans. That says a LOT about this story.

 
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Okay, stalking stories have been around for yoinks, but because of the art style and the straight-forward story-teling, this manga retains a lot of its power. Not that readers understood that this was a “stalker” story when this story first came out. Most readers back in 1993 probably knew nothing about stalkers, and so were probably quite freaked out by what they might have originally thought was just some over-zealous admirer. Even the title, Zashiki Onna, reflects what the true form of the female stalker might have been. You see, this manga marries two of the most enduring horror-supernatural tropes of Japanese culture – a creature called the Zashiki-Warashi, and a famous Japanese ghost story written in 1825 called Yotsuya Kaidan. Without understanding these two cultural references, most readers these days may just think that this is just a “typical stalker story”, and that the stalker was a human. Not so.

In Japanese mythology, a Zashiki-Warashi is a creature who appears in the form of a young child, who often lives in big houses with a long history. These creatures typically bring great wealth to the household, which makes it seem benign… but not really. If a Zashiki-Warashi should leave your house (and they can leave on a whim), then disaster will strike and your household wil lose all the wealth it’s acculmulated. So it’s a creature that is more like a double-edged sword – and the reference to Zashiki in the title of the story may hint that the stalker is a modern, twisted form of the Zashiki-Warashi.

The other reference – that of 19th-Century ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan – is a much more famous reference, due to it having influenced the storyline of famed J-Horror movie The Ring. When The Ring first came out, people waxed lyrical about the story… except people who are already familiar with Yotsuya Kaidan. Even though Yotsuya Kaidan is about a vengeful female ghost called Oiwa who comes back to relentlessly haunt her evil Samurai ex-husband, it’s really about how the re-telling of a story can give it great power. Most people miss the true story of Yotsuya Kaidan, which is about it’s author researching the history of Oiwa legends, and discovering all the various versions of it is giving form to this demonic creaure called Oiwa. Which sounds like the storyline of the movie Candyman, but variations of this idea has been around for centuries. The Ring simply represents a modernised re-telling of it.

 
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All-in-all, if you’re armed with knowledge of these two cultural facts, it may make Zashiki Onna a more interesting read. It’ll certainly help explain the ending, which may confuse some people who don’t realise that the title alone explains that the stalker isn’t human to begin with. Which then makes it not a “stalker story”, but a “ghost story”. And guess what? It’s more successful that way.

 

Recommendation: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

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I finally finished toning for the first third of Small Shen, and am taking a week off so I can work on a short story for a Bento Comics anthology. This month has really flown by… it’s 2012, but I’m wondering where all the time has gone.

I also noticed that I haven’t made a Recommendation for a while, so I’m recommending a no-brainer manga-but-not-quite today: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

 

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Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (manga)
(1982-1994, Hayao Miyazaki)

If you’re familiar with the work of Studio Ghibli, then you probably know that Nauscaa of the Valley of the Wind was the studio’s first full-length animated movie (a big success for the time). What many may not know is that the director of the film, Hayao Miyazaki, actually started the story as a serialised manga, and continued to write/draw the manga over a period of 12 years, long after the animated film was finished and screened. The end result is two separate stories that start the same, are different lengths, and also end vastly differently. Needless to say, due to the length of the manga, the themes tackled in it are alot more complex than it was in the animated film.

 


 

Plot
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where massive pollution has rendered much of the air poisonous to humans, and giant insects ruled the world. What’s left of humanity huddle together in tiny pockets, constantly at war with each other and with the denizens of the insect world. Much of this world is covered by a gigantic, poisonous forest known as the Sea of Corruption, where much of the giant insects live, but where the humans need to don gas masks to survive.

 

 

In this setting lives the main character Nausicaa, who is the princess of a small coastal kingdom called the Valley of the Wind. The sea air protects this little hamlet from the poisonous air, but trouble comes when an aircraft full of refugees escaping from the powerful kingdom of Torumekia crashes near the Valley. The aircraft was carrying precious cargo – a stone that can activate a powerful biotech monster that the Torumekians were planning to use (possibly against their arch-enemies, the Doroks). When the stone comes into Nausicaa’s posession, she becomes drawn into the battle between the Torumekians and the Doroks, under the command of Princess Kushana of Torumekia.

 

Why I Recommend this Manga
Well, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s work. What more can I say? The man has crafted a complex eco-fable here, a highly-enjoyable piece of science fiction irregardless of which side of the global-warming fence you’re from. Perhaps the biggest joy for me was to read more about the characters I knew as a child from the animated film, and appreciate how Miyazaki was able to carve two different-but-similar stories from the same mould, each being self-contained and with a satisfactory ending. For that reason, I suggest watching the 2-hour animated film first, then reading the manga. The manga fleshes out fully what the animated film cannot, due to time constraints.

 

 

Apart from the complex story, the art is also worth a big mention. Animators always make interesting manga artist, probably because their methodology of story-telling comes from a slightly different place from those who only draw manga. I find the sequential art of animators simultaneously more complex and simple than that of manga artists. By that, I mean that while their character and world designs tend to be more simple, the way they place their characters and the details they place in their environment tend to be more complex. Miyazaki’s work is a perfect example of this.

If you’re familiar with his style, then you’ll know the man’s not particularly great at drawing faces. He has a simple style that is adequate for distinguishing different people, but that’s about it. Where he truly excels, is in his backgrounds, which are present in nearly every panel. Animators-turned-manga-artists almost never do the “character floating in a void” thing that some manga artists do. There’s also the incredible detail on the planes, the machines, the dress, the flora and giant insects that inhabit this fantasy world. The characters don’t have an awful lot of complex clothing designs on them, but they’re designed in a way that lets you know, at a glance, what faction they’re from. Either way, I have no complaints about his art.

 

 

His story-telling is also worth mentioning, since there is so much stuff happening on each page that it hardly feels like a Japanese manga. Infact, his style seems more similar to European styles, where the cinematic quality is in the detail of the individual panels, not so much in the panel-to-panel transitions. This gives the feeling of an extremely-compressed story, which may take some time to get used to. While I wouldn’t do this kind of story-telling myself, I must mention that it’s not at all a bad thing, because it’s consistent. Miyazaki is a consistent story-teller, and while things may get confusing in action sequences, there’s never any mistake about where he’s heading with the story.

All-in-all, there isn’t much more praise I can heap on Hayao Miyazaki, whether his work is in film or on the page. It’s just a matter of find his work to read, in a form that does justice to the details in his artwork. My Nausicaa books is printed in A5 format, which is smaller than I recommend. This work was originally printed in A4 format, which I believe is the best format to read it in. If possible, I suggest you find the bigger size.

 
 

 

Small Shen: Some Art

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Well, I’ve been crocheting a lot of cool amigurumi toys lately, which I’ll show in the next few weeks, but I also finished pencils for chapter 1 (of 9) of Small Shen, my collaboration with author Kylie Chan. This is a Chinese Fantasy story and is a prequel to her White Tiger series, and people who are familiar with what I like to draw best will probably know that I’m in my element here.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what Small Shen is about, so here are a few sample pages from chapter 1. Some are inked/toned and others are still in pencils, but you can probably get a good idea of how the art will turn out from these samples. Since Small Shen won’t be out (from Harper Collins) until Christmas 2012, I’ll probably show more later on next year.

 


 

NB. And yes, if you know your Chinese mythology, I can tell you that “Gold” and “Jade” are references to the demi-semi-gods “Golden Boy” and “Jade Girl”. The story’s written by Kylie though, so if you want to know more about how she uses these characters, I suggest you read White Tiger, which is the first actual book in the series.

 

Pages 1 – 3

Page 1 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"
 
Page 2 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"
 
Page 3 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"
 

Pages 15 – 17

Page 15 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"

 

Page 16 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"

 

Page 17 from Chapter 1 of "Small Shen"

Recommendation: Maison Ikkoku

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I should be flying back to Sydney as we speak, so let me take this opportunity to recommend some vintage manga this week, namely Maison Ikkoku, by the best-selling female manga artist in the world, Rumiko Takahashi.

Now, I would recommend all of Rumiko Takahashi’s work, since her work is almost an institution in Japan, but I settled on Maison Ikkoku simply because it’s the most balanced of all her long-running series (and there are quite a few of them). It’s also one of her older works, with a different tone to her latest ones, which seems geared to a younger audience.

 

CoverMaison Ikkoku (Rumiko Takahashi) 15 Volumes

Maison Ikkoku was one of the first manga translated into English by Viz, and Rumiko Takahashi’s work remains one of the first manga to be exposed to Western audiences. Her work gained a huge following in the states (and in other countries) years before TOKYOPOP ever came to be. Apart from Doraemon, her Urusei Yatsura was among one of the first manga I’ve ever read. Her career spans over 40 years, and she has sold millions and millions of books worldwide. She is, hands down, the most prolific and best-selling female manga artist ever to have lived.

 

Plot
Maison Ikkoku is the name of a run-down, cheap boarding house, where the residents are either broke or crazy. The building is divided into a number of rooms (with no private bathrooms), and in room number 5 lives Yusaku Godai, a ronin, described in Japan as a college applicant who has yet to successfully pass the entrance exams. Godai is a nice guy (if a bit of a loser), and constantly tormented by his crazy neighbours, who thinks the sole purpose of his existence is for them to hold loud, drunk parties in his room.

 


 

Godai’s had enough. He was about to move out of the building, when a new manager moves in – an extremely beautiful young woman named Kyoko Otonashii. Since Kyoko will be living at the boarding house as its manager, Godai decides to stay – having fallen in lust at first sight with Kyoko. Kyoko herself is a gentle, caring woman with a quick temper, and the residents quickly discover that she’s actually a widow, who had married her high school teacher as a student. Kyoko is still deeply in love with her late husband, and as Godai gets to know her better, he falls in love with her. However, the road to love isn’t so easy for these two – Godai barely scrapes into unversity, and Kyoko has other suitors. Misunderstandings and the hijinks of the neighbours also make any kind of intimacy difficult. Will Godai succeed in winning Kyoko’s heart?

 


 

Why I Recommend this Story
Ofcourse Godai marries Kyoko at the end. You don’t write a 15-volume dramedy asking the readers to sympathise with the underdog hero, and then snatch the prize away in the last volume. People would be so angry. Having rooted for Godai and Kyoko for literally years of their lives, watching as Godai gets into college, almost flunks out of college, eventually graduates, attempts to find a job, fails due to bad luck, tries again, and eventually succeeds… wow, the world sure doesn’t make it easy for Godai. Unlike other manga heroes, who seem to naturally fall into leadership roles, possesses special powers, or at least has an an interesting personality or quest to go on, Godai is remarkably ordinary and average. Heck, I would say he’s below average. He struck it lucky with Kyoko.

 

 

Which is the whole point of Maison Ikkoku, a funny, poignant story about how the underdog finally wins the day. Finally. Compared to Takahashi’s other more well-known series, like Urusei Yatsura or Ranma 1/2 or even Inuyasha, the trials and tribulations of Godai seems utterly benign. While the story has its fair share of entertaining weirdos, it doesn’t have half the bombast or physical comedy of her other works – and Takahashi is mostly known for her loud, in-your-face, laff-a-minute comedy. No, this story is more rooted in reality than many of her other series, and that’s what makes it stand out. Godai eats cheap food, lives in a crappy place with crappy neighbours, constantly has money worries, ends up working in some dodgy places to make money, and constantly has to fight for almost everything he has. No need for aliens, gender-bending martial artists or monsters to spice things up. Life itself is a struggle enough, and it’s good to see a funny manga that is so rooted in a small moments of day to day life.

The romance between Godai and Kyoko is one that sticks in my mind – they’re both complex and emotional people with a lot of baggage. Kyoko feels she’s betraying her dead husband, and Godai feels he’ll never be good enough for Kyoko; often comparing himself to her late husband and her other suitors. These two drag themselves, kicking and screaming, to the inevitable final conclusion. When all is said and done, it’s a relief to see them finally acknowledge their feelings to each other. They get a lot of help (and hindrance) from Godai’s wacky neighbours, an assortment of working-class types, all of whom have sharply drawn personalities, and are always entertaining. Especially Yotsuya, the guy in room 4, who may or may not have a job, and whose life involves slithering like a snake into Godai’s room to steal food. Some of their antics have to be seen to be believed.

 

 

A Takahashi manga is always worth a read, because she’s a powerful story-teller who never fails to make you sympathise with her characters, and capable of finding comedy in the most mundane situations. Maison Ikkoku is a good place to start, as an introduction to her work (most of which is a lot whackier than this story). She excels in ensemble casts, taking extra care in the way they interact with each other, and despite the large numbers of secondary and tertiary characters, always manages to make them interesting and relevant. Her long-running series has a tendency to drag in the middle, and Maison Ikkoku is no exception, but the story ends the way it should end, and loose ends are neatly tied off. Her work is often light-hearted, with great comic timing, a fair amount of Japanese cultural references, and is always memorable.

Takahashi was one of the manga artists I tried to imitate when I was younger, and eventually gave up at, because I realised her voice was unique and inimitable. Even though I don’t follow her current work much, like some other manga artists I’ve recommended on my site, she’s a master worth learning from.