British Culture, Anime, Corto Maltese, and Reefer Jackets

I followed a link on Journalista (required reading, every day) that lead to yet another Guardian article on comics culture. This time it was about manga, well more specifically anime based on manga. The article is called Why is anime invisible on British TV? and it looks at the cultural differences between Britain and Japan that might help explain why Britain's TV schedule is now devoid of manga - after the demise, of course, of Anime Central. The premise of the article seems to be that animation aimed at anyone other than children is doomed to fail in the UK because we are Disneyfied. I'm going to call shenanigans on that.

The article lacks any depth or insight into why British TV has such a paucity of anime, save for the quote from Emily Man from Orbital Comics, who says "The UK censorship laws have made it extremely hard for the networks in the UK to show Japanese anime on TV too, our societies' tastes and cultural history are different." This is definitely a truism, but the "cultural history" that has disconnected some adults from appreciating animation, including anime (remember one hell of a lot of adults in the UK watch The Simpsons, South Park, and King of the Hill), had nothing to do with Disney (a point made in the article), and everything to do with the stranglehold a couple of British companies had on the indigenous British comics industry.

The success of the Japanese anime industry is inextricably linked with the popularity of manga, and as we have discussed here in a number of posts in the past, the Japanese manga industry has thrived because of the method of production and the primacy of the manga creator. The Japanese public have grown up reading comics, and have progressed through the ranks of the different genres targeted at males and females and children, teens, and adults. It is actually difficult to imagine an occupation, a way of life, a hobby, or a past time, that is not reflected in manga's broad range of subjects, from adventure, romance, sports, history, comedy, science fiction, horror, business and commerce, fishing, tennis, football, basketball, being a teacher, a wine critic, a butler, a shop owner, a baker, every gamut of society is catered for, and almost nobody is excluded.

I've written before about the organic way that much manga finds its audience. A serial like Monster or Death Note, begins in a manga magazine fighting for its audience alongside a lot of other stories, and its success leads to the collected chapters of the story being republished in book-form ( Tankobon). If a manga series is popular enough, as both Monster and Death Note were, it may be animated, and the process that leads to this stage practically guarantees financial backing because the readership or viewing figures are already proven.

I'm not going to suggest that had the British comics industry mirrored that of Japan we would also have manga cafés, where people can drink coffee and read manga all night. In that respect I suspect our cultural differences do matter, but I am going to suggest that if it had mirrored the Japanese model, British TV would not only be airing a lot of anime today, but it would also be airing a great deal more British animation. I'm convinced that with a different British comics industry, anime as good as Monster and Death Note, and animation on a par with King of the Hill and The Simpsons, would have been made and produced over here.

Anyway, there I was thinking about the different methods of comic production in different countries, and I happened upon the French magazine, Monsieur; which caught my eye because it had a Hugo Pratt drawing of Corto Maltese on the cover. Those of you who read my article on Corto Maltese on the Forbidden Planet UK blog, will know that I just had to pick the thing up. Also, and you may not know this about me, I'm a bit of a clothes horse (I'm wearing blue deck shoes and a stripey pirate top at the moment, and my Reefer jacket has anchors on the buttons) and since I know that all things nautical are de rigeur for men, currently, I didn't need to call on my very poor French to work out that Corto Maltese was being featured here as a fashion icon. looking at Monsieur, I just couldn't help thinking that this sort of love affair, with Bande Dessinee, or graphic novels, evidenced in the illustrated review of Piscine Molitor and the gorgeous Hugo Pratt reproductions, just wouldn't happen over here in the UK, with any degree of heart-felt honesty.

A quick update, Spirtofcorto left a message and I nipped over to the site and there is some great Corto Maltese info over there (really nice blog), including the new edition of Celtiques and a good look at the Corto Maltese line: Spirit of Corto.

Death Note, Re-Post

By sheer coincidence, I was watching L: Change the World, which is both a prequel and a sequel (you'll understand when you see it) to Death Note and Death Note 2: The Last Name, on Saturday evening, and so I had the movie on my mind when, on the Sunday morning, I opened my Times and found the teeny little review of Death Note 2: The Last Name, which is currently running in UK cinemas.

It's such a pathetic review, that I've re-posted my Death Note post from IMANGA, from May, below, in the hope that someone in the Sunday Times leads movie critic Edward Porter here so he can discover a little something about the movie he watched. Here's the review in full, and the link to it so you can see I'm not making it up. According to mister Porter, Death Note: The Last Name is:

A teen-angled Japanese popcorn movie that plays like a live-action version of an anime cartoon, Death Note had a brief run in British cinemas earlier this year, and here we have its sequel, directed by Shusuke Kaneko. It revolves around the same smooth-faced central characters - a precocious, eccentric detective and a scheming antihero - who continue to do battle regarding the latter’s ownership of a notebook that magically kills anybody whose name is written in its pages. I found the first film enjoyable enough in its own silly way, but the follow-up is strictly for devout fans (should there be any in the UK). Nobody else can be expected to wear out their brains trying to keep up with the plot, which introduces all sorts of new rules and regulations governing the fatal book.

THE SUNDAY TIMES REVIEW BY EDWARD PORTER

Okay, there are so many things wrong with this review that it's hard to work out where to start. I mean, honestly, do these people actually go to these things and look around? Edward and his partner in crimes against pop-culture, Cosmo Landsman (remember his graphic novel epiphany from watching Persepolis?), surely notice, when they are sitting there watching movies like Death Note, that they are the only people wearing plus-fours and Tweed jackets and who are completely unfamiliar with the material they are looking at.

I think we should begin by taking it for granted that there are Death Note fans in the UK. There are 4 in this household. Secondly, no, it's actually not a 'live action version of an anime cartoon', it's a live action and CGI version of a manga, that also has been made into an anime series, to great acclaim. Thirdly, this is part 2 of the story that began, strangely enough, with part 1, the first Death Note movie - you must have noticed that the little preview after the credits of the first Death Note movie (which you say you saw) opened this movie? And fourthly, you could have mentioned that the movie is well acted, well produced, and the CGi is excellent, Edward, because it is.

Now, it may well be that the movie critic concerned is taking the piss, but one can't be too sure, so let's take a quick look at some Death Note facts:

In Japan, the Death Note manga has sold around twenty million copies, and Death Note was nominated for 'Best Manga' at the 2006 American Anime Awards.

Over 800,000 copies of the 12-volume Death Note manga have been sold in the United States, and the first volume of the series is heading for around 100 weeks in the top-50 charts. Even the spin off novel, Death Note: Another Note, climbed into the top-10 in the US Science Fiction book charts.

Adult Swim, which also runs in the UK, on Bravo, is showing the 37 episodes of the Death Note anime series to millions of happy US viewers, and the Death Note DVDs have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the US and the UK (my daughter Kim got her free 'Light' figure with Volumes 1 and 2, in the land of Scotchland, no less). This popular series, as you can imagine, repeatedly pops up in the top 5 in the Anime sales charts.

They have actually even heard of Death Note in China, where the manga has even been recalled in places, after the Chinese government panicked when Chinese schoolkids made their own 'Death Notebooks'.

The Death Note movies have been no less popular, and on its release more 65,000 Japanese movie-goers watched the first Death Note live-action movie on just two days in May.

So, since we don't live in a cultural bubble, I'm guessing that yes, there are some Death Note fans in the UK, even some devout ones, but just in case any non-devout cinema-goers actually fancy popping in to see the movie, it's just not true that '(The Last Name) introduces all sorts of new rules and regulations governing the fatal book.' on the contrary, those rules and regulations are all well established, and even a passing familiarity with the first Manga volume, or a quick look at Death Note on Wikipedia, will tell you all you need to know. I'm afraid you just either didn't pay any attention to Death Note or Death Note: The Last Name, Edward, or you just didn't do your research properly.

Death Note, Re-Visited

My major difficulty here is that I am aware that lots of you are currently reading the Death Note manga, and watching the anime, and may not even yet have seen the movies, so I have to avoid spoilers and as a result I don't want to go into too many plot details in case I accidentally let the cat out the bag. So, the review is kind of general, but it's affectionately done and I hope it gives the casual reader, unfamiliar with Death Note, a nudge toward reading the series.


I hate a lot of book reviews. Many book reviews nowadays are little more than puffed-up plugs between Oxbridge graduates, and a good many seem to be little more than the reviewer comparing the title to other books he or she claims familiarity with, in order to impress other editors with his/her reviewing powers. Having been to university with at least one critic, I have to tell you I'll be amazed if she has ever actually read anything other than a take-away menu from cover to cover.

Two things really bother me though, a review like the one I read this weekend where the reviewer only spoke about the book being reviewed in the final paragraph (which is okay when the reviewer is Umberto Eco, or George Steiner, or Derrida) and ridiculous hyperbole like 'understanding Hamlet's world is like trying to comprehend a whirlwind...'. Actually it isn't, because trying to 'comprehend a whirlwind is nonsense, unless you study whirlwinds, in which case it's a simple exercise - but it tells us nothing about the story. Besides, Hamlet's world is really very easy to understand.

What I want to know is will I like the book, will I be interested in what happens next, will I be desperate to finish it and yet desperate not to leave the world I have stepped into, too soon? This is difficult to gauge with a straightforward, dare I say conventional and old fashioned, book. The fly-leaf and the pages on view may well engage one, the book itself can still go on to be a tremendous let down. It's a lot easier, I think, with a graphic novel because you can tell from looking at the drawings and reading the dialogue from just one or two pages, whether or not it has you in its grip - especially if you have been anticipating the release of the larger work after following the story in comic form weekly or monthly, which is often the case with Manga, and is the case with Death Note in particular.

By the time Death Note (デスノート, Desu Nōto), written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, kicked off as a regular series in Shonen Jump Weekly, it centered around Yagami Light an extremely gifted, but bored, High School student who happens upon a supernatural notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. With 108 chapters, spread over 12 volumes (tankobon) the series picked up a large and dedicated fan base.

The Death Note Anime, more or less follows the Manga pretty faithfully, the Death Gods, the Shinigami, carry notebooks called “Death Notes” with which they control the lives, and principally the deaths, of us mere mortals. If your name is written down in their Death Note, you will die, of a heart attack ( unless another cause of death is specified) within 40 seconds. The Shinigami, Ryuk, who mirrors Light's boredom, drops his Death Note in the human world, where Light discovers both it, and his new found power over life and death. He can now kill people, or at least his alter-ego 'Kira' can, with the stroke of his pen. At first Light uses his power to kill bad people whom the State seems unwilling or unable to punish. The powers that be, unsettled by the hornets nest Kira has stirred up, employ the mysterious L, a master detective, to track down the Kira.

The series has been also been adapted into two live-action movies, Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name. Here, Light is again a brilliant student, but somewhat older than the anime character, and his pondering on criminality (his father is a high ranking officer), morality (he is a student of philosophy and criminality) and his role of man/god after finding the Death Note is more fleshed out.

A novel based on the series was written by Ishin Nishio, called Death Note: Another Note. The premise of this was very clever and it tied into the Death Note universe by having Mello (a young candidates to become L's successor) narrate the story of L's first encounter with Naomi Misora during the Los Angeles 'BB Serial Murder Case' which was mentioned in volume 2 of the Death Note manga.

As you will know from the recent post on my blog, a third Death Note movie, L: Change the World, was released earlier this month (February 2008) in Japan, and a new tie-in, one-shot story was published.

Without wishing to repeat the very thing I mentioned earlier as a pet-hate, the hyperbole that causes one to write ridiculous sentences about 'whirlwinds' (although 'reaping' such a whirlwind might be more appropriate with Death Note, than Hamlet) I have to say I have never read anything in the West that can compare to this work, in scope, size or scale. I have read other manga that compares, such as Monster, or MPD Pyscho, but I don't think our comics or graphic novels operate on this standard of magical realism. Perhaps, some South American fiction comes close, but those would mainly be short stories and their aims and goals would be more limited. Manga on this scale, sets out to transform the lives of millions of readers, not a few, well-read English majors.

From a cartoonists perspective, I see the benefits of the Japanese system of production as key to the superiority of work like Death Note. The story actually began looking very different indeed, as a one-shot, with some very loose ideas about where the story would go, or what it might become - one imagines:

The triumph of the Japanese system of producing anthologies of weekly and monthly comics, targeted at specific age-groups, allowing the artists and writers a large degree of creative freedom whilst building a large and loyal audience, can be seen to great advantage here with Death Note. After the one-shot's success, the story reappeared as the more finished article we know today. The careless Ryuk even reminded us that he had lost his Death Note again, and over the succeeding months the tale grew more and more sophisticated with each twist, turn and moral dilemma. The popularity of the feature soared and it quickly became a hit all over the world, thanks to word-of-mouth and the scanlation groups.

Of course there was the possibility that the Death Note anime would be horrible. The manga is superbly drawn and the plot doesn't pander down to the lowest common denominator, so there was a possibility that the anime would strive for a larger audience, and water the story down. Those fears were quickly dispelled as the anime clearly used the manga as a template, and like the manga, it looked fantastic:

The biggest test though, would be the live-action movies. There were so many possibilities to screw-up here, loyal fans are both a blessing and a curse and the casting could be wrong in their eyes, the story could be scrambled, the CGI could look dreadful, the script could be awful, the permutations were endless. As it transpired, the first movie met with such universal praise that for months the coming second movie was the only chatter on the Death Note fan sites and forums. The casting of the first movie had been perfect and the teaser at the end of it, for Death Note 2, really caused a buzz:

All in all, Death Note, the manga, the anime, the movies, it's an experience. You will be transported to another place - that's the best that great fiction can aspire to.

Get that Manga blog in order!

Okay, it has been a slow start to the year due to bugs and sneezes and stuff. And besides, I have worked 'manfully' (we all know that Man-flu is worse than any other kind) on the Bee-Man (now only 8 pages to fix and then I'm adding bees and lettering and it's done) despite being at Death's Door.


So my Imanga blog is a little behind, but I did say it would be self-indulgent. Anyway, I'm going to stick to the theme of my favourite Manga, and like the MPD Psycho post, I'll tie in the links with any other incarnations in other media. Death Note is a case in point, and it'll be the subject of my next Manga post, this weekend. Death Note began as a one-shot with Light as a very young boy. In the Death Note Manga series, and the anime, Light is a High-school pupil, and in the movies, Death Note I and Death Note II (The Last Name), Light is even older. In every case the stories achieves a new level of sophistication and it all seems to work as a sort of Death Note universe. It is a joy to be part of that universe.

Comparing the Death Note pilot (scans below) with the highly detailed moral exercise the story later became, and the highly lucrative Death Note merchandising industry it gave birth to (my daughters Kim and Dom are currently walking around with their new matching L bags - courtesy of Forbidden Planet ) will, I think, reveal a little of the way in which Japanese publishers encourage the growth of a Manga brand; although we do have to bear in mind that Death Note is a superior product, you can't fake that.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the first incarnation of Death Note, the pilot for the manga series, here's a little taster of what will be on the blog. The work was translated by AK and Mike, scanned by Mike, and edited by Darci-San and Draygon Zero:

I've been watching the Honey and Clover live-action TV show and I think I'll follow the Death Note post with that because whilst I'm a fan of the Honey and Clover movie, and the manga, I'm less enamoured with the anime or the TV show; so I think it makes for an interesting contrast, and discussion.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee, And revery.

The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

(Emily Dickinson, 1755)