Short Program: Manga for People Who Don’t Like Manga

Sorry for getting a late start into February. I have a whole shopping list of excuses (snow storms, boyfriend in town, new Scott Pilgrim book out) but let’s just get on with the show.



Today I’m showcasing a manga that’s very near and dear to my heart. I credit it with not only getting me into manga, but comics in general. It shifted my perceptions of comics away from tights-and-capes and made me see the breadth of story telling available within the medium. So, if it could do that for me, maybe it could get you into manga.

The name of the series is ‘Short Program,’ written and drawn by Mitsuru Adachi. It’s a two volume collection of short stories, usually of the romantic-comedy variety. While volume two is fun and has the occasional flash of greatness, volume one is pretty much perfect. It’s on that volume that’s I’ll be concentrating on.

Adachi’s art is simple to the point where some might find it a little plain, but Mitsuru is a masterful story-teller. Instead of being a sorcerer who wows you with dazzling images and dramatic moments, Adachi is more like a magician, calling your attention to certain elements and then surprising you with some deft sleight of hand. Little details, gestures and throw-away lines, all end up being the key to everything in these stories. Mitsuru rarely makes a big deal out of the big reveals; he gives the reader just enough so that they can figure it out themselves. And instead of feeling manipulated, you end-up feeling like a participant in the story, as close as the situation as the characters.

My favorite stories in volume one include junior high school reunion. As we see the kids (now in high school) mingle, the story flashes back to their junior high school days. The back and forth makes for a much more powerful story than if it had just been told straight-up. My other favorite takes place in a guy’s living room as he and his buddy watch the Olympics. How do you get a romance story from that? (And no, they're not gay). Adachi manages and it’s great.

Short story is a difficult medium, no matter if it’s print or comic. None of Adachi’s longer form work have been translated into English, which is a shame because it’s wonderful to see the same deft touch he uses in Short Program in a long, serial format. But at the same time, he has the short story format nailed. If you like short stories and want to see how their best utilized in comic book form, you need to check out Short Program.

If there’s one pain about Short Program, it’s how hard it is to find. Published back in 2000, the artwork was flipped so that it read the western way (a bonus for people getting into manga who haven’t gotten the reading from right-to-left thing down yet). Amazon doesn’t have it for sale, though you can buy it secondhand. Still, it’s worth your while to track down a copy.

Next week on MFPWDM: Shannon takes a long, hard look at manga mega-stars CLAMP and sees if there’s anything there for non-otaku.

Uzumaki: Manga for People Who Don't Like Manga

One of my favorite things about "Uzumaki" is that you can open up to just about any page and you’re guaranteed to see something disturbing.

Like this:

Uzumaki starts out simple enough. Kirie Goshima and Shuichi Saito are a couple of high school kids in the seaport town of Kurôzu-cho. Shuichi’s dad has a started a new hobby of collecting spirals. He hordes anything with a spiral pattern on it: seashells, pottery, anything. While Kirie thinks it’s a harmless quirk, Shuichi thinks something more sinister is at work: he thinks the whole town is being taken over by spirals.

It doesn’t sound like a conventionally horror hook, because it’s not. There’s no ghost that needs to be appeased or a vampire to stake, just spirals. But how do you fight back against a shape? Especially one that’s part of you, in the twists of your fingerprints, the curl of your hair, ingrained into the double-helix of your DNA?

Junji Ito uses the basic set-up to just go all out and put on paper all of the crazy-spiral related stuff in his head. For example, from the basic premise of ‘Spirals take over small town,’ you wouldn’t expect people to turn into snails, would you? But they’re there.

While most of the stories are pretty episodic, the tension and craziness gets ratcheted up every volume. And considering that the snail people happen early in volume two, you can guess just how crazy things get by the end of volume 3.

Volume one is the slow-burn start of the series, focusing mostly on the Saito family. What I like about this volume is how, in the beginning, it’s conceivable that this is all just one man’s twisted obsession. But with each chapter it gets clear that things are much bigger than the main characters originally thought.

Volume two has the previously mentioned snail people, but it also has one of the creepiest arcs in the series: a couple of stories set in the neonatal ward of the town hospital. I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say that if you ever looked at a smiling baby and thought it was too cute to be true, than this story will prove you right.

Volume three concludes this whacked out horror story. The town is in the grips of the spiral, but even worse the citizens have also just completely lost it. Shuichi and Kirie decide to make a run for it.

Uzumaki isn’t perfect: even though Viz did a great job with it, the dialogue is wooden and the characters are pretty flat (Kirie’s boring and Shuichi’s a jerk). But it shows such inventiveness in the art and story that it really doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t like manga, if you’re a horror fan in any sense you need to check this series out.

Manga for People Who Don't Like Manga: Antique Bakery

Welcome to the second edition of “Manga for People Who Don’t Like Manga.” Do big eyes make you look away in horror? Prefer superheroes to magical girls? Than this is the column for you.

A note about the list: this isn’t a top ten list where placement denotes quality. It’s really more decided by which manga I grab off the shelf that day. Today it happened to be Fumi Yoshinaga’s ‘Antique Bakery.’

I have a little confession to make about ‘Antique Bakery’: I hated it at first. Maybe it’s because I’m naturally weary of critics’ darlings, but while Antique Bakery was winning awards and love from the online world, I just wasn’t feeling it. I mean, it was a nice enough slice-of-life series, but I wasn’t motivated enough to pick-up volume two.

But then I saw it on sale at a local comic book store and I gave it a second chance. And somehow, something had changed (or maybe it was me). It just clicked in a way that hadn’t before.

Tachibana is a guy with too much money and too much time. On a whim he decides to open up a bakery (he knows next to nothing about cakes). He also decides he needs the best baker in Japan. The best baker in Japan turns out to be Yusuke Ono, a gay man who went to high school with Tachibana (Japan is a small place). Ono had had crush on Tachibana back in school, which Tachibana rudely rebuffed.

If you’re yaoi-sense are going off, calm down. Ono may be a gay character, but that doesn’t make this a boys-love manga. Their relationship is a professional one, though they do need to sort out personal feelings to make it work.

Eventually other characters make a place for themselves, such as boxer-turned-apprentice-baker Eiji and Tachibana’s ineffectual bodyguard, Chikage. Not to mention the regular patrons of the bakery.

I think that what did get me hooked on Antique Bakery had a lot to do with the second volume. It introduces Chikage, my favorite character, and also introduces a subplot that adds a tragic shine to Tachibana. (Minor Spoilers Ahead): When Tachibana was a child he was kidnapped. He doesn’t remember anything about the abduction, except that he was feed cake everyday (End of Minor Spoilers). After learning that, it puts Tachibana’s decision to open a bakery in a new light.

Fumi Yoshinaga uses very fine detail for things like cakes and other delicacies, but doesn’t use it so much for drawing backgrounds. Her character designs aren’t anything extravagant, but there’s a confident grace to them that sells each character.

The series is only four volumes long, but packs a lot of character development into each book. It also ends really well. Plotlines are resolved, but in a way that shows that closure comes in many different forms.

So, even if you don’t like manga, Antique Bakery is still a sweet and funny series to check out.

Manga for People Who Don't Like Manga: Monster

I wanted to have this up earlier, but then I started to re-read Monster. It’s amazing how just grabbing a random volume off the shelf can be enough to draw you in and not let you go.

But while I keep hyping up Monster, I haven’t told you very much about it. So, let’s get started.

Kenzo Tenma is a Japanese doctor working in Germany during the eighties. He has a pretty charmed life: he’s an up-and-coming surgeon and also engaged to the boss’ daughter. The only thing he doesn’t have is a spine. His boss (and potential father-in-law) not only takes credit for Tenma’s research, but also makes him operate on rich or influential patients rather than those who need help the most.

One day a horrible murder takes place at a politician’s house. The man, Michael Liebert had just defected from East Germany along with his wife and young children, a twin boy and girl named Johan and Anna. When police arrive at the house, the husband and wife are lying in the living room, shot dead. The son also has a gunshot wound to the head, but is still alive. The daughter doesn’t have a scratch on her but is in a deep state of shock.

The kids are rushed to Tenma’s hospital, and Tenma starts preparing himself for the boy’s operation. Just as he’s about to go into the operating room, he gets a phone call from the boss. The mayor also needs to be operated on, so Tenma needs to go operate on him instead.

With all the crazy sound effects used in manga, I’m really surprised they don’t have one for the sound of someone suddenly growing a spine. If they did, it would fit here. Tenma chooses to continue to operate on Johan, leaving the mayor to another doctor.

As you can probably guess, the mayor dies and so does Tenma’s career. His boss basically tells him never to expect another promotion, and don’t bother applying to other hospitals. No surprise, but Eva, his gold-digging, social hyena fiancée, leaves him.

But even as his life goes down the toilet, Tenma can at least hold onto the fact that for the first time in his life, he did the right thing.

Or did he?

Skip ahead nine years. The boy Tenma saved is now a young man with a beautiful smile and shadowy agenda. By saving Johan, Tenma saved not only a serial killer, but also a sociopath who seems perfectly capable of bringing about the end of the world.

Well, we all make mistakes. Though Tenma, with his now fully formed spine, isn’t going to take this one lying down. And since Johan’s now framed him for murder, it’s kind of hard to go on living his normal life anyway. So Tenma packs a gun and goes chasing after Johan.

Johan is my new standard for fictional villains. Playing with people’s minds is like mini-golf for him; little more than a fun way to spend the afternoon. One of my favorite chapters in the series is one that has the least impact on the overall plot, but it also just illustrates the utter lack of caring in Johan’s personality. An abandoned kid knows his mom is out there, and that if they just saw each other, they would recognize each other right away. When Johan hears this theory, he tells the kid where to go to find his mom. It ends up being the red light district. The kid doesn’t find her, but he does get to see a dark side of humanity that a child can’t really conceive of. By the end of the night the kid is standing on the ledge of a bridge.

As you can guess from the above summary of just one chapter, it’s not a happy manga. But it’s not all doom and gloom either. Naoki Urasawa pays great homage in his works to Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga (someone I will look at in this series later). Like Tezuka, he takes the time to show us the characters suffering, but he also shows us their joy as well. Like, ‘The Baby’ might be an awful human being who was going to kill lots of innocent people, but when you see him fumble as he tries to impress a date it’s hard not to relate to the right-wing, racist dwarf. Nearly everyone who shows-up becomes a fully rounded character (and hey, some of them even survive in the end).

I remember when ‘Perfect Blue’ came out, a critic called it “Hitchcock meets Disney!” Which is a lame quote, but also applicable here: ‘Monster’ is what a manga written by Hitchcock would be like. The suspense is almost tangible. It always feels as if Johan is only a few panels behind you, closing in. I would actually get pissed off when finishing a volume, since it was usually on some kind of game-changing cliff-hanger.

So, if you’re someone who doesn’t like manga, give this one a try. The art style is expressive, but more realistic than cartoony and far from the stereotypical big-eyes anime look. But if you do decide to give it a go, be careful; you might find yourself trying to read all 18 volumes in one sitting.