The Hidden King

So I've been reading Nabari no Ou lately, and it's actually better than I expected. On a plot level it's not terribly ambitious (a sulky, androgynous teenage ninja goes on a magical McGuffin hunt), but it's got a few things going on under the surface that catch my eye.

The big one is that this is one of the surprisingly few ninja manga I've read that remembers that ninja are spies and liars. Every single character has ulterior motives (not all of which the reader is privy to), loyalties are often divided, and at least one triple-cross has been sighted. We haven't reached Death Note levels of plots-within-plots (at least not yet), but the constant simmering undercurrent of "I know you're lying to me, but I'll pretend to ignore it because I'm lying to you too" livens up things tremendously. I also enjoy how the "ninja villages" are metaphorical, updated with modern facades (I was amused that one poses as a temp agency). People still use swords and throwing stars a lot, but they also know what guns are.


I also like that these are Ninja Scroll/Basilisk style ninja whose cool esoteric techniques come with awkward drawbacks. As of volume 7 the number of total freaky mutants is pretty low (and even they're more sleek killing machines than misshapen monsters; this does run in the same magazine as Black Butler), but advanced ninjutsu either has morally questionable requirements or messes up the user pretty bad, as in "one of the main characters is quickly going blind and deaf".

Another pleasant surprise is that the women in this series have lots to do. Again, this runs in G-Fantasy, so the hero may well not have any interest in women, which frees them up to actually be supporting cast and participate in the plot instead of just motivating the hero by getting kidnapped or being part of his harem. Quite a few of the villains and walk-on characters from other ninja clans are women too. This pleasantly reminded me of Fullmetal Alchemist (both series also share a habit of randomly breaking the mood with cheap jokes), and I was not too surprised to find out that Kamatani is a woman.

On the other hand, I don't think this series actually passes the Bechdel test, because all the notable female characters I can think of are either trying to help or manipulate the main (male) character (discussing his mysterious powers still counts as talking about him, I think), or are motivated by their devotion to or hate for a man, and there's not really a lot of non-plot-related chit-chat.

I don't want to oversell this series too much; Nabari no Ou is still fundamentally a Teenagers Against Evil manga, with all the tropes and baggage you'd expect if you've ever read one of those, but I'm definitely enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. It takes a couple volumes to warm up, but once it turned that corner I started seeing some promise, and I'm willing to stick around and see how things develop.

One more label gone

So it looks like Bandai is doing the Geneon thing.

Lately I've been going through a lot of my old backlog to show friends who never saw this stuff the first time around, and it's been faintly odd to see all the logos for companies who are now long gone. And now one more.

Akira Kurosawa

Detective Dee and the Out of Context Clues

Don't have time to give Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame the review it deserves, but this is well worth seeing, Tsui Hark brings that old wire-fu magic yet again. The translation is good enough that I could follow the plot, but not SO good that I was denied classic HK moments like the above. Perfect.

Dazzling the stage!

Helldriver is the kind of movie where, while choking her daughter to death, a woman gets a hole blown clean through her chest by a meteor, and then without missing a beat, she rips out her daughter's heart and sticks it in the smoking cavity, where her other organs start healing around it.

As you may have guessed by the fact that I'm bothering to post about it, this is another one by B-movie hero Yoshihiro Nishimura (writing and directing this time), so that happens about ten minutes in, and is pretty much the tip of the iceberg of insane special effects and high-pressure fake blood antics that I'd be screencapping like mad if I hadn't just come back from a festival screening. As usual, conventional reviewing techniques are useless against him, but this is another one deep in the "deliberately ridiculous" zone, and actually relatively restrained in terms of gore effects per se; of course, "restrained" by Nishimura standards means "when zombies get chopped into bits you usually don't see recognizable organs".

The crazy SFX is much more constant than his last two projects; in fact, there's so much craziness going on in this one that it became a bit overwhelming by the end. That's kind of all there is in this one though; the lead character is a leaden cipher (I think she only has like ten lines of dialogue, and nowhere near the screen presence to pull it off), and there isn't so much a plot as a collection of chainsaw fights, zombie dance clubs, Imperial Japan imagery, Verhoevenesque public service announcements, dozens of ways to contextually translate "-chan", and possibly the coldest open I have ever seen. I'm still waiting for another one of these movies to have the same level of overall craft as Tokyo Gore Police (come on, Mutant Girls Squad), but I'd rank Helldriver above the faintly disappointing Robogeisha and Vampire Girl. It hits home video next month, so if this sounds like your brand of cheap thrills, buckle up.

King of RPGs Second Edition

King of RPGs volume 2 has fewer references to porno manga than the first, but since its ending seems like a suspiciously good break point if further volumes don't get greenlit, it seems like a good time for a closer look.

KORPG actually has some surprisingly complex structure given how broad the jokes are. I always get a kick out of structural metahumor; Thompson has a longtime interest in both RPGs and manga, and it's amusing how seamlessly he fits the conventions of tournament battle manga (childhood inspirations sparking lifelong obsession, villains almost more interesting than the heroes, each more powerful than the last, defeat means friendship) with the inside-baseball gamer humor of Knights of the Dinner Table, Order of the Stick, Darths & Droids, DM of the Rings, etc (satanic panics, LARPing, adversarial GMing, and some MMO stuff in volume 2). It's especially great when the two synergize, like referencing Death Note to emphasize the Game Master's control-freak nature.

The main idea of "Shonen Jump-style battle manga about Dungeons & Dragons" isn't a very pointed parody given that things like Yu-Gi-Oh and .hack have already played it completely straight, but this time there's the occasional undercurrent of absurd black humor from the tone clash of zany unrealistic plot elements uneasily butting up against the reasonably honest portrayal of the main character's emotional problems. It's either tasteless or ballsy to have the plot basically boil down to "Mazes and Monsters by way of Bastard!", but then Thompson always was fond of manga's transgressiveness, and "Jack Chick was right!" is pretty much the ultimate taboo in RPG circles.

And finally, there are lots of tiny throwaway jokes all over the place, from the blatantly referential to the obscure (like Shesh Maccabee's signature in-game weapon). The art's quite nice too; Victor Hao's got a nice, cartoony expressiveness that works well for the comedy and lends the proper flair to all the scenes and characters.

I'd be happy to see more of this, but frankly the odds seemed kind of against even getting as much as we have. I'm honestly not sure if you can fully appreciate King of RPGs without having spent way too much time both reading manga and playing RPGs (though actually we have a couple guys like that here on the blog), but if you are one of those rare no-life kings, you should definitely check it out.

Best news ever

This year being the 25th anniversary of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and the 30th anniversary of Araki Hiroyuki's career, I was sort of hoping we might finally get a kanzenban I can't afford but would buy anyway.
Instead, we get Jojorion/Jojolion, the eight Jojo series, and a package designed for me personally -- three Jojo's Bizarre Adventure novels.
Written by Kadono Kouhei, Nisioisin, and Maijo fucking Otaro.
http://www.araki-jojo.com/74/
Kadono's, in typically eccentric fashion, apparently features Purple Haze.

Out of Context Theater Presents: Trust The Cybercactus

From Splatter: Naked Blood, which is actually less exploitative and more disturbing than you'd guess from the title. It's very Cronenberg actually, with a very sterile-surreal medical ero-guro vibe going on. It's unsettling in the way I was kind of expecting Lychee Light Club to be. I found it quite harrowing to watch, actually, don't let this benign cactus-voyeur interlude lull you the way it did me. BuyerNetflixer beware on this one.