What the fuck happened to Kiba Kouichi, anyway?

One volume of short stories done over several years (and released several years ago) is not enough.
Apparently he was working on a novel, and is now doing a cell phone comic.
And blogging a fuckload of boring crap.

Revenge of the Undeniable Truths

The ACTUAL top ten Manliest manga!

1. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, fucking obviously. I mean, come the fuck on. Manliness just pulses off the god damn page. And it has more pages than anything else. Except maybe Golgo 13, which isn't on this list because I haven't read it. But Jojo's! I have read many, many manga, and quite a number of them were actually better, but this will always be my favorite.

2. Souten Kouro - King Gonta's epic retelling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the villain's point of view is so god damn manly it makes women grow beards. Which is why it remains untranslated. They quiver in fear, the fairer sex. Quiver in awe at the sheer power contained within.

3. Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Burned - all the epically over the top retro robot kung fu hero styled madness of the Giant Robo anime, plus art heavily influenced by Jojo's. Also cuts out all that pansy ass time wasted on strong female leads. I kind of missed that, honestly, but fuck it, it has a dude with a chainsaw fighting a giant robot.

4. Kilico - Kouichi Kiba's works are always deranged - he's the manga answer to Drill Hole in the Brain's Maijo Otaro - and this is his longest, and stars a man with a really fucking big gun. Probably only ranks this low because I don't remember much about it.

5. Iron Wok Jan - You know what often defines manliness? Being a complete fucking dick.

6. Violence Jack - This probably deserves to be a bit higher on the sheer epic manliness scale, but I bumped it down a bit because I would be hard pressed to actually describe it as good. Diseased, yes. Fucking bizarre, yes. Good? Fuck no.

7. Ushio and Tora - ah, remember the days when shonen manga actually featured manly shonen? I'm trying to work out some crack about the hair extending super powers that doesn't involve me thinking about Ushio's balls, and failing. On a side note, an entire set of this is sitting randomly on a shelf in the Nintendo Starbucks.

8. Gunnm: Last Order - I think Joe already proved this point.

9. Vinland Saga - Vikings! Revenge!

10. Berserk - Phallic symbols!

I am hungry. To heck with writing more!

Shugo Tokumaru's Exit

The description of "Japanese pop" is enough for me to lose any sort of interest, but my curiosity usually gets the better of me -- thankfully, this is one of few times where I'm glad my expectations were wrong.

Shugo Tokumaru's Exit was recorded in 2007, released stateside in 2008, and I'm only getting around to giving it some justified listening in 2009. He will never be mistaken for a Tom Waits or Elliott Smith, but his sense of eclecticism and its relation to production doesn't ruin songs like, say, Animal Collective consistently do. I probably enjoy it a bit more than I should, but it's too short and fun for me to care.

Shugo Tokumaru's MySpace.

Ride Back, Episode 03

I am hoping that Andrew swoops in to assure me that the manga is better.

It's an alarming sign when the most exciting bits are the shounen-inspired race scenes. Rin is passively interesting, but cannot carry the work by herself. Shouko isn't much more than a wallflower. Suzuri needs to fall off a Ride Back and break her goddamn neck. I can't even remember the names of Glasses Guy and the other one. Katoaka is the Rival and Potential Plot Device right now. Okakura is the only one that grabs me, but that's largely because he bears an actual relation to the politics and history of the world -- the draw of the series to begin with!

I also am not optimistic that it'll be satisfying if they get around to "the war shit" as Andrew has previously described. The likelihood of hurried exposition that is revealed simply when it's convenient isn't my lone worry, either -- anime just rarely succeeds in presentation of politics. The only titles that meet that level have been made by Kenji Kamiyama, Mamoru Oshii or Satoshi Kon. Just about any other attempt either makes a superficial protest (Kamichu!, Now and Then, Here and There) or else becomes too apologetic (Gasaraki, Zipang).

Maybe Hideki Arai has spoiled me with The World is Mine and Kiichi!!, but that's still no fucking excuse for this apolitical attitude that Japan apparently has in their graphic mediums.

Jonathan Clements is better than you

There's no shame in it, just accept it and move on. And buy his books.

Undeniable facts

No book by Kia Asamiya can ever appear on a top ten list of anything. Unless that list is a "Top Ten Shittiest Things Ever Drawn" list. And he will undoubtedly be all ten fucking entries.
There is nobody worse. There never will be anyone worse. All his works should be burned, and his hands should be cut off and fed to his children.

Especially do not include one of his works on a top ten list of manly manga that does not include Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is required on just about any top ten list, particularly ones involving words like "Manly", "Awesome", "Fucking Awesome", "Orgasmic", "Genius", "Virile", "Oddly Gay", and "Fucking go read this now".

Zoo Finale: In the Falling Airplane

Nastily funny black comedy to wrap things up; rivals Seven Rooms as the best story in the book. An apologetic student hijacks a plane after failing the Tokyo University entrance exam for the fifth time. Any number of passengers try to stop him, but invariably trip on an empty soda can and get shot.
Meanwhile, a suicidal salesman is attempting to make one last sale - the poison he'd planned on killing himself with. Haggling furiously with him over the price is a woman on her way to get revenge on a man who did something unspeakable to her in high school. (We're not told what, but both the salesman and the hijacker nearly throw up when she tells them.)
Very dry all the way through. "Do you believe in the prophecies of Nostradamus?" is the salesman's opening line; "I'm not really in the mood to die," she explains, vaguely exasperated.
"If this were a manga, the hero would rally us together and we'd take the hijacker down. But if, for example, this were the last short story in a collection, we'd be doomed."

Zoo 09: The Word of God

Big return to form here. Narrator is not a pleasant individual...and he has the word of God, the power to make anyone do his bidding. But with one catch - he can't ever reverse the effect.
This starts out innocently enough, with his mother no longer being able to tell the difference between the cat and a cactus, but soon progresses to his father losing all his fingers, and concludes with the narrator discovering he has already murdered the entire population of the earth, and has used his own powers to keep himself from noticing.
Beautifully nasty.

Tokyo Gore Police cannot be summarized

... only recommended.

It's tasteless, erratic, ecstatic, and lots of other words. Only for those with a high tolerance for fake blood, rubber intestines, weaponized genitals, and the most horrific chair this side of Iain M. Banks. Familiarity with The Machine Girl a plus.

Goth: Mori no Yoru

I was more than a little surprised to see this title pop up on the novel release charts last month. Otsu Ichi is not exactly known for sequels, and Goth was written six years ago.
On closer inspection, the thing appears to be some sort of photo essay; the actress who played Morino in the movie teaming up with a photographer and Otsu Ichi to do 79 pages of text and story set a number of years after the original novel.
I'm curious, but not enough to actually pick it up...

I was totally not fucking kidding about trailer day

Goemon. Same director as Chassharn, and this also appears to be very pretty and utterly fail on every other aspect of filmmaking possible. Jesus, is that a lot of terrible fucking acting and writing. (I found the embed code!)

Yatterman. Miike Takashi on a big budget children's movie? Let's hope it's more The Great Youkai War (fucking awesome) than Zebraman (WTF happened?)
So um, neither of these exactly sold me, but they do both look batshit, which always at least intrigues.

Prepare yourself, AIRRRMASTERRRRRRRR

I come once again to praise this stupid, marvelous show. Air Master 6-14 are, if possible, even more awesome and insane than the first five, if a little more shakily animated.



Episode 6's budget nosedives horrifically in a way rarely seen nowadays, but thankfully the series manages to drag itself back out of the crater in fairly short order. After that initial burp, the fights become even more absurd and brutally, beautifully kinetic, to the point where they've pretty much ruined me for other shows.



While the fights are all serious business, pretty much everything else is strange as all hell. I'm way past the point where I can take fighting-anime plots seriously, and AM's apparent allergy to coherent narrative or characterization is a refreshing change from expecting me to actually, like, respect the internal logic of the story of a teenage gymnast turned antigravity street brawler. In this series, any damn thing can happen, and usually does. In fact, this block of the series has multiple arcs that start as oddball one-off fillers that randomly just refuse to end, and derail the show for several episodes.



The other thing this run of episodes has is plenty of Kaori Sakiyama. As commented last time, Kaori is that rarest of anime characters, the comic relief "rival" who becomes awesome in her own right, mainly due to sheer psychotic force of will (and occasionally channeling Devilman Lady). She is quite probably the best character in the series to date, even beating out the perpetually hung-over invincible gigolo. Cannot wait to see how this insanity ends.

French people are awesome

Apparently it is trailer day.
District B13 was fucking awesome; District B13: Ultimatum looks awesomer.
The teaser was a little overedited, and the trailer has too many French people yapping, but fuck it, it also has parkour dude flipping onto the balcony on the floor above.

Kamui Gaiden

Co-written by Kudo Kankuro - who wrote Ping Pong and a shit load of other great stuff, but has been largely doing comedy the last few years. Nice to seem him back to drama.
The manga is...well, strictly speaking, I haven't read the manga. This is Kamui Gaiden, and I read Kamui Den I (there's also a Kamui Den II).
Kamui Den I is uh...fascinatingly erratic, although I never actually finished it. Have all three series in a pile. But it basically lurches wildly between lengthy animal kingdom specials (heavy handed analogies), history lessons so heavily reflecting the author's communist beliefs they amount to propaganda, and crazy ass ninja shit.
My understanding is that Kamui Gaiden is just the crazy ass ninja shit, the author having mellowed out a bit.
More than enough to mine for awesome.

Ride Back 02

Finally found time to watch this.
Whoever the fuck is voicing this character:

Needs to have their voice box ripped out by jackals.
Then we need to stab fucking knitting needles through the director's ears for letting her fucking talk like that and eviscerate his show.
I can't even decide if the rest of the episode was at all watchable, because every time I thought I was safe she fucking squealed like a stuck pig being roasted alive and ruined everything.
Can't get on to the war shit fast enough.

Zoo 08: Closet

Um. This one's a puzzler; Otsu Ichi has mentioned that he's a big fan of traditional mysteries, with their endless boring explanations of ludicrously involved deductive chains no actual human would bother with (we have this thing called intuition which tends to skip a few pointless steps).
He occasionally tries to write them himself, but doesn't seem to be very good at it. He likes them too much, or something; the moment he tries to write a mystery he starts writing the sort of flat, cryptic non-entities that populate most mysteries - for a writer so good at sketching strong characters in his regular work, it's baffling how something like Closet, where you know nothing about the lead, and nothing about the detective other than "she has pale skin" which he keeps repeating, like it will help us care.
And while the parameters of the mystery did shift nicely at one point in the middle, the logic ultimately failed to add up, unless I was just past caring and missed a bit. I mean, we've proven how the killer left the room, so how does that lead back around to him still fucking hiding in the closet?
The most entertaining thing about this was that I totally misread the katakana for the victim's name, Ryuji. Everything was quite a bit stranger when I thought he was Luigi.

Disappearance Diary

"This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible."

The above quote opens Disappearance Diary, a filtered autobiographical manga by Hideo Azuma, known for his science-fiction works and as the father of lolicon. It's not an entirely fair representation of the book -- Azuma doesn't outright reject the hardships he went through, or that he didn't endure them because of his own shortcomings -- but it's an accurate indication to the distanced tone of his two disappearances and period of heavy drinking.

This "removal of realism" is what will divide readers who will find enjoyment over Azuma's failings and misadventures and those that will come away hating the man -- neither are wrong in their respective position. Azuma's restrained acknowledgment of what he put his loved ones through, as well as his editors and readers, is only reserved for two interviews, one posted at the end of the book and the other on the insides of flaps (the reality of the situation fittingly hidden). There's a couple nods to them inside Azuma's stories themselves, though hardly to the point of warranted sympathy. ("None of this was funny," Azuma insists, as he refuses to give any details of a particular reunion with him and his wife. The incident wasn't funny for him, I'm sure.) Azuma is simply more interested in making his life's derailments enjoyable to the readers -- which, when putting any sort of ethical obligations aside, he does succeed at.

I'll admit that I rarely laughed during my reading of the book. There are plenty of scenes throughout that are obviously intended to evoke laughter, but I mostly found them either cloying or else fitting to the bouyant tone of the story. (There are a few exceptions to this, such  as the ending of his first disappearance period at a police station, where it is revealed that one of the cops is a fan of Azuma's work, and has the artist draw and sign a piece for his child.) What continually carries Disappearance Diary is the fact that the stories are simply engaging. All of the little survival pieces and advice, along examinations of his jobs and of other's quirks, strengths and mistakes -- even if Azuma only superficially alludes to his own -- drive the tale, up until the conclusion partway through Azuma's alcoholic rehabiliation.

Though, in truth, there is no actual conclusion, no sort of All Important Moral to Learn from the book. Azuma implies a continuation to conclude his diversions from reality sometime in the near-future. Even if it is a detached enjoyment, I'll be looking forward to following it.

Eve no Jikan, Episodes 01-03

Japanese animation is all too often an emotionally and intellectually shallow subset of a medium. If an anime series features young girls in contrived, tragic situations, why it must be very deep -- ask any otaku who seeks out tragedy porn that isn't far removed from daytime soap operas, save for the characters' ages. And for depth? Who needs actual examination of socially and philosophically relevent themes (any of the four yoshitoshi ABe anime or Satoshi Kon's works) when all you apparently need is a love of pastiche and superficial real-world references (Ergo Proxy, Boogiepop Phantom, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence).

In this industry of melodrama and allusions, it makes it all the more satisfying when works like Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Eve no Jikan (Time of Eve) are created.

To give a brief background: Yoshiura's first foray into anime was Mizu no Kotoba (Aquatic Language). It's a quirky nine-minute short, charming in its rough artistry and decidedly different sense of humor. This was followed by an extremely ambitious work, Pale Cocoon, which remains as the best short film that I've ever seen. Aside from an interestingly subverted cyberpunk setting and gorgeous visuals, it features satisfyingly sharp commentary on heritage and knowledge. The film is is suitably moody; while not dark as is common with these type of stories, it definitely leaves a fair bit of time for introspection, in spite of the quick editing.

It only makes sense, then, that Yoshiura follows such a weighty piece with a story that is the tonal opposite, though not lacking any of the intelligence.

The premise and concepts are hardly originally, as has been pointed out with snide remarks by science fiction readers. Yet Eve no Jikan still succeeds because of the frank, playful nature of Yoshiura's storytelling. From wink-turned-stars to thought bubbles to fast-paced sequences of overlapping dialogue to the most convincing "camera illusion" in anime, it's hard not to view the series as straightforward fun. This lightning-fast writing and wit is complimented by a simple structure of introducing and fleshing out new characters -- be they human or not -- and ideas, all in the span of 15 minutes.

In fact, the short runtime of each installment is the only major mark against it, really: the production team is the same for each episode so as to maintain visual consistency (which is well worth the effort). This emphasis on detail means a long wait between releases, with the first episode of the "second season," episode four, set to come out in April.

If there is any sort of justice in this world, then the North American anime fandom will at last catch on to Yoshiura's underappreciated genius. Eve no Jikan is accessible and entertaining enough to do just that.

Taste the Chocolate Pain

The official US trailer basically adds a fucking awesomely terrible tag line. Midnight screenings February 6th in Seattle and a few other cities; DVD on Feb 10th - did they not think this would make money? I do not understand a world where that can be right.

Zoo 07: The White Hut in the Forest

Briefly thought about combining this with the next story, since my reaction to it can largely be summed up with the phrase, "What the fuck is this garbage?"
This is just a pointless grotesquerie about a man with a hole in his head who builds a home for himself out of human bodies. There was absolutely nothing good about it, and this fucker alone makes a strong case for a more traditional, selective approach to Otsu Ichi; you'd get access to the best of his earlier work, and not have to include his oddball diversions and occasional disastrous failures.