I was working on a long-ish piece, and it was going pretty well. I took a quick break to do some blog hopping and noticed that Danielle Leigh had done a terrific job covering almost exactly the same material in her column at Comics Should Be Good. So it’s back to the keyboard.
Speaking of manga for grown-ups, I finally got around to reading the second volume of Hiroki (Eden: It’s an Endless World!) Endo’s Tanpenshu (Dark Horse). Overall, I found the content of the two books to be excellent overall, but I think I’ve developed an allergy to anything Endo writes about organized crime. The two-part “Platform” just made me tired. Why are creators so fascinated with mobsters, and why do so many of their otherwise admirable sensibilities go out the window when they dramatize them? I’ve seen Endo pose a thousand interesting questions about the human experience in his science fiction and slice-of-life stories, but pieces like “Platform” read as depressingly literal. I’m thrilled that Dark Horse is committed to delivering more Eden, but Endo’s gangster stuff leaves me utterly cold.
On the brighter side of Dark Horse, the opening story of the sixth volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (written by Eiji Otsuka, illustrated by Housui Yamazaki) left me slightly giddy. Anyone who can craft a funny, creepy, strangely sweet story around the privatization of the postal service has won me as a lifelong fan.
February 21, 2008 at 11:44 am |
Considering you are one of my favorite blog spots, I consider this an honor (?!) and hope you aren’t too annoyed I beat you to the punch! Thanks so much for dropping by with your own suggestions for “manga for adults” recs, I’ll be sure to work some of those in to my next column (with credit, of course).
I also wonder if your “long-ish” piece shouldn’t see the light of day anyway — after all, most of my piece is explanation rather than persuasion, at least as I think about it. Of course, I love to read your writing so I would love to see your take on it.
February 21, 2008 at 10:47 pm |
I don’t think I’d classify Platform as a crime story. Like just about every other story in the collections its more or less a psycho-sexual drama, and though not as good as the Sci-fi story or the one about the play I think it works very well at what it sets out to explore. The yakuza-war setting was a throwaway element.
February 22, 2008 at 8:29 am |
Danielle: I might revise it, or just use it as a starting point for something else. My thoughts are still crystallizing or calcifying or whatever it is that they’re doing.
Huff: I think the yakuza-war setting informed everything, to the story’s detriment. There were so many familiar constructs in play — father/son agression, concepts of loyalty, women as victims or property. How did you see it as transcending those aspects? Or am I just excessively averse to fatalistic stories about criminals and the people who feed off of them?
February 25, 2008 at 12:30 am |
It’s been a while since I read it but there was a fair amount of depth to the characters, and combined with the Freudian-undertones it was a far more unconventional read than I think your making it out it be; sort of like how David Cronenburg’s recent films sound like fairly typical gangster flicks on paper but are really a completely different monsters. I guess the fact that I couldn’t lump the main character’s goals into simple categories like “revenge” was what made the ending (which was predictable in a sense) work.