Dec 13, 2022
Katsuhiro Otomo is a crucial figure in the history of both anime and manga, and his work has influenced creatives all around the world, from Ghost in the Shell's Shirow Masamune to Kanye West. I use the word work in the singular because it's easy to think he has only one, that being Akira, which is a medium-defining masterpiece of an anime film and an important, accomplished manga, with such detailed art that it's painful to even imagine the wrist-breaking effort Otomo spent over its decade of publication. A handful of anime fans know he directed the impressively well-animated Steamboy, but after Akira his
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most commonly known manga is probably Domu, which only 5,000 people on myanimelist have read. For this book, Memories, that figure is less than 800, perhaps in part because its only English publication was a short-lived 1995 printing by Random House Australia.
When I fell in love with Akira in 2019 and started looking into the rest of Otomo's oeuvre, this was listed for over $150 on Amazon - but the French version, whose title is the English word Anthology, had a printing in 2009 and was closer to $20. That was the version I bought, which introduced the small hitch that I didn't know how to read French. A few years later, with some practice in the language from reading comics such as Spirou and Titin, I finally came back and finished this.
As the name implies, the book is a collection of short stories from early in Otomo's career, published in periodicals for young men throughout the 70s, particularly Young Magazine. Their most immediately noticeable characteristic is just how *short* they really are. The first, Flower, in full color and inspired by the French artist Moebius, is only a few pages long. Two others, Sound of Sand and Minor Swing, begin with the main character trapped in sand or goo respectively where a more traditional story would take the time to introduce the characters and show the audience exactly how they wound up in such a sticky situation. They tend to end abruptly, often anti-climatically, and feel more like gag comics that build to a punchline rather than serious attempts at storytelling. In the post-face, where he reflects on each story, Otomo says of the aforementioned Sound of Sand that he doesn't remember how he came up with the concept or what he was trying to do with it. All he has to say about the segment Electric Bird Land is that he wanted to create something with Birdland in the title as an homage to the New York Jazz Club, since he loved Charlie Parker's recordings from there as a child.
The collection mainly serves to throw a bone to people who are really fascinated with one of two works: Akira itself or Magnetic Rose, Satoshi Kon's captivating take on Memories from the film anthology of the same title (whose other two segments, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder, have no analogs here.) Memories headlines the collection and is one of the most atmospheric of the short stories, but doesn't really measure up to Kon's characteristically psychological extended take from the film. Akira's precursor Fire Ball is the main event of the album. It is set against the backdrop of rebellion and totalitarianism, and its lead characters are two brothers with psychic powers, one working for the police and the other the resistance. This predicts the dynamic between Tetsuo and Kaneda that is, to me, the emotional heart of Akira and the reason it's so great: two people who find themselves as enemies despite their brotherly love for each other. That kind of emotional confusion drives a lot of powerful storytelling throughout all kinds of fiction. Fire Ball *predicts* the dynamic, but it doesn't *actualize* it. The two brothers don't fight over their difference of allegiance. Their only interaction is a jovial conversation after meeting for the first time in years, where they catch up on each other's personal lives and a death in their family. Its most memorable scene comes from the inhumanity with which the cop brother is then dissected for science, in a scene many times too graphic for a Western youth comics magazine.
The anthology presents a deliberately cultivated 1970s identity. Hair (named after the musical) is a parody of Fire Ball where the rebels are long-haired hippies who steal the world's last King Crimson vinyl from a museum and their scheme to take down The Man is to bring back the common cold, which has been wiped out for a hundred years in the comic's totalitarian future. Authoritarianism is associated with obsessive cleanliness throughout the collection, especially in Electric Bird Land, where automated military mechs gun down impurities like a man's long hair (along with all his clothes), or a dropped plant from a "strictly ornamental" glass ball. The other reoccurring theme, also popular in the era, is pacifism, or rather distrust for all forms of military activity, particularly through the Planet Tako stories where political conflicts and genocide are experienced by slightly phallic cartoon sushi ingredients, and Farewell to Arms where a sci-fi war-mech wipes out a platoon of helpless soldiers (accompanied by a cool background art style based around digitized photography.) In comparison to these depictions of systemic cruelty, though, I was personally more disturbed by the horror story Minor Swing, where the main character emerges from a rotten sea covered in black tar that hardens in the sun until he suffocates in a cement shell, and the people around him let him die, even as he begs for help, because they see him as a monster and not a human being.
This covers all the stories except "That's Amazing World", a quartet of short comedy versions of famous stories from the west: Aladdin, Noah's Ark, Knights of the Round Table, and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. These are probably the weakest part of the collection, inoffensive but pretty fucking stupid. For the Old Man and the Sea, when Santiago pulls the marlin onto his boat, it turns out the have the lower body of a woman, so he rapes it. In Noah's Ark, Noah and two of his sons eat all the animals on the ark except for the reptiles before they finally find land, and one of the boys remarks that they should've thought to bring a woman, which would've been a funny observation on the story except that Noah and his sons do bring their wives aboard the ark in the Bible.
What you have here on the whole is a collection that's a little uneven and never excellent. The artwork is great, and there are some neat little stories, but it's hard to really recommend unless you're so into Otomo you want to study him - especially given how hard it seems to be to access in English.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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