At least that is what it can sometimes seem like in Astro Boy. The ongoing story that makes up issues 6, 7, and 8 comes across as deeply pessimistic, even in comparison to Tezuka's adult work. In the most recent volume of The Phoenix Stories, Karma, (read my review here) the central character Goa is portrayed as an unforgiving butcher, but you understand what lead him to become an unforgiving butcher. However, there's little such consideration of the reasons for humanity's endemic lack of compassion within these volumes.

These strips, first published in the Sankei newspaper from 1967-68, seem designed to speak to a wide ranging audience, but maintain the simplified dialogue and quick pacing of children's entertainment, which can have a disconcerting effect. I would love to read more about the context of these stories- I'm interested in finding out if this was a normal approach that speaks to cultural differences between North America and Japan or if audiences Japan shared my opinion that the child/adult dichotomy was ultimately over simplified, and just too heavy.

The point can be made that many cartoons and some comics enjoy audiences that cover a huge age range, Peanuts, for example, but seldom was the result so overwhelmingly depressing. Peanuts could be maudlin, but none of the main characters actually died.

That said, I enjoyed Volume 7 of Astro Boy more than the previous volume that I complained about a couple of months ago. The art seems fuller, Tezuka takes less narrative short cuts, he manages to fix a poorly conceived character, and he lightens things up a little by throwing in some of the goofy and inventive visual gags that I loved about the first couple of volumes.

In the last volume, Astro had been blasted into to the late 1960's, destroyed a few US battalions in the Vietnam War, and sunk to the bottom of the Mekong. By the beginning of Volume 7 a few decades have passed, it's 1993,"Flower's bloom where once there was only ashes" and the lifeless form of Astro is dredged from the bottom of the river, mistaken for a doll, and returned to his owner in Japan. But in spite of this hopeful intro, you just know that this bright and tranquil vision of the future (and our past) won't last long.

Astro is delivered to his friend Shin-Chan, who appeared as a young street urchin in Volume 6. He's now President of a junk collection company and, luckily, one of the few people rich enough to be able to get his hands on an atomic energy tube needed for Astro's resuscitation. This leads to an odd and somewhat uncomfortable burst of humour- refueling is accomplished through a valve in his the little robot's rear-end.

The 1990's of Tezuka's imagination we've made it to Mars and, to Astro's relief, robots have arrived on the scene, helping to improve our quality of life considerably. The slum where Shin-Chan lived as a child has been rebuilt by them, and is now a sparkling and modernized apartment complex. Unfortunately, the tenants who reside in them have entirely lost their will to work, which made me wonder if Tezuka might have had some conservative notions about social housing and the welfare state kicking around, despite his obvious connection with liberalism and the 60's student movement.

As Astro gets out and experiences this New World he becomes dismayed that, despite their pervasive role in human society, robots are basically slaves, unappreciated while alive and forgotten once they break down. Later in the story Tezuka makes the more explicit comparisons to the civil rights situation of the late 60's. Taba Koh, a mysterious first generation Japanese American is driven by his personal experiences with prejudice to support the cause of robot rights.

Tezuka doesn't reserve his criticism for human prejudice, but also the varying ways we chooses to distract ourselves from the important issues of the day. We entertain ourselves in 'Fun Zones', popular entertainment complexes that isolate humans from one another in various imaginative and disturbingly recognizable ways. There's the 'Dance Space' where earphone wearing patrons dance chaotically to the beat of 150 independent rhythm tracks. Astro is also given a tour of the 'Floor of Dreams' where people listen to recordings that stimulate them to dream beautiful dreams while asleep in coffin-like boxes. But what most horrifies Astro is 'The Murder Room' a virtual reality hall where patrons exorcise pent up aggression by killing a member of the community.

Another decade passes and, as Astro's 'birth' originally occurred in 2003, Tezuka is able to take advantage of the time paradox to elaborate on the story of his origin. He add pathos by filling in the details of Astro's father, an innovator of the mass production of robots, and Astro's attempts to fit into the shoes of the dead son Tobio who he was meant to replace. There is also the tragic details of his mother's terminal illness, of which Astro is unaware because he busy being forced to destroy other innocent robots at the circus he has been sold to. It's here that the comparisons with the movie AI first became really became obvious to me.

Tezuka remakes his less successful supporting character; Skara, a lazy and selfish locust-alien, who emerges from under a rock in a much wiser and less annoying version. She becomes a sort of Jimminy Crickett to Astro's Pinochio. It would’ve made a lot of sense for Tezuka to have made this her role in the first place.

I never expected to say this, but Astro Boy can be a difficult read and it would be hard for me to whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone. It seems that by this point in the strip's development Tezuka wanted to inject the big themes his great mature works, but didn't have the time or desire to do them justice. But there is something fascinating about trying to decode what great cultural and personal demons drove Tezuka to use Astro Boy as a forum for his bleak vision of the future and humanity in general.

1:44 PM

Big apologies...

To Thomas Herpich for mangling the spelling of his name in in the review I posted on the 25th of his book Gongwanadon.

posted by Alan
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3:14 PM

Monday, September 27, 2004

Three random doodles:

posted by Alan
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7:16 PM

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Thomas Herpich's Gongwanadon received a lot of positive feedback when it came out in early July and I've been excited about getting my hands on a copy for a while. Jeff Mason's Alternative Comics have been hurting lately, so when I was in the Beguiling a couple of weeks ago I made a point of picking some of their books and this was one of them.

It took several reads for me to get my head around this comic; my first impression was that the artwork was really sharp with big half page panels and loose but controlled brush work. My second impression was that most of it had been drawn while chilling out from an acid trip. Even if this wasn't actually the case, it was definitely meant to be a direct expression of the creator's subconscious, which is good and a bad thing.

Herpich has said that it's a book about "personal responsibility and relationships". I'm going to make some pressumptions here that could be very wrong, but my guess is that was written by somebody who was young enough to have some experience in relationships, but not too much experience. The reason I think this is because it has been my experience that art dealing with love can lean towards abstraction when there is no actual person to direct the love feelings towards. After all, without a two-way exchange, love is just an abstraction.

The first strip, Labyrinth, features two humanoid creatures sitting together in darkness. They’re a couple, and during the course of a monologue by one of them, we learn that the labyrinth "symbolises love or what might be love." This could be taken in several different ways:
a. He doesn't trust his audience to figure out the symbolism
b. it's some sort of post-modern commentary on the nature of symbolism
c. Rather than consciously impinging meaning on the story and taking away from its purity, Herpich decide to leave the story exactly as he wrote it at a first go without any editing.
If I'd written the piece and was applying for an art grant, or presenting the piece to an art school class, I'd probably say that my intention was b. but my instincts tell me that the real answer is c.

Gongwandon's central story features an alien looking creature that has resemblance to a Skrull (a regular enemy of the Fantastic Four for all non-superhero-indoctrinated readers). As with the first story, it seems to be set nowhere in particular. A disembodied voice repeatedly tells the Skrull-like character that it doesn't believe him. We are not filled in on what the voice doesn't believe, but the Skrull quickly concurs with the voice because, "I am young and the captain is wise". All statements seem to be open to contradiction in the story, and again, it reminded me of the angtsy, ephemeral inner dialogues that I subjected myself to in my early twenties. One element combining many of these stories is a dominating voice that is trying to manipulate the characters.

The Captain appears later in the story on the deck of a spaceship, and if the big penis about to be inserted into a non-specific vagina is any clue, appears to be trapped in a sexual reverie in which he could remain forever. Someone wearing a german army-helmet circa WWII named Crybird takes the Captain against his will to the planet's surface, and he actually ends up liking the new place, but never-the-less returns to the ship, abandoning Crybird. The characters seem to symbolize elements of the conscious and unconscious brain and that Herpich is creatively struggling with what voice should dominate. If this is the case then it seems that the story might be saying is that even when Herpich tries to depend solely on his subconscious his conscious brain will somehow manage to sabotage it.

Uurogo's 18 Demons features an amazing jump of imagination that I would loved to have read another fifty or so pages of and I felt short changed that it didn't continue for more than two. I would have also liked to have seen more of the short strips that I found to much more evocative, engaging and disturbing than the longer stories he chose to focus on. The all text Relaxation seemed like an encapsulation of what Herpich was trying to do with the comic. He dreams "A pair of giant armoured hands, supported a limp but terrified body vber a black chasm." and imagines what would happen if he falls, "masturbate in public, molest children, maybe never get out of bed again."

Remember those vague angsty feelings about love that young people are prone to I mentioned earlier? I've often thought that they were simply distractions from that gaping existential chasm. That's kind of what I think about this comic. If Herpich can get beyond these somewhat adolescent preoccupations and manage to reconcile the fascistic tendencies of his conscious mind with the terrifyingly limitless intelligence of his subconscious, he'll be able to create comics that will be really astounding, and that I can't even begin to imagine. I look forward to reading them.

Here's what some other people think:

Digital Webbing
Ninth Art

and his website.

posted by Alan
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4:32 PM

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Stephanie Nolan, etcetera...

A couple of good episodes of CBC's The Current this week:

An interview with the Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen who has been covering individual stories out of millions in the AIDS pandemic. Her sense of frustration with the what she see's as the world's indifference to the thousands dying every day is emphasized through a story (told through clenched teeth) of her role in Oprah Winfrey's crusade to help the orphaned children of Africa. Her appearance on the show lead to her phone ringing off the hook from people urging her to: "Get on that African orphan story!" despite the fact that was just a one aspect of an overwhelmingly horrifying situation that she'd been covering for five years

I never read her stuff, but I'm going to start. The Globe and Mail's website is hard to find your way around, and the search function doesn't work well, but here are the recent articles by her that I could discover (you'll have to register:bugmenot.com):

>>'We've jumped from one holocaust to another': A new South African film is among the first to deal with something other than apartheid, STEPHANIE NOLEN writes. Starring Leleti Khumalo, it focuses on a newer fact of life -- the country's AIDS pandemic. Thursday, Sep 16, 2004

>>Canadian looking for ways to aid students in Lesotho: Woman 'confronted with a whole new dimension''of poverty in African nation. Tuesday, September 7, 2004

>> A new peril, this time from the sky: Hunkering down in teeming rain that hits almost daily, STEPHANIE NOLEN wonders how Darfur's refugees will last the season. Friday, Aug 27, 2004

There's also this enlightening interview with Dick Cheney's biographer John Nichols(scroll down to Part 2), author of Dick: The Man Who is President
Listen by clicking here.

And this BBC 4 episode of Costing the Earth describes a what sounds like a sci-fi plan by Egypt to create millions of hectares of farmland in the desert in order to sustain the countries incredible population growth (a million new people every 9 months?!) In order to make the the Toshka Project a reality, Egypt will need to increase the amount of water provided by the Nile. And how do they plan to do that? By preventing water currently "wasted" by evaporation in the wetlands of the Sudan from ever getting there. As the spokesman for the project says that they expect this will have "micro-effects" on the ecology of area.
Listen by clicking here.

posted by Alan
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5:57 AM

Friday, September 17, 2004

In what's becoming a semi-ritual for me, I took Marianne downtown to go out with some of her friends, headed off to the comic shop to buy some stuff and then ended up in The Green Room to drink a beer, eat delicious Vietnamese soup and read them. If you're not from Toronto and ever visiting, The Green Room is one of those places you have to go for an evening; it's loud, bohemenian, and annoying in large doses, but fun.

I read the new issue of Palookaville and the flickering light of the candleon my table created just the right ambience for the reading experience, which is dark, and a more than a little disturbing; Simon, the protaganist of the current storyline Clyde Fans, is entering into an ever deeper state of hallucinations and paranoia. I think this may be the starkest looking issue yet, in terms of layout and design, which really works to intensify the feeling that the world is closing in.

After finishing my soup I pulled out another comic and clumsily knocked over the Steamwhistle that had just been delivered. It poured over the table, and down on to the chair and floor. I looked around,embarrassed, and immediately assumed that I had suddenly transformed from the 'quiet guy nobody really notices' to the 'old comic-book reading wierdo siting all alone in the corner, who is so pathetically drunk that he has lost all motor control' in the eyes of everyone there,. I started grabbing napkins to wipe it all up and realised, with some relief, that everyone was too busy gabbing among themselves to notice what I'd done.

I didn't like the beer that much anyway.

***

On a totally unrelated note, a colleague at work and I had a small debate about the proper spelling of Smorgasbord (I lost) which prompted me to look up a partial spelling of it which came up with a list of words that prove Joe Matt's theory that some letter combinations are just intrinsically funny:

smorg as
smorg-as
smags
smoaks
mogas
smirks
smorg
smras
smirk's
sorgos
smocks
smokes
smeacs
msogs
smegmas
mogsa
smacs
smokers
somas
smock's
smoke's
smudges
smoss
mogs
smas
smecs
smog
smoker's
smos
sogs
smrs
srgs
margays
morgues
saigas
smearcase
sorghos
sorgo's
samaras
samosas
smcs
smerfs
smiris

posted by Alan
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11:58 PM

Thursday, September 16, 2004

More on Nausicaa

Looking through some back issues of The Comics Journal last night I came across a review by Stepan Chapman of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind in issue 170. It's entitled "In The Valley of Manga of the Pillbugs". 'Pillbugs' is a reference to the Ohmu, the insects that are at the centre of the story, that do look quite a bit what I call a Potato Bug except that they don’t roll themselves up in a little tiny ball when you pick them up. Although, that may be because they and are a couple of thousands of times bigger.

I was really was hoping to read some critical analysis, and the review didn’t really hit the spot in that regard, but it's an enthusiastic summary of the themes, setting, and politics of the story, which by this point (1994) was up to 700 pages but still incomplete. I did come across what might be criticism in the final few paragraphs of the review:

It must be admitted that characters in mythic fairy tales have lots of mythic resonance but very little depth. In this one, we have a cute kid (telepathic), a wise old monk (mummified), a gleefully merciless emperor (reconstituted), et cetera, et cetera. Probably the only characters who are neither black nor white are bitch-warrior Kushana and her aide-de-camp, Kurotawa. Kushana is hell on her enemies and hates her family’s guts, but she's fiercely loyal to "her" fighting men. Kurotowa is a delightful blackguard who prides himself on being an opportunistic shit, but sometimes catches himself behaving unselfishly and has to stop and get a grip.

I like the Kurotawa/Kushana combo too.

One of the main reservations I have about Nausicaa is that it began really well, but as it progressed and Miyazaki butted up against plot obstacles, his solution often seemed to be to introduce a new character. This gets kind of confusing and clumsy from a story structure point of view. Granted, he was probably doing this because he’d written most of his other characters into corners, but the result is that very important characters, that have never been previously been mentioned, keep popping up. This seems strange considering it’s getting close to the end of the story. Isn't there some kind of rule about that? Something along the lines of, "Don't duplicate character elements if you can combine several in one"?

An example is the young girl, Tepa, blown in to Nausicaa’s valley by the wind of the Daikaisho (a kind of global environmental cleansing) in Volume 6. She wants to be a wind rider, shares much of the spirit of Nausicaa and seems specifically designed to fill her shoes after she’s gone. This automatically made me think a. that something bad would be happening to Nausicaa in the last issue and b. that Miyazaki still wanted to have a happy ending of sorts by having a replacement. If I'm right, then the plotting maneuver is too obvious. There were several young characters rescued by Princess Nausicaa earlier in the story that could have served this purpose.

I know this is meant to be an epic story, but I’ve still got close to 200 pages to go, and I'm running out of steam. My feeling is that it might have had more impact if it had ended somewhere around issue 5. But my predictions could be wrong, or if right, the ending may compensate for what might ultimately be a small weakness.

Also of note, Christopher Butcher has posted a review of the first volume of Nausicaa that he wrote for AnimePlay magazine.

posted by Alan
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1:29 PM

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Two of my favourite things

Some of the most amazing cartoons I've ever seen are the trio of television documentaries that Disney artist Ward Kimball created in cooperation with Wernher Von Braun inn the 1950's to promote the American Space Program "Man in Space," "Man and the Moon," and "Mars and Beyond". I saw these on SPACE several years ago but because they were so good I figured I'd be able to find them anywhere on video so I didn't record it (I was wrong they didn't exist on video).They were finally released in the late spring as part of the The Walt Disney Treasures DVD collection and I highly recommend them if you haven't seem them before- they're technical masterpieces as well a visionary piece of propaganda that really proves the case that if we want to create the future we first have to imagine it. According to the article Eisenhower wanted the movie made to prove a point about space exploration: "to show it to all those stove-shirt generals who don't believe we're going to be up there!" The shuttle segment is really amazingly close to what NASA ended up going with 20 or so years later. (Makes me think that somebody should do the same thing making the case for environmentally sustainable development, or really anything where we need to get people inspired to think long term. )

This leads me to the reason for this post: justification of my own personal obsessions. A recent Cartoon Brew link brought to my attention to an article that combines two of them, UFOs and cartoons, so I get a double hit of self-justification endorphins. Apparently, Kimball was working on similar documentary about UFO phenomenon at the request of the US Air Force:

According to Kimball's account, Disney went along with the USAF plan, which was not that unusual. The use of Walt Disney cartoons, after all had been suggested by the 1953 CIA Robertson UFO panel as part of a public-education program involving the mass media to "strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminate the aura of mystery it has acquired."

The film was apparently eventually squelched without the promised UFO footage being supplied, but the alien segment created by Disney animators were shown a late seventies UFO convention by Kimball. The article goes off into talk about aliens kept in Los Alamos safe houses, government disinformation campaigns and the like.

I don't believe all that stuff, but I love it anyway.

posted by Alan
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7:04 PM

Sunday, September 12, 2004

From Now On...

I will only be posting pictures of my cats...

posted by Alan
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1:56 PM

Monday, September 06, 2004

posted by Alan
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8:44 AM

posted by Alan
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8:35 AM

Having hung around the Comic Journal Message Board over the past three years or so, it’s hard not to notice trends of recurring topics. At least one of these is prevalent enough that it seems to have become kind of standing joke: "Whatever happened to Al Columbia?" While Al is the most popular name, it can be replaced with David Mazzuchelli, or any other prominent artist who has been keeping quiet for a while.

I've got in the habit of avoiding the recurring variations on the theme of "Why do all comics suck so much right now?" A post-entitled Bored Bored Bored seemed to fit this bill and I avoided it when I saw it a couple of months ago until, after searching for discussion on a seemingly unrelated topic, I ended up in the middle of it. It consists of people attempting to disprove the opening hypothesis by providing examples of really good, exciting, and not boring comics that are coming out at the moment. The disillusioned types rebut this by saying that far from being examples of interesting comics, they were in fact exactly the type of boring comics that they were talking about.

During the discussion a lot of my favourites, including Dupuy and Berberian and the Kramers Ergot Gang, get a walloping and eventually someone brings up Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and a conversation about the merits of Miyazaki follows. No one seems to share my affection for Whispers of the Heart, the Ghibli movie that I praised a month or so ago. Dan Parmenter has this to say about it:

The only real "dud" for me in the Studio Ghibli ouvre is Yoshifumi Kondou's Whisper of the Heart, which really is cloying and sentimental. Miyazaki was heavily involved, but except for one scene, did not actually direct the film. Kondou should have been the third Ghibli star director, but he passed away in 1998. It's not an awful movie, but it reminded me of one of those sentimental "afterschool specials" of my youth.

OOF! Right to the gut!

I have to say that I would have been willing to acquiesce to some criticism of Miyazaki’s comic Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind; I’m just making my way through Issue Six of and overall I’d say it is impressive, although I don’t think I’m comfortable elevating it to the status of a ‘great’ work of comic art yet. Not because of the fantasy theme and echoes of other sci-fi fantasy works like Star Wars, Dune, and LOTR, but because the story just isn’t as tight and focused as it could have been. I think that the feeling of some meandering is due to the fact that, as Miyazaki himself has stated, he only had a vague idea of where the story was heading when he began. Never the less, it’s an interesting story with great loose slightly "Moebiush" cartooning to it and I’d recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a bias against the fantasy genre.

If you’re in Paris in December (I won’t be), check this out…

posted by Alan
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8:10 AM

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