ジャングル大帝 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Compact Manga Epic about Africa, Nature, Animals, Human Beings, Civilization, and Life and Death **This review is about all three volumes of the manga** When I was about ten, I enjoyed watching Kimba the White Lion anime on tv in California, mesmerized by scenes of the hero running over the African plains to adventures with quirky animals and inimical people, so I was curious to read Osamu Tezuka’s source manga Jungle Taitei (1950-54), or Jungle Emperor. I found that the two are very different, as, for example, the anime Kimba stays young, while the manga Leo grows up, and the anime has fewer disturbing moments. The manga is a 534-page mini epic about a family of white lions living in a jungle in east Africa in the Great Rift Valley and the interactions between the lions, other animals, and human beings. After introducing Leo’s legendary father Panja (called the Demon Beast by the local natives because he hinders their exploitation of animals), the story shifts to his son Leo, who’s born on an ocean liner bound for a London zoo, is raised for a while in Aden among people like the Japanese youth Kenichi and Hige Oyaji (Moustache Uncle), returns to his birthright in Africa, attempts to pacifically rule an obscure jungle, and finally leads a party of men on a Quixotic cold-war quest for the source of the Moon Jewel on a legendary inaccessible mountain. It ends with Leo’s son Rune, who finds the reality of NYC less magical and more nightmarish than he’d expected and tries to escape back to Africa. My favorite parts are about young Leo trying to fit into human life (including attacking a movie screen showing a film of Africa and visiting a zoo and trying to free its animals) and later trying to establish himself as Jungle Emperor in the face of a hostile local tribe, a rival lion, an uncooperative herd of elephants, and a horrifying plague. Also, the climactic scene of mountain blizzard chaos and terror is hair raising and the late large picture of Leo as a giant white cloud is magnificent. Throughout, Tezuka highlights and blurs the dichotomy between wild animals and human beings, as Leo wears human shorts till he finally casts them off to be more au naturel, learns human language, and seems much more humane—brave, generous, non-violent—than most of the humans in the story (like the awful ex-Nazi war-criminal Ham Egg, the delusional and selfish Pierre, and the amoral gangster-spy Adam Dandy). There are, to be sure, some good people, like the early hero Kenichi and the late hero Hige Oyaji. The anti-heroine of the middle part of the epic, Mary, is great: feisty, violent, and, she thinks, unbeatable. When tribesmen capture her in the first volume, Mary sure doesn’t swoon and wait for rescue! Instead, not unlike H. Rider Haggard’s She or Robert E. Howard’s Belit (and as offensive to people of color), she takes over the tribe, names herself Konga of the Upper River, and starts carving out an empire in the jungle, demanding total obedience from her human and animal subjects. She tries to extinguish her persona as white civilization representative, dressing native (leopard skin bikini top and feathered headdress) and wielding a sharp spear and a cutting whip. She is insane and brutal, but read with Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi, in which the girl Sapphire dresses and passes for a fairy tale prince, Mary is an interesting female character for the 1950s manga world. But—alas—Tezuka domesticates her by making Kenichi take her to Japan, where she becomes a typical quiet young Japanese mother! Although the manga makes plenty of fun of the large number of venal and or stupid white characters, it is egregiously offensive to people of African descent, as every dark-skinned native is an absurd, repulsive caricature, naturally serving white (or Japanese) people. The callous, “comical” depiction of them, the use of them as porters and props, and the lack of interest in their cultures and needs let alone in their exploitation at the hands of white imperialist countries, is disappointing. That’s especially so because Tezuka shows a breadth of vision vis-à-vis animals, wanting to take human arrogance down a peg and to demonstrate the characters, needs, lives, and fascinations of animals and the frailty of human life in the face of the awesome power of nature. The manga features some sad, painful scenes involving abuse, disease, and death (like when young Leo dons his deceased father’s skin), and as there are no small syllabary to help young readers who don’t know many Chinese characters read Japanese, it almost seems like the manga, unlike the anime, is more for adults than for kids. This feels especially the case as Jungle Taitei becomes an anti-war cold-war story, with Countries A and B rivals in spies and exploration etc. finally (almost) transcending their rivalry via hardship and adventure on Moon Mountain. The compact, three-volume edition that I read had such small font that I often had to use a magnifying glass to read the text (I have old man eyes), and at times Tezuka draws at least a dozen small panels on a single small page, so it’s hard to read and appreciate in this format. A larger size would be more impressive and pleasurable for sure. Throughout, Tezuka uses all his manga techniques and tricks: zooming in and out, silhouettes, broken frames, shaky lines, establishing shots, strategic point of view and camera angle shifts, and dynamic, beautiful, impressive, creative art and layout, as in the following example. There are more that I couldn’t find pictures online of to link to, like these: A great sequence: Leo freshly returned to Africa shocked by vultures feeding on a zebra carcass, with closeups of his appalled face interspersed with different angle shots of the carcass and birds, the vultures beautiful in their stark black silhouettes on the white pages. An impressive frame: pitch black frame but for the malevolent large eyes of a black panther at night. A majestic picture: a full page showing the jungle river landscape with mountains in the distance, the human party like tiny ants dwarfed by the land. A surreal sequence: Rune fantasizes a Hollywood movie musical scenario where he goes to the big, tall-skyscraper NYC and goes to the zoo and sets free all the animals and is a celebrity and then imagines he’s flying around with butterflies and then comes to a mountain top where he sees all of Africa spread out in the sunset below him. Finally, Jungle Taitei is a weird, unpredictable story. It has powerful and wonderful and strange moments, but it also has silly ones, repetitive ones, and head-scratching ones, perhaps down to the impromptu plotting. I think too much time/space is spent on the exploration of the mountain (nearly the entire third volume). Finally, I’m glad to have read it, but I prefer Tezuka’s Ribbon no Kishi. View all my reviews
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Hadashi No Gen Vol.1 - 10 Complete Collection [In Japanese] by Keiji Nakazawa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Manga Epic about War, the Bomb, and Buckwheat Whew! I finally read Kenji Nakazawa’s atomic bomb manga epic Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). Twenty years ago, I bought the three-volume set in the Hiroshima Peace Museum (the original was published in ten-volumes from 1973-1987), but I’d never read it ‘cause it’s so long (2600+ pages) and promised to be so horrifying. It turned out to be a harrowing but also funny and moving story and good practice for reading Japanese (e.g., I learned the Hiroshima dialect way to hostilely address a person: “Odore!”). Inspired by Nakazawa’s experiences before, during, and after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the story recounts eight years in the life of his fictional alter-ego (Barefoot) Gen Nakaoka, from age five to thirteen, including his relationships with his family, friends, and nemeses as they struggle to survive before and after the bomb. Throughout, Nakazawa relates historical facts (e.g., how American scientists developed the bomb, how American researchers took samples from the victims to see what effect radiation had on them, and how American authorities suppressed such info to avoid criticism) and reveals Japanese culture (e.g., foods, clothes, jobs, baths, beds, houses, songs, jokes, schools, and communities) and human nature (from selfish and cruel to generous and loving). He draws and writes many memorable scenes, like the following: Gen’s father being beaten by the Japanese police. Gen and his family being helped by their good Samaritan Korean neighbor. Gen and his little brother fighting over a grain of rice. The atomic bomb detonating and destroying. Gen trying to free his family members from their collapsed house as an inferno approaches. Gen helping his mother bear his baby sister. Gen losing his hair. Gen caring for a badly burned young artist whose family won’t touch him. Gen mistaking Ryota for his deceased little brother. Ryota recalling reaching for a cicada when the bomb detonated and killed his parents. Gen trying to steal milk for his sister from the US military but ending up with condoms. Gen earning money by scavenging scrap metal, collecting sewage, and selling skulls. Gen learning how to draw perspective from an old artist. Gen going on a date to Miyajima with Mitsuko. Gen giving Mitsuko’s chastened father a portrait of her. Although Nakazawa depicts the terrible nature of the bomb, he also shows how Japanese war fervor, atrocities against civilians in China and Korea, and abuse of Chinese and Koreans in Japan, deprive the country of innocent victim status. Some of the most disturbing parts of the manga occur before the bomb when, because his father is antiwar, Gen’s family is tormented by neighbors, teachers, and police. Nakazawa’s art looks like that of 1970s manga, ranging from realistic to cartoonish and effectively using camera shots, dynamic motion lines, and expressionistic emotion lines. His panels are rectangular or square, and he dramatically employs rare full-page, half-page, or third-page pictures. He depicts the aftermath of the bomb as a hellscape: buildings collapse, streets buckle, telephone poles snap, and everything burns (even horses); semi-nude people shuffle with hands outstretched before them, their melting skin dripping like wax, or stagger like walking cacti, their bodies bristling with glass fragments; corpses bloat and burst in the river; maggots squirm, flies swarm, and mass cremations smoke. An appalling visual assault on the senses. Maximum body horror. Nakazawa also draws beautiful pictures, like in establishing shots of the sky, as in a small panel showing three flying birds silhouetted against the sun and singing “chi-chi-chi.” He also draws subtle and moving images, as when a closeup of the kids’ footsteps through the sand leads to a zoomed-out picture of their silhouettes starting to run home from the beach with a bright sun above them. He evokes strong emotions via his layouts, as when Gen has been missing his hospitalized mother, and the turn of a page reveals a close-up of her smiling face, evocative lines radiating out from it, her eyes with stars in them. She’s home! Nakazawa also effectively uses suspense and time, as when he informs us that the bomb detonated on August 6th at 8:15 AM, so the family wall clock reading 7:00 means 75 more minutes of “normal” wartime life. When Gen assures his mother that they have nothing to worry about, we worry for them. And when the family clock reads 8:00, they should have fifteen more minutes, but when we turn the page the bomb detonates, time having skipped forward to shock us. Throughout the epic, Nakazawa vividly shows that “In any and every way, war ruins people’s lives.” Gen meets many physically and psychologically damaged people, like the burn-scar-faced girl he says is beautiful only to have her curse him and try to commit suicide after she sees her reflection. At the same time, Nakazawa depicts the resilience of the human spirit. Despite everything he experiences, Gen lives spunkily and encourages other people to try. Surviving adversity makes us stronger, as Gen’s father tells him early on: “Be like buckwheat! The more you step on it and press it down, the stronger and straighter it grows.” It becomes an inspiring refrain for Gen. There are other themes in the manga: Hard work and a positive attitude improve your chances of survival; in any society, in wartime or peacetime, there are unethical, amoral, and cruel people (e.g., politicians, officials, police, gangsters, and any majority) exploiting and tormenting weaker people, and we must oppose such bullies with all our strength; families don't have to be biological to be strong; art should be borderless. At times Gen seems too articulate, intelligent, and aware for his age, serving as mouthpiece for the creator Nakazawa. At one point, Gen’s mother says, “Any time you sense a war feeling starting, you have to immediately speak up loudly against it. There’ll always be some people who say, ‘for the country,’” and Gen replies, “Mom, I won’t let another war happen! No matter what noble and beautiful things people say, I won’t be deceived.” Another time he stops “Kimigayo” from being sung at his junior high school graduation ceremony, telling the audience that the song represents the emperor, who is a war criminal, and that Japanese soldiers cut babies out of pregnant Chinese women with bayonets. Such messages are apt and necessary, but I can’t always believe Gen’d be able to deliver them. The manga has other slight flaws. Given its antiwar thrust, it indulges in too much typical Japanese slapstick violence among family members--though that may be a matter of cultural taste. Nakazawa seems to distinguish between different kinds of violence, acceptable one-on-one fighting vs. abominable bombing and war. Gen is righteously violent: as he ages, he moves from biting evildoers’ fingers to the bone and headbutting their groins to knocking them out with his fists. More than once the manga condones the killing of wicked yakuza by Gen’s surrogate little brother Ryota, being nothing compared to what war criminals did during WWII. Finally, there’s a bit too much potty humor, as when Gen pees on malefactors. All that said, the work is majestic. Anyone wanting to know what it was like to live in Hiroshima before, during, and after the bomb while affirming the power of the human spirit to survive horrors should read Hadashi no Gen (and there are English and other translations). View all my reviews
Le Secret de la Licorne by Hergé
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Collectors Amok, or the Past in the Present, or Ever a Pleasure When I was a kid, I avidly read Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin in English translations. I loved to open a book and immerse myself in the Tintin world of clean lines, vibrant colors, vivid details, and dynamic action. Whether Tintin was solving mysteries or exploring in South America, East Europe, North Africa, the Himalayas, the Arctic Ocean, China, the Moon and so on, Hergé’s art, layouts, characters, and adventures were exotic and unambiguous, exciting and comical, cartoonish and realistic. I often read aloud, giving different voices to the different characters, like the intrepid cowlicked young reporter/explorer Tintin (a straight man for the outre characters around him), the alcoholic Captain Haddock (joyful, maudlin, or berserk when drunk), the incompetent and clumsy twin detectives Thomson and Thompson, absent-minded and hard of hearing genius Professor Calculus, and the cute, frank, doggy, and loyal terrier Snowy. Twenty years later while preparing for a graduate school French proficiency exam, I read Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin in the original French, enjoying them as much as when I’d been a kid. And recently I happened to watch—and dislike—Spielberg’s Tintin movie. It jams together parts of at least three books while leaving out some of the best parts, fabricates a new villain, indulges in too much showy non-stop action, inflicts constant egregious John Williams music, removes Snowy’s charm and “spoken” thoughts, adds a totally out of character dialogue in which Captain Haddock (!) gives Tintin (!) a corny morale raising speech about never giving up, and so on. Although Spielberg and company impressively capture the surface look of some scenes and characters from the original comics, their 3D CG approach makes it all feel less real and less appealing than in the original comics. Thus, the movie made me want to re-read the books, and I started with Le Secret de la Licorne (1943) because it’s one of my favorites. Le Secret de la Licorne is great. Into it Hergé interweaves two plots, one featuring a serial pickpocket targeting men’s wallets and one featuring three cryptic scrolls hidden inside three antique model ships and supposedly indicating the location of a pirate treasure. The pickpocket leads to a clever deus ex machina in the end and adds another layer to the book’s themes about our desires for material things, as with overly avid collectors. The stubborn model ship aficionado Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine and the ruthless antique dealing Loiseau brothers are, then, mirrored by the well-organized pickpocket Aristide Filoselle, who, he says, is not a thief but a passionate collector of wallets. Even Tintin and Captain Haddock become eager to find a treasure. Of course, the Loiseaus are villainous partly because, unlike Sakharine and Filoselle, who genuinely love model ships and wallets, the brothers care nothing for the antiques they deal in, seeing them only as sources of money. And Tintin and the Captain are the moral compasses of the book, so they sure wouldn’t do anything unethical to pursue a treasure! Moreover, the plot originates from Tintin’s desire to give his nautical friend a model ship for a present. The prime part of the sixty-two-page book is a brilliant fourteen-page sequence early on in which Captain Haddock recounts—and reenacts—the adventure of his doppelganger ancestor the Chevalier Francois de Hadoque when, in 1698 in the Antilles his magnificent frigate the Licorne (Unicorn) was attacked by a smaller pirate ship captained by Rackham Le Rouge (Red Rackham). After an exchange of canon-fire, the pirates board the Licorne, resulting in a ferocious melee, with the Chevalier fighting off numerous pirates until he’s captured, after which he must try to find a way to escape. Throughout the sequence, Captain Haddock channels his late 17th-century ancestor, with the pictures of the Captain acting everything out for Tintin in the present, alternating seamlessly and amusingly with the pictures of the ancestor fighting etc. in the past, including props like the battered furniture, skewered pillows, and bottles of rum of the Captain’s apartment. Conflating past and present, it’s a visual and textual tour de force. And if you have a pirate fetish (as I did when a kid), the fourteen pages will scratch your itch. The book features impressive frames showing a busy marketplace or a sailing frigate or a country road and includes plenty of kinetic (often slapstick) action and a variety of camera angles and all of the best tricks that comics can perform when combining text and sequential pictures. There are amusing sequences featuring the detectives Dupont and Dupond (Thompson and Thomson) struggling with stairs, their hats, or a pickpocket, Milou (Snowy) tracking Tintin through the countryside, and Tintin fleeing from the ruthless antique dealers and their huge dog. As usual in Hergé’s work, there’s plenty of drops of sweat (especially conveying astonishment) and stars (especially conveying pain), but, despite stabbings, shootings, trippings, punchings, and the like, no blood. And no romance—except for Tintin and Captain Haddock’s eternal bromance. Sometimes Hergé overdoes action scenes, as when the chases, escapes, and fights etc. add excitement but don’t move the plot. There are a few sequences of panels where nothing interesting happens visually, when characters stand or sit and talk to each other so Hergé can info dump. At one point, Tintin gets a villain to spill the beans for ten frames in which large text-filled speech balloons nearly force the two characters out of the panels. Thankfully, the racist stereotypes of the early books like Tintin in the Congo are absent here (apart from the absence of people of color!), but the only female characters are an earnest landlady or two and a troublesome woman inopportunely occupying a public phone booth in the rain. Anyway, I can’t help it—I’ll always love rereading the adventures of Tintin. Le Secret de la Licorne is the first of a two-part story, the second volume being Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (Red Rackham’s Treasure), in which Tintin and the Captain organize a search for sunken pirate treasure. I am looking forward to it! View all my reviews
The Sandman: Act II by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Graphic Novels Are Still Better, But-- The Sandman Act II (2021) is Dirk Maggs’ audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels Season of Mists (issues 21-28, 1990-91), in which Dream tries to right a 10,000-years-old wrong done to a former lover and ends up becoming the reluctant new owner of Hell and A Game of You (issues 32-37, 1991-92), in which Barbie’s dream world begins merging with NYC, leading to some complications and adventures for her, her dream companions, and her real world neighbors. Both story arcs are moving, frightening, funny, imaginative, original, and unpredictable. Wanda is one of the first sympathetically depicted transgender characters in popular culture (though in the early 1990s Gaiman couldn’t get past biological gender as determining destiny). Before and after A Game of You come seven of the fine stand-alone short stories from Fables and Reflections (issues 29-31, 38-40, 50, 1991-93): “Thermidor”: Lady Johanna Constantine, Dream, the head of Orpheus, and Robspierre converge during the French Revolution’s Reign of Reason. “August”: Augustus Caesar does some pleasant slumming and some unpleasant reminiscing, while planning the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. “Three Septembers and a January”: Dream knows better than his siblings Despair, Delirium, and Desire what a failed entrepreneur in 19th century SF really wants. “The Hunt”: the virtues of staying with your own people in/from the old country pale for teenagers in contemporary New Jersey. “Soft Places”: young Marco Polo is lost in a desert where “the geographies of dream intrude upon the real” and meets Rusticello of Pisa--who is dreaming whom? “A Parliament of Rooks”: Cain, Abel, Eve, and a special baby enjoy a storytelling tea party. “Ramadan”: Haroun al Raschid wants to preserve Baghdad, the Heavenly City, the jewel of the Arabs, forever in dreams. The long story arcs and short stories are imaginative, funny, moving, and unpredictable and express important themes (e.g., we carry our own hell with us; we should accept people who are different from us; the world of the imagination is real). To adapt the graphic novels to a radio drama, voice actors, sound effects, and music are employed. The text is virtually identical to that of the graphic novels, the main differences being that some descriptive text, especially at the beginnings of scenes, has been added to compensate for the lack of pictures in the aural medium, as when Loki’s wife is said to be “thin to the point of emaciation” and the Perth beach on which Lucifer is reclining is described. Interestingly, some of the imagery in the audio adaptation is stronger than in the graphic novels, perhaps because of early 1990s censorship. For instance, the original picture of the total-body pierced demon of hell doesn’t reveal his pierced double penises, but Gaiman the narrator relishes relating that detail in the 2021 audiobook. Most of the voice acting is excellent: James McAvoy as dry, wry, and gloomy British Dream, Kat Dennings as perky punky American Death, Michael Sheen as jaded Lucifer, and the demons of hell, Cain and Abel, Barbie and her friends, and Eve. (I do wonder why the Aesir have Gaelic accents.) As for Gaiman as narrator, I like his manner and voice, BUT I did notice that he tends to pause oddly (almost distractingly) in places where no commas appear in the text: e.g., “since his father [pause] left the country,” “reading a tattered copy [pause] of The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and “The school [pause] is in the south of England.” There are plenty of effective sound effects: Thor smashing a boulder, Dream cutting off Lucifer’s wings, a mother bearing a baby, etc. But there is also plenty of overdone music, especially the Tim Burton movie-type synthesizer stuff that tries too hard to enhance moods and introduces each chapter. One of the most visually impressive features of the graphic novels that the audiobooks cannot approximate is the varied fonts and balloons for different characters: Desire’s erotic font, Dream’s gloomy black speech balloons, Lucifer’s elegant demonic font, the angels’ angelic cursive fonts, Delirium’s giddy colored speech bubbles and font, Matthew the Raven’s jagged caw-like font and balloons, Order’s computer font text, the “Arabic” calligraphy of “Ramadan,” and so on. Some other things are also more impressive visually than aurally, like the dramatic double page spread depicting the shattering of the Porpentine, with small figures dwarfed by a blinding blast of yellow aurora borealis and stars, or the page where a shooting star morphs into Morpheus’ eye close-up, and he’s there with Barbie et al in the Land. Some things are better left to the imagination than physically heard, as when in the original “Thermidor” the story and pictures potently evoke the strange power of Orpheus’ song, while in the audio version, we hear a Greek voice singing a timeless kind of song, but then in the conclusion it’s replaced by soaring (overdone) synth movie score music. The song in the graphic novel is more marvelous in my imagination than actually hearing it is. And *seeing* Wanda looking beautiful and natural and happy with a cheerful goth Death at the end of A Game of You moved me more than listening to the scene. A last example: all the sound effects and pseudo-Arabic music of “Ramadan” can’t approximate P. Craig Russell’s beautiful art in the graphic novel, and the ending shift to present day Gulf War ravaged Baghdad is more potent visually than aurally. All that said, imagining sublime or horrible things by hearing them described by excellent voice actors may be more affecting than seeing them depicted by mediocre graphic artists. The art quality in Season of Mists is not SO great, so some images of hell or of Dream’s castle, etc., don’t look awesome enough. Finally, both versions are excellent in their own ways. Dream’s incantatory words to unmake the Land are left to readers’ imaginations in the graphic novel, as Barbie says, “I don’t know what language the words were in, but it felt like I ought to have understood them—or rather that part of me did understand them, on some deep, buried level.” In the audio version Dream directly says, “Land, I unmake you.” It’s a powerful moment, but the graphic novel leaves more to our imagination aurally while providing much visually. As the audio version leaves more to our imagination visually while providing much aurally. Why not read the original graphic novels first and then listen to the audiobook adaptations if you want to hear a visual medium adapted into an aural one? View all my reviews
The Sandman by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation, but the Graphic Novels Are Best For The Sandman (2020), Dirk Maggs adapts to an audio format Neil Gaiman’s first three Sandman graphic novel collections. I reread the graphic novels while listening to the audio version and renewed my appreciation of the former while being (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the latter. Preludes and Nocturnes (1991; issues 1-8 1988-89) introduces Dream, aka the Sandman or Morpheus, one of the Endless (his siblings are Death, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction, and Destiny), anthropomorphized aspects of life predating all gods. In this first story arc Dream is mistakenly captured by a 20th-century black magician who wanted to capture Death, resulting in strange effects on mortals when Dream isn’t able to give people dreams. Dream manages to escape after seventy-two years of imprisonment and subsequently attempts to retrieve his powerful artifacts, including a trip to hell, an adventure with John Constantine, a duel with the horrible and pathetic Dr. Dee, and a neat conversation with his cheerful sister, Death. The Doll’s House (issues 9-16 1989-1990) continues the first story arc as Dream puts things back in order in his realm the Dreaming that had been messed up by his long absence, including dealing with a “dream vector” and four “major arcana” gone AWOL from the Dreaming and making mischief in our world. The arc begins with stories introducing Dream’s former lover Nada and his one (at first mortal) friend Hob, goes on to depict Rose Walker’s travel with her mother to England to meet her grandmother Unity, and then features a creepy serial killers’ convention (not unlike a comic book convention), an abused youth, and a moving superhero parody. Dream Country (issues 17-20, 1990) is a set of four standalone short stories: Calliope (an ambitious writer discovers that there are worse things than writer’s block), Façade (a former CIA operative tries to come to terms with being a “metamorph”), Dream of 1000 Cats (the dreams of our feline friends are revealed), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s troupe performs A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the King and Queen of Fairies and their court). Maggs includes about all of the elements from the plots of the graphic novels, while trying to approximate in an audio radio drama format the information and atmosphere evoked by artistic images and styles and layouts and so on. Their adaptation retains pretty much all the text from the graphic novels, much of it quite witty, cool, beautiful, or challenging, like: “Light drips from the ruby like drops of blood,” “It is never only a dream,” and “It was a dark and stormy nightmare.” The main text added by the audio adaptation is description to set the stage and characters’ appearances etc. For instance, an era marker is spoken each time Dream meets Hob a century later, whereas in the graphic novel each later era is conveyed by pictures of clothes and references in the dialogue (e.g., Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, slavery). The audio adaptation adds sound effects, like Rose flying on a jet liner, Rose typing a letter, and the Corinthian eating eyeballs. It also adds music by James Hannegan—too much—grandiose synthesizer music to start and end chapters like Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton movie soundtracks on steroids. That said, when restrained during quiet and moving scenes, as in The Sound of Her Wings, the music is effective. The voice acting is mostly fine. Luckily, the moments when average actors try and fail to impersonate famous people like John Wayne are few. Most importantly, James McAvoy as Dream is perfect: lugubrious, intelligent, wry, condescending, and vulnerable. My first reaction to hearing American actress Kat Dennings doing Death was that she should be British like her brother! And they cut her line from the graphic novel mocking Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious British accent in Mary Poppins. But Dennings is finally appealing as the perky punky Death. Except for Calliope, the other major characters like John Constantine, Lucifer, various his demons, Lucien (Simon Vance!), Cain and Abel, Dr. Dee, etc., all sound great. There are things that the graphic novels do better or more impressively. For example: When the layout shifts from vertical to horizontal when Rose falls into a dream. When the art style suddenly changes to Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo. When Rose’s motley housemates dream in completely different art styles. When Dr. Dee is suddenly a small figure on a full blank white page. When Dream gets his purpose back in a ¾-page picture with gold behind his outflung arms. The audio drama cannot replicate the impact of such visual moments (made potent by form and color and layout and text in the graphic novel), even with voice acting, sound effects, and music. The audio version also cannot approximate the different colors of the speech balloons and the different fonts of their texts, like Dream’s black balloons, Lucifer’s ornate font, and Delirium’s multi-colored balloons and meandering fonts. Voice acting may try to simulate that kind of thing, but it is an example of something that comics can do uniquely well (but that most other comics don’t take enough advantage of). Dream of 1000 cats is a story that works best as a graphic novel, because it leaves up to our imaginations what talking cats would sound like, whereas voice actors are too obviously people, so the fantasy doesn’t work well in audio form. There are, to be sure, places where the audio adaptation is more impressive than the graphic novel, like the scene where Rose and her mother meet their grandmother/mother Unity. The fine voice acting and subtle and beautiful music make the scene more moving than when I read it in the graphic novel. Finally, I confirmed my suspicion that the graphic novel is superior as a medium for Gaiman’s story, and that the special strong points of the aural medium are not as impressive as those of the comics medium. But Dirk Maggs and co. did the best they could with translating it from one to the other, and I will listen to the future ones they produce. View all my reviews
リボンの騎士 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Gender, Adventure, Romance, Suspense, and Humor in the First Modern Shojo Manga By mixing adventure and romance with a disguised female protagonist, Tezuka Osamu’s Ribbon No Kishi or Ribbon Knight or Princess Knight (1953-56) started the modern shojo (girls’) manga, leading to things like Sailor Moon. Tezuka also added some interesting elements regarding gender and identity, and through 700 pages told an exciting, humorous, unpredictable story with dynamic artwork and layouts. The story begins in heaven, when a mischievous pint-sized angel called Tink approaches the line of babies waiting to be born on earth and shoves a boy’s heart into a baby girl just before God inserts a girl’s heart in her, so she is born with both a boy’s and a girl’s heart. Tink’s punishment is to descend to earth until he’s able to get the girl to act feminine enough and or to remove her boy’s heart from her. His task is complicated by the fact that the girl, Sapphire, is born to the King and Queen of Silverland, and as only males may inherit the throne (shades of Japan) and as they have no other children, they announce that their baby is a boy. Thus, Sapphire grows up as Prince Sapphire, learning fencing and horse riding and acting masculine, apart from some private moments where she’s able to dress like a girl and enjoy flowers in a private palace garden. Meanwhile, the scheming Duke Duralumin and his nefarious minion Sir Nylon suspect the truth and try underhandedly to reveal that Sapphire is a girl. If they’re successful, Duralumin has an spoiled young son called Plastic ready to be a puppet on the throne. This situation provides Tezuka with plenty of gender material. Much of it is stereotypically disappointing: e.g., boys’ hearts in heaven are blue, girls’ red, and Sapphire is rather weak, passive, blushing, and “feminine” when her girl’s heart is dominant compared to her feisty self when her boy’s heart is dominant, while Plastic becomes independent and commanding after swallowing Sapphire’s boy’s heart. Despite Sapphire having been raised as a boy, she starts acting like a girl the second she has a chance to. At one point, the pirate Captain Blood gives her (disguised as a boy) a beautiful ball gown, and as soon as she’s alone she puts on the dress, becoming a swooning maiden daydream-dancing with the prince of Goldland, Franz Charming. She speaks feminine Japanese when alone and masculine Japanese around other people. The reader never forgets that Sapphire is always a girl, even when she refers to herself with the male pronoun “boku” and says to guys who see her in feminine costume and want to marry her, “Hah--I’m a boy!” The manga repeatedly indicates that because her body is female, Sapphire is female, regardless of the gender of her heart or hearts. Although Sapphire is a girl who can do most of the things a boy can, she’s often rather passive, getting captured and wounded and rescued more often than she does the capturing, wounding, and rescuing. A good fighter, she’s nonetheless often defeated when possessed only of her girl’s heart. After all, in many ways she’s a stereotypical traditional girl as seen from the 1950s. Tink at one point asks Sapphire, “Which do you want to be, a boy or a girl?” That the question is starkly binary reveals Tezuka’s 1950s era: there’s no question of Sapphire choosing both or neither. All that said, when the early 50s publication of the manga is accounted for, Tezuka does some cool things with gender, like criticizing the (Japanese style) line of succession through male heirs only. The women of Silverland are stronger than the men (husbands, soldiers, advisors, etc.), and make the men start doing “women’s” work to teach them a lesson and win a war between the genders. And the most powerful and compelling characters in the story are female. Metamorphosing people or turning herself into a dragon and summoning snakes etc., the formidable witch Madam Hell wants to take Sapphire’s girl’s heart and give it to her own wild daughter Hecate. The ponytailed Hecate, clad in modern slacks and turtleneck, doesn’t want Sapphire’s girl’s heart and constantly subverts her mother’s plans. The goddess Venus also transforms herself or others and becomes a potent foe of Sapphire’s. Finally, Furibe, a young lady who dons black armor (with hearts over her breasts), fights in tournaments and wants to marry Sapphire disguised as a boy. Into his episodic story Tezuka weaves disparate elements: Christianity, Greek mythology, the supernatural, chivalry, pirates, fairy tales, and exotic islands. He also does some social commentary (as when Plastic makes a law guaranteeing equal treatment for women and men), refers to other literature (as when Duralumin compares his suddenly independent and feminist-oriented son Plastic to King Lear’s wicked daughters), and plays postmodernist tricks (as when Duralumin tells Nylon to take a photo of Sapphire dressed as a girl only to have his minion say, “Unfortunately, cameras have not been invented in this era”). About Tezuka’s art, it often looks cartoonish and violates human anatomy. His animals look cuter and less natural even than Disney’s. His art is nothing like Hal Foster’s for Prince Valiant or Otomo’s for Akira. But Tezuka’s art is dynamic and vivid and boasts playful or compelling visual touches, as when Duralumin becomes so frustrated at not being able to execute Sapphire that he bites the bottom line of his panel frame and pulls it up with his teeth. Another remarkable page features a broad panel at the top showing Captain Blood bringing a life-restoring medicine to Silverland, sailing in a small boat on the sea set against the big full moon, beneath which panel a pair of broad ones combine to show a single scene, Silverland’s castle and surrounding town set against the same moon. The juxtaposed scenes impress with suspense and beauty. And Tezuka’s imaginative flights of fancy are neat, as when Tink dreams that he’s surrounded by an orchestra of crickets, their music swirling all around him. In Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka created a compelling and immeasurably influential and amusing, exciting, surprising, and sometimes moving story. There is an English translation available… View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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