Back to machchan's Profile machchan's Profile

One of the lesser early Tezuka works. That's maybe because I've always preferred his sci-fi and mature works, not the fairytale stuff.

The story jumps here and there, and is somewhat difficult to follow or care about, not least because there are a ton of characters that are virtually indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't help that the lines are wavery and uncertain, and the Disney-like animal and human characters are kind of difficult to read. They also change form a lot. But that's normal for a lot of his early work.

The setting is a fairytale-like and, as Tezuka admits at the beginning, it ... is strongly influenced by classic tales from Western and Northern Europe. It is not a retelling or reimagining of a single one of them, but more of an amalgamation of beats and themes from different fairytales. But mixing many tales in one leads to an overcrowded, underdeveloped story in which nothing has real consequences. Though the same is true for a lot of his early manga, it is never as big as here. Major plot points are dropped like nothing all the time. This might be acceptable in a manga broken down in chapters, here it is presented as a single continuous story.

This is one of the earlier manga by Tezuka, written before The New Treasure Island, I think. And it kind of shows.

The story is very thin and jumps here and there thorough the entire hundred-page run. The chapters are brief, with each of them introducing and dropping new things all the time, without any consideration for what's happened in the previous chapter, and at times, even the previous page.

This makes for a very dynamic and eventful, but uneven and unexciting, read, which starts off as a Titanic-cum-abduction sci-fi mystery and grows to involve robots, secret organizations (like those in The Lost World), and towards the ... end - Martians trying to invade Japan. It's all very tropey and inconsequential to the plot mostly because of the frenetic pace and the fact that everything gets resolved almost the moment it is introduces.

This habit of overcramming the stories with as much things as possible isn't something that Tezuka has ever grown out of, I think. It's not among my favorite qualities of his manga, because it feels like he's treating the readers as children (to be fair, the readers of most of his stuff were children). I'm not sure if it's condescending or just the result of a frenetic mind, though. Maybe in the case of this manga is the latter.

The style is the typical Tezuka Disney-esque one. We get the same soft, wobbly lines and forms here as in his more mature works, just in a much cruder form. The characters are a bit less appealing, a bit more difficult to read at a first glance. Their designs are also less perfect, though we can see glimpses of his later style in them. The same can be said about the backgrounds, whenever they are drawn, that is. There are many panels with nothing in the back.

Tezuka has always been a very interesting author for me. One that is both incredibly child-like in his humor and mature in some of his themes. Reading his early work, a part of which is this manga, points me to an oeuvre of incremental development towards perfecting a specific form of expression, never of extreme reinvention or swerving from the path he's been building since his childhood manga. (At least, that's based on the work I've read so far, and that's not even half of his massive output.) Some might not like this method, but as I grow and read more, I find myself and more and more drawn to this single-minded, almost crafstman-like, dedication.

Like probably many people, I first encountered Riki-Oh through Lam Ngai Kai's 1991 adaptation. Advertised as one of the most violent movies ever made, I saw it with VCD quality and loved it. The practical effects were amazing, the blood was bright and flowing, spraying, and exploding in buckets, the fights were over-over-the-top insane. And don't get me started on the final bout with the mutated warden...

Recently, I discovered that it's based on a manga, and a long one at that. So, I dug in, wanting to see how much of the film violence came from the original and overall, what did the move from ... the page to the screen do to the story.

Having finished the entire 12 volume run, I can say that the manga is almost as good as its adaptation. It is hyper violent with blood, brains, eyes, and guts flying left and right on almost every page. It's also very campy, especially in the second half where everything gets batshit crazy and incomprehensible. Weirder and weirder enemies start appearing, some of them with almost magical powers, others from different periods and dimensions. But, by definition, none of them are particularly interesting and exciting, because we know they'll be chopped, eviscerated, or decapitated by Riki in a single blow. Moreover, none of them are given more background than maybe a speech bubble or two, telling us their amazing powers and how they will be the ones to finally destroy the indestructible main character.

It is not the camp, though, that makes this manga more of a letdown. After all, macho campiness and ridiculous powers is what we must expect from a work of this type from the period. Rather, it is the desire of the authors to introduce some kind of epochal seriousness and gravity to Riki's travails. Sprouts of this start appearing after the end of the first prison arc on which the 1991 movie is based. Each of the remaining four arcs starts introducing more unbelievably ridiculous plot twists such as Nazis, religious zealotry, biblical prophecies, pseudo-philosophy, and tons of other things.

With each introduction of a new development and theme, the initial point of the manga seems to be lost more. This is because most plot points were just thrown in by the authors without much attention to what happened or was said in previous chapters and especially arcs. Things happen, new things get introduced, oftentimes contradicting the past, people die, new contradictions are introduced, and so on, until it all ends extremely anticlimactically. I know that strong and logical storytelling isn't to be expected much from such works, but compared to the relative realism and subtlety of the first arc, it looks like a nosedive.

There isn't much of a subtext here, at least not a consistent one that I could catch. There is the running themes of belonging, family, duty, and forgiveness, but they are muddled and shallow. Its more like they were mentioned so the thing can seem semi-serious, not that the authors wanted to explore them. This makes this manga a pretty uninspired read for me, because I prefer it when the violence is used to tell something more meaningful. Here there are is only the pretense of meaning. And this suck, because the setting of the first arc and to a degree, the second one, gives plenty of room for exploring serious topics like corruption, power, policing, control, and others. When Riki breaks the cell wall for the first time in the first part, there is some potentiality for meaning, when he does the same thing for a hundredth time by the final arc, there is none.

What is worse, though, is that the introduction of nazism, teleology, prophecies, and such, negates the impact of the possible critique of the system. All of the occultism of the second part of the manga seems to exonerate the ones who are actually at fault in society, making them powerless pawns in the hands of eternal, otherworldly powers. Moreover, the enemies are almost always framed as being not only powerless in front of Mukai, Riki's father, a would be god, and the ultimate villain, but also people with families and humanity they need to suppress.

Luckily, whereas the storytelling falters as the manga progresses, the art kind of soars. There is nothing mindblowing composition-wise. Most of the panelling is conservative, there are few splash pages, and almost no double page spreads. The ones that appear are also pretty mediocre. The character design is also relatively good, most of the characters look consistent thorough the entire run, with only some contorted faces difficult to understand at points. Luckily, the context helps for them.

The best part by far is the 80's macho hyper violence. It is relatively detailed and realistic, with eyes and brains popping and flying, carcasses hanging and sliding. Most of the action is also comprehensible, but there are some panels in which it is difficult to discern what is happening due to the gore.

Like the name of this short series suggests, the manga deals with a crew of cleaners who specialize mostly in taking care of places where people have died. Most of the usually decomposed remains they clean are either of suicides or of elderly people who've died alone. This allows for some very poignant observations about the state of neoliberal society where people are abused by corporations, everyone has to fight with everyone else for the little space and resource allotted to the masses. There are also numerous references to the bust of the bubble economy at the end of the 80s and the decades-long suffering ... it forced onto people. The majority of the suicides or their neighbors/landlords/etc, for example, are directly hit by it, mostly in the form of extreme loans, or are indirectly suffering because of it, through the way labor and education changed. As expected, the atmosphere in most of the chapters is defined by despair, depression, and alienation.

Structurally, the manga is split into two parts. The first one consists of short stories. Each one lasts for two to four chapters and deals with a different case taken by the company. The stories develop pretty fast and their focus is less on the act of cleaning or the story how the person dies, but on the conversations between the cleaners and their insights into life and death. This is by far the much better part of the manga.

The second part continues to be somewhat episodic but a few overarching plots about a cult and the end of the world start appearing. None of them are given enough time to develop naturally, they are just crammed into the story, develop incredibly fast, and just kind of finish. As such, they leave a lot of questions but not in the way a thoughtfully constructed narrative would. The same can be said about the characters. They are very enigmatic but in the worst way possible. We not only learn almost nothing about them, but also don't witness any growth in them. They are just there, tokens to kind of make the manga supposedly interesting and strange.

Not a bad horror manga anthology, but absolutely nothing memorable here. Like any such work, the quality of the stories varies greatly as does the quality of the art. Most of them are gruesome, but in a teenager-kind of way. A lot of visually repulsive stuff like guts, decapitations, and such, but nothing existentially unsettling. This, coupled with the brevity of each story and the fact that they finish with a very predictable "shocking" ending, makes for a very underwhelming read.

Having finished it a few weeks ago and not remembering almost any of the stories except maybe for the one with the book browsers, ... says it all about this.

As far as I remember, this is the first Man☆Gatarou manga I've read and for sure the first one written by Pierre Taki (I'm not really familiar with his other work in cinema and music, too). So, I didn't know what to expect beyond the loud and garish-looking cover, except that it maybe will be comedy, and probably won't be the type I enjoy.

I was somewhat correct. The manga is comedy, but much funnier than I ever expected. It is a very in-your-face mockery of capitalists, the semi-literate nouveau riche owners of companies, but not of capitalism itself. The way these bosses and their dimwit ... servants are poked fun of is also the crudest possible - through extreme caricature exaggeration and offensive nicknames. Think of a fat ugly man with snot dripping from his nose being name Dimwit. It's neither subtle, nor especially smart, but it also works in the case of this nonsensical story.

The volume works not because of the thin repetitive plot or the escalating numbers of decapitations, but Man☆Gatarou's art. Drawn with extreme amounts of hatching, using furiously sharp and thin lines, every panel brims with detail and decayed life. Every face is as expressive as it can be, every movement, expression, body shape - as exaggerated as possible. There is nothing "manga" here, not for the majority of the volume, at least. It's all comix and outlaw comics, and it's simply marvelous. Reading some of the pages, I couldn't but be reminded of Ed Piskor's Red Room series. Not for the content or gruesomeness, but for the way both artists draw flabby fat.

The visuals also create a pleasing sense of rhythm, mostly through the use of repetition. Many panels, even whole pages are repeated almost ad nauseam, pointing at the repetitiveness of factory work and life under capitalism. The belt moves, the people do the same robotic movements, things take shape. The things themselves might be different, might even be things that do not usually belong to a conveyor belt, but the workers don't care. Whether they make a tank or a fatty lip, it's all the same. They'll get their measly food scraps, sleep, and come back to build the next thing.

But this repetition also works because it is just damn funny. It is so rhythmical and punchy that looking at the pages, I can feel its beat, see it as an anime sequence. In this sequence there is a lot of pause at every repeated cell, the only sound coming from the speakers a loud, equally long "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH". And then, a reverse shot of something short and insignificant. And then, again, the same, repeated cell and the sound "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH". And like that ad infinitum, until we stop for the day, go have some slop, sleep, and wake up for another day of capitalist consumption.

This manga was incredibly difficult to finish, not because of the brutal, nihilistic violence, alcohol abuse, cults, and mental breakdowns, but because of the father's repugnantly abusive understanding of family and family dynamics. The primitive digital art and the use of pixelation as a technique, didn't help either, even though some of the male character designs and their facial expressions are grotesquely pleasing.

Maybe this is where Arigatou differs from most manga of this ilk (the ones I've read, at least). Whereas in other series the patriarch's abuse would be presented in the most cliched way ever - through rape and impregnation of his ... daughters - here is the exact opposite. His overbearing love (represented in the manga through a heart literally brandished on his forehead) is shown through, quite physically, forcing all of the members of the family to stay together. Initially, he locks everyone in the house, later, he starts going to one of his daughter's school, to observe how others treat here. At one point, he even forces everyone to work together at a family restaurant.

Of course, it all has the exact opposite results of what the weak-but-willed patriarch expected. One of the daughters starts living with the boss of the gang that initially invaded her house and raped her sister. The mother joins a cult. The older sister becomes a hikikomori. And all this makes him even more overbearing and abusive, pointing, very weakly, though, to the evil that is the patriarchal system. Rinse and repeat with even more extreme examples until it all, very inorganically and anti-climatically, implodes.

There is a part in me that wants to read the manga as a consequence of the 1990's bubble burst coupled with the mangakas antiauthoritarian beliefs. The father never allows members of family to call the police or go to the hospital, or to have anything to do with any institutions. He hates all of them with passion and knows them to be corrupt, either trying to protect themselves and their image, or steal all of his hard earned money. He doesn't trust even his own company, and yet he abuses his position within it constantly. Until he is fired, that is, and even then uses the false authority he has over one of his colleagues. And if it was a critique of the post-bubble society, then what does this manga tells us? Well, not much, outside of the nihilistic surface level representation of contemporary society as broken beyond repair. Not that necessarily there needs to be a message, especially if there are compelling characters with novel or at least interesting arcs. But there are none here.

This must be one of the worst manga I've read in a very long time. Don't get me wrong, I love many of Nagai Go's series, though I don't read his work all that often anymore. I even have physical copies of some of them in languages I don't know. But Kamasutra is just terrible. And its terrible for all the reasons his other books are great. Because, it is the typical Go Nagai schtick but this time set in India and instead of gruesome violence and murder, there is explicit sex. Loads of it, even sometimes with genitals.

There is sex, but it isn't ... sexy at all. Rather, it is childish, filled with idiotic jokes, and characters making stupid faces. And by filler, I mean, every single chapter has at least two or three scenes like that, some scenes even including gerontophilia, bestiality, and others. Oh, in "good" Nagai Go fashion, it is also racist and misogynistic. The women, all of them without any exception, are presented as sex bombshells, annoying horny girls, or empty vessels for the male characters' seed. Or an amalgam between the three. The male characters are not much better - they are either sexgod superheroes or inane oversexed butts of jokes. The latter, of course, are drawn as small and weak people. One of them is even Higegojira from Go's classic sex comedy Harenchi Gakuen.

This all begs the questions, for what audience was this thing made? Was it for teenagers, like most of Go's other work? Though the sex and jokes might make it seem so, the numerous pages with direct quotations from the Kama Sutra make me feel like it wasn't. After all, would children, even teenagers, would be interested in reading pages upon pages of long, boring passages of an ancient Indian text with minimal illustrations? Also, would they be into the main theme of the original text, pleasuring your partner, and the ultimate, haphazardly slapped one of the manga - procreation for the sake of humanity's existence? Can't be certain, but don't think so.

On the other hand, I can't say that it's made for grown readers, either. There are just way too many childish sex jokes, horny, predictable plot twists, and overall immaturity of the thing to make me feel like it wasn't. But, again, that's Go's entire thing. He's been doing pretty much the same thing, rehashing the same tropes for who knows how long now.

Visually, it's also 100% Go's style. Characters that look like they came straight from 70s shonen manga, static-looking action scenes that finish way too fast, uninspired panelling and page design. All stuff he can probably do in his sleep, and reading these volumes, I couldn't but feel that he did just that.