september's coming soon

I'm going to assume that people picking up the years-later oneshot sequel to a decades-running comic will already be familiar with the original, so google SiP if you want the summary. Given that nobody I have ever come across online even knows about SiP, I'm going to assume no-one will ever read this, but hell. Reviewing ended up being how I process the media I consume, and this in context with the Utena sequel means I'm having thoughts.

SiP: XXV more or less starts where the original ended: The Parker Empire is gone for good with Tambi devoted to making sure it stays down, Katchoo finally has peace and her happily ever after with Francine. But oh no oh no, some ex-Parker girl is getting into apocalyptic military science secrets and the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of one Katina Chovanski who has to hunt her down to keep her family safe.

Content, as such, is familiar territory for those here from the original. There's a lot less romantic drama, naturally, and all the more James Bond. Which on the one hand is a kind of a weird choice, given that I deeply suspect that the drama was what endeared this story to most readers. I can't begrudge it, though, because the kind of clunky story flow that always bothered me with SiP is absent here. Granted, this is also a shorter format than the one in which I read SiP (the pocket collection), so it's possible that the shorter length just made it easier to digest. Unlike the original, I never was confused about the chain of events, here.

The story is old, and that is of course perfectly fine. The only thing I could fault it for is possibly the ending, which took a turn for the mystic that's not entirely off-brand for this universe, but still kind of dissonant with the genre. (and honestly the plot engine is fifty degrees of spaced out but seriously, who cares). Some might also complain about the relative absence of Francine in this story, or the fact that she and Katchoo are together for like... three pages, total. Some might even note that David is never as much as alluded to, except for being included in a collection of character sketches at the end of the book. Both of these are things that someone concerned with pleasing fans would've probably shoehorned in, but I'm happy Moore didn't - because it would be shoehorning, and I prefer my stories well told. We got BAMF Aunt Libby in exchange.

Visually, Moore is still a brilliant artist, and I wonder if part of the improved story flow isn't that he's toned down the experimental parts of his comics. The larger format certainly opens up for enjoying the artwork all the better, and the artwork was always the absolute highlight of this story, for me. I particularly liked the way he used landscapes here, and particularly the parts set in Scotland were gorgeous. The one "untraditional" thing I noticed here was Moore's brilliant use of vertical panels and whole-page frames. They're sparing, but man, are they good.

Should you read it? If you liked SiP, this is more of the same, and - I'd argue - better narrated. If you want to get into SiP, this is probably a decent introduction to the universe, though be aware that there's a considerable amount of comedy and romantic soap opera in the original that are almost entirely absent here.

Pity the foolish maiden who went on a two-week journey to the land of a vital manga market with the small suitcase, only to discover that oh crap, I love Tokyo Tarareba Girls. Six volumes are out in German this far, and to be fair, I'm promised 50% off of some textbooks relevant for work so I might just be shipping a box home anyway.

I've only read the first of those six volumes, but I like it a lot and I've no doubt I'll get the rest. It's not mindblowing at this point, but it's cute and it's funny and it's touching onto a topic that I'd love to say I was self-assured enough to not be dwelling on on occasion even though I'm both comfortable and confident in my asexuality. And to be fair, I don't think it's so much the non-confidence in the fact that the only time in my life I've wanted a romantic relationship was when I was the unpopular girl who still spent more time fantasizing about being BFFs with one of the popular girls. Rather, it's that extremely pervasive mindset that a woman is a "girl" until she's married and mothered. It's a mindset that is being criticised here (the afterword goes into great detail about that), but it's still one that hits closer to home than I'd like. I might write more about that whenever I've read the full manga, but suffice it to say that there was an uncomfortable level of recognition here for ladies who are single at thirty-three (or four, as the case might be).

I also picked up one of the "special collections" of Detective Conan, this one with the focus on the "life and death situations". It's got the one the bomb in the tower where there's apparently some real Takagi/Sato development, so I clearly need it. It's also got bits with some of the other characters I never got around to by following the publishing order, so I guess that's exciting. Best of all, the first case had a real shippy moment between Conan and Ai and I am easy. But mostly I just love that dumb detective comic a lot okay, and I wish the English-speaking internet would open its eyes to it already.

When that EFL teachers on facebook ask for "comics or other kinds of easy readers" and within three comments they're recommending looking up "manga" in the import stores and sharing scanlation sites

For today's lesson in how weirdly sensitive I am to how stories do romance: I'd have forgiven it all the suck and weird storytelling choices if Kimo and Mender had switched places, and I'm perfectly serious about it.

But the general lack of quality has put me in the previously unfamiliar dilemma of pirating things readily available in languages I understand. Had this comic been anything else than Elfquest, I'd have dropped it long since. But it is Elfquest and my appreciation of the Pinis' previous work means that I want to do my share to support them. And so I'll probably buy the last Final Quest collection whenever it comes out, while doing something I wouldn't have dreamed of doing three years ago: Looking up the single issues online to cringe.

I just really want to pretend that Elfquest ended with Wild Hunt.

( Obviously spoilery commentary up until issue 22, with reaction gifs )

The Thing With Franco-Belgian Comics is that I buy them 110% for the nostalgia value, though which nostalgia here is debatable - the only one of them belonging to my childhood is Asterix. I never much cared for Tintin (it's the art); Spirou and Fantasio I only really discovered as an adult, and I love it but it's also kinda... hard to defend, on quality measures? It's essentially a fifties boys' adventure series that never really grew out of the fifties, and god only knows what it sells itself on these days. It's not parody the way Asterix was parody, it's not really comedy, very shallowly political, and the format is too short to allow for drama or engaging plots. I guess it's essentially aimed at the same market as the Donald Duck pocket books, except that they clearly have some kind of artistic ambition; The Moran and Munuera run might've had some storytelling issues, but I forgive them all of it, all of it, for how bloody gorgeous those pages are.

So also with The One With Borneo. No, no panning citiscapes or actions scenes in breathtaking angles, but a lot of really gorgeous animals, really pretty Franco-Belgian backgrounds, and that one thing that I love so much about modern Spirou: they've taken the European caricatured style out of its original stiff format and made it work with dynamic panels, in closeups and in serious scenes. This one is particularly good at it. There are also some dream sequences that honestly work a lot better for me than non-verbal dream sequences in comics normally do. Can't say much about the story: It's Spirou and Fantasio, it's a fifties boys' adventure story with a fixed ending and an appropriately politically correct moral. I'm not reading this for the plot and neither are you.

I'm also 95% certain that Spirou and Fantasio are a couple in this one, and believe me, having Spirou flirt with the Cute Art Teacher on the literal final page of the story just cements it further.

tl;dr watch them if you're a fan, but don't go to them if you want a taste of what the series are really about. This is Tsubasa on valium and xxxHolic on ACID.

( Not really a review, because you don't need it )

I read Blue Is The Warmest Colour and got into thinking about the whole thing with first person POV in comics, because it seems to be such a... kinda contradictory thing? The purpose of first person narration IS the extreme intimacy and subjectivity of hearing a story from a character's mouth, yet the comic as a medium necessarily robs us of that subjectivity by also giving us a view of the action that is only limited by the panel's focus.

You don't get to see a comic through a character's eyes because comics can't do the handheld camera bullshit and even film long since realised that an entire film emulating someone's POV would kill the audience

Anyway, I went over and did the count.


STATUS OF MY SHELVES, CA. NOW:

Maus (biography, ca. mid-seventies to mid eighties?): First person voice past (the father telling of his story) and present (Spiegelman's reflections upon his re-telling of it)

Hugo Tate (fiction, roughly nineteen eighties): First person voice used in journal entries and letters to friends and family that are so self-centred that they obviously are just journal entries in disguise (that is: present)

Odilou (fiction, mid-eighties to mid nineties?): First person voice present

Palestine (documentary, early to mid nineties): First person voice present

Understanding comics (documentary, mid nineties): First person voice present

Strangers in Paradise (fiction, mid-nineties to late noughties): First person voice of various characters, on different occasions, present except for in the epilogue

Persepolis, Embroideres (autobiography, early noughties): First person voice retrospective

Blankets (autobiography, mid-noughties): First person voice retrospective

Daisy Kutter - The Last Train (fiction, mid-noughties): First person, but sparingly used and mainly seems to substitute thought bubbles; retrospective in the epilogue

Elfquest: The Searcher and the Sword (fiction, late noughties): First person voice retrospective

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (fiction, late noughties): First person voice used in diary entries read within a frame story

Herr Merz (biography, coupla years ago): First person voice used by quoting letters and other writings on the subject

Are You My Mother? (biography/autobiography, coupla years ago): First person voice present



Very quick thoughts to this:
- Documentary is overrepresented, with well over half of the titles here being either non-fiction or lightly fictionalised real events (Maus, Persepolis, Blankets)

- Mainstream comics are also underrepresented, with only three titles whose open and stated goal is to be light and entertaining instead of some degree of "deep" (Daisy Kutter, SiP and that Elfquest one). The rest of them do clearly have various degrees of special audience that does not include the normal comic-reading lot. More telling about my comic tastes than anything, I guess: the non-artsy-fartsy titles are all independent.

- The topic-oriented documentaries on my list (Maus, Palestine, Herr Merz) dwell, to a surprising degree, on the artist's struggle with telling the story. Seriously: How often do you see documentary films, far less non-fictional book, that spend a good third of the story detailing how the documentarist is being torn about the topic they're uncovering? Understanding Comics is the one exception, but that one's more like a textbook anyway.

- Palestine and Understanding Comics are the only titles on this list that ultimately isn't focused on the life of one human being.



One interesting thing to note is that the only time I've found first person narration used in manga would be in four of the stories in Kaoru Mori's Anything and Something, all short and two of them instances of a one-sided conversation between a fictive, off-screen part through whose eyes the story is seen, and the on-screen, speaking part. This is probably where someone should comment on the creepy thing with this being scantily-clad women speaking indirectly to the reader of seinen manga, but that someone won't be me because Kaori Mori so very clearly loves women for something else than their butts even if she does have a thing for bunny suits.

I read "Suki, A Like Story" years ago, and wrote it off as boring and badly suffering from Clamp's icky ideas of how love works. I read it again, and I changed my mind. A bit.

( Not as dumb as I used to think but still plenty uncomfortable )