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13 May 2012

Some Thoughts About Good Manga 2

Since some of you guys said you missed reading my blog posts, I thought I'd try continue the "Some Thoughts About Good Manga" that I intended to turn into a regular series of posts all the way back when I still had that fluffypress site. In any case, the first of two comics I want to talk about today is Kingdom, which I recently read since I heard it was getting an anime adaptation this summer. I'll do my best to avoid mentioning any critical spoilers.
Kingdom is the first full-length serialized manga by Yasu Hirasawa. He's one of those success stories in the game of follow-your-dreams, as he worked as a systems engineer after graduating university only to say fuck it, I'll give this manga-career a shot. 9 magazine editors told him his stuff was pretty bad, but 3 found it acceptable and some time later, he got hired by Weekly Young Jump.

Like his other attempts for a serialization early on his career, Kingdom takes place in ancient China. To be specific, it's the latter years of the Warring States period, which is always a great source of interesting stories. Then again, considering it's probably the most commonly depicted period after the Three Kingdoms era, I'd rather see a story from the Age of Fragmentation instead. Plus then, the cataphract depictions would make a lot more sense but I digress. The plot details the rise of both Xin (most likely based on Li Xin), a former slave, and the Qin Emperor Yingzheng, better known as Qin Shi Huang, so as you might expect, it's full of factional struggles, intrigues, and the like. And then there's the warfare. Whoo boy. I came in expecting a more realistic depiction of warfare from a mangaka who professes to be an avid fan of Chinese history. Was I ever wrong. It's not exactly Dynasty Warriors-level of fighting enemies while running down a waterfall, but it's close with one-man armies, female super-warriors, and other things that just make you scream plot-armour. Enemy infantry in a phalanx formation? No problem, a head-on cavalry charge should take care of that, right? To be fair, there are other aspects which are more realistic like battle formations and flanking maneuvers, but it's sort of cheapened by the more over-the-top elements.

So why do I even like this manga to the point where I've already read over 20 volumes of it? Well, other than the fact that I'm a sucker for ancient China, I kept reading because unlike a lot of historical manga told from the perspective of the key players, Kingdom initially offers the perspective of a low-ranking peasant conscript, aka. arrow fodder. Scenes with Xin and his 5-man unit (the smallest unit of Qin military organization) frantically trying to survive a cavalry or chariot charge is great fun to read through. There's also the fact that the odds always seem stacked waaaaay too high against for both Xin and Ying Zheng, and it's hard to help myself from turning the page to see how the hell they're going to manage to pull themselves out of their current dilemma. Seriously, the latest development in this manga is all kinds of "Oh shit, they're completely fucked now." So despite some shortcomings and cliches that you might see in your typical action-shonen manga, Kingdom manages to come across as an entertaining-read. I have my doubts that the anime adaptation by Studio Pierrot will be any good, but hopefully it won't be too bad and who knows, it might even encourage some scanlation group to pick this manga back up.
The second story I want to talk about in this post is Epileptic (L'Ascension du haut mal). Yeah, I know it's not a manga but to be honest, I never really differentiated between comic books/graphic novels/manga. The author/artist for this is David Beauchard, a French cartoonist famous not just for his works, but also for co-founding L'Association, a well-known publishing house in the Franco-Belgian comics industry. I won't say any more about L'Association, because I'll only come across as a name-dropping faggot to someone actually knowledgeable about Franco-Belgian or European comics in general. Nor am I going to give a background on Beauchard, because that's what Epileptic does as an autobiography. I say autobiography, but Epileptic's a lot more than a literal telling of a person's life, which is reflected in both the art and the story.
No dissociation of the visual and narrative elements here, no siree. So much of what makes comics entertaining has to do with this balance of these two elements. Often at times, I find that people relatively new to comics focus too much on the literal story/words and completely miss out on the whole experience. It's the same thing in movies or animation, really. No, you cannot create a good atmosphere in film without the appropriate camera angle/movement. No, you cannot have good characterization in anime without expressive character animation.

Epileptic is chock-full of these great visual metaphors and symbols to complement to its story. Seriously, just look at the picture above of Beauchard's epileptic brother being carried away by an uncaring police, all the while watched by hysterical bystanders lacking in understanding. Absolutely brilliant. Now the story's about Beauchard and his family's struggle against epilepsy, and there's a lot of social commentary sprinkled here and there but at its heart, Epileptic is a tale of how the author's personal struggle with this "High Evil" has allowed him to grow as a person and better understand his own self. I won't say any more, because you really have to experience it with the art for the full impact. The point is, if you like stories about character growth and expressive art, you're doing yourself a big disfavour by not checking out this comic book. Now if only more of his stuff were translated into English...

21 comments:

  1. Thanks Hox. It is good to see/read that you widen your net and not just post blogs about japanese manga but good quality europian comics as well. North America lacks not just good manga but good europian comics too, and you shining light on some of the great stuff out there is a good thing.
    Now if only you would have made a mention of UTAMARO , the blog would have been complete.

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  2. Yay, one of those posts! Thanks, Hox.

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  3. Interesting. Glad you're bringing it back.

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  4. Kingdom sounds intriguing. The first two volumes seem to have been scanlated. I just hope the translations are up to snuff when I start reading it.

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  5. Talk about timing, I just finished reading Epileptic last night.


    His use of black and white in Epileptic is brilliant. I loved that descent triggered by his brother's illness. The characters are gradually and visually changing along the story. His iconography is great: I liked the epilepsy "monster" drawn using a frightening aztec snake.


    I ordered some of his other works on amazon in the very same hour: two of his latest color works (La lecture des Ruines & Chercheurs de trésor). I can't wait to devour them.

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  6. I have a big size edition of Epileptic, it's simply gorgeous.
    If you like David B, I recommend also Les incidents de la nuit.

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  7. Just finished Kingdom. The author tries a lot of stuff --- shoju-level-tearjerkers, political intrigue, battle manga, an exploration of social mobility within the ancient Chinese caste system lol --- and pretty much bats 1.000. This manga reminds me a bit of Ares in that they are both shonen > seinen for my tastes, but I said "screw it", went along for the ride and liked it.

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    1. Yeah, it's got a lot of cliches and feels very "shonen" for a lack of a better term, but it's still pretty entertaining in the end.

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    2. It's taken four scanlation groups two years to non-consecutively scan 14 chapters of Kingdom, which is 2 of the 20 volumes you said are out in Japan. This made me realize how ridiculously spoiled we are that you 1) chose titles like Historie, Vagabond and Sangokushi and 2) crank them out like clockwork and 3) produce United-Nations-nuclear-disarmament-negotiations caliber translations. Yosh!

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    3. Vagabond? You meant Vinland Saga, right?

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  8. Any reaction to this interesting bit of news?

    http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2012-05-17/jojo-araki-1000-twitter/facebook-fans-to-redraw-kingdom-manga

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    1. >Araki and Inoue participating in the project

      Fuck, what I would give to see the either of them be in charge of the character designs. If there's one thing I dislike about Kingdom's art, it's the character designs for the key characters. It's weird because I like how most of the minor characters look but people like Ying Zheng, Xin, or Wang Qi just look a little... wonky.

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  9. Hey Hox, since you are pretty much like GOD to us by now, only sexier since you have the power to turn straight men gay and lesbians straight for you, would you be interested in sharing us something about your personal life, or thoughts on stuff unrelated to manga?
    Anything would be nice, but mostly, i want to know, if our constant sexual harassment pleases you. Not once i've seen you reply to that stuff, even when some of us would probably be willing to be your sex slaves. It makes me fell lonely.

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    1. Uhh, I don't know. Do you have something specific you want to hear from me or what? I mean, I suppose I could talk about stuff I find cool/curious in history or science but I'm not sure how many people would be actually interested in that.

      As for the "sexual harassment"-jokes, I'm a little at a loss how to properly respond to that but I suppose we could always pretend...

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  10. Hell yeah, Hox Machine. Really missed these, thanks for bringing them back. Also, I'm glad you're a fan of european comics too, just a heads up, in case you never tried any, american comics can be really great too, they're not just superheroes and shit, actually believing that is like believing all manga are narutu crap.

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  11. Good to see some appreciation for European comics, especially a rereadable modern classic such as Epileptic. I've long held the belief that if scanlators devoted at least 1% of the energy they spent on European comics that they did on Manga, there would be a larger range of interest in that field of comics as there would be for Manga. There are literally hundreds of 48-62 page albums out there that are deserving of a wider audience, and because of a little casual nudity or cultural differences, some of them never gain wider distribution. Sound familiar?

    I've been helping proofread several comics from people who're not quite fluent in the English language to make their translations sound more natural, and their sentences sound clearer. Actually, my mission is twofold - 1. I make sure the script is linguistically cohesive as well as close to the source material, and 2. I get to sample a lot more comics that I wouldn't otherwise.

    One of my fellow scanlators is someone who worked on the third Violine book when no one else was willing to continue past where the previous translators left off. There haven't been any updates for almost a month though. Hopefully there'll be a comeback sometime soon.
    http://lcvtranslations.blogspot.com/

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    1. Oh yeah, I almost forgot - another worthy scanlation site worth viewing is the Manga/BD releases of Freaks Squeele.
      http://squeelatrix.wordpress.com/

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  12. Hey Hox, David B's The Littlest Pirate King, the Armed Gardens and Les incidents de la nuit have all been released in english.

    There's a scanlation of the two books of The Treasure Hunters too.

    http://www.mediafire.com/?03yibd39dx8rf

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  13. hox, can i ask where you actually find all these comics? is there a site u particularly freqeuent?

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    1. Just a combination of googling mangaka I like, and browsing interesting looking stuff whenever I'm in a bookstore selling manga/comics. Also, I try to read whatever this guy recommends (http://bjkun.egloos.com/) since it usually lines up quite closely with my tastes.

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  14. Turnip Farmers is doing a great job scanlating this manga. Almost one chapter per day O_o

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