Cringe, Baby, Cringe!

Hey, all:

This was originally started on the weekend and then put aside until now—Thursday night—for a plethora of reasons, laziness probably being right up there at the top of them.

But! Another horrifyingly valid reason was that, thanks to having a few new subscribers, one of whom more or less said, “I have wondered what kind of manga you’ve been reading lately,” I set a plan to talk about comics (specifically, manga) that I've been reading. And, looking things over, I kinda went, “uhhhhh, I talked about all this shit already? Really?”

As you know, the main reason Graeme and I shut down Wait, What? had to do with it just taking up too dang much time to edit and get out the door three times a month. But there was also part of me that thought it was a good time to get out because, frankly, Graeme and I both had stopped remembering what we had told each other years ago! (Both of our memories run to the absent-minded side of things. (The charming way one of my coworkers put it today when talking about himself was, “Yeah, a lot of RAM, not a lot of storage.”)

So the idea for the new subscribers I’d be talking about books the rest of you had already heard me talk about kinda stopped me dead for a few days.

And even now, I don’t think I’ve got the greatest solution, in that yeah there are going to be references to stuff I’ve already mentioned but I thought it might be worthwhile if I talked about the stuff I might otherwise pass over in silence—ya know, because it’s extra dumb or maudlin or, as the kids say, cringe?

So, apologies to old readers for the old takes, and apologies to the new readers for the new takes—this installment has something for everybody! (Even me—as long as you think of “shame” as a “something.”)

WOLVERINE: REVENGE #1: Ok, this is neither manga nor a book I’ve talked about previously nor a book I’m ashamed to admit I read—this is a book I’d like to shame Jonathan Hickman for writing.

I picked it up because it was Capullo drawing Wolverine—just the cover alone, with Wolverine in his old yellow and blue suit coming at ya through the profile of a dinosaur’s mouth? How the hell am I supposed to resist that?

But yo, this Hickman guy…. I guess I can understand a writer being, “ok, what was a dumb, fun Wolverine story—oh yeah, Millar and Romita’s Enemy of the State definitely fits the bill, I should do something like that.” But I can’t understand how Hickman walked away from Enemy of the State going, "ok, so ‘fun’ means ‘nihilistically cynical in my attempts to grab attention.’ Gotcha.”

How else to explain this first issue that starts so promisingly (Wolverine in his yellow and blue costume being smug on top of a triceratops!) and then has (a) a hundred million people killed (off-panel); (b) Mastermind taking control of Clay Quartermain and blowing up the last three helicarriers; (c ) Wolverine, Captain America, and Winter Soldier doing a full-page skydive away from the resulting explosion; and (d) Deadpool, Sabretooth, and Omega Red teaming up with Colossus (!?) to put bombs in the chests of the captured Cap, Bucky and Logan so they can then be set off, killing the first two and leaving the last of the three swearing his bloody revenge?

Really, Jonathan Hickman? Take away your Neal Stephenson novels and your DM’s Guide, and this is all you have left? Mark fucking Millar?

I don’t know, maybe Capullo gave Hickman a list of shit he wanted to draw and the list was shit like “Sabretooth decapitates Maria Hill” and “Captain America dies screaming” and “(Oh yeah, I want to draw Dum Dum Dugan so I can draw his dumb little hat and make his mustache turn up, so he kind of looks like a Powerpuff Girls character, k thx)” I mean, really, what was DC’s Metal but Batman also riding a dinosaur, and Superman always being in the act of dying screaming, now that I think about it?

But there’s something so Hickmanish in the whole “yeah, Magneto dies in Asteroid M as it re-enters the atmosphere, setting off the mother of all EMPs” premise that I can’t help but feel it’s mostly all at his feet.

Anyway, maybe it gets better in issue #2 but I won’t know for another few months until it hits Marvel Unlimited. (If then.) Bleah.

NANA & KAROU, VOL. 6: Cringe manga time!

Nana and Karou is billed as an “escalating S&M love comedy” and don’t let the volume number fool you—even though “vol. 6” is the final volume, Denpa chose to make each volume a 3-in-1 omnibus. So that’s something like 1800 pages of “escalation.”

Nana is the hard-working, high-achieving, drop dead popular girl at school, and Kaoru is her next door neighbor and ex-childhood friend who is literally the opposite: a porn-loving loser who hangs out with his other porn-loving loser friends.

But through a series of shenanigans I literally read too long ago to recall, Nana ends up locking herself up in the bondage outfit Kaoru has bought that literally fits her like a glove. In the course of negotiating for its removal, Nana and Karou discover they both have more in common than they might have imagined.

It’s a weird work, in part because of how markedly unweird it is. Ryuta Amazume is basically just dressing up a shonen romance in seinen clothes, but Amazume’s style is off-beat: heavily cartoonish expressions but realistic backgrounds, a lot of grayscale shading, and just a ton of paneling and rapidly changing angle work. It somehow reminds me of…Will Eisner? Without being anything like Will Eisner?

Also weird/not-weird about Nanou & Karou—and what made it a worthy read overall—is that it’s mostly serious attempt to understand S&M and especially the psychology that goes into making a dom or a sub want what they want and what they get out of it. The push and pull between Karou’s insecurities and his strengths that drive him to be a dom (and a good one) is just miles ahead of the beloved car crash that is Mi Murao’s S&M (beloved by me, anyway).

Now that I’ve finished the last volume, I can also say Nana & Karou is also a very typical manga in that it arguably goes on too damn long. At some point, Amazume decides that not only would having his leads have sex take away all the mystery and the tension in their relationship, but part of the reason they are in dom & sub relationship is because they cannot get to a place where they can have sex with one another—their S&M relationship is the only place where they can express or acknowledge their love for each other.

That’s….kinda weak sauce, if you ask me (although I do think that Amazume is taking the approach in part to show a relationship more familiar to those in BDSM communities—people whose “play” is very heavily sexual but is not actually about them having sex).

And perhaps sensing this, Amazume drops a few chapters far into the book—starting around chapter 125—where two seemingly unrelated characters already in a relationship are introduced and we see how their S&M relationship develops. It’s a weird swerve, one that evoked strong memories of the back door pilots of my youth—and wow what a smutty phrase that is out of context!—like if Woody and Norm from Cheers became private detectives in Hawaii (and had an S&M relationship).

But it also works because Amazume gives the readers what they want—the S&M in the case of these two new characters is so they can solve their problems and get to fucking. And once it’s over five chapters later, we’re in to the final arc of the manga: Amazume’s scene is finished, and all that’s left is the aftercare.

OUR AIMLESS NIGHTS: I’ve mentioned both my love and frustration with Insomniacs After School, Makoto Ojiro’s lovely, loping low-key romcom Viz began simulpubbing about two or three months before it ended and even now a year later has a 50 chapter gap between that end and their slow-to-update beginnings.

Our Aimless Nights is a much simpler, humbler version of the same (sort of): Chika and Waya are two very different types of high schoolers who nevertheless hang out at night after Waya gets off work at the convenience store he works at.

It’s a very sweet read—far more conventionally drawn, far more conventionally told than Our Aimless Nights but man, I loved reading each new chapter every Thursday morning on my commute to work.

I don’t know if it’s a new thing in boy/men’s manga or just something I’m more aware of than I used to be, but the focus of their romances are very much about the way the girls are in love with the boys—they’re definitely in love with each other (even if it will take them at least a dozen chapters or more to express it) but the focus is through the female gaze on the male characters. Yet the female characters usually aren’t nearly as psychologically well-delineated or complex.

So the focus of these manga isn’t really about young women and how they desire, it’s about young men being desired (and usually men who aren’t typically seen as desirable).

I like it; it’s sweet; but it’s cringe for me to admit precisely because I feel pretty vulnerable saying, “I like this romance because it’s about a shy guy who’s a bit of a loner and a bit of an outsider being worthy of love and desire.”

I could probably go on and on about how much American media generally has a very different focus on romance, especially when you get something as tricky as the romance being for the male audience, not the female audience….but that’d be me just trying to cover up the cringe not exposing it.

Anyway! 1600 words; three comics. That’s enough for this installment. I feel like now that I’ve opened Pandora’s Chest of Cringe—and now that EC’s back, thanks to IDW, I certainly hope they call one of their new-fangled anthologies that—I can probably dig up a few more things I might not’ve mentioned otherwise. But that’s for another time.

Oh! And I should say (and probably write about at some point): I’m back on social media! Feel free to follow me on BlueSky at jefflester.bsky.social! I’m pretty quiet there, much more of a lurker than I was on Twitter, but you can occasionally see me shoot my mouth off there now and then. I think once I’ve got twenty newsletters through beehiiv I’ll make an announcement over there about here…but do feel free to mention the newsletter if you want before then? It was a nice shot in the arm to see a few new faces drop by this week!

Anyway, yeah. Hope you are well—the weekend is imminent, and I hope you have an excellent one!

-Jeff