Escaping the Trunk

Note: My husband typed this during his usual comics-consumption time. If it was important enough to interrupt that, you should definitely read it.

This is Not a Digital Revolution

or

You Won’t Believe What Watching The Runaways Taught Me About the Fight Over Manga and DRM

In my last year of high school, I wrote an essay that used the French Revolution as a model to describe the fall of communism in the U.S.S.R. as a revolution. The realisation that all revolutions follow such a similar, and relatively simple basic pattern was one of those mind-opening moments that has stuck with me ever since. What does this have to do with anything? Maybe nothing, but I’m going somewhere with this, so stick with me for a few pages and see what happens.

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Okay, so you want to read some manga online. Good on you. It’s a rewarding pursuit, engaged in by millions of readers globally, of all types. You’re sure to find something that suits you: manga about flying, manga about fighting, manga about fucking. Different brushstrokes for different folks. You’ll love it.

Wait. What’s that you say? You want to read licensed manga online? From commercial distributors?

Well, that’s very noble of you. Let’s give that a shot. Let’s pick a proven winner, a manga-ka who has always managed to sell despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she returns to the same themes, over and over, with increasingly delicate and ornate artwork and equally precise worldbuilding: Yuu Watase. Viz has recently begun publishing her latest, a shounen title called Arata: The Legend. Before you buy the paperback edition, you probably want to sample it online. Come with me, to the Viz Online Manga Viewer.

…What do you mean, the print is too small? What do you mean, the screen is absurdly sensitive? What do you mean, the zoom—>grab function works better on your iPhone than it does on the publisher’s website? I thought you wanted to do the right thing, here! Don’t you know that doing the right thing is always harder? Viz has to make it difficult for you. Otherwise you might not feel self-righteous enough, each time you visit their website.

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Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons, apparently writes comics. And apparently, those comics flagrantly plagiarize panels, character designs and dialogue from Tite Kubo’s manga Bleach. The parallels are so close, Simmons’ publisher has halted production on his comic, pending an investigation.

Pro-tip: if you plagiarize (jackass), make sure you go after small fry, and not, say, one of the top-selling manga in Japan and North America. And not copy the design of, say, one of the most popular cosplay characters ever. Seriously. I know Bleach is awesome and everything, and we’d all love if we could draw half that well and write characters that compelling and build worlds that complex. We’d all love to have Kenpachi Zoraki — that spiky-haired fellow laughing insanely, in the panels linked above — wandering around inside our heads. After all, he’s an indestructible badass who bears a striking resemblance to Ian McShane, and his best friend is a cute pink-haired girl who rides around on his shoulder, occasionally steering him toward “play dates” that involve obscene amounts of blood and pain. Evidence:

Unfortunately, Nick Simmons didn’t come up with Kenpachi himself. And while there is an argument to be made for the long history of pose grabs and tracing in comics (you can read about it in the comments thread at this Comic Book Resources post), the truth is that if Simmons were half as talented as the manga-ka he lifted those poses from, he’d have come up with something that could stand on its own merit. I’d have no problem if Simmons were at Comikket, selling Zoraki doujins for the cost of printing just like everyone else. Then he’d be a fan artist. Then his position in the creative ecosystem would be perfectly obvious and, strangely, more secure. In fact, he could forge an apprenticeship out of his fan works, and move on to commercial material if and when he was ready. He’s just not ready, yet, and the editor who approved these drawings should have recognized that.

Because really, what self-respecting comics editor doesn’t know at least a little something about manga, these days? What, there’s this whole wave of material out there that’s devouring the youth market and the female market and Simmons’ editor didn’t know about it? Really? Really? Well, maybe. Radical, Simmons’ publisher, is no stranger to copyright suits. Maybe it should come as no surprise that someone waved these drawings through. But it means that if, on the vanishingly small chance that Simmons did this unwittingly, his comics career will have been tarnished from the very beginning by accusations of plagiarism. And not just plagiarism, but stupid plagiarism.

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This afternoon after picking up my students’ exams (and spending far too much time wandering gourmet food shops in search of the perfect bar of Earl Grey-infused dark chocolate, and then even more time trying on dresses in shops whose soundscapes were punctuated alternately by concrete drilling, poetry slams, and un-medicated raving), I decided to send them a summer reading list. Ironically, I rarely paid attention to such lists as a student. When I wasn’t reading for a project for the next year, I relied on a former teacher for recommendations. He was my teacher in junior high, but steered my reading habits through college, inadvertently assuring that when I started reading SF I did so with a lot of Murakami, Japrisot, Zola, Irving, and others under my belt. Plenty of adults feel (or once felt) the need to “grow out of” their SF readership so they can “move on” to mainstream lit. I have the reverse issue; I grew up reading books about alcoholism and adultery and suicide, and now I really relish my Hugo voter packet.

That little piece of my readerly history rather explains the following list, which is full of things I thought my students might enjoy, and also a few things I thought they might need later on:

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During the holidays, I promised myself that I would write about the books I gave at the end of 2008. They ranged from manga to cookbooks to hard sf to satire. I had no idea I’d get to brag so much about the books I got, too. (Spook Country needs its own post, because it’s just painfully good. It’s rare that I sit and ponder the simple beauty of a given sentence, but Gibson’s latest makes me sit up straight and pay attention like I’m back in catechism.)

Books Given:

Claymore, v.1, by Norihiro Yagi This series can never get enough love, in my opinion. Not only does it refuse to pull its narrative punches, but it’s unafraid of setting genuine limits on the abilities of its central characters. Moreover, the women of Claymore never dissolve into exhausted stereotypes of either bubbly beauty or mousy intelligence. These are hard women who do a tough job for little reward, because they think it’s the right thing to do. As is the case in many professions, their greatest competition comes not from outsiders, but from within their own community. (Also, there’s a lot of truly awesome demon slaying going on.)

Super Natural Cooking, by Heidi Swanson I keep up with Heidi’s latest at 101 Cookbooks, but I’d never given her any funding in exchange for the hours of domestic and gustatory pleasure she’s given me. So when Christmas rolled around, I jumped at the chance to send this book my parents’ way, as they’re interested in learning more about whole ingredients and how to incorporate them into their daily meals. Heidi’s writing has taught me so much, and I’m sure it’ll do the same for them. (Her Thai-spiced Pumpkin Soup is so good that my friend phoned me up after surgery to tell me how much he enjoyed his care package.)

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For American Thanksgiving, I visited Texas and read Watchmen. (It’s surprisingly pertinent Thanksgiving reading; there are a lot of very clever, very painful observations about family dynamics throughout.) I’ve been holding back on posting about it, mostly because I haven’t entirely digested it yet. This post at MangaBlog, however, made me wonder:

…what’s the equivalent of Watchmen in manga? What title made artists and readers re-consider the medium? Is there any manga title that simultaneously uplifts and undermines a whole genre (like superheroes), and proved to be a game-changer?

Ignore my verb tense agreement issues and consider this problem, especially that last question. I might argue that Evangelion did this for mecha anime, in that it (like Watchmen) proved how unnecessary and even harmful giant mecha would be, while also showcasing entirely new levels of mecha action. It was the apotheosis of the mecha genre, in many ways. But that’s anime, not manga. For that, we might have to turn to Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Utena, if you’ve never read the manga or seen the anime, has all the standard tropes of a shoujo (girls’) story: high school setting, multiple possible romantic partners, deep dark past histories, lesbian characters…the whole nine. In fact, when I first watched a few episodes, I rolled my eyes at how similar it was to other stories in the same genre. Years later I re-approached it, and my mind was changed. The aesthetics (much like those in Watchmen) are all window-dressing for a story that subtly undermines what we’ve come to expect about a given genre.

Most shoujo stories are about gender and power. That’s a given. (It’s also true of most YA entertainment for girls, East or West.) Where Utena differs from most stories is in how it proves, again and again, how ultimately limiting and harmful those standard meta-narratives can be for both girls and boys. Yes, by now we all know that forcing oneself into a “type” is a bad idea. But Utena takes that message above the level of “hanging out with the wrong crowd” and tells a story of abuse, both inside and outside the home, and how choosing one’s role can dictate one’s response to that abuse. Being a prince (or a witch, or a warrior) is easy, but being yourself? And being okay with that? That’s tough.

Which, as it occurs to me, is yet another message nestled inside Watchmen.

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I found out about Astral Project via this post at MangaBlog, and I’m glad I did. Because even if this story didn’t have call girls, cults, and free jazz beats that literally pull you outside your body, it has one very special thing going for it: it makes me feel like I’m back in Japan.
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I just finished a new post over at FPS about the recent developments at the intersection of fandom and the law, specifically whether anime and manga featuring children in explicit situations still counts as child pornography. (In Canada, it already does.)

The argument for this definition states that even though the images are drawn and rendered rather than photographed and filmed, they still incite arousal on the part of the pedophile, and therefore encourage criminal behaviour. The argument against it states that the children are fictional and nonexistent, and that no harm is being done. Right now, this definition is being tested in Iowa. Christopher Handley faces twenty years in prison for possessing material imported from Japan that a postal inspector found objectionable. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is now serving as his special counsel.

My own perspective on the issue has been outlined elsewhere, but this does remind me of a funny and disturbing story of my time in Japan.
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