mayday, mayday

To quote The Giant from Twin Peaks: “It is happening again.”

A few months back, I was all fired up to write one of these things…and got totally sidelined by the fact a friend’s husband had died. (He was one of those guys who was almost but not quite a friend of mine? Like, he and I went paintballing together?)

That kind of threw me for a loop, took the head off some of the steam. I was torn because I couldn’t quite be in the right space to talk about it here, but it also wasn’t letting me talk about anything else. As I recall, it took me a couple of weeks before I finally eked something out.

Yesterday I found out some more-than-likely quite terrible news about a coworker, one of those people I just adore working with. And I’m in an even worse spot as far as not being able to talk about it at all: I’m not even sure anyone else at work knows.

But I really don’t want to get off-track again—if nothing else, I wonder to what extent this newsletter is some kind of terrible game with my most self-defeating instincts: “oh, the last themed month totally blocked me, let’s do another!” “Oh, why don’t I write the next newsletter in rhymed couplets! But only if I can remember that one rhyme that came to me three weeks ago at 2 a.m.” “Remember, don’t write anything sad, but here’s one of the saddest things you’ve experienced yet!”

So fuck it, I’m officially flying the “the show must go on” flag. If things seem a bit lackluster, please forgive me. I’m hoping at some point the distraction of everything will fade. If not this post, then the next.

Additionally! As I mentioned in the other post, rather than just list all the comics I’ve read the last few months (which is a thing I genuinely find cathartic, and so view with much suspicion), I wanted to talk about a few of the new-to-me manga I read I found really notable.

Hands Off Eizouken: The covers for these really caught my eye as I was doing my weekly browse of the new week in Comixology. Three schoolgirls with bad haircuts riding futuristic vehicles under animation blue skies? I dunno; there was something that felt very rich in the presentation, compared to the usual “mangaka only sleeps three hours a night and now they’re going to lose at least another two doing the cover for the next tankōbon so here’s a close up of the characters cheering” stuff you usually see.

One of the really great things about HKE is about how much the interiors fulfill the promise of the covers in the most indirect of ways. Ostensibly a story about three girls who start a club so they can make their own anime, the story’s a very wry treatise on what it takes and what it means to make art and build worlds, but it’s also a kid’s adventure story of exploration and adventure.

Asakusa is the dreamer/director with the knack for worldbuilding and extrapolate detail; Mizusaki is the technician/animator with the understanding of movement and character; and Kanamori is the producer/realist always figuring how to exploit every possible angle and save every possible yen.

In the early chapters, Asakusa will talk out the possibilities of a mech or a vehicle to the point it’ll materialize out of nothing, and the characters will climb into it and ride around, commenting on its likelihood or fallibility: the book literally follows the characters on their flights of fancy and then returns back with them as they figure out how to refine or ground it further.

As if that’s not twee enough, the school the girls attend is on its own island, and the author spends plenty of time showing us the roads, buildings, rivers, and lairs dotting it—the treatise on convincing and unshowy worldbuilding and art is taking place within a dellightful built out world. By the time the girls go on a treasure hunt for the secret treasure of the tanuki in order to fund their next project, Hands Off Eizouken’s two halves are effortlessly pushing each other forward, like one of those tottering perpetual motion toys that would lurch forward indefinitely if you let it.

I should talk a bit more about the art—it’s definitely odd, like if someone tried to storyboard a Miyazaki movie using MS Paint (you already know I’m old, so it won’t surprise you that some of the textures gave me flashbacks to Mike Saenz’s Shatter)—but I worry I wouldn’t do it justice and just risk flogging the horse. Part of the significant charm of Hands Off Eizouken is how the reader’s delight in discovery indirectly mirrors the characters (they don’t show you what they’re feeling, but you’re feeling it for them, in a way?) So let me just say, yeah, it’s good.

And if you have Hoopla, you can read all five (of the soon-to-be six, I think) volumes for free! I bought the first four and just caved and checked out the fifth (though I suspect I’ll do some sort of weirdo digital completist thing and buy it the next time it’s on sale).

Homonculus: Yeah, over on the opposite end of the sprectrum is Homonculus, a Jungian, uh, thriller(?) by Hideo Yamamoto, the mangaka who created the manga Ichi The Killer (which I guess is like being the mangaka equivalent of the guy who wrote the books Jaws?). This is another one where the cover struck me while I was perusing Comixology.

Nakoshi, the protagonist, a middle-aged homeless guy living in his car, agrees to be experimented on by a medical student. The medical student believes trepanation is the key to unlocking ESP and other psychic powers, and wants the protagonist might manifest—if anything.

What happens is somehow exactly what you’d expect and absolutely nothing like what you’d expect—Yamamoto crafts the story to keep you off-balance, and one of the tools he uses superbly is the pacing. The story doesn’t exactly start out at a clip—you follow Nakoshi through his day to really show you how unrooted he is—and then it slows down even more. And then some more.

By the time Nakoshi is experiencing visions out of one eye, the pace drops to that Lynchian dream-like speed: shot, reaction shot, return to the shot, return to the reaction shot, some weird and uncanny thing starting to move, reaction shot….

As with Lynch, Yamamoto realizes the trick is in highly realized detail and the absence of explanation. (And maybe as also with Lynch, Yamamoto is exploring the dream-like to talk about consciousness and how precarious our self sits on a pinnacle of unconscious and subconscious otherness.)

In the first volume—which is an omnibus volume, so I think it’s actually three regular manga tankōbon in one—you get the set-up and only the first real encounter with Nakoshi and the monstrous inner self of a yakuza big-shot. But it’s the second volume, where the medical student asks Nakoshi to spy on the inner self of a high school girl he lusts after, that knocked me on my ass–like the characters, I went through discomfort, disgust, and finally relief that mirrored the character’s own cathartic encounter and breakthroughs.

I haven’t goten any farther than that, actually? These are not on Hoopla and not exactly cheap (though actually really well-priced in digital considering each volume is close to 700 pages). But, yeah. These two had me oomphed out for a few days after reading. I’m both eager/reluctant to return, but I was haunted for days afterward

Dandadan: At least two Whatnauts told me they were enjoying this and recommended it, and I knew I needed to get around to it. Honestly, I should’ve kept the podcast going if only because our listeners were so astute—and I’m such an absurdly open book—I got so many stellar manga recommendations.

Anyway, Dandadan. Man, I wish I hadn’t slept on it, but getting to power through 150 chapters in (*checks chart*) ten days was quite the rush.

It’s a tough book to describe in part because the hook is the least of it: two kids—one a nerdy loner, one a sharp and popular student—try to prove to one another that their own weird obsession actually exists and the other’s doesn’t. (The boy believes in aliens; the girl believes in the occult.) To their chagrin, they discover they’re both right as they’re attacked by both spirits and extraterrestrials.

That’s the hook of the first chapter, which takes what I think is a pretty lackluster high concept, and then just runs balls-out with it (literally, as the series goes on). The mangaka, Yukinobu Tatsu, was a former assistant to Tatsuki (Chainsaw Man) Fujimoto, and it looks like he paid very close attention to Fujimoto’s craft: well-designed characters out-of-nowhere twists; and a sustained ability to deliver greater and greater climactic beats on top of, and out of, one another hook you in and refuse to let you go.

In addition, Tatsu is great with creating off-the-wall characters, bringing them back when you least expect it, and then adding them to the main cast. Throw in a “will they or won’t they, well of course they will but when?” burgeoning romance with the leads, and the book kinda ends up reading a bit like Claremont’s X-Men if it was a screwball comedy set in a shonen manga? (That is the most weird and insane description, but I think I’m standing by it.)

Yeah, it was just great. A delight. My only regret is that, now that I’m come out, each weekly chapter is like the slightest drops of dew on the tongue of a man dying of thirst.

(PROTIP: Dandadan is on the Shonen Jump app but because it’s rated mature (because people say fuck and the quest to recover a character’s balls is ongoing) you can’t read it in their app, only their shitty webreader that….there’s got to be some way to make that work, right? I can’t read it without the top and bottom of the reader inch right up against, and often into, the art.)

(So if you have a tablet of some kind, download MangaPlus where you can read it all on their much-better reader. Although the catch there is you can only read each chapter once, unless you’re reading, I think, the first chapter or the last three? God, I hate having to jump through bullshit hoops like this, but, at least in Dandadan’s case it’s worth it (though unnecessary).)

The Summer Hikaru Died: Heard good things (though I don’t remember from where?) and oof the first volume of this is just…perfect. Two teenage best friends have to deal with the fact that one of them died out in the mountains over the summer and then came back…not quite right. Whatever it is that’s taken Hikaru’s form and his memories is back because he can’t bear to be away from Yoshiki…and Yoshiki, for his part, can’t bear to be without his friend, Hikaru, even a strange and dangerous doppelganger version of him.

As the series has gone on, it’s done some great stuff and I can’t wait for volume 4 (in….August?! Ughhhhhh….).

But volume 1, man. Jesus. It’s just fucking great horror, that moves effortlessly along all so many stripes and types: body horror; the uncanny; rural “what’s in the woods” creepiness….but first and foremost, a very circumspect and absolutely convincing portrayal of two teenage boys in love with one another. (One of whom is….something else?)

I don’t want to say much else—which is kinda killing me because there’s one or two scenes I wanna mention because they’ve haunted me ever since—because that mix of expectation and dread that comes from not knowing where the page after the one you’re on is going to go next was such a big part of why I loved this book. This is being published by Yen Press, so you can buy it in print and digital and probably get it out of your library if you have a good one.

And that’s that! Four very different series, but all of them addictive in their own ways. Don’t know if they’ll hold up as the go on, but hey! That’s the risk of the serialized fiction game, right?

I hope you’re well and hanging in! Not quite sure when I’ll be back, or what I’ll be talking about….but believe me, you’ll find out not longer after when I do!

Cheers,

-Jeff