You’re Not Reading Enough Japanese Comic Books: Guest Post by mcmanus-sensei

Woh, totally lost following that train of thought. But I like Naruto too!

I also read from the scanlation sites, but I assuage any sense of nagging guilt by paying for the Shonen Jump Alpha subscription even if I never actually read chapters there because they’re always behind the scanlation sites.

3: Wolf’s Rain is in many anime lover’s top twenty all-time. I place it higher, cause Ztianity + Buddhism + kill everybody, I mean everybody. And flowers.

Oh. And why I prefer anime?

Collaboration. Cause manga can’t give me Kanno Yoko. Cowboy Bebop, Vision of Escaflowne, Sakamichi no Apollon, GitS:SAC. Wolf’s Rain may be her masterpiece.

It’s about time CT got around to manga & anime.

Kanno Yoko rocks! Youtube has clips of her, including with the big band that did the music for Cowboy Bebop.

So does Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics & it’s good for things other than understanding comics.

As for Astro Boy, Astro’s origin story is suspiciously like Pinocchio, w/ Astro being a replacement for a human child, and getting spirited away to the circus and all. Did you know that Kubric had wanted Tezuka to art design 2001 but Tezuka declined because he didn’t want to take a year off? So anyhow that maybe tells us something about Spielberg/Kubric’s A.I. which is also about a robot replacement for a human child & involves a whole carnivalesque sequence & then ends up under water with the Blue Fairy, which was probably a Spielberg addition to Kubric’s original and unfinished plan.

On foxs, foxes are also shape shifters.

On foxs, foxes are also shape shifters.

Belle, when next you get a few days in Japan, take a quick Shinkansen ride down to Odawara (or just take the Odakyu line from Shinjuku) and go to the museum inside Odawara Castle. On the 4th or 5th floor is a display of Odawara Lanterns. The display there explains that Odawara Lanterns are different in 3 very special ways:
1. They are collapseable.
2. The ribs are flat, giving more surface for the glue to stick to the covering paper, which helps to resist peeling.
3. Since they are partially made with wood from the sacred groves of Saijoji temple on Mount Daiyu, they will never transform themselves into an evil badger or fox.

Ameratsu is a woman, the kami of the sun who in primeval times was lured out of the cave by the sound of divine laughter, thus restoring light to the world. I don’t mean to be pedantic about such things, but I love that particular myth.

I will always prefer the manga, because the story generally has more integrity. I always get pretty pissed when I remember how PlanetES was butchered in the anime version to appeal to certain…attitudes. Much like how Alan Moore’s work is carefully defanged for the movie version.

14: Most manga readers do. The usual complaint is editing, compression, or bowdlerization.

I have been thinking about this again today. And I do need to read Understanding Comics, altho there are other books. Will Eisner. Ano, I am not qualified, so just an amateur’s thoughts:

“The gentleman entered through the open door, handed his hat and coat to the attendant, and placed his gloves and card on the small table.”

Is the image in your minds-eye Edith Wharton or…Dr Seuss?

Fictional text never gives you enough visual information to recreate a character or scene. You do it yourself, filling in the blank space. A lot of various kinds of blank space.

A lot of the blank space is in the narrative, we don’t follow everyday between the Shire and Rivendell.

I could link to the storyboards from Vertigo here, they’re really good, a quality manga on their own. What are the differences between those storyboards and the final product, the film? There is quite a lot on those storyboards, they are more for the cinematographer and backstage crew. Shots, lighting, shading, framing. In what sense do the storyboards give you the narrative, the story in what way different from the widescreen technicolor film with actors and Hermann soundtrack? What is left out in the storyboards for the reader to fill in?

Two different cognitive experiences. My guess is that manga readers are somewhere between novel readers and anime/cinema fans, and that they feel somewhat empowered by their habit of filling in the space between the frames.

And then of course there is the art. I saved my link for this.

Image Googling Clamp XXXholic manga

The anime version made a good faith attempt, kept the bodies distorted and elongated for instance, but didn’t even wave at the density of detail, the cognitive difficulty, of the Clamp line drawings.

Possibly unexpected fact of my aesthetic is liking to hear people talk about something I don’t know anything about. Even foreign language conversations, as long as there’s a reasonable metabolic okayness (not starving and having to negotiate indecipherable menus etc.). So fine great manga v. anime learning. But then, oh dear me:

Not in a tedious Hannibal Lecter way

Are we conversant, really, here?
Not the movies, the books.
Thomas Harris, author of, creates a villain, Verger, who lives just outside the Beltway in DC, fabulously wealthy, who literally drinks the tears of pre-puberty ghetto kids? Whose face Hannibal has hypno-convinced him at an earlier date, to surgically remove, because fun, and then cook it on the little french table-stove, with nice seasonings and sauce and, quite happily at the time, eat it? His own face?

Tedious.

I read kiddie manga to my daughter in Japanese as a way to keep my reading practice up. So far it’s been 90% dragon ball, which she is into.

I will say that all imperial units have some connection to some human experience, which means that some of them are more natural than metric units. It’s one of the reasons that many metric cookbooks still use cups and teaspoons, and even “metric” pubs still use pints and schooners.

This thread is a semantic kaleidoscope to me. Dazzling, fascinating, but I can’t get a handle on what the gell is going on. And I mean “gell”.

(Facebook Conversation with 17 y.o. son…Manga Fan..Japanophile…Currently into the boxing genre)

Dad:Check out this article on this blog I read

Son:She has horrible taste in manga

Son:>Black Butler

Son:>Naruto

Son:>Shoujo manga at all
(Aside to Belle–I think the >signs mean something..not good)

Dad:some kinda academic

Dad:she is funny though and has kinda cool taste in music

Dad:lives in thailand i believe

Son:Thailand

Son:Ok

Son:but she has horrible taste in manga and must therefore be by extension a horrible person

Son:#logic

Dad:seems legit

Belle–I got a good laugh outta him tonight..thanks!

I don’t understand, what was so hard to follow about it? (If you
can follow the physical action in manga, you can follow
anything– I sometimes think they all need to read the complete
works of Jack Kirby– but then, what’s really going on in manga
is an emphasis on different things– American super-hero outfits
are incredibly boring (so as to be easier to draw, and presumably
to symbolize public nudity) and it’s exteremly difficult to go
back to them after you’ve been reading the Black Butler, Skip
Beat or One Piece — and what kind of wimp Otaku would balk at
issue 20? You can’t even get through “Hikaru no Go” in 20
volumes.)

Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” lost me early on because
he kept harping on sequence when he needed to talk about
narrative– for which sequential images are just a tool, not any
transcendent breakthrough on their own (a single panel “Far Side”
is not a radically different form than a multi-panel one).

And as for Wolves, yeah obviously there’s “Wolf’s Rain” (a tad
dull, but a Yoko Kanno soundtrack cures all ills, except perhaps
with “Earth Maiden Arjuna” which collapses under the weight of
bad 3D and is best listened to in audio-only form).

But what’s wrong with “Kamisama Kiss”, anyway? (Though I confess
that I’ve just been watching the anime, but then it’s one of the
interesting cultural puzzles of J-culture, the anime only rarely
differs much from the manga). Anyway, I see you and raise you
“Fruits Basket” (though that has no wolves in it either, though
rats are prominent).

It is interesting to see Crooked Timber ramping up it’s coverage
of otaku-fodder– it may seem a little late to the game, but it
does put it way ahead of the rather musty-and-fusty New York
Review, for example. I look forward to the inevitable Serious
Coverage of topics such as moe and pedophilia, implicit racial
issues, reactions to post World War II trauma– and an
interesting question with me: is shoujou anti-feminist (or
perhaps pre-feminist) or is it groping toward it’s own alternate
conception of feminism?).

And how about the thesis that the cooperative,
non-individualistic nature of Japanese culture lending itself to
an incremental, evolving creativity– a review of Azumi’s
“Japan’s Database Animals” might make a convienient frame.

Though one might use that as a lead-in to the increasingly
self-referential nature of manga/anime where otaku, maid cafes
and cosplayers are increasingly likely to appear in the narrative
(Sket Dance, Steins Gate).

Shouldn’t crows be more involved in this discussion?

Now, you’re reminding me of Machi de Uwasa no Tengu no Ko! Of course, I read that manga because the love triangle is a girl flitting between two guys who have different virtues, not good boy and bad boy. Even with the upper and lower class division, it’s inverted. Love triangles annoy me, and I try to avoid harem stuff. I usually avoid comics that have been going on forever. I ground down on Gakuen Alice and abandoned that series after a hundred, and even when I know I want to read Narue No Sekai, the amount there is, is intimidating before I get all caught up.

That’s an awesome hat! Here, want some kappa soup? No, not Kappa Kappa Gamma, those are too stringy and bitter, the water kind! /jägermonster (spoken without the lisp)

Oh, and I forgot:
Chichi no koyomi (The Almanac of My Father) by Taniguchi Jiro.
http://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=1486
Very good.

Also, Mori Kaoru, A bride story, ongoing