Jonathan Clements is a longtime translator and industry insider, and more importantly, an informed and witty writer. In the '90s he edited the fantastic magazine Manga Max, home of many thoughtful reviews of translated and untranslated material (many later recycled into the Anime Encyclopedia), and his regular columns in Neo and the defunct Newtype USA were and are the best reason to read either. And now a few hundred pages of those columns have been rescued from stacks of periodicals and collected in one place.
"Schoolgirl Milky Crisis" is a long-running gag, a generic Engrish series title Clements uses to protect the innocent in a variety of blind items (usually; there's at least one very amusing incident involving a "Kazuhiro Domu", famous for creating a manga and anime about psychic teenage bikers). Most of the material in this book of the same name is kind of inside-baseball, but frankly, if you're the kind of person willing to read a blog about anime and manga, let alone this one, it's pretty much unmissable. The essays, interviews, and lecture transcripts are breezy, knowing, sometimes self-deprecating, but rarely arch. It's a book that sees and promotes the respectable heights anime and manga are capable of, but understands and has affection for what they usually are. I mean, look at that cover.
Overall, it's a bathroom-reader kind of book, easy to jump in and out of and with essays conveniently grouped by topic, as the scope ranges widely, with occasional entries on other Asian animation and film, but mostly focused on anime, manga, and the business of translating them (not unlike this blog, and I'm interested in A. Cunningham's response to Clements' stories of teaching English abroad, and adventures in pro translation). The reviews of themed manga magazines are particularly amazing (with subjects ranging from golf, to gothic romance, to pachislot), and being who I am I can't resist quoting this bit from "Five Girls Named Moe: The Anime Erotic":
"Modern developments in Japanese animation reflect a mildly disturbing trend in these dating sims and moe games. Which is that some girls come in and out of fashion. [...] Today, the fashionable girl reflects the increasing isolation of the audience. She is young, perhaps even underage, she is stupid to the point of being retarded, and hence goes along with everything. She is submissive, to the extent that she will fuss and cook and clean for a lazy boyfriend like she's some kind of doormat-mother substitute. And she is so shallow and so needy that she will have paroxysms of joy if her love object so much as says a kind word."
For further information, I refer you to Clements' blog, which he was kind enough to set up for the express purpose of reprinting columns that didn't quite make the cut for reprint.
"She is young, perhaps even underage, she is stupid to the point of being retarded, and hence goes along with everything. She is submissive, to the extent that she will fuss and cook and clean for a lazy boyfriend like she's some kind of doormat-mother substitute. And she is so shallow and so needy that she will have paroxysms of joy if her love object so much as says a kind word."
ReplyDeletePerfection.
I need to look into this man's work.
Everyone does!
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