Monster Princess

There's been a few times this blog's progenitor, Lunatic Obscurity, when I've been the first person to ever write english-language reviews of some games. For the first time, Lunar Garbage Hell can make such a claim, though I am cheating slightly. You see, I chanced across this one-shot story in an issue of Animedia Pocke Comic I picked up a few years ago. I then scanned it and commissioned Tumblr user and friend trubografx16 to translate it.

But that's just the surface of how obscure this comic is! Though the creator, Takashi Akaishizawa is well known for anime character designs as well as cover and promotional artwork for videogames, as a comicker, as far as I can tell this is his only comic. I say "as far as I can tell", as not only does this comic have no entry on the manga database baka-updates, but the man himself doesn't, either!

Anyway, enough of this self-back-patting, let's get onto the comic itself. It stars Nana, a somewhat naive young woman who lives on a planet of Kaiju with her parents, where she seems to act as a kind of scantily-clad park ranger, breaking up fights between the monsters, and protecting them from space poachers. A pair of two such poachers are the antagonists in this story, though they aren't looking to kill the monsters, but capture them in capsules with a shrink ray and sell them, presumably as weapons. They talk at one point about how Nana's beaten them up and seen them off before, which makes me think this comic was a pilot episode, and they were intended to be reoccuring villains.

When Nana finds them, they fob her off with a story that they're not on the planet for poaching, but just to harmlessly get footage of the monsters. Unfortunately for them, this only serves to get Nana's attention more, as she wants to be caught on film, so she follows them around until they try to "film" the monster Miguras, suddenly juming in front of the camera and getting shrunk down and capsulised herself. Then, the space police turn up because the shrink ray the poachers are using is stolen. The poachers panic, using the gun's release mechanism to release all the monsters at once, and with them, a (temporarily) giant-sized, naked Nana. The resulting confusion allows the poachers to make a quick getaway, and everything's back to normal at the end.

It's an okay story, and the art is obviously excellent, as you'd expect from an artist as talented as Akaishizawa. If it was intended as a pilot, I wonder how far it could have gone with the "poacher's zany plan of the week" format. Maybe it would have moved on to cover Nana's parent's work as scientists on the monster planet, or maybe show planets where stolen monsters had been successfully deployed as weapons of mass destruction? I guess we'll never know. Anyway, Monster Princess is no lost classic, but reading it's a pretty fun way to spend five minutes or so.

What If Volume 1, Issues 13 and 43

Back in the 70s and 80s, when Marvel did licensed comics, they sometimes worked the licensed properties into the marvel universe. The most famous example of this is probably the Marvel UK Transformers comics. With Conan the Barbarian, they decided that Hyperborea was a place in the distant past of Earth-616, meaning that there could be occasional crossovers, thanks to time travel and other magical shenanigans. Conan appeared in a few issues of the first volume of What If, usually having face Marvel characters with similar temperaments, like THor and Wolverine, but my favourite of the Conan What Ifs are these two: What If Conan the Barbarian Walked the Earth Today? and What If Conan the Barbarian Were Stranded in the 20th Century?

The first one feels a lot like a straight-to-VHS movie, and starts in the Hyborean era, with lots of exposition telling unfamiliar readers who Conan is and where he's from, and then into a slightly too long scene showing how he ends up in the 20th century. An evil wizard has found a mysterious "well in time", and when he throws things into it, objects from the future come out of it, and Conan is his latest planned sacrifice. Rather than death, what awaits Conan in the well is th dirty, hot, violent world of New York in the summer of 1977.

From this point on is where it begins to feel like a family movie, despite the grittiness inherent in anything set in 70s New York: Conan doesn't speak English, gets mistaken for both Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (this being printed a few years before Arnie actually played Conan, so it's coincidence rather than reference), puts an old lady in a bin, and meets, befriends and seduces a pretty young taxi driver. While she shows him photos from around the world to find out where he's from, Conn freaks out at a picture of the Guggenheim museum, since it looks like the wizard's lair, but upside down.

So they go to the Guggenheim in the dead of night, to discover that it's being burgled. The taxi driver gets shot by the burglars, enraging Conan, who swiftly deipathes them. Eventually the cops show up, and Conan climbs to the top of the museum, where he gets struck by lightning, which returns him home. It's a really fun story, and the art in particular is excellent, managng to be both dark and colourful. And I've never been to New York at all, never mind how it was a decade before I was born, but it really captures the feel of the place I've gotten from watching TV shows and movies from that era.

The second issue is a lot grittier, starting with a change to the ending of the previous story: Conan reaches the roof of the Guggenheim a few minutes before lightning strikes, and is arrested, rather than getting sent back in time. He escapes from court and runs away to seek his fortune. He slowly stars a career as a mugger, eventually moving up to druglord as he gets the hang of English.

Eventually, he gains the loyalty of a bunch of bodybuilders/criminals who become his gang, the Barbarians, who go about seeking excitement and riches while wearing a mix of 70s New York street fashion, along with swords, horned helmets and loincloths. Along the way, Conan goes to visit the girl who helped him when he was new to the modern era, but unfortunately, he does so wearing a white suit and walking a leopard on a chain, making her think he's become a pimp, and she wants no part of what he's offering.

After a while, the Barbarians' crime spree attracts the attention of no less than Captain America, who tries to apprehend them, single-handed, as they rob an exhibit of Hyborean Gold and artifacts. It doesn't go well for Cap, as he finds Conan a formidable opponent, and takes a sword to the shoulder. The two do develop a respect for each other's code of honour, though, and Conan sets up a duel between the two.

The duel is ambushed by a small army of heavily-armed cops, however, and in the affray, Conan's second-in-command gets killed. Conan manages to get away, though not before Cap offers him a place on the Avengers and a chance to do good. Annoyingly, the story ends with a sequel tease, as Conan considers the offer, but there was never a third episode of this series, and since Marvel haven't had the license for years, there probably never will be.

All in all, these two issues are two of my favourite What Ifs (and it's a series I've always liked), and definitely the best of the first volume, which had a lot of lacklustre stories, especially compared to later incarnations of the series. I definitely recommend seeking them out.

Ohikkoshi

Ohikkoshi is a collection of short slice-of-life stories by Hiroaki Samura, who's usually better known for his saumrai fantasy series Blade of the Immortal. I was attracted to it back when the english-language version was first released by the really badass cover art, which you can see above. Unfortunately, there's no delinquency or violence in here, so it's a bit of a bait-and switch. Fortunately, what there is is a bunch of really good, relatable stories, so it all works out in the end.

More than half the book is taken up by the five-chapter story Ohikkoshi, which tells the tale of a group of young students and their multi-directional web of semi-requited love. And a crazy Italian teacher on a ridiculous quest for revenge. The most obvious thing that makes this story stand out among the crowd when it comes to Japanese comics, especially those that get english translations, is that the characters are all in their early twenties, and none of them live with their parents.

Furthermore, they're all really cool: they look cool, they dress cool, they're in cool bands, they drink in cool-looking bars, and so on. The romance follows suit, it's not earth-shatteringly melodramatic, and relationships don't seem like they have to be life-long one true loves. They're just a group of people who fall in and out of love, sometimes at inconvenient times. There is one boring romantic trope that's popular in a lot of Japanese comics and cartoons, but I can't really tell you what it is without spoiling it for you, but nevertheless, it's annoying when it turns up. On the plus side, once it does turn up, it's kind of cast aside and everyone moves on. I really liked this story, it's cool and aspirational without being a total fantasy, and it's realistic without being grim and depressing.

The second story is called Luncheon of Tears Diary, and it details the long string of tragedies that befall a young comic creator after her series gets abruptly cancelled. It's kind of like a more adult version of the girls' comics being printed in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, where the heroines would tumble through hardship after hardship, living lives of constant despair, all while dreaming they might one day be a ballerina. Always a ballerina. But rather than strict boarding schools and servitude as a maid under a sadistic butler, Natsumi's problems include homelessness, gambling, indentured sevitude as a prostitute, and so on.

It never gets depressing, though, for two reasons. The first is that it's so fast paced, you don't really get to "live" each of Natsumi's tragedies before the next one befalls her. The second is that the comic has a very subtle black humour about it and it's very aware of how over-the-top and melodramatic it is. Again I can't really say much more about it without spoiling anything, but Luncheon of Tears Diary is a great read that I shot through in no time.

Finally, there's Kyoto Super Barhopping Journal, a short, autobiographical story about a rain-sodden drinking trip to Kyoto. It's nice I guess, but it's really just filler. Anyway, Ohikkoshi is an excellent book, and I highly recommend reading it.

Batman: Digital Justice

Released in 1990, Digital Justice had lofty ambitions. Not only did it claim to be revolutionising the way comic art would be created, but it also predicted that it would, in time, be counted alongside the likes of Blade Runner and 1984 as an immortal classic of dystopian sci-fi. 25 years later, we can see that though computers are used by a lot of comic artists, they're used to create traditional 2D art, rather than the 3DCG type art that features in Digital Justice (which has aged like a banana in the years since its publication), and obviously, it's been pretty much completely forgotten by everyone whether as a sci-fi story in its own right, or even just as a notable Batman story. If anything, it feels more like the equivalent of a straight to video action movie starring Rutger Hauer or Chistopher Lambert than any serious addition to the sci-fi canon.

The story revolves around James Gordon, GCPD detective, and grandson of the Commissioner Gordon we all know from regular Batman stories. He finds out about a secret conspiracy causing the armed flying robot drones that have replaced most of the police force to assassinate various targets around Gotham, with their actions covered up. While investigating these events, James also finds the costume of the original Batman, given to his grandfather as a gift by a retired Bruce Wayne. Various events lead to his picking up a good-hearted street punk as his Robin, and together they eventually find the batcave, which is being run by an AI program written by the late Bruce Wayne, who gives them both fancy high tech costumes to fight the enemy behind the drone murders: another AI program, written by the late Joker, that controls all the other computer systems in Gotham. Obviously.

The story isn't great, but it's about on par with most of the "Batman in a different setting" Elseworlds stories that would follow it throughout the 90s, but what really sticks out is the artwork. The whole reason for this comic's existence is that it would be the first ever comic with completely computer-generated artwork. More specifically, the artwork is a combination of computer-coloured 2D artwork, which actually looks a lot like the Judge Dredd and Sinister Dexter stories 2000AD would print in the late 90s with computer coloured artwork, so I guess you could say it was ahead of its time in this aspect. There's also a lot of 3DCG artwork, which looks pretty much how you'd expect 3DCG artwork from 1990 to look. Very low poly, lots of purplish-grey cuboids with jagged edges, and the represntation of The Joker's AI program is a bizarre jumble of simple 3D shapes. It's good that DC were confident enough to push the boat out on this, but it's definitely more of a piece of experiment art than it is an attractive aesthetic item or an effective narrative work.

I don't really think I can recommend Batman: Digital Justice. There are a million better grim cyberpunk dystopiae to enjoy in pretty much every medium, and you can go to youtube and see many more attractive and imaginative works of early 3DCG. It can remain a historical curiosity, something that could never have been made at any other time.

Some Rambling Thoughts on Early 80s X-Men

(For clarification, we're talking roughly issues 150-200 of Uncanny X-Men, and this post is slightly adapted and slightly expanded upon from a forum post that I wanted to keep here for prosperity.)

One thing i'm really enjoying about 80s X-Men is generally how tactile and hormonal it is. I don't think there's anything like it in modern mainstream superheros. The closest would probably be Adam Warren's Empowered, but that obviously has a lot more sex, and the characters are a few years older than the 80s X-Men. but there's a part where Nightcrawler, Rogue and Colossus are training/play-fighting and Nightcrawler jokes about kissing Rogue, and she flies off crying. He realises what he's done and says to Colossus "I never even realised she's never had the experiences we take for granted: she's never been kissed, never even been touched!"

But what I'm talking about isn't really a sex thing. It's more like how most of the characters are going through teenage/young adult stuff, like working out who they are and their place in the world.
 
There's also loose tiers maturity among the characters. There's the naive youngsters, like Shadowcat and Colossus. The young adults, who might not be much older than them, but they've lived lives that have made them more mature by necessity: characters like Storm and Nightcrawler. Then there's the actual adults, who all have different methods and levels of involvement with regards to the upbringing and education of the younger characters: Xavier, Wolverine, Cyclops, Banshee, even Emma Frost and Magneto could be considered part of this category at times. One issue in particular I really like regarding Magneto has him taking Kitty Pride (Shadowcat) to the National Holocaust Memorial in the hopes of finding someone who might have known her great aunt. (And of course, Emma Frost eventually becomes, along with Banshee, one of the mentors of Generation X, an all-teen X-Men offshoot in the 90s)

I guess what I'm trying to get across here is that the most important thing about this era of X-Men is that it's about growing up in a non-traditional situation while also feeling like an outsider to society, and that's why I love it so much. What I'm really looking forward to, though, is catching up to the mid-late 90s era starting with the Phalanx Covenant and Age of Apocalypse storylines, which is where I started reading X-Men (and superhero comics in general) as a kid, and seeing what my enlightened adult brain takes from it now.

Books of Magic #24

Hello! You might know my other blog, Lunatic Obscurity, where I review obscure old videogames in an attempt to save them from damnation (in the Fortean sense of the word). Because I have many thoughts about comics, TV shows, movies and other miscellany, I've started another blog (this one). This blog will probably be pretty different in tone and content to the other one, since it I do plan on it mainly being an outlet for thoughts, rather than the opinionated reviews of LO, but who knows how much of this will end up being true?

For the inaugural post on this blog, I've picked a single issue of a comic, and it's a single issue that represents various firsts for me: the first comic I'd ever read that was marked "for mature readers", the first time I'd ever seen fairies depicted as anything other than harmless creatures in childrens' stories, and probably the first comic I'd ever read that didn't contain any action. Read without the context of the issues preceding it, this issue is about a girl going up a hill, reading a letter and meeting a fairy. Though it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would appeal to a 10-year-old boy,it totally enthralled me! I'd never seen anything like it before!

It wasn't set in a city acting as a superhero habitat, or a futuristic dystopia, but in the Irish countryside. A countryside, which, as depicted in this comic at least, bore more than a passing resemblence to the Yorkshire countryside that surrounded the village where I lived. The main character was just a mostly-normal teenage girl, in regular clothes. Even with the fairy and the talking stones and such, every part of it, story and art, felt totally grounded in reality. I'd never seen or read anything like it before!

I've since read the entire Books of Magic series several times, so I know all about Molly O'Reilly, Amadan, Tim Hunter and all the other things that led up to and from this issue, and though the series as a whole is one of my all-time favourites, even against the rest of the localised golden age that DC's Vertigo imprint was going through at the time, with series like The Sandman and House of Secrets alongside Books of Magic, this issue in particular will always have its own special meaning to me, for introducing me to kinds of fiction and aesthetic that were totally new to me.