Friday Night Fights: Sole Blade

During the strife of Sengoku period Japan, Lord Daigo strikes a bargain with the forces of darkness. In exchange for gaining temporal power beyond imagining, Daigo offers up his unborn child, whose body parts will be divided up between forty-eight demons.

The horribly disfigured infant is then, in proper Campbellian (Joseph, not Dave) fashion, placed in a basket and set adrift on upon a river. A kindly wise man discovers the child's basket on the river and raises the tenacious tot as his own. The child's adoptive father crafts prosthetic body parts, including a pair of arms which conceal a pair of sword blades, to replace the ones stolen by the demons, and aided by his natural tenacity and peternatural sensory powers, Hyakkimaru, as the boy is named, is able to function and fight as well as any able-bodied soul.

After receiving a tantalizing message from a mysterious voice from beyond, Hyakkimaru sets off on a quest to hunt down and slay each of the forty-eight demons, and by doing so, restore what was taken from him.

He also fights a pair of sandals possessed by the vengeful spirits of the unquiet dead...


It all happens in Dororo, the late "Godfather of Manga" Ozamu Tezuka's unfinished series from the 1960's. Though Dororo is one of Tezuka's lesser works, it still ranks light-years beyond the best efforts of most other creators, masterfully blending horror, humor, and action while managing to grapple with the requisite BIG SUBJECTS^TM (the consequences of war, what it means to be "human") common to Tezuka's stories.

The first English language volume of Dororo (in a handsomely-designed trade paperback format) was recently released by Vertical, Inc, and can be obtained here for a reasonable sum. A live-action Dororo film, which takes a few liberties with the source material, debuted in Japan in 2007, with sequels planned for release sometime this year and in 2009.

For those seeking a more interactive experience and willing to overlook shitty in-came camera problems, Blood Will Tell, Sega's 2004 offering for the Playstation 2, not only provides players the opportunity to indulge their inner prosthetic-using samurai, but also posits a possible conclusion to Hyakkimaru's unfinished story.

Animetal Lady - Dororo No Uta (from Lady Marathon II, 2002) - A heavy metal rendition (featuring former Pink Lady Mitsuyo Nemoto on vocals) of the theme to the 1960's Dororo anime series.

The Supremes - Bits and Pieces (from A Bit of Liverpool, 1964) - Yeah, the Dave Clark Five hailed from North London rather than Scouser territory, but why quibble? Geography has never been a strong subject for the American people.

I have mixed feelings about this Motown foray into British Invasion territory. On one hand, it's represents a historic convergence of the two major musical currents of the era; on the other, the material is presented too damn straight and would have benefited by more of the stylistic "wall of sound" flourishes that embodied the Motown sound.

(Viva Bahlactus!)

don't need the masters

It's an all right place to visit, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Today was supposed to be fairly quiet and uneventful, what with the wife away negotiating the cosplay-and-body-odor-heavy seas of the Anime Boston convention and little old me being left to my own devices here at our house on the hill.

Not that I'm unhappy with how things turned out. I could have done without the family hassles which manifested themselves and the dinnertime encounter with the Church of Latter-Day Saints' black-suited community outreach program. The visit from my brother was a nice surprise, though, especially as it included the gift of a stack of old Marvel comics from the 60's and 70's and a marathon sibling co-op session of the Xbox 360 version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

The Pillows - Little Busters (from Little Busters, 1998; also available on Fooly Cooly OST 1: Addict, 2004) - I didn't accompany Maura to today's convention because that particular form of salinity lost its savor for me sometime in the early 1990's. It was a combination of popcult saturation fatigue (coupled with the ubiquitous shallow Japanophilia in the fan scene) and the simple fact that my personal tastes and prevailing trends in manga and anime have diverged a great deal over the years. (I'm an unreconstructed old school mecha jockey and space opera enthusiast.)

There are a lot of things of note out there at the moment, but very little that appeals to me personally with the exception of occasional works like Youtsuba&! or the not-that-recent, but wonderfully bizarre FLCL, which featured today's song (as well as several other gems) by the Japanese indie rock outfit The Pillows on its soundtrack.

a steaming bowl of ramen

Ocassionally, I'll come across a piece of sequential graphic art that manages to pierce though my crusty shell of jadedness and remind me why I fell in love with comics in the first place. It doesn't occur that often (and I'm willing to split the blame for that equally between myself and the current state of the comics industry), but it did happen last Thursday, when the fifth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! I ordered arrived in the mail.

I'm a pretty reserved guy, and it's a rare occasion where I find myself laughing out loud over something I'm reading, but this...

(It's manga, so read right to left.)
...had me in stitches. Granted, I have a weakness for scatalogically-themed humor, but it was more than that; few works in any media have been able to capture the spirit of childhood as well as Yotsuba&! does, and that sequence in particular nailed that special mix of immaturity and whimsy (and adult exasperation) perfectly.

PINE*am - Get a Choco (from Pull the Rabbit Ears, 2005) - Imagine Ladytron run through a slight J-Pop filter, and you'd have something close to this track. Highly recommended.

it´s the latest thing to be nowhere

Depending on which side of Armagideon Time’s comics/music demographic divide you fall upon, you might have heard about Nymphet, a manga series about a prepubescent girl who attempts to seduce her teacher. (Oh, Japan, there are some things I’ll never understand about you, and it’s for the best. Really.) There had been plans for an American release of the series, but the publisher, who had picked up the rights for the series based on early Japanese installments (as is typical in the highly competitive world of manga localization), decided after a more in-depth review of the material to pull the plug on the project.

Dorian, who has retail experience in selecting and ordering manga titles, sums up the salient issues involved here, but comics fandom being the abattoir of reason that it is, it was inevitable that the shrill cries of “Boo! Censorship!” and “What about free speech, you fascist?” should arise, especially with the moldering corpses of similar straw men still fresh on the playing field from the Mary Jane statue and “Heroes for Hentai” controversies.

Here’s the thing – this has fuck all to do with “free speech.” I’m not sure when it happened, or how it happened (though I remember something similar erupting when EA axed the release of Thrill Kill in the late 1990’s) but there is a large vocal contingent of people working under the assumption that “free speech” means “speech free of consequences,” and are willfully ignorant that civil liberties and commercial considerations are two very different creatures. I would well be within my rights to compose a two hundred page litany of profanity, but that does not place any obligation upon any publishing house to see that work gets released to the public, nor does it exempt me from criticism – justified or not – regarding its contents.

Ideologically, I’m with John Milton on this score; I’m all for seeing a diverse multitude of literary vessels set loose upon the waves, and let the passage of time and intrinsic worth determine what shall sink and what shall float. Practically speaking, though, why should a small publisher, most of which operate on narrow financial margins, feel obligated to release a title that could, in this environment, cause serious legal repercussions, if not for themselves, then for the retailers who might carry the title? Plus there’s a risk that the potential media firestorm could poison the well for the rest of their line of goods. Even if the right on is on their side, the financial and temporal costs of litigation could, in all likelihood, make any victory a Pyrrhic one.

And for what, in this specific case? A comic that embodies the creepiest type of pandering to the vilest instincts of the fanboy crowd. “But that’s exactly where one must make a stand,” some may say. Fine. Let the benighted crusaders pool their funds together to buy the American release rights and publish the book themselves. It’s very easy to seize the moral high ground when one doesn’t have a personal stake in the outcome.

This may seem a bit Torquemadic of me, but the stridency of those arguing in favor of the release is disturbing in the extreme. Why such lengths for such an obviously inappropriate bit of fan service wank material? The past couple of weeks have dropped my already low estimation of lumpenfandom a dozen or so notches. The attempts to compare the artistic value of Lost Girls -- which was intended by Alan Moore as deliberate act of provocation -- and Nabokov’s Lolita -- which I suspect very few fans have actually read, though perhaps they Netflixed the 1997 film version and skipped straight to the salacious bits -- are fairly absurd. (The Lolita comparison especially amused me, seeing as how the novel is really about a self-deluded fool’s obsession with an unobtainable ideal – a pretty accurate summation of the pathetic side of comics fandom.)

Back to the idea of “speech free of consequences,” I find this tendency to associate criticism or disapproval with repression odious in the extreme. As it has been stated many times in the past couple of weeks, no one has the right to determine what someone else finds offensive. Some criticisms are more valid than others, to be sure, but that’s something to be hashed out via discussion and debate, not dismissed with a wave of the offending party’s hand and the customary weak bromide, “Get over it,” or through the use of loaded terms like “misconstrued” which attempt to deflect the issue back at the those doing the criticizing. The current of free expression is not a one way street, and getting called out on one’s crapulence – real, perceived, or somewhere in between – comes with the territory of expressing one’s self in the public arena.

Dubstar – Disgraceful (from Disgraceful, 1995)

Nikki and The Corvettes - You Make Me Crazy (from Nikki and The Corvettes, 1980)

sometimes I’m taken by madness divine

The growth of Japanese comics (aka manga) in Western markets the past few years has been nothing short of phenomenal. So much so, in fact, that based on sales figures, manga books have supplanted superheroic fare as the “new mainstream” (or a parallel mainstream, depending how holistic – or myopic -- one’s view of these things is), built largely on a reader base outside the traditional comics reader demographic. These days one can enter a bookstore or decent comics shop (accent on decent) and find hundreds of manga titles covering a broad range of genres (horror, teen romance, martial arts, competitive cookery), but two decades ago, when the translated manga trend was in its infancy, one could count the number of titles being released on the fingers of one hand.

Back then, the two publishers with their hands in the game were Dark Horse, with their squarebound Lone Wolf and Cub reprints, and the late (and sort of lamented) Eclipse, which published a small number of biweekly titles in the traditional pamphlet format through an arrangement with Viz (before Viz began publishing their own titles a short while later). Eclipse’s initial roster of manga offerings included the Marxist ninja story Kamui, the gory teen hijinxs of Mai the Psychic Girl, the fighter pilot soap opera Area 88, and the subject of today’s post, Xenon: Heavy Metal Warrior. (I guess “Noble Gas Warrior,” though scientifically correct, didn’t sound as cool.)

Xenon tells the story of a high school “bad boy” (with the obligatory tender side), Asuka Kano, who finds himself with a cybernetic body and a bad case of amnesia following a horrific plane crash. It’s all part of a grand new product rollout by The Bloody Sea, an international arms cartel seeking to perfect the next generation of cyborg super-soldiers. Askua’s efforts to come to grips with his new abilities are consistently interrupted by Bloody Sea retrieval teams, real go-getter types who aren’t above using rocket launchers or industry-standard killer cyborg biker monkeys to achieve their goals.

The twenty-three issues of the series fall into a predictable series of arcs, where Asuka, along with the crusty scientist who originally developed the project, a high school rival-turned-friend, and a female track star (and Bloody Sea prototype effort) with cybernetic legs attempt to thwart the organization’s plans thusly:

- “I can’t win against this cyborg/super-mercenary/killer monster!”
- “You must win against this cyborg/super-mercenary/killer monster!”
- “With this new secret data/add-on/weapon I can now defeat this cyborg/super-mercenary/killer monster!”
- Rinse, repeat

It’s not the most sophisticated plotline, but the hyper-frenetic pacing pushes things along nicely and keeps the reader from noticing some of the more problematic parts of the narrative. (It helps to read the entire series in a single setting, something that will take the average reader, oh, an hour and a half, tops.) The early issues of Xenon featured articles about manga and mecha culture in lieu of letter pages, and one of these refers to the series as being part of a “new wave” of manga. I’m still unclear of what that appellation is supposed to mean, except that the narrative is sparser and anticipated the Hollywood blockbuster formula (lots of flashy “wow”, lean on substance) by ten years, but the same qualities can been seen in plenty of older manga and anime series. Xenon, to me, reads like the marriage of the classic Marvel superhero template (a conflicted hero thrown into a world he didn’t want to be a part of) to the highly-stylized aesthetics of manga. Kano’s cyborg form is a slick blend of sentai, giant robo, and American superhero designs.

There’s also plenty of dramatic shouting and big dollops of ultraviolence to keep things from getting boring. Fred Burke commented on his experiences translating the series as “the book in which I had to decide what it would sound like to shove a woman's heart out of her rib cage, and then recreate the comic-booky dialogue she will spurt with her blood.” There were ample amounts of fan service, as well; featuring both Yoko (the woman with the cyber legs) and Sonoko, a high school girl with a crush on Asuka. (Burke also mentions that the comic received a considerable number of fan letters from female readers – more evidence that pat judgments linking gender to genre tastes are nonsensical and reductive.) The depiction of women in the book can be a little off-putting, and in one case downright icky. (I could have done without the scene where Sonoko is taken hostage. It’s not hentai, but in some ways, it’s even more disturbing.)

Even with the occasionally skeevy moment (and the nonsensical conclusion of the series), Xenon is a wildly entertaining read, and was perfectly suited for my tastes as a fifteen year old fanboy beginning to feel jaded by American superhero fare. (Secret Wars II and Millennium damn near did in my interest in the Big Two’s offerings a while.) It’s a shame my efforts to adopt its style of dialogue into everyday life went so poorly. Maybe I should have picked another time and place besides at church on Easter Sunday to inaugurate the change.

AHHH! DAMN IT! HERE IS THE MUSIC! FOR TODAY!!!! (Feel free to add in your own speed lines and fist-through-the-rib-cage sound effects.)

Nitzer Ebb – Kick It (from Big Hit, 1995) – Also sold under the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not NIN” brand name.

Judas Priest – Turbo Lover (from Turbo, 1986) – Turbo Lover = a 1982 Camaro Z28, Part-Time Lover = a 1983 Chrysler Cordoba, Easy Lover = a 1976 Chevy Vega with a leaking head gasket

Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Teenage Thunder (from Flaunt It, 1986) – SSS were a one-trick-pony, but what a delightful trick and colorfully clad pony…