The Diamond Island

So here’s what we got:

Fruits Basket
Premise: Family of cursed shapeshifters adopts good-hearted orphan girl.

Notes: I didn’t know this was one of the most famous and popular of manga in the U.S., but I can see why. K and are totally hooked and can’t get enough. There’s this extended family of people (the Sohma family), most of them teens and young adults, and each is possessed by a vengeful spirit of the Chinese zodiac (there are twelve of them, one for each animal). When hugged by a member of the opposite sex, they change temporarily into a cute version of the animal they are possessed by. The head of the family is a malicious person who stands in as the ruler of the zodiac.

The main character, Tohru Honda, tries to manage her day-to-day school and work activities while handling the intrigues of the Sohma family. She also has two friends in school who watch over her since her parents died. Tohru’s only superpower is her relentless optimism and good will, matched against the dark secrets of self-loathing and abuse within the Sohma family. A lot of the book is conflict and self-discovery. Each character struggles to become a better person and face their past.

On the surface, the characters do a lot of ordinary daily life stuff. They have to get good grades, make work deadlines, or cook a dinner on short notice. There are factions within the Sohma family that shift and change depending on who is present and what dark secret is rearing it’s ugly head. The main character Tohru has to endure stressful challenges and handle adult responsibilities when she hasn’t even graduated high school yet! But the core of self-discovery never lets up, and never disappoints. Characters who come off as maladjusted jerks suddenly become sympathetic as you see their side of the story and they strive to get better.

Tohru’s own journey takes a long time, and she can be pretty annoying and simple-minded at times, yet there’s more to her than she knows and her character holds up despite the strain.

Verdict: I don’t want it to end.

Hot Gimmick
Premise: Girl living in a company apartment complex gets mixed up in a revenge plot between her childhood tormentor and a childhood friend.

Notes: Reading this, I’m reminded how vicious kids can be regardless of economic circumstances. This is a disturbing tale of a parental community struggling against itself over class lines, with the teenagers picking up the pieces and not always behaving decently.

What do you do when you’re in a family with damaged interpersonal dynamics and a shameful past? How do you cope when ulterior motives and a lack of parental guidance taint people your own age?

I found a lot of the subject matter in this book disturbing. I almost turned away, but then I saw how necessary and real it was. A teen reading this might find comfort and strength in seeing how a crummy neighborhood is just some people’s lot. You aren’t crazy, it’s the environment you’re growing up in.

But even in a neighborhood of dysfunction, you’re involved in a changing tale of growing up. There’s no doubt that Hatsumi, the main character, is involved in life. It’s refreshing to see a female character going through such turmoil and having a meaningful adventure.

Verdict: I’m involved now, and I’m with Hatsumi all the way.

Love Hina
Premise: Failed college applicant loser becomes owner of an all-girl’s dormitory.

Notes: I’ve heard it said that comedy is a man in trouble, and this manga fits the bill. You have Keitaro, the stereotypical loser (unattractive, bad at sports, not too bright, no special talent), trying desperately to get into the best college in the nation and failing. He refuses to try for a lesser college that might accept him. As a result his life is passing him by and his future is looking bleak. Of course, it follows that no sensible woman will have anything to do with him.

His family can’t stand the shame, so they kick him out and he goes to stay with his grandma. She owns a hot springs house converted into a small girl’s dorm. Keitaro’s aunt helps to run the place. There are five teenage girls of various ages, representing common archetypes (the brain, the martial artist, the crazy foreigner, the artist, and the shy innocent) also staying there. Grandma goes on a trip and leaves the house in Keitaro’s hands. He accepts the job so he’ll have a place to study. His next chance to enter his dream university is coming up.

Unfortunately, being a landlord means new responsibilities, and the five girls do everything in their power to get him to give up and leave (they see him as pervert and want grandma back). How will Keitaro cope with all these shenanigans and find time to study for another test he will likely fail like the two previous years?

At first, I dismissed this as just veiled voyeurism with a funny guy cover. But now I’m starting to root for the guy as he finds his way into a mature way of thinking. He refuses to give up his dream, and he isn’t afraid to ask for help. The interpersonal relationships are growing on me. You start to see how everyone needs each other, and how it’s okay to be yourself. Being a loser isn’t the end of the world. Life goes on.

Verdict: I’m hearing the Rocky music here.

Because I’m the Goddess
Premise: Misfit guy becomes sidekick of Goddess on a mission.

Notes: Reading this, I thought the setup was one mighty dumb idea. The revealing outfits of the Goddess Pandora looked like un-necessary cheesecake to me. I mean, you’ve got a wisecracking pet cat breaking the fourth wall. However, again I see there’s more to it than this.

Pandora has been sent to earth, accompanied by the talking cat, to retrieve several “gifts”. These “gifts” are negative qualities that have possessed women on earth and given them evil powers. They become giftmasters and enslave someone to do their bidding and cause trouble. Their slaves can turn into magic weapons capable of killing Pandora. She locates the “gifts” by identifying the slaves – they have a psychic collar and chain that leads back to the giftmaster.

Pandora runs into Aoi, a sourpuss guy, and discovers he is her sidekick. Pandora, being a Goddess, has magic powers. But when she uses her powers she turns into a normal girl. She can only regain her Goddess self by kissing Aoi. When in the presence of a giftmaster, she can kiss Aoi and turn him into a magical weapon. She can then break the chain between giftmaster and slave, and retireve the gift.

The complication is that Aoi doesn’t want to have anything to do with Pandora, but he’s stuck with her until she completes her mission.

This manga’s got a wacky side. The cat is the best part, with his funny one-liners and stoic attitude. Aoi is actually a decent person, but he clearly needs to work out some issues with people, something Pandora forces him to do by her mere presence. Aoi’s troubles as her sidekick make him more interesting, but I like that. It’s refreshing to see a sidekick be the focus of the struggle. You have the conflict between divine and mortal embodied in a super-powered relationship.

It’s hard to emphasize with Pandora, as she’s a force of nature and used to being venerated. Her own quest is harder to follow because the writer is holding back her big secret until the end. The manga only lasts three volumes before it concludes, which cuts back on her development. Just when Pandora starts to acquire a cast of characters besides Aoi and the cat, and seems to be relating more, the climax of the story comes.

But I like her quest. The idea that she is removing “negative qualities” from women on earth is cool. It’s only after she starts to see Aoi as a person who can get hurt, and relies on her friends, that she is able to push her quest to its conclusion.

Verdict: Needed to be longer. It’s hard to execute a complex, long-term “Goddess seeks human quality/Loner discovers his heart” story in so short a time.

Claymore
Premise: Demons roam the earth and only the claymores can defeat them.

Notes: It’s a medieval world. Shapeshifting demons, called Yoma, are infiltrating and attacking the settlements of humanity. No human can detect or stand up to them. Claymores, women who have become half-demon and half-human hybrids, are the only hope. They have superhuman fighting abilities and demon-locating senses. All of them use huge two-handed swords called claymores, thus their nickname. They travel from place to place, locating and killing Yoma for a fee.

I decided to take a chance on an action-based manga here. I find that I go through such manga faster, as a lot of panels are filled with fighting maneuvers without dialogue. For me, that means the story has to be good enough to make the fight scenes worth examining. The tale of the hard line fighter with the humanizing sidekick is not a new one, but I found myself drawn in and liking what I saw.

The sidekick is a boy named Raki. The first story concerns the Yoma that infiltrates and murders his family, then begins attacking the village. A claymore named Clare is called in and she dispatches the Yoma. Raki’s village banishes him and he joins her until he can find a place he can live again. Together, they have adventures as Clare fulfils her duty.

The claymores all have to be put down eventually, as the demon inside them slowly takes over their mind. So new claymores are always coming in as the last batch burns out. Clare is believably both inhuman and human. She has nothing to look forward to. Yet she cares about Raki. Her past is not so different from his. Unfortunately, while Raki has hope, she knows where she will end up. Someone must fight the Yoma to the bitter end.

The guy in the story is another sidekick, and I like that. It can be an adventure even if you’re a secondary dude with no powers. He’s learning things and seeing sights no one else would. One gets the sense that Clare’s attachment to Raki (cold and pragmatic as it is) is allowing her to resist the demon inside her longer. I like how for once the doomed defender is a woman, and she is following a calling of her own volition. She’s effective as a heroine. The action is all about her. The strongest male fighters lose ground against the Yoma. Clare gets the job done using a combination of unexpected tactics and quick thinking.

Verdict: Thumbs up, all the way.

Overall, not bad at all for a first-time dive into the material. It makes me excited about comics again, in a way I haven’t been for ten years.

Back when I was studying in Japan, I thought it was mega-cool how comic books were a way of life in that country. Store shelves were often jammed with huge volumes. Each volume was filled with tons of different stories. It blew me away how you could literally create your own collection of favorites and get pure satisfaction from whatever your urge for story was.

For the last few years, I’ve noticed that the big chain bookstores have been carrying huge collections of manga volumes. That is, comic books collected into trade paperbacks of a size that’s easily transported in a purse or bookbag. The manga collections easily outstrip the graphic novel section in size and scope, both of mainstream Marvel/DC has-beens and independent trade paperbacks combined.

K and I decided to finally start getting involved, so we sat down and selected some titles. I kept getting the feeling that there’s “energy” here, and that what’s happening in comics is where the manga is. The other stuff is just the artifacts of an old road that’s rapidly aging itself into obsolesence.

Manga are usually rated by age, from 13-18, and/or by genre (comedy, fantasy, etc.). I would place a lot of what I saw in the bookstore as “teen” overall, with an attitude directed towards the teen mindset. But, I found these books to be amazingly addictive and engaging for the adult mindset, and that’s no mean feat.

There’s supposedly a line between the “teen” subset and the “mature” subset, but I didn’t find myself attracted to anything “mature”, as it reeked too much of the phony sex and violence of mainstream comics. If there’s a particular strength in these “teen” manga, it is the focus on relationships and conflict. These make for good stories, so even if you don’t get the Japanese cultural references or like the attention to cuteness, very often there’s a core that keeps you reading, and reading.

What gets me is that this is a new thing I haven’t seen in mainstream (and many independent) comics. You have a defined baseline outlook that unifies the entire “teen” manga setup, and you have a vast diversity of premises that means you can find satisfaction if you look. There’s a reward for getting involved I just don’t see in western comics.

And judging by the shelf space and the amount of young people crowding me out, there’s a huge demand here. Well, duh! Young people are reading comics who have never heard of Captain America or the X-men or Superman or Crumb’s Mister Natural, and have never known the tangled history behind mainstream comics.

That makes me happy. Go, young people! Instead of the same old young turks kicking old farts off the block to claim a share, this is a new subculture that doesn’t owe us comic dweebs a damn thing. It’s like back in the day, when I picked up a Richie Rich comic and nobody took it seriously, but it was my interest and I found my own world power in it. That special feeling has been born anew in another time and another place, and who knows what mighty powers these youngsters might be developing.

Would it even be powers? Maybe it’s a whole new kind of culture and civilization that delves into something the superheroes and neurotic loner stories of the past lost touch with. The oldsters can’t go back, but maybe they’ll be redeemed by the struggles of the next generation. Because right now, the comic wasteland suffers without the dream.

I just got myself a copy of a graphic novel called Fall of Cthulhu: The Fugue. If you are unfamiliar with the HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myhtology, here’s a synopsis, free of charge.

The universe is populated by monstrous, unstoppable alien god-beings that drive anyone who has dealings with them into madness or death. In the past, these beings ruled the universe and people were just apes in a petri dish for their amusement, when they thought about us at all. For some reason, the god-beings were all imprisoned and/or put to sleep in forgotten nightmare worlds and locations on earth. Their cultists and minor demon servants live in secret among us, and wait for the day when the beings rise again to show us the true meaning of long lines at the fast checkout lane.

Chtulhu is only one of the “beings” in the mythology, but for convenience’s sake many geeks use the name to describe the general mythology. As in “the world of Cthulhu”.

The story in The Fugue is your typical Cthulhu story:

1. Person encounters mysterious plot.
2. Person investigates mysterious plot.
3. Person tries to stop mysterious plot.
4. Person goes insane or dies hideously.

Sometimes the person in the story escapes to tell the tale, or even manages to foil the plot. But the ending nearly always makes it clear that the unimaginable horrors of the universe are not defeated, only delayed from their eventual awakening to cause havoc and higher electricity bills.

I found the mystery in The Fugue too rushed, and therefore hard to follow. The protagonist plods through the mystery and finds out things by accident. That’s always been the problem, I think, with Cthulhu stories set in the modern age. Writers today don’t have enough faith in the material. They feel the mystery has to be complicated, and the protagonist has to be dragged along because otherwise they’d turn the thing over to the cops or just get killed.

I enjoyed one of the characters known as The Harlot, a ghoulish demigoddess who captures men and puts them into boxes of madness for all eternity (guess how the protagonist ends up…oops, I made boo boo). The interaction between her and the protagonist, even if it was one sided, was the best part.

I find the idea of Cthulhu worth pondering. Unimaginable alien horrors lurking in states of mind now only accessible by means of forgotten rituals and encounters with minor monsters makes great material for stories. The Fugue disappointed me because I expected better.

I started thinking about a scene in The Sandman graphic novels, where Dream (a divine being) tells his sibling Desire in so many words that humans are not playthings to be toyed with. It is the other way around, that they play out their divine roles in the manner of dolls in a dollhouse for humanity’s purposes.

It’s a point of view that can lead rapidly to hubris and self-inflation, which I want to avoid. But I think something that is perhaps missing from the Cthulhu mythology is the most alien and horrific “being” of all – human beings. That the collective will and growing consciousness of humanity is what really pushed the monsters back into their prisons, and all the talk of a “rise of Cthulhu to roam free again” is just wishful thinking on these beings’ parts.

The apocalypse of terror might already have happened – when humanity rose from the depths of it’s own unconscious sunken city and beings like Cthulhu were forced to cage themselves for the amusement of people lest they be snuffed out like the dinosaurs. A few cultists play at being followers of these mad monsters of unimaginable power for the sake of their own unreflected projections, while the rest of us pretend they don’t exist because we like it that way?

Not that the preceding premise of “the elder gods are out there waiting to rise again and get you” is invalidated. But what kind of terrifying secret would it be to find out “Cthulhu is humanity’s favorite action figure in the game of life where everything hurts for real”? What if it’s both?

The Fugue falls far short of evoking anything beyond “some people get jacked at random”. I read this graphic novel and chuckled at the machinations of the Cthulhu monsters to further their plans. I’d like to see the Crawling Chaos’s (human) face when he gets his monthly gasoline card statement. You want horror? Try shopping at Wegman’s without losing your mind.