The Last of the Great Manga?

Before we go any further let me just make it clear that there are certain aspects of manga that do make me feel uneasy. Firstly, the excessive gore and violence in MPD Psycho, both in the manga and the TV series (I have some details in this older blog post) is certainly not going to be to everyone's liking and I'd have to admit, might be fodder for a certain type of individual to put forward as an influence for their own dark deeds. Having said that, I like the mood of the thing and whilst I'm not advocating censorship, I do find it difficult to envisage the sort of youngster the work would appeal to. However, as the work comes clearly labelled "adult content", I feel that should be enough of a heads-up for the average supervising adult. I'm telling you this so that you are aware that I didn't just read the series and watch the TV show without registering some disquiet - I'm not ever what you would call a passive viewer.

Even more disquieting for me though, on a personal level, is not the violence in some manga, or even the porn manga, which I personally don't bother with, much, but a technique used in a lot of manga to signify embarrassment or belittling, literally, by drawing the adult characters, or one of the adult characters, as children or a child. I find this very unsettling when it happens in a story where I've accepted the characters as adults. Oh, I know it's a technique some Japanese illustrators use, but I personally dislike it very much, especially if it happens in a manga that includes, er, bodily interaction or those frequent up-skirt angles. Heck, I don't even like it in the more mild knicker-showing stories like Change123 - which is otherwise fun.





Hopefully it's clear then that I do find fault with some manga, and I'm not blind to the fact that there is as much pap-manga as there is superpower-pap indie-pap and pap-graphic novels.

Anyway, that said, I got to thinking about the amount of posts out there hypothesizing about the death of manga, or at any rate those suggesting that there is no new great manga being created. The posts reminded me of a phenomena that the poet and critic Tom Paulin pointed out at the turn of the Millennium, when quite a lot of writers began to produce a lot of work that focused on sleeping. It is sort of zeitgeist moment, coupled now, as it was then, with a sort of quasi-New Testament panic about a possible end-of-days. It struck me that such thinking is understandable, because we do seem to have come to the end of a particular cycle, with the likes of Death Note, and Monster, and MPD Psycho, completely finishing. After all, in one form or another, whether available only from Japan or as scanlations following their publication in the weekly or fortnightly or monthly Japanese comics, these titles were around, literally, for decades. And now, having finished their run in Japan, and having been removed from scanlation sites as they appeared in full volumes here in the West, there is something final about their disappearance.

Not that the genius behind Monster, Naoki Urasawa, has stopped producing work, he has followed 20th Century Boys and Monster and Pluto, with Billy Bat, which I wrote about at some length on a post below. I've been keeping up with the story and there is little doubt in my mind that "the god of manga" has created another classic, although it was a safe bet that he would. In a sense, although it is, strictly speaking, less so than than the current manga that explore the job of working as a mangaka, it is also very self-referential in that it is a story based around a fictional comic book character, and a manga creator.








Just as Urasawa has a new title that is developing nicely, so to does the team behind Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Unlike Billy Bat, Bakuman deals directly with the business of aspiring to become a mangaka, bringing us the story of Moritaka Mashiro, a high school student and the nephew of a man who was himself a mangaka.

So, exactly why, with new titles by some of the leading figures in manga really getting into their stride, and with some great new titles out there, is there so much gloom about the art form? Well, I suppose, at least partly, it has something to do with the self-referential nature of some of the stories. Manga is often very, very, imaginative, very out-there, and seeing so many titles looking inward may have caused a sense of panic in some circles - maybe. And of course there is the steady decline in manga sales in Japan, that might have added to the sense of foreboding; but then surely that downward trend is counterbalanced by the increase of sales of manga on phones and handheld readers. Then there is the increasing cherry-picking by some publishers who seem to conduct their research and development by hanging around the scanlation sites and the comics scene, to find out what is hot. As soon as they step in and option a title, the thing gets pulled from the scanlation sites (a gentleman's agreement that most scanlation groups adhere rigidly to) and so the reader who has already gone to some lengths to find the thing ends up with a hiatus between the most recent scan, and the first western publication which covers the story the reader has already consumed, and invariably the interest in the title drops. I mean to say, how long have we had to sit and wait for the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service volumes to trickle out?

I suppose, to be honest, that there must also be a certain amount of disenchantment involved in these posts. After all, many of these writers discovered manga like Death Note years before it appeared in the West, and then became ubiquitous as merchandise and anime and as live action movies, and they wrote a great many posts extolling its virtues and the virtues of manga in general. And perhaps there is no need to do so now, or at least they may feel there is no longer any need to do so, now that the mainstream press is sniffing around. It is, perhaps, not so much that there is no new great manga being produced, but that there is no longer any great need to try to impress upon the reading public that manga is great. They are preaching to the converted, not only that but they are preaching to those whom they themselves converted, and the converted have all gone their separate ways.

Whether you or I think it is a great manga or not, a title like Antique Bakery deserves its place in the manga firmament. It is a popular manga, and it is well drawn and to be honest, it is just another one of those ideas that at first glance seems unlikely to appeal to us in the west, and actually turns out to be a complete joy. To dismiss work like this out-of-hand because we don't like the way the eyes are drawn or for some equally idiosyncratic reason, is just plain silly, it is clearly work executed by an expert hand.

What I'm trying to say, in a round-about way, is that it is no coincidence that the much-missed titles are all Seinen manga, and what the writers who miss some of this Seinen manga seem to forget is that a diet of nothing but Seinen manga may not be everybody's cup of tea. The reader may well have have been turned on to manga by one gateway Seinen title, like Death Note or Monster, but they may well, by now, have moved on and decided that they prefer Shonen titles. In fact I'm sure we all hope they have moved on and discovered what a broad church manga is.

The fact that the much-missed titles all seem to be Seinen manga, actually got me thinking that this worry, that the really great manga has come to an end, might actually just be a perceived problem for male readers of a certain age - of which I am one (both a fan of Seinen manga and a male reader of a certain age). After all, one look at my previous manga-related posts over the years, is a clear illustration that I veer toward Seinen titles:

http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/monster-will-astonish-you.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/work-of-jiro-taniguchi.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/ykk-alpha-at-end-of-world.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/kurosagi-corpse-delivery-service.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/06/takeo-saitos-golgo13-kimonos-and-bad.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/07/death-note-re-post.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/09/astro-boy-mighty-atom.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2007/07/where-to-begin.html

However, if you are familiar with those old posts, or if you clicked them, you'll know that I don't just read Seinen and horror manga, and that is what has given me, I think, a particular perspective on these events. For this perspective, I give the credit, or blame, to Dirk Deppey's deep knowledge of manga, and his championing, in particular, of Ashinano Hitoshi's dream-like, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, romance, manga, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (YKK). My exposure to this story, created over a period of 12 years and still not optioned in the west so the scans are still available (here), helped position me, I think, to appreciate a wider range of work like Nana, Honey and Clover, and Walking Man, and brought me to a slow appreciation of manga's huge sweep and broad canvas. It also helped me to realise that the titles some of the critics' miss so much, are not necessarily the titles that the majority of manga readers actually read. In fact the current "crisis" has probably not even registered with the readers of manga that coexists in both the East and the West, such as Nana. And those who have just started reading manga titles like Soul Eater, or Spray King, or Moyashimon, or Oshinbo, or Astral Project, have probably never seen or read anything so exciting.

No, the great manga has not stopped, it continues in an unbroken chain that eventually winds its way to our shores, and it takes different forms and slips between genres of manga. YKK is a great manga, a great voluminous sprawling epic that meanders peacefully towards its final chapter. It is nothing like Monster, which is nothing like Death Note, which is nothing like Nana which is nothing like Billy Bat which is nothing like Homunculous which is nothing like Mushishi which is nothing like Until Death Do Us Part (UDDUP) which is nothing like Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture. In other words the great manga is still out there, if we don't recognise it that says more about us, than it does about the state of manga. I mean, be honest, if someone suggested that you might like a manga called Tales of Agriculture, you would be a little skeptical, until you actually caught a glimpse of the fantastic artwork and then started to read the thing that is.










To be honest, I also think there is something else going on, an undercurrent if you will; a subtext, perhaps one that the authors of the pieces are themselves unaware of. It just might be that Tom Paulin's observation can be applied here, and the blog writers are all displaying a end-of-days style panic, based not just on fact that a few great stories have come to an end, but also on the fact that printed comic books are being replaced by digital comics. To people of a certain generation, and again I am also one of those, that really does represent the end of an era. There was always something elemental about making marks on pulped wood with a liquid that itself came from deep beneath the earth. Perhaps, and I'm only surmissing here, the bloggers concerned cannot with any certainty look 10 years down the line and see any future at all for comic books, let alone "great" status for a title like Detroit Metal Blues.

Then again, perhaps I am just reading too much into it. After all, I noticed a reply to a post on the TCJ forum that more or less suggested that the "big-eyed manga", as the poster called it, is the wrong kind of manga. Which informs us that the poster is either completly unfamiliar with manga classics like Black Jack and Astro Boy, or has probably only ever read a limited amount of Seinen manga, and decided that is the only style of manga that counts. It is, I think, to be sure, befuddled way thinking, but it may be no more than a failure on the part of some people to embrace titles that look a little different from the ones they usually pick up. Perhaps, it really is no more than that.

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.