Author: larsmagne23

The Amazing Cynicalman (1987) #1 by Matt Feazell et al.

Eclipse had published the four-issue Giant Size Mini Comics series the previous year, but that was during the black and white boom which was long over by now. So it’s difficult to guess what made them publish this, because the commercial appeal doesn’t seem obvious.

It’s Feazell’s usual stick figure stuff, and the main story here is amusing. I haven’t read Feazell widely, but I’ve read a story here and there over the years, and while you can’t really say that it’s a focused story, it meanders pleasantly to its ridiculous conclusion.

Feazell had a regular one page backup feature in Zot!, which I guess is where most people would know him from. He’d also done a solo “Zot! in Dimension 10½” book.

The last half of the book is by other writers and artists doing Feazell’s characters, mostly in something approaching Feazell’s style, too.

Bob Burden (of Flaming Carrot fame) even does a page.

Feazell explains the entire mini-comic thing, and also promises to send a mini-comic to anybody who sends him a drawing of Cynicalman. Offer good forever, so get to it, although I’d check to make sure that address is still valid.

Contractors (1987) #1 by Ken Macklin.

Ken Macklin was a regular contributor to Fusion and an irregular contributor to The Dreamery, and Eclipse also published the Dr. Watchstop collection later, but this is one of his rare solo books.

And it’s a total delight. Macklin’s creature design is so charming, and his pencil-soaked art style is so engaging.

The artwork does veer off into the very dark sometimes, but it’s so pretty.

The storyline is surprisingly clever for such a silly book. It has a twist ending, but nothing I could see coming, yet it’s completely logical… and utterly amusing.

The indicia indicates that this was supposed to be a monthly book, but I’m guessing that was never on the table. But it seems like more work and thought went into this than a one-shot would entail, and it’s called “summer special”, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Macklin meant this as the start of an occasional series.

That didn’t happen, which is sad.

This is such a surprising find. It’s a little lost gem of a book, because it’s apparently never been reprinted. It’s funny, smart and beautifully drawn. Perhaps somebody could publish a Macklin retrospective and include it?

Samurai, Son of Death (1987) #1 by Sharman DiVono and Hiroshi Hirata.

Eclipse had just gotten started with publishing translations of Japanese comics, and then the go a publish a samurai story written by an American.

According to the back of this regular-sized but squarebound comic book, it’s the first collaboration between an American writer and a Japanese artist ever, and it’s been in the making for three years, so way before Eclipse started publishing translations.

This is a very wordy comic book. The way the author drops footnote* bombs all over the place, you get the feeling that he either is a very didactic gentleman with a vast knowledge of this era, or… he’s just dropping random cool factoids wherever he can find the room.

The pages are in magazine size form factor, and it generally looks like it’s been drawn for a larger size than it’s printed here. The very detailed costumes have a tendency to just fade to fuzz here, which is a shame. But on the other hand, the storytelling is choppy and awkward, like the transition from interior to exterior (with speech bubble) back to interior. Is it the same person speaking all the time? Is it a dialogue?

Oh noes! A vermillion (sic) letter*!

Oh, yeah, the war is about a war or something. I read the book ten minutes ago, and I can’t really be any more specific, because my eyes glazed over two pages in.

Good on you, Toku, daughter of Narita Ujinaga! Take his place at the side of Harada Sadayasu! And thank you and the rest of the characters for constantly announcing your names, because a lot of you are drawn very similarly! But beware! Too much declamation of lines in the middle of battle isn’t healthy, Toku, daughter of Narita Ujinaga!

Oh, yeah, there’s a zombie samurai, too.

In the backmatter I fully expected to find that the entire story was 100% true, because it was certainly boring enough to read…

… but then it turns out that the author had faked it, because he doesn’t read Japanese.

*sigh*

Hm… according to The Comics Journal 87, this book was announced from DC in 1984!? That explains the aspect ratio, because DC had a graphic novel program in 1984 where they published stuff in “album” format.

There aren’t many reviews on the web, but here’s one:

The opening character “recap” page is so complex, it makes you feel like you’re jumping in on the 256th issue of X-Men. But it’s actually mostly just background historical detail. Confusing things, one of the characters listed has the wrong portrait associated with his description. And the description of Harada Sadayasu who “undergoes a bizarre supernatural metamorphosis” is confusing, because it makes it seem like it happened beforehand, but we see it happen in the pages of the book.

And here’s another:

The structure of this tale is a little odd and I suspect it was originally intended to be a longer work, but it’s an engrossing and exotic yarn for all that.

No it’s not. But they make a good point: It’s so odd structurally that something must have happened during the making of it. I wonder what the story really was: Abandoned halfway through, so DC dropped it, and then Eclipse picked it up for nothing and shoved it through the door?

Mai, the Psychic Girl (1987) #1-28 by Kazuya Kudo, Ryuoichi Ikegami et al.

Back in the 80s, I would lethargically buy issues of this series whenever I happened upon them at sales, and I would read them as I bought them. This was an interesting reading experience, and I got the impression that Mai was a kind of semi-abstract, mysterious creation where every stare between the characters had some deep portentous meaning.

So sometime in the 90s I decided to root through the issues I had, and buy the rest so that I could read this enigmatic masterpiece properly. It turned out that I had every other issue. All the even-numbered ones!

So I did the sensible thing and went to the Mile High Comics web site and bought all the odd-numbered issues and sat down to read it.

And it was such a crushing disappointment. Instead of being a vague strange thing, it turned out to be a straightforward children’s action/adventure story.

But now that I know what it is, I wonder what this re-reading will be like. It’s my second-and-a-half reading of this series, after all.

All these Viz/Eclipse co-productions have a bit of text on the cover to tease the contents. “She is pretty. She is psychic. She is Japanese.” is very much to the point.

The storyline is basically about a number of super-powered kids (all around 13 or 14 years old) and a vast conspiracy surrounding them.

Ming the Merciless is the leader of the bad guys.

But since this is about teenagers, we also get lots of totally incredibly realistic teenage drama, too. Or to put it another way: I think it’s been a while since the author was a teenager.

The three initial series that were chosen for translation were pretty different, and two of them sank without a trace after the initial attempt. Area 88 is a military soap opera that takes place mostly in the west, so you get few references to Japanese culture or daily life there. The Legend of Kamui takes place hundreds of years ago, and is about ninjas, so no pop culture references there, either.

Mai was, I think, the most successful transplant: It’s contemporary and it’s very Japanese. If you look at subsequent translations of Japanese comics that have been successful abroad, it’s this kind of thing that people turned out to want; not medieval ninjas or Western military.

Frederik Schodt, author of the seminal Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics book points of that this is exactly the opposite of what comics professionals, both in Japan and abroad, predicted. “People may be able to tolerate exoticism in other media, but not in comics.”

But it’s this fascination with the exoticism (real or otherwise) of everything connected to Japan that’s made Japanese comics such a big deal with certain sections of the public abroad; it’s not really the er content of the comics, which is often rather mundane.

As it is here in Mai. Reading it now, I think it’s quite entertaining, but it’s not particularly well constructed.

(I included the page above just as an example of the puzzling way many Japanese action comics for kids have a tendency to draw everybody as if they’re European.)

Ryuoichi Ikegami doesn’t go into super-deformed mode a lot, but when he does, it’s worth it.

And I think he has a crew of assistants that are incredibly well-versed in the art of tracing images from cookbooks.

Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention that this series has it all: Not only psychic heroes who fly around and shoot lightning bolts out of their heads and stuff, but it also has random people who turn out to be incredibly well-versed in martial arts…

… and huge monster men that have a pretty unclear reason to exist, other than that it’s cool to have huge monster men. I’m disappointed that they didn’t stick a dinosaur into this comic. That’d be fun.

Fred Patten explains “American/British cartoon-art storytelling” isn’t everything.

As with the other two Viz/Eclipse books, this has a very distinctive design, and unlike the rest of the Eclipse line of comics. I like these back covers where they’ll take a random panel and do psychedelic colouring on them.

Mai the Psychic Girl originally appeared in a weekly marketed towards teenage boys. Choosing a girl as the protagonist is slightly unusual in that market, but it allows the creators to do some fan service. The first issue ran too long: The Eclipse issues are either 40 or 32 pages, and the first episode was longer than 40 pages, so Eclipse decided to drop several pages of Mai having a bath. The editor explains that that wasn’t meant to be titillating at all, but just totally normal Japaneseness, and I have to wonder how naive the editor really was.

Scenes like this, where our 14-year-old heroine gets rescued by a kindly college kid and stays in the dorm start off in a really squicky way, where these students seem to be besides themselves with horny glee at having the girl in the dorms.

It calms down pretty quickly and gets really sweet (and then Mai does their laundry, as one does), but those initial pages were creepy.

Oh, and there’s supernatural stuff with Mai’s mother’s ghost.

And a puppy! This comic has everything!

Aha! We finally get the explanation of why these books are so stylish and different from all other Eclipse books: They’re all designed by Shinji Horibuchi.

Oh, yeah, the books has motorcycles too, because why the hell not.

Police violence seems to be expected in Japan, too. At least in this comic.

Ah, right, the ancient city of Dresden. Check.

While the storyline is fine, I guess, the real reason to read this book is Ryuoichi Ikegami’s artwork. He draws people in a not-very-cartoony way, but manages to manages to keep pretty much everybody look distinct. His action scenes are extremely propulsive, with blood splattering every which way, but I’m particularly taken with pages like this, that are just so… cool. How’s that for articulate art criticism.

Once Our Hero and The Villain starts flying around, every other page has an upskirt panel or two, which is totally normal in Japanese culture and not titillating at all, and common to all Japanese comics. Right? Right! Sure!

And, oy vey, the racism. Everybody in the book are either Japanese or European and are all non-icky, but we get two people from other countries: This guy is from Vietnam, and gets called a “weirdo” by everybody around them.

And then we have this charming portrait of the psychic from Mongolia.

*sigh*

This one’s from the US, so no running snot. But the reason I included this snap is just to illustrate Ryuoichi Ikegami’s tendency to use the Xerox machine. I think it’s probably used an interesting effect more than because of laziness, because the identical images gives the sequence an unnerving effect.

And, of course Mai’s top gets shredded in the final conflict, so she spends the last two issues fighting while topless. This is a totally normal thing for superheroes to do in Japanese culture and is not a matter of titillation for the 12-year-old boys who are reading these comics.

Not at all.

How dare you!

Anyway, I thought this book was a lot more fun to read this time around when I had no expectations beyond that it’s a dopey book for children. It’s a quick read: It’s almost 1K pages, but I read it in an afternoon.

After Viz and Eclipse parted ways, Viz reprinted the series twice; once in smaller format paperbacks and once in larger format paperbacks. The last reprinting was in 1998, so it’s been out of circulation for a couple of decades, which I think it pretty odd.

If I remember correctly, Mai (other than Lone Wolf and Cub) the Japanese comic book that got most attention and name-dropping until Marvel reprinted Akira a few years later.

Here’s Rob Robi in Comics Journal #122:

Mai also bears an uncanny resemblance to the Disney studio’s juvenile adventure films of the ’50s and ’60s—and to George Lucas’s Star cycle, for that matter. Both Disney and Lucas sought to evoke the psychological power of the folk tales by dressing up their plots in a pop-culture context. Kudo and Ikegami do the same. With such thematic and structural antecedents, it’s no surprise that Mai the Psychic Girl should turn out to be the best comic book for children and adolescents in twenty years. (It’S embarrassing to compare it to American comics that attempt Similar themes— say, New Mutants.) Nor that, as with the best children’s literature, it also makes compelling reading for adults.

[…]

Kudo has clearly done his homework; Mai is such an accomplished incorporation of every proven mythic sucker-punch, from the oral traditions of the dim past to the poppsych requisites Of today, that it will probably make even the most jaded kid turn dizzy with excitement waiting for the next issue. (This is one jaded kid who can’t resist it.) It’s a perfect conception, with a whiz-bang execution to boot.

Ikegami’s cartooning is extraordinary. Although gently employing the brilliantly expressive, highly-stylized facial features traditionally associated with manga, Ikegami keeps his characters’ figures supple and natural; his juxtaposition of wild exaggeration with crisp realism is especially pleasing to western tastes. Mai is genuinely pretty juvenile, and the Other characters all so likable. (Ikegami’s landscapes, architecture, and interiors are pristine as well; in some places they almost look like photostats, but I think they’re not.)

Lost Planet (1987) #1-6 by Bo Hampton, other Hamptons, et al.

This series is obviously a work of love by the entire Hampton family: I think five or six of the siblings were involved in the making of this series.

It’s basically a riff on early adventure serials, so you have this adventurer who’d investigating a MacGuffin… but then they mash all things imaginable into the stewing pot.

So we get magic, dinosaurs, space travel, savages, alternate worlds, and everything that’s fun, in one single series.

Bo Hampton writes and does the artwork for the main storyline (which typically takes up 17 pages of each issue), and his artwork is pitch-perfect for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, the storytelling is choppy as hell. There’s no rhythm to it. It’s just difficult to get involved in it while reading it.

It’s a pretty amusing read, though.

Since the main attraction is so short, we get lots of backmatter and backup stories. For instance, in the first issue we get the background on all the Hampton siblings.

Scott Hampton draws a couple of the backup stories. This one is the original version of something that had been redrawn and coloured for publication in Epic Magazine, so we get to see the original grey-washed one here.

But most of the backups are written by Bunny Hampton and feature non-Hamptonian artists. Here’s Mark Chiarello, doing a very stylish job on an unfortunately not very thrilling story about how Amelia Earhart ended up on the Lost Planet. All the Bunny Hampton-scripted stories are of this kind: They fill inn the backstories of the characters we follow in the main serial. It makes sense to do it that way, and I can see the enthusiasm by everybody involved, but since the stories end with “and then they ended up on the Lost Planet”, it’s somewhat unsatisfying.

Bo Hampton apparently drew these pages on duo-tone craftint paper, which is paper that has tones embedded in the paper that you bring out by painting over it with a special chemical. It was used heavily in the 50s on newspaper strips, but had gone out of style by the 80s, and the main problem is that is leaves the artwork somewhat muddled if you then add colour to it. Colourist Tom Littlejohn does an admirable job of adding mutes colouring to these pages, though.

Tsk! The fourth issue printed the pages out of order, so the second and first pages get shifted around.

Bunny Hampton writes about what a typical day in the Hampton household sounds like. They’re all still living at home? At least they all work in the same room, and it sounds like they like to argue. It’s cute.

Bunny Hampton has a tendency to overwrite: We see that Romney’s mother is knocked out by the avalanche, so why put it in the caption, too?

That choppiness in the storytelling… I don’t know whether it’s because Bo Hampton hadn’t thought it all out in advance, so he just brings out these random ideas (and then have to infodump them on us), or whether he just has too many ideas? Perhaps if this book had been twice as long, it’d have better flow.

The first five issues were released on a pretty steady clip, but there was a one year delay between the fifth and the sixth issues. Bo Hampton was involved with Total Eclipse during that time, I think? So perhaps that just had to take precedence. But it’s nice that he finished it, because the ending is pretty nice.

IDW released a collection of this series last year, and it doesn’t really surprise me that it’s taken this long for it to be collected. The collected edition is in black and white, which will probably allow the reader to enjoy the craftinting more clearly. But Littlejohn’s colouring job is very nice, too.

Milton Caniff’s America (1987) edited by Shel Dorf.

As covers to collections of Milton Caniff strips go, that’s a very stark choice.

Huh. My copy of this book (bought used earlier this year) is signed by the editor.

Anyway, as Dorf explains, this is a collection of Caniff’s Christmas day strips, especially from the Steve Canyon period. In addition there’s other… patriotic ephemera.

James Stewart says that he approves.

cat ⊕ yronwode explains in her introduction that she was so fed up with Caniff’s hippie baiting during the Vietnam was that she didn’t read his stuff for half a decade.

After all the introductions, and a further essay, we start off with some very old Caniff strips. This one from the 30s.

We get one Terry and the Pirates strip, and this one “was read into the Congressional record”. I’m sure that’s a thing.

The main section of the book is the collection of the Steve Canyon Xmas strips, and they’re all like this. Caniff writes a mini-editorial, mostly of the sentimental kind, but sometimes somewhat political, and adds a little drawing to go along with it.

I think this is probably more effective in context than reading one after another, because that’s just doesn’t work.

At least not for me.

There’s also strips in verse.

And then we get to the “misc.” bit that fills out the last half. We get random things that Caniff did for the military or things used as public service announcements. Or something.

Handiable!

And finally, we get a sequence from 1982 where Steve Canyon explains to some college students what patriotism is, and they don’t egg him, so they were pretty much convinced, I take it.

I have to wonder who the audience for this book is. I guess it’s not really meant to be read, but is something you can peek at once in a while when you want to get a shot of patriotism to perk you up.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

Or as this person puts it:

Stirring, gripping, heartfelt, these evocations from a master of his craft are the best tribute from, to and by an honest plain-dealer. Simply Wonderful.

Enchanter (1987) #1-3 by Don Chin and Mike Dringenberg.

The black and white bust is mostly over by now, but Don Chin (of Hamster fame) is a central character there, so perhaps Eclipse turned to him when they wanted more product during that period and the artwork was just delivered late?

Because Dringenberg’s artwork is nice, even if he skimps on backgrounds a lot. It’s more than a smidgen like Jeffrey Catherine Jones’s artwork… by way of Sam Kieth? Dringenberg would later become renowned for his artwork on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics for DC Comics.

But this was done three years earlier?

Oooh… That’s a nice raven in the rays of the sun…

But what’s it all about? I wish I could say the plot was pleasantly vague, but it mostly seemed like it a mess disguised as mystery. The panel-to-panel pacing often tries for portentous depth, but mostly just succeeds at being without rhythm.

Aha, I see. Chin had come up with the concept years before, while he was a teenager, I presume, but roped in Dringenberg a few years earlier. And then Eclipse wanted to publish it, and here we are.

Dringenberg experiments with a variety of fantasy styles and rendering methods, like using a touch of wash (or pencil?) here.

And then suddenly lots of horizontal panels. Hm… That poster says “47 killed”?

And tomorrow’s will say “117 dead”? So the big kitty killed (er where’s my slide rule) 70 people that night? Bad hungry evil sorcerer kitty! Bad!

How does that makes sense? Why did Bad Kitty Sorcerer kill all those people? What’s happening? WHYYY???

We never find out, because this projected 8-part mini series was cancelled after three issues. However, four more issues were published by something called Entity-Parody in 1993. The covers there says that it’s an eight issue series, too, so were the first three issues reprints?

I’ve been unable to find anybody writing anything about this series.

Floyd Farland – Citizen of the Future (1987) by Chris Ware.

Chris Ware is now among the most-recognised names in comics, but in 1987, he was 19 and in college. This is a reworked collection of strips that ran in the university newspaper.

Eclipse very rarely printed anything in special formats, but this one is squarebound and uses metallic ink on the cover. Ware is notorious for the care he puts into the physical appearance of the books he publishes, so my guess is that he somehow convinced even Eclipse to put in the extra money.

It’s been rumoured that Ware himself snaps up copies of the book now so that he can burn them because he’s that embarrassed about it. Which is understandable… and seems to have an unintended side effect, since it now goes for $80 on ebay, apparently.

Aaanyway! It’s basically Terry Gilliam’s Brazil drawn in a very stark graphical manner. Set in Futura.

It has a humorous callousness that’s typical of a person that age, but I have to say that it’s surprisingly coherent. As it’s been sourced from a weekly newspaper strip, you’d expect the plot to go off the rails as the months pass by, but it’s a pretty tight little package.

And it’s fun to see that Ware enjoyed doing fake ads even this early. I’m not quite sure what he’s satirising here… It’s a fake ad for income taxes? Taxation is bad? Perhaps Ware was a libertoonian at the time…

The other objects of his derision, like uncouth people who like processed cheese, induces eyeball rolling in this reader.

I like how Ware’s having fun with his pared-down stark graphics, sometimes slipping into abstraction.

And I wonder how much of an inspiration Mister X (designed by Paul Rivoche and Dean Motter, with comics created by The Hernandez Brothers) was. That looks a lot like Mister X, and so does a lot of the city design.

Chris’s mother provides an afterword that I’m sure wasn’t embarrassing at all.

I can certainly understand why Ware would prefer that this artefact not exist, but I think it’s an enjoyable read. It’s very derivative, yes, but it’s interesting.

But what did the critics think? Hm… Oh, I wrote about this on my Ware fan site in the 90s. Hm… I didn’t write anything perceptive back then, either.

This person things that Floyd Farland is a bad comic by basic comic book standards.

Hm… Nope, I’m unable to find anybody that had anything interesting to say about it.

Kamui (1987) #1, The Legend of Kamui (1987) #1-36 by Sanpei Shirato et al.

This is the second of the three initial biweekly translations of Japanese comics Eclipse (in cooperation with Viz) started in May 1987. Whereas Area 88 is a modern jet fightin’ slash soap opera, and Mai, The Psychic Girl is science fiction slash romance, here we have feudal Japanese ninja comics. I guess they wanted to try out as different genres as possible, but stay mainly with comics directed towards children or teenagers.

Kamui has a more complicated history than most commercially successful Japanese comics. The first series ran in Garo, the late-60s left-wing underground comics magazine. Kamui was the most popular feature there, but it didn’t make much impression on the general public. The series Eclipse is reprinting in Kamui Den, which is the followup series that Sanpei Shirato created for a mainstream weekly marketed towards teenage boys, and was a major success in Japan, and was a trendsetter in upping “mature” themes in these comics (i.e., violence, nude women and “crude” jokes).

These aren’t episodic comics: The first sixteen issues basically tell one continuous story, and the remaining twenty issues tell another one. Each Eclipse issue has 32 story pages, so it’s pretty chock-full of comics.

The first serial felt a bit choppy in storytelling to me. Basically Our Hero is saved by a fisherman, and is so cold that the only way to thaw him up is to make him lie next to the hearth without a blanket, but covered in the fisherman’s naked wife and oldest daughter. That makes sense, right?

And then we get this exposition bomb dropped on us: The fisherman’s wife is an ex-ninja that Our Hero knows well, and the wife thinks that he’s been sent to kill her, and hilarity ensues. I mean, lots of flying around, ninja style, and lots of fighting.

And, basically, that’s Sanpei Shirato way to plotting. It’s accidents all the way down. If you can make accidents meaningful, pointing towards a mysterious greater conspiracy, perhaps, this storytelling method can be effective, but here’s it’s basically just laziness. All the characters we meet will turn out to have accidentally killed the brother or father of all the other characters we meet.

In over half the issues, we an inside back cover that explains a bit of Japanese feudal society, mostly in relation to something we’ve just seen in the preceding issue. These are mostly written by the Japanese translator, and are, indeed, very informative. The translator seems to have a passion for his subject.

It’s not all accidents and fighting. We get a lot of propulsive scenes of fishing, and Sanpei Shirato and his studio sure knows how to draw wildlife.

And there are tender scenes, and scenes of slightly embarrassing humour. I mean, embarrassing for the characters.

These issues are very quick reads: I read the entire series in an afternoon. It’s not just that there are many wordless pages, but it reads so well, most of the time. It’s propulsive and makes you want to see what’s on the next page, and the next page, and the next page, so that it’s difficult to stop and take in these beautiful drawings.

(Yes, fishing in Japan is draaamaaa!)

And apparently, when fishing for sharks, you use live puppies that you dangle by their necks. Yes, if you don’t like seeing dogs killed, this is not the comic book for you. There’s at least one dispatched every other issue.

A reader seems to think that the translations “read like bad Saturday morning programs”. They look fine to me. I’m not quite sure what they’re trying to say with that “P.S.”… Er… Adults don’t care about nudity, but kids do, so it should be left in? Me confused!

I like these text bits on the covers.

Anyway, we were talking about violence. This is an extremely violent book; probably the most violent book published in the US direct market to that date. Body parts go flying every which way, heads are sliced in two, and bowels spill. This scene, though, with the really violent bits that follow on the next pages (I’m not including them because they’re ewww), is on another level. That’s Our Hero taking revenge on a guy who’s… bad. But it’s a rather extreme method.

After the first story is wrapped up, the translator explains that the next sequence is going to be even longer.

And we get a survey where we can tell Viz what kind of comics we want in the future. Market research, man.

The first issue of the new storyline is, indeed, quite confusing. We’re introduced to a number of new characters who then proceed to hack each other to death, and the ones we don’t expect to survive then goes on to be major protagonists. I had to read some of the scenes twice just to keep the names straight, and everybody looking very similar didn’t help much.

Sanpei Shirato helps the poor reader a bit by dropping in these fact boxes every once in a while when things get too confusing.

Aha! That’s why the first sequence seemed a bit choppy: They dropped bits to give us “only the very best stories”. Well, that’s not unusual when doing translations, but perhaps that wasn’t quite the right approach here. Either they chopped too much or too little.

A reader writes in with “one of the most appealing things about Kamui is the way the violence is played down”. Now, that may have been written before the “going shark fishing with a dismembered, living man” issue was published, but… What series was this person reading?

There’s a lot more covers to the American series than in Japan, so the number of colour paintings of Kamui available ran out at issue 21. At the end there, they weren’t… the best.

The obligatory “was is hell” panel after 40 pages of kick-ass exhilarating ninja fighting. That’s how you know it’s a mature comic.

So they ran out of paintings to use, so they made new ones based on the splash pages. Here’s an example:

Well… that’s kind of goofy-looking, isn’t it? His face looks … weird…

And that’s the original, which looks really cool. The vertical lines makes all the sense in the world, while the radiant colours of the cover don’t.

In short: The colourised covers from issue 22 on out aren’t much to write home about.

The interiors are as wonderful as ever. I especially like the many scenes of cruelty in nature, which is, of course, a metaphor for etc etc.

Yes, I mentioned crude humour?

A reader well-versed in Japanese comics writes in to ask about the curious choice of Kamui to translate when there are so many more significant series to choose from. I agree that the plot is simplistic. Well, the number of characters and their mostly hidden motivations makes it for a sometimes obscure reading experience, but in a good way. Confusion is a powerful storytelling tool, making things seem more significant than they may in reality be. I think you can pretty much sum up the “plot” of the second serial in a line or two, but figuring it out is most of the fun. And as for uncompelling characters I disagree completely.

Editor Fred Burke explains that the Japanese partner Shogakukan decided what comics Eclipse would publish. At least that’s how I interpret what he wrote there. I may be reading between the pixels.

Stuff like the panel above makes me wonder whether it was Eclipse who decided to drop in a sudden explanation of a long-thought-dead character (at least 500 pages ago) was or whether Sanpei Shirato did that in his original version. In any case, I thank them, because I was all “wha?” even though I’d read about him just a couple of hours before.

A reader writes in to compliment Sanpei Shirato on the uniqueness of his storytelling techniques; i.e., having people meet by random.

And speaking of which… Yes, another random meeting without which the plot wouldn’t have any resolution.

And then it’s over. Viz parted with Eclipse and took all their marbles with them, but they did not continue publishing Kamui. They took another stab at it ten years later and published the first storyline in two paperbacks, but then abandoned the project. The rest of the Kamui stories have never been published in English.

So perhaps that reader that thought it weird that Kamui was translated in the first place had a point. I seems like an anomaly amongst the Japanese-martial-arts comics I’ve read.

I mean, it’s good, non-formulaic, non-repetitive and difficult to predict where it’s going, so it’s nothing like Lone Wolf and Cub, for instance.

I was unable to find any critical response to this series whatsoever, but here’s Goodreads:

Very confusing plot also I am reading only part of the series as only few volumes were translated to English, these volumes only cover two major arc spanning 37 chapters.

The art is ancient as the manga was originally published in 1960’s. I did enjoy them in the beginning with the heavy use of ink and natural detail but as the manga progressed it was the same old thing repeated panel after panel, unbelievable muddle fights which look more like blur than anything else.

Waste of time.

And:

Really, really stupid.

Well, I had a nice afternoon, anyway.

Area 88 (1987) #1-36, Area 88 (1988 Viz) #37-42 by Kaoru Shintani et al.

With this comic, a new era starts for Eclipse comics, and probably the most historically significant. If Eclipse is ever mentioned any more, it’s as the company that brought Japanese comics to the US.

Less than a handful of Japanese titles had been published before this in the US: Barefoot Gen and I Saw It (both about Hiroshima and Nagasaki) had made some waves, and Raw Magazine had published some more Japanese underground comics, but nobody had ever attempted to translate and publish Japanese children’s comics for an American market before.

And Eclipse attacked the challenge wholeheartedly, it seems: They started three bi-monthly series in May 1987 (this one, Mai and Kamui), so it represented a significant part of their monthly output. Looking over the list of comics I have to read to complete this blog series, a bit less than half the remaining comics are translations of Japanese titles. For the non-Japanese comics, Eclipse would concentrate on graphic novels and mini-series, so there’s oodles of titles to go through, but not that many issues.

The format that eventually made a break-through in the US wasn’t this, though. This sold like hotcakes in the direct sales market, but it wasn’t a cultural phenomenon. That didn’t happen until the early 2000s, when Tokyopop started publishing un-flopped (i.e., reading in the original Japanese right-to-left order), cheap smaller-sized books instead of stapled, normal-US-sized, flopped pamphlets, which is what Eclipse (co-publishing with Viz) was doing here.

And it’s strange to read these comics now. The pages are so big! The lettering is so big! These books are so short! It’s a weird feeling going back to these floppies after reading the “new” (i.e., more Japanese) format for fifteen years now.

This is an action book, but Kaoru Shintani had also done romance comics before starting this series, and you can see the influence in the extravagant hairstyles and the not-very-macho posture of the hero (to the right here).

These comics read fast. Quite decompressed. I read the entire stack this (long) evening, and that’s… 1100 pages or something? There are a lot scenes of fighter planes fighting, and they flow past very quickly, even if they’re the prettiest part of the book. I’m assuming Kaoru Shintani has a coterie of assistants whose only job it is to draw pages upon pages of airplanes whizzing past (virtually all Japanese children’s comics are created by studios headed by one person, but created by a number of uncredited people).

In the advertising copy for this book (and in the editorial pages), it’s stressed again and again how anti-war this book is. Which is kinda risible, because it makes the fighting look so cool. On the other hand, Kaoru Shintani favourite trick is to introduce a sympathetic new character, and then kill him off 18 pages later. War is hell!

I wonder what the division of labour was between Viz and Eclipse. Did Viz do everything and just hand over camera-ready pages to Eclipse, or did Eclipse do the coordination with the translators and stuff? It’s never explained. If it’s the former, it’s more easy to understand why Eclipse would go all in, because it would then be no financial risk on their part at all. And they had a lot of empty schedule to fill after the black-and-white boom had gone bust a few months earlier.

I know you’re thinking: If this comic is just about pilots sitting in planes that SHEEEOH and RRREEE past, doesn’t that get boring? It would have, but these are thoughtful pilots, and while DOPYUTTing through the air, their minds would often slip back into the past and dwell on how they ended up as mercenaries in an airforce in a country that has lots of desert and is probably near Saudi-Arabia somewhere.

And it turns out that some of them have the Stupidest Origin Story Ever. Our hero, for instance, ended up in the troupe by being tricked to sign a document while drunk. That holds up legally in many jurisdictions I’m sure.

And the plots are mostly very stupid, but eh, whatever. I used to read European race car comics as a child (Michel Vaillant), and those weren’t… Hm… OK… Those were less stupid. But not a lot!

The trade dress of these books is almost completely separate from Eclipse’s wider line of comics: No editorials from cat ⊕ yronwode and virtually no house ads except for the other Viz books. And the design of the covers of these books is very distinct, which leads me to suspect even more that these books were mostly created by the hands of Viz.

Did I mention that Kaoru Shintani also did romance comics?

James D. Hudnall, creator of the critically acclaimed Espers (according to James D. Hudnall) writes about the translating process. First it’s translated non-idiomaticly to English by a Japanese person, and then Hudnall fixes up the English.

Kaoru Shintani’s studio may be adept at drawing airplanes, but when it comes to simple sequences where things happen, things can often get slightly confusing. In the scene above, the photographer removes a roll of film from his camera, twists of the heel of his boot to reveal a hidden room, and then slips the roll into that room. You know the approximate diameter of those rolls? He had boots with heels that high? In a war zone? Fashion forward choice!

And since this is a Japanese comic book, there’s always racism. The only black characters to appear in this series are those three, and they’re later revealed (in the same issue) to be scoundrels and are almost lynched. And are never seen again.

Did I mention the plot being stupid? Yes, Our Hero is $20K away from Freedom (out of a total of $1.5M), but does his very good friend offer to lend him that money, or does he sell his airplane (which is worth a lot) to bring in that $20K, or… does he wreck that plane later the same issue, bringing him 1M into the hole again? Take a guess!

I know, I know, it’s a children’s book, and I don’t find this that annoying. It’s fine. But with a little more care, this could have been a more exciting book. Because it’s a fun read, but you have to just go “OK then!” every other issue.

OK then!

And we learn a lot of interesting facts, like how all Swiss people were mercenaries during World War II, and were all killed.

*gulp* There’s allegedly enough material to keep the series going for 240 issues.

The chapters are of uneven length. Some are 32 pages and take up the entire issue (and I wonder whether they lopped off some pages if the chapters were too long), but most are around the 28 page mark. Which leaves room for text features, and most of them are about Japan and Japanese comics. Heidi MacDonald provides and overview of comics mostly marketed towards girls.

Some non-Viz Eclipse house ads sneak in, like this for Real War Stories. I wonder whether Eclipse snuck that in just to fuck with Viz, because Area 88 isn’t very real as war stories go.

The back covers are also very un-Eclipse: They’re all like this, with just a single little image dropped into a flat-coloured space. It’s nice.

As the series progresses, we get more and more plot happening off-base. There’s intrigue and plotting, but most of all, there’s accidents. Every thing that drives the plot forward happens because of the main characters happening to meet each other. It’s very lazy.

While the planes look very realistic, Kaoru Shintani (et al.) draws the male character’s faces in a very cartoonish manner. Each character has at least one defining er deformity, and I love it, because it makes it possible to tell them apart. Like here’s one with a huge nose…

… and here’s one with no nose. Faces in Japanese comics are often drawn identically from character to character, which means that the only way to differentiate them is to look at the hairstyles. Kaoru Shintani isn’t of that school, which is great.

But then there’s the female characters. They’re all pretty, so they’re all drawn with the same features, so you’re back to the “well, she’s got slightly curlier hair… so that must be Ryoko up to the right”.

In one of the text pages we learn that Kaoru Shintani ran a horrifying hell-camp of a sweatshop studio where they cranked out almost six pages per day. (They didn’t phrase it quite that way.)

The Viz editorial staff sure know a lot about planes, so we get a handful of these pages with All The Facts.

Speaking of male faces… is that fish-lip guy supposed to be a reference to anything?

The leader of “namely, the anti-government forces!” presents himself. Like all rebel groups, they don’t bother coming up with a name for themselves.

Pin-ups!

Editor Fred Burke starts off every letters column with a little paragraph about his life. It’s nice.

Whaa… I bought these comics used, and in one of them I found this newspaper comic strip that somebody had cut out. And used as a bookmark? Or had it just gotten wedged into this book?

The plot gets strangely convoluted after a while, even as it seems that nothing much is happening. It’s a strange trick: It feels like the conspiracies proceed at a snail’s pace, but it actually builds up and gets quite interesting after a while.

Hm… is that hair curly enough for that to be Ryoko? No… Must be somebody else!

And then it’s announced that Viz would take the book and leave Eclipse. Whaa?

One the one hand, the book isn’t well constructed. Whenever somebody needs to find something out, they’ll just stumble over the conspirators while being in an airport lounge in Rome. On the other hand, that panel up there is the pay-off for a sequence thirty issues ago, so perhaps somebody at the studio were taking notes and has a plan.

A reader writes in and asks what’s up with all the racism in these Japanese comics, and the editor explains that they considered just erasing the black characters, but decided against it. And apparently hopes that the influence from America in Japan will make Japan less racist. Yes. I think that’s what he’s saying?

So after 36 bi-monthly issues the book moves to Viz.

The printing quality takes a nosedive. The Eclipse issues were very crisp and nice, but here the finer lines are eradicated, and everything gets a wispy look.

And we get pictures of planes on the covers instead of drawings. Mostly because they’d ran out of colour drawings by Kaoru Shintani.

I take it back about the note-taking: He’s saying here that they’d never use nukes in the war, but we saw in an early issue that they did use a nuke and tried to use another one.

Huh. On this subscription form, they’re only announcing the book up till #42, and that’s how many they published. Why yank it from Eclipse just to cancel it a couple of months later? It’s weird.

And… Aaargh! I forgot to buy the last three Viz issues, so I don’t know whether they tied anything up, but it seems unlikely. There are 200 more potential issues to be published, remember? So I’m assuming it didn’t end very satisfactorily.

And weirdly enough, even after the Manga boom, Area 88 has never been printed in the US again. And googling a bit shows that it was released in 23 paperback volumes in Japan.

It’s so odd. The series they picked as the first one to be published in the US has never been translated to completion.

On the other hand, I can certainly see why it’s not as popular as One Piece, which… has fewer long scenes of jet planes shooting at each other.

And these fell out of the final issue. I’m assuming it’s a clipping made by the same person as the other issue…

Aww.

I guess these issues were once owned by a child.

But what happened between Viz and Eclipse? The Comics Journal #123:

VIZ AND ECLIPSE SPLIT

In November Viz Communications will end its joint publishing venture with Eclipse Comics. Viz, a subsidary of the large Japanese publisher Shogakukan Inc., was formed in 1986 and began copublishing comic books with Eclipse in 1987 including Mai: The Psychic Girl, Xenon, Area 88, and The Izgend of Kamui.

Viz General Manager Seiji Horibuchi said the decision was made to split with Eclipse because sales on the titles were less than Eclipse had promised. Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney agreed, adding only that sales could not be attributed to only one party in such a co-publishing venture.

Viz and Eclipse have agreed to allow their contract to expire in November. Mullaney called the split amicable.

Mai and Xenon were finite series. Mai will end in July and Xenon will end in November. The rights to Area 88 and Kamui will pass wholly to Viz in November. Eclipse had announced another Viz book. LUM*Umsei Yatsura. originally for Spring release, then pushed it back until 1989. It will now be published by Viz in ’89. Both Mullaney and Horibuchi said that the delay for LUM was not related to the break-up, although their accounts differ as to what the cause was.

Shortly after the book was delayed, Eclipse issued a press release attributing the delay to Shogakukan’s insistance that the book be printed in Japan. Horibuchi told the Journal this was not the case. He said the delay was due to a number of complex reasons which he declined to enumerate.

He said he requested that Mullaney retract the release, and Mullaney agreed. Mullaney claimed, however, that he had never been asked to retract the press release and told the Journal that as far as he knew the delay was caused by Viz’s insistence on Japanese printing.

OK then!

The final six issues of Area 88 were printed in Canada, so I guess Viz… changed their minds? Or perhaps somebody’s er misremembering.

Despite the alleged low sales, Eclipse would publish a number of Japanese comics over the following two years, but with a new packager: Studio Proteus. That ultimately ended in Eclipse going bankrupt, but not for the reasons you might guess.

I’ll cover that story when we get to it chronologically.