Un Gentil Garçon

Un Gentil Garçon by Shin'ichi Abe collects eleven short comics originally published between 1970 and 1994. While I don't think it was originally his intention, read together, these stories end up sort of making one story - as for the most part they seem to be autobiographical snippets taken from his & his girlfriend / wife's life.

There's a real mundane weirdness to the stories in here. The character's tend to be inarticulate - the dialog is minimal & unemotive / calm. The drawings vary widely from quite simple and stylish in the beginning, to much more punk and rough, bold and over-excited in the middle, to almost conventional, and finally to just plain crazy bad in the final story (with disturbingly off anatomy). Whatever the style though, even when "bad," the art is always interesting to look at - you can at times see a lot of influence maybe from Yoshiharu Tsuge and Seiichi Hayashi (whose work is being published in English by Drawn and Quarterly this summer, I believe). For the most part the stories center around the raw relationship between the author and his girlfriend, as they drift together and apart and back together again, as he drifts between comics and friends and alcohol. While mostly written from the male perspective, the later, more settled (?) stories in the book switch to the female, which is interesting - as you get the feeling he's writing for her, describing himself - it's a weird feeling.

That's the thing about this book - it keeps you off balance. It's hardly a masterpiece, but it's damn interesting and original. It's a weird one! Definitely glad to have picked it up.

Alive v.1

Another comic I pretty much just selected at random, because the artwork (by Adachitoka) on its surface, looked sort of interesting - but unfortunately when I actually sat down to read the thing and look at it more closely, the art's overall generic quality became much more apparent. Functional doesn't mean bad, just the studied competence on display here (and honestly in LOTS of the manga appearing lately in English that I've come across) can seem uninspired and too by the numbers to really keep somebody looking at it interested.

What does actually make this first volume of Alive kind of interesting, is the mystery of the story (by Tadashi Kawashima). A wave of 100,000 suicides sweeps the globe in the course of one week. We are introduced to at least several characters who seem to have some sort of paranormal powers that may or not be related to the suicidal outbreaks. The bulk of the tale is shown through the eyes of a small group of teenagers, with lots of playful weird humorous asides and over the top emoting. Since in this first volume all the plot provides are hints at the truth about what is going on (similar to the way the TV show Lost parcels out "the truth" in small bits, for instance), I did find that mystery aspect sort of drawing me in, but not quite enough to convince me to pick up volume two, I don't think.

Manga Zombie

"Manga Zombie, written by Udagawa Takeo, was published in Japanese in 1997 by Ohta Shuppan. The book covers a range of thirty-one Japanese manga artists active primarily in the 1960s and 70s. [...] ComiPress has teamed up with Udagawa Takeo and translator John Gallagher to publish an online version of the English-language translation of Manga Zombie."

Link