This took entirely too long to write, and it’s probably too long and rambly to read anyways. Bear with me.
If the average person were to ask me how I felt about anime and manga, my knee-jerk, gut reaction would be largely negative, and I would probably make some comment about how annoying most anime fans are, and act as though I am above them. Which is silly and hypocritical, really. This reaction comes from being around too many of those fans who reinforce the stereotype of a crazed otaku virgin or some such, far too obsessed with Final Fantasy and Naruto for their own good. There’s an anime club at ETSU. A former co-worker of mine is the president and my ex-girlfriend is a member of it, and they’re both quite cool, but most of my encounters with other members of the club left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’ve got some friends who have been pestered by them as well.
But anyways, no, I make comments about anime nerds having poor tastes and bad social skills, only to go home to watch Birdy the Mighty: Decode on Netflix after tripping over myself at work just because a cute girl spoke to me. I own the entire series of Outlaw Star and Ergo Proxy on DVD, I was bitterly upset when I learned that Satoshi Kon died, I really want to get my hands on the entirety of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, I swear to you that Osamu Tezuka is a comics god and that Astro Boy is the best manga ever, and Shinya Tsukamoto is one of my favorite film directors. Hi, my name’s Brett and I am a nerd who makes fun of other nerds. I am the pot calling the kettle black.
ANYWAYS. That…wasn’t exactly the point of this post at all, no, I guess I felt I needed to throw a confession out there that while I’m embarrassed of the stuff I liked when I was younger and totally obsessed with anime, I still love a lot of the crazy things that Japan likes to fling at us over the ocean. By the way, thank you Japan for the splattergore action comedy genre thing. Keep sending those movies my way, please.
THE POINT IS. I just finally got around to reading a copy of Masamune Shirow’s original Ghost in the Shell manga, an old battered copy put out by Dark Horse in the 90’s, flipped to read left-to-right as we the English speaking/reading do. AND IT WAS AWESOME. Well, no, the first couple chapters made little sense to my simpleton brain and the pseudo-philosophical metaphysical what-have-you vague ending was a head-scratcher, but otherwise? Very cool. Ghost in the Shell is an important piece of Japanese sci fi with good reason, and it’s kind of the backbone of the Japanese cyberpunk movement, which is arguably cooler in many ways than American cyberpunk. Of course, cyberpunk is dated by this point for whatever reason and all the cool kids are into steampunk now, but considering I did a freaking comic called Cyberpunk Blues, yeah, I guess I‘m kind of biased.
Simultaneously, as I was reading Ghost in the Shell, I was picking up other stuff. We acquired a MASSIVE collection of comics at G2K, and nearly a month was spent just organizing, pricing, and putting those things out. A lot of crap, keeping with the rule that 95% of everything is crap, but a lot of wicked gems too that I immediately snatched up for myself before anyone else could, along with obscure stuff that I don’t think anyone else would’ve bought in the first place. Among these little treasures were a few issues of various manga, from back in the late 80’s and early 90’s where folks like Dark Horse and Eclipse put them out issue by issue, like American comics, rather than in digest volumes that are the norm today. I know they quit doing it pretty much because the hardcore fans preferred the digests, reading right-to-left as the Japanese do, but for some reason I really love the flipped stuff. Probably because it makes almost all the characters left-handed and this makes me very happy as a lefty. I’m sure there are some crazy hardcore fans that would froth at the mouth upon reading that, but publishers like Tokyopop are dying off because no one buys the actual books anymore. They just read the scanslations online, so screw them.
I found the first issue of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed, book 2 of something called Grey, and an issue of something called Xenon. Later, while browsing the back issue bin of another comic store, I came across two more, Genocyber and Chronowar, and I already own some other stuff in this format like an issue of Cutey Honey and Pixie Junket. That’s when the pieces started coming together in my head.
Anime didn’t really start reaching the ultra-saturated levels of popularity it’s at now until about the 80’s, when Voltron wowed little kids and Robotech, an amalgamation of Macross and two other shows, started airing on TV. Then the animated film adaptation of Otomo’s Akira arrived, kicked down the doors, and blew everyone away. Similarly, Ghost in the Shell followed not long after.
Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Robotech, all this crazy sci fi militaristic awesomeness is what opened the floodgates, and these books that I found, Grey, Genocyber and Xenon, the others, they’re part of the massive wave of Me Too’s that poured into comic stores. Everyone wanted a slice of the pie that Otomo and Shirow were enjoying so much of, and that meant wave after wave of crazy sci fi and super violent weird stuff like the Guyver, Wicked City, and Doomed Megalopolis.
I have a friend who, like me, hates hardcore anime fans, but nevertheless owns the entirety of Sailor Moon S on DVD, Serial Experiments Lain (possibly my first introduction to cyberpunk culture) on VHS, a bunch of CLAMP graphic novels, and loves Junko Mizuno‘s work. She says that anime was a lot better back in the 90’s, when the Pacific Ocean served as a kind of filter where only the wildest, most violent and awesome content made it to American shores. I kind of agree with her on that, as most of the anime and manga I’m seeing nowadays is this silly moe-blob romantic comedy crap, all bright colors, no high concept, and then the Naruto and Bleach stuff which appeals more to young teenagers in the way that Dragonball Z did to me when I was in middle school, and none of it has that same appeal to me that these obscure 90’s titles do. Not to mention the fact that the art in most manga nowadays all looks the same, kind of like most superhero books do these days.
I’ve typed over 1000 words now and maybe it’s too vague, so I’ll make it clear: Anime and manga from the 90’s is awesome and appeals to me because of all the crazy sci fi high concept stuff and violence and I enjoy finding the old single issues of this stuff, and I also wish there was more of it coming out nowadays and less of that K-On! and Lucky Star stuff. Also, the immense international popularity of Hatsune Miku disturbs me greatly, as do those body pillows with the sad-looking naked anime girls printed on them.
You can keep your One Piece and Strike Witches, I have a comic about biotechnological alien life forms merging with a serial killer, detective, and 30-year-old housewife in the middle of an exploding apartment building that probably no one else has ever read, and it‘s intricately drawn, too.
NEXT TIME: A Korean man-wha inspired by Christianity, spaghetti westerns, and Hellboy, and the piss-pour American film adaptation thereof.
[Brett]