Category: Drama

AX Alternative Manga Vol. 1: Like Ramza Beoulve we are Heroic Heretics.

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hisuiconMy mother has a decent repertoire of meals she can make and not much beyond that. The problem was that my mom likes to try crazy new dishes in hopes of expanding her menu. On occasion we will get new meals everyone will enjoy but most of the time we get an inedible mess. This is the perfect analogy for the AX anthology. The main appeal of this book is that it is not a book of your standard Shonen Jump style manga. Some of the art has distinctly European and American influences, some of it looks like offbeat seinen and josei, and some of it is just plain ugly. The stories can often be extremely sexual and often throw out the idea of a conventional narrative. They push boundaries and try things no one has tried before for the better and for the worse. While this means when these comics work it can knock your socks off with how original they are it also means most of the time they are a mess.

This unique collection, the first of a presumed series, contains more than 30 very short manga approaching all subjects, genres, and art styles. More than anything AX allows its creators a large amount of freedom and encourages thinking outside the box. Anthologies like this are incredibly important to manga diversity. They showcase experimentation and go far beyond most of the manga one has access to in English. I hope to see collections like this continue to be made if only to further expand manga’s reputation and give people a place to try new things. All that being said, I didn’t like reading this nor did I think many of the stories succeeded.

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Paradise Kiss’s Hiroyuki: One Point on Two Triangles

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Paradise Kiss is all about relationships. Friends. Co-workers. Family. Lovers. And Paradise Kiss goes a long way to showing that all of these relationships, minor or major, make a difference and effect your decision, consciously or not. Growing through experience plays a solid tune throughout the series. As each character goes down their paths, some having a better idea of where they are headed than others, no one is alone on their journey. Hiroyuki, the seemingly average man among men, plays pivotal roles in much of the story despite being not quite part of the group.

hisuiconI always took away the message of Paradise Kiss being that what we think we want, what we actually want, what we need, and what we get are all very separate things. No matter how much we may try to get them to be the same we discover life is about dealing with the fact that these four things may never meet up no matter how much we try to make them. All the member of Paradise Kiss kiss deal with these clashes of desires and realities both romantically and professionally throughout the series. But there is one character who on the surface seems out of place. Hiroyuki Tokumori seems to be a minor character who is both above this and apart from this. But on further analysis we see that he is not only a key player in all the lives of the main characters but also just as torn and effected by these conflicts as everyone else.

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REPOST: Brief looks at The Color Trilogy.

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Color of Earth by Kim Dong Hwa strikes me as the Oscar-bait of manhwa; it is a prestige release. You release this to win awards and gain great praise from reviewers and comic experts but never get more than a handful of mainstream sales. It is a historical, slice-of-life comic about a young Korean girl named Ehwa and her journey towards womanhood. It depicts Ehwa discovering her first feelings for a boy which parallels her widowed mother finding a new love. It is quite frank about the physical development and emotional changes of growing up. Overall, I found in enjoyable if very sedate. The characters were engaging and I was slightly amused by their constant use of metaphor during conversation. It was a stark contrast to the very base matters that are often the point of discussion. The character designs are simple but effective and have a traditional ink drawing feel to them. The backgrounds alternate between being very ornate, especially with some of the full-page spreads, to totally nonexistent during conversations. Most people are going to be captivated immediately or quickly turned off by either the slice-of-life nature or the earthy tone of the book. Still it is a good read for people who want their comics to have the weight of more award-winning prose.

Color of Earth touts itself as a unique work and I would agree. It easily pushes itself with its matter-of-factness of learning about one’s sexuality but at the same time tends toward metaphor and innuendo in people’s conversations. As we follow Ehwa she often finds herself at a loss because of the way people phrase things. It goes to show that even though she has to learn these things, it can be hard to get people to give you a straight answer. And unfortunately that is what Ehwa really needs. But like everyone else in life, you learn about things eventually and get it all straight in your head, sort of. The mother and daughter relationship is at the forefront and the most interesting development in this book. As we go along they become more like confidants rather than parent and child. This seems to happen for a number of reasons, not the least of which is they don’t have any men in the house. The art is very classic feeling. It fits the time period of the book and makes it seem more like fine art than sequential at times. I’d say this series is worth checking out just based on having never read anything else like it. I can’t say it is a story I would normally read, but it is has a charm that requires me to finish reading it.

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