Amused in Review

Welcome to the new, and I hope improved, Amused in Review! Since I haven't posted a review in ages, posting anything ought to be an improvement, right? Don't answer that. Anyway, I'm excited about the idea of reviving Amused in Review as a blog; I've been blogging for a little while now, and the ease of adding a new post, compared to what I used to have to do updating my site, makes me think that this time around it won't grow to be a chore (Hint: as soon as you realise that you're actually dreading your "hobby" it's time to take a break.)

Anyway, if you made it this far, welcome again, and if you used to read Amused in Review "back in the day", welcome back.

Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a review out of my...er...hat!

I've just finished loading up all my Amused in Review columns back to April of 1996 as blog entries (unfortunately, I no longer have any of my prior Compuserve only columns). Movable Type's import facility is pretty nice, but the task would still have been nigh impossible--since they weren't actually exported from any blog software-- without the aid of my favorite programming language: Python. Yay, Guido van Rossum and the members of the Python dev team! (Yes, technically, I could have done it in many other programming languages, but the bottom line is that if it weren't as easy as Python would make it, I wouldn't have tried.) It's almost midnight now, so my first new review will have to wait for tomorrow. In the meantime, burrow around in the archives and see what there is to see...frankly, I'd forgotten I'd ever written most of those entries.

Zodiac P.I. #1
by Natsumi Ando
Tokyo Pop, b&w 179 pages, $9.99
Rating: Neat-O

Zodiac P.I. is one of the flood of new manga that Tokyo Pop is loosing on the American market; printed "back-to-front" and about the same size as a Japanese tankobon they sell like hotcakes to people (primarily adolescent girls) who have had zero interest in comics American-style, and mostly from places (bookstore, record stores, video stores) that have hardly carried comics rather than the comics specialty stores known as the "direct market." At some point Tokyo Pop and its imitators (Viz, long-time player in the manga translation market has just changed the format of its collections and dropped the price-point to match Tokyo Pop, and Random House has announced it's getting into the act) will saturate the market and there may be some kind of shake-out. It's gone from where I could automatically pick up anything new from them to, well, this week when they released over 15 new books; even at ten bucks a pop that's a fair chunk of change. Still, there is so much good material in Japan and Korea, in genres that "mainstream" American comics publishers haven't been willing to touch with a ten foot pole for decades now, that even once an individual reader can't aspire to follow them all, the market may continue to support multiple genres, just as the book market has its mystery, science fiction and fantasy, and romance readers.

Which brings us to Zodiac, P.I. which manages to be all three of those genres at once. It's a murder mystery, with fantasy elements and romantic overtones. The title character is a thirteen year-old girl named Lili, an astrologer from a long line of astrologers, possessed of a magic ring that lets her communicate with the personifications of the spirits of the Zodiac, who adopts the identity of a private investigator called Spica in order to solve crimes with her astrological insights. The crimes are, at least so far, down-to-Earth murder mysteries; it's only Lili's investigative m.o. that smacks of the supernatural. The romance, or potential romance (I'm anticipating a bit here), comes in with a rival detective and class-mate, who it happens is allergic to girls (!). And, although the rating on the cover is for ages 7+, I think it would depend on the 7 year-old; there's at least one depiction of a bloody corpse with a knife sticking in its neck, and a girl being strangled in silhouette. Nothing grotesque or shocking, but quite a bit grimmer than, say, Kodacha: Sana's Stage. The art is typical shoujo (girl) style, neither extremely squashed and cartoony nor exaggeratedly long-limbed and elegant; there are lots of expressionist background motifs (flowers, solarization patterns, "speed" lines) and dynamic figures breaking panel boundaries. If you like this sort of thing, and I do, it comes across as stylish, vibrant, and expressive; if you don't then it probably seems busy, confusing, and even precious. And if you're one of those people who just can't get the hang of reading back to front, left to right, then forget about it.

Overall, I quite enjoyed it, and I expect I'll keep picking it up, even if it means finding something else to drop.

Man of Many Faces #2 by CLAMP TokyoPop, b&w 166pages, $9.99 Rating: Neat-O! Man of Many Faces is one of the earliest works from the CLAMP studio (later responsible for one of my favorite shoujos, Magic Knight Rayearth). MoMF is a romance of a sort, that begins when the protagonists are absurdly young but continues throughout their lives. The hero, Akira, is a grade-school student by day, and a gentleman burglar--Twenty Faces--by night. Why does he steal? For the thrill? For the money? For the romance? No, he reluctantly steals in order to satisfy the acquisative impulses of his two ditzy mothers (no explanation given, but they were both apparently married to his father). He meets Utako, who is to be the love of his life, while ducking through her window to escape pursuit. The art is towards the cute, incredibly huge-eyed end of the shoujo spectrum, and is much of a piece with the rest of CLAMP's work; the plots and characterization are a bit primitive compared to later work. The interesting thing about MoMF, though, is the fairly long meditations on love by the various characters, and I'm fascinated by the fact that in Japan they can get away with something like the following in an all ages comic, not because it's racy, it's not, but because it's fairly long and it's serious. This is the opening to MoMF #2, a six page illustrated text piece:

"I always want to be excited to see the one I love."
Utako-san was smiling when she told me that.
We spend every Friday together. 
This one is no different. We meet on the
balcony.  Utako could tell I was confused by
the way I cocked my head to one side, like a
puppy.  It made her smile bigger.
"Being in love doesn't give you the license to
do whatever you please."  Utako-san poured
me another cup of tea with milk.  I was still
confused.
"I think love is a very selfish emotion.
I mean, to love a person is a selfish act.
I also think it's a wonderful thing.  But even
then, it still doesn't give you the license to do
whatever you want.  Even if we get to the
blissful stage where the love and affection
is mutual, we are still two different people.
You can't expect the object of your desire to
love you in the exact same way you love her.
"I think...
...romantic love will blossom
when you and I accept each other
as strangers.  Different people,
different hearts.
Because we love one another,
we don't want to lose that excitement.
"I want to remember the thrill
that I felt when we
first met.  You can't
take love for granted.
If you love someone,
you need to discover
the boundaries of your
relationship in order
to make it last."
I gave Utako-san my full attention.
Ironically, since we are two different people,
I'll never be able to completely understand
her point--which is part of her point, as well.
Nevertheless, the things she said about the
excitement of seeing your sweetheart made
a lot of sense to me.

When I see her beautiful smile, I feel a rush of
emotion.  It's so great, I worry that my heart will
beat so loud that she'll hear it.

Now, there's nothing quite like that in the rest of the book, but the audacity of it--at least in terms of American comics--leaves me dizzy. The fact that I think it's actually an interesting take on love is icing on the cake. Man of Many Faces is absolutely not going to be to everyone's taste, and it's certainly not my favorite CLAMP, but I finding it charming and fascinating.

Hell on Wheels
by Rob McCarthy and Shaennon Garrity
webcomic: http://www.howcomics.com/
Rating: Neat-O
My online pal Rob McCarthy finally has a website, or at least the beginnings of one, with his comic Hell on Wheels, illustrated by the inimitable Shaennon Garrity of Narbonic fame. I like it, and I don't think it's just because I've known Rob (at least as an online presence on Compuserve's Comics and Animation forum) almost since I began Amused in Review, so I can clearly hear his "voice" in it. I do wish he'd stop trying to batter down the doors to Marvel and do, if not more comedy like Hell on Wheels, at least superhero work using his own or public domain characters. I mean, why obsess over the Yellow Claw, when Fu Manchu is in the public domain? Unfortunately, I'm sure that Rob could tell me: Rob knows the ins and outs of Golden Age Marvel comics the way Mark Waid knows Silver-Age DC, and that, my friends, is scary. Be that as it may, I want more Rob McCarthy material, and I don't want to have to wait until some twit at Marvel "gives him a break."
On the surface, Hell On Wheels is about the trials, tribulations, and rare triumphs of a wannabe comic book writer, who happens to be disabled and wheelchair-bound. I say "happens", because although much of the strip revolves around his disability, it's not a high concept strip in the sense of being about how his disability affects his comic book writing aspirations. HoW, though, gets more complicated than that rapidly (maybe too rapidly) as it goes meta--it involves how the protagonist, Dave is actually a comic strip character, by another wheelchair-bound writer named Dave and his cartoonist partner Norb and her talking gerbil...but they don't know that they're all actually characters of ("wheelchair guy") Rob and cartoonist Shaennon. Clear?
I know it sounds like the Seven Deadly Sins of Webcomics smooshed in a blender and stuck on Frappe, and that's before you get to Dave's creation "AppleButter Man", but it's quirky, bitter, and funny, and that's worth something.