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Column by Scott Green
Manga Spotlight: Black Jack Volumes 5 and 6 Released by Vertical Inc. Previews Here
Before Skynet and Doraemon tag team to exterminate humanity, the cabal of quantum artificial intelligences will assert their genius by writing more Black Jack stories. I based that theory on the supposition that this is the kind of work that an AI would produce if it achieved artistic mastery, in that it is the antithesis of stories that provoke "where did that idea come from!?" befuddlement. The cerebral network used to construct Black Jack's chapter long plots is imprinted right on the page, ready to be reverse engineered. One could Visio out a diagram. "Artistic mastery" certainly describes Tezuka's work. His creativity can't be overstated. In terms of experimenting with and getting the most out of what can be visually convey in manga, he was one of the medium's foremost minds. There is no contradiction in suggesting that beyond these uncertain elements of trying something new, or trying something lateral, bringing in ideas from cinema or other forms of storytelling, there is a mechanistic quality to Black Jack's stories, as if they were the product of input being passed through a processor. The inputs are what caught Tezuka's attention or sparked his interest. A quirk of genetics is fed into the BJ engine along side Tezuka's notion of Texan justice. Or, his concepts of Catholicism and Italian culture provide the material from which a religious variation on the theme is conceived. There's no apparent filter blocking in this intake. The results can be exquisitely strange, as in "Nadare:" Fatal Attraction recast with the Glenn Close part played by a deer with augmented intelligence. They can be meta, as in "Pinoko's Mystery:" in which Tezuka toys around with rewriting the premise for his creations. Or, they can jump genres, as in "Twice Dead:" which started with a Hitchcockian moment of cinematic suspense, proceeding into drama set in hospital corridors and finalizing in an Inherit the Wind/12 Angry Men legal social debate. One story is delicately poetic and the next is a farcical parody with a shogun's procession of Tokyo University grads turning there nose down on alumni of less prestigious institutions. One story has a youth that looks suspiciously like the man who would become the Dirty Uncle of Manga, Go Nagai - the mind behind the transforming magical girl, the internally piloted giant robot and the combining giant robot, not to mention salacious marvels like Kekko Kamen and Violence Jack. Another visually and then explicitly reference gross out horror manga luminary Hideshi Hino. Created in an age before Tarantino, YouTube and every issue of New Yorker up to 2006 collected on eight DVDs, this is the media lovers dream - reaction to a cornucopia of inspirations in a manner that is informed and opinionated. Spun on a weekly basis, Tezuka was operating with remarkable vitality as he wove ideas into stories. There are times where he overclocks his work to keep pace with the input. Even within a given story, the manga might meander. "Downpour" in volume six feels like it packs in as many convolutions as one of Tezuka's epics over the course of its twenty something pages - starting with a repaid debt, firing up friction between a surgeon and an internal medicine specialist, then getting tangled up in romance, character history and civic politics. Yet, even then, there is an effecting perspective corralling the venture. The processing engine of Black Jack is Tezuka's philosophy as expressed by the titular renegade surgeon. This is the polar opposite of Tezuka's other best known character, Astro Boy. Where Astro is a primary colored super hero with his large red boots and green belt, Black Jack is a stark figure, dressed either in white surgery scrubs or a dramatic black cloak, marked with a half discolored, scarred face, crowned by a black discord of hair highlighted with a shock of white. Where Astro is an innocent who experiences and reacts to the world, Black Jack is a formed character. In part due to the near non-continuity between the stand alone stories, the character does not adapt. However, even if Black Jack was featured in a more novelistic manga, along the lines of Tezuka's epics like the Phoenix books or Ode to Kirihito, he would still likely be a static character. His function is to stand for a value system. Black Jack is not without personality and charm. On one hand, he is a two fisted surgeon who isn't above setting some knuckles across the face of someone who gets in his way, or allowing retribution to occure when he believe it's proper. On the other, the character is far from humorless, for example smirking at the absurdity of a rouse as he allows himself to be tricked into operating on a needy child without compensation. While the character is not robotic, he presents a defined process, a sort of moral algorithm. There is an interpretation of the Hebrew bible premised that while humans have free will, there is a proper course for every action. In that view, one of the roles of scripture is to provide an exhaustive set of laws to direct all eventualities. The manga has a comporable opperating principle. When it comes to the topics addressed by Black Jack, a licensed physician himself, "God of Manga" Tezuka is similarly unequivocating. The manga does not pretend that medicine is a panacea, but it insists on its fundamental role in a framework for valuing and preserving human life. As the prophet of this ideology, Black Jack directs any situation that Tezuka envisions without being thrown for a loss. The Black Jack volumes that Vertical offers feature a selected order of stories that is different from the original, serialized publication. I don't believe it's a case of finding patterns where they don't exist to say that these books fall into vague, volume-based patterns. Some of the early ones looked to test Black Jack's conviction. Tezuka probed his own philosophy as Black Jack was subjected to crises of faith and situation. Though the character was harrowed, Tezuka's ideas were affirmed by his surrogates unwavering dedication. Volume 7 looks again at his adherence to his moral framework, both in the actions from which he will not be dettered, and in the actions to which he refuses to be party. Unlike those earlier volumes, Black Jack is not a legendary hero, suffering and overcoming to exemplify a principle. In volume seven's stories, his role is more that of messenger or observer. He'll step in to perform a surgery that occasionally serves the role of catalyst, but more often than not in this volume, the operation does not direct the course of events. For example, in "Revenge," Black Jack simply practices civil disobedience. In refusing to be licensed and join the medical community, he illustrates the flawed priorities of that establishment. Other stories emphasize Black Jack's role as pure life saver whose exorbitant fees underscore the value of human life and whose indiscriminant case work removes social distinction from that value. Whether it's the son of a laborer or an industrialist, whether it puts him on the line against police or criminals, Black Jack undertakes the effort. A contributing factor to the mechanistic quality of the Black Jack manga is its kit of reusable pieces - otherwise known as the Tezuka Star System. Growing up, Tezuka was frequently exposed to the all female performers of the Takarazuka Revue. This familiarity with theatre informed his work as a manga artist. Knowing the stage, he rejected it as a metaphor for framing images, moving away from a front-center view of the action. Conversely he looked to the model of theatre for a cast of characters. Designs appear over and over throughout Tezuka's work, and even repeated within a specific one such as Black Jack, with type cast members of the troupe loyally filling their role from one diverse story to the next. The story "Con Man, Aspiriting" is particularly worthy of a declaration of "Tezuka Bingo!" The atypically large round up of familiar faces opens with a poor woman in a patch dress bringing a bundled child to a clinic. The mother is Sapphire, heroine of Tezuka's proto-shoujo fairytale, concerning a girl with both female and male hearts who assumes the identity of a prince to inhert her kingdom's throne - along with adult Melmo, Sapphire is one of the women characrer type seen most often throughout Black Jack The baby is Sharaku Hosuke, aka "the Three Eyed Boy" a Charlie Brown-ish kid with a bandage covering a mystical third eye - signifiying power hidden below a meek, even feedle exterior The blustering clinic doctor is Tezuka's famous gruff elder Ban Shunsaku, best known as Astro Boy's teacher - already in Black Jack as a veteran pick pocket amoung other rolls The child's rough, belligerent father is Marukubi Boon, based on French actor Lino Ventura (he serves as a police inspector in volume 5) Calling in even more of his stars, lacky or morally compremised personalities Ham Egg (the circus ring master with the pencil moustach who bought Astro Boy) and Acetylene Lamp (large glasses, knotched head, sometimes cartooned with a candle resting on the back of his head) appear as the father's co-workers during the course of a flash back Duke Red (the villain of Metropolis) soon turns up as an unscruplous doctor in another memory. There's strange casting throughout these Black Jack stories, such as when Ambassador Magma, the giant robot turned star of Japan's first color tokusatsu show (less than a week ahead of Ultraman) turns up as the injured father, trapped in an elevator with his son and Black Jack by an earth quake. The Magma-dad points to some of the cheekiness in Tezuka's casting of his stars. Yet, Tezuka is nether cavalier nor lazy with his used of these designs. As humanist as Tezuka's sentiments might be, his works do call attention to patterns in human action with an air of peccimism. A. Lamp might be a cop in one story or a criminal in the next, but when that character turns up, he's representing a personality type or a set of behaviors. In a given story, that instance of A. Lamp might be forced to change his perspective or might not survive the events, but the character is not exhausted in the venture. The second type of reused element is particularly relevent to volume 5. If there is in fact a theme or purpose to the volume, it's contextualizing Black Jack. Continuinity is not entirely abscent from Black Jack. The scars that mark his face are part of a history that is revealed over the course of the series. One story in v. five points to known elements in that past as a source of inspiration for others. Beyond that, there are characters with which Black Jack has a history. Foremost amoung these is his adorable or creapy, child sidekick/assistent/"wife" Pinoko - a parasitic twin who Black Jack saves with the aid of an articial body. In the previously mentioned, meta-heavy Pinoko's Mystery, Tezuka games her origin, shows her drinking, and otherwise has fun with the character concepts. Other characters who return for the volume include Black Queen - today's progressive is tommorow's fossil. The gender politics behind this character haven't stood the test of time, either in this incarnation, or in her other Tezuka role - Zephyrus of Swallowing the Earth. Here, she is a dedicated nurse, willing to supress her humanity to take the ncessary steps to preserver lives. In her previous appearence, Black Jack stepped in to ensure that she is able to maintain a relationship with her fiance, allowing her to avoid forgoing being a woman to be a live saver Biwamaru - the blind acupuncturist (a minor Star System actor, also appearing as a blind muscician in Dororo) who represents one opposite to Black Jack's approach to health, viewing surgery as an unnatural invasion of the human body Dr. Kiriko - the foremost anti-Black Jack. A brilliant surgeon whose war experience left him a proponent of euthanasia. He and Black Jack engage in several races to save or peacefully end lives over the course of a volume that also introduces Kiriko's family and his history. Black Jack reminds me of a kinetic sculpture in that it is an ingeniously contrived clockwork expression of a set of laws. The patterns of human behavior are traced and, in some instances, redirected by medical ethics. Those ethics are immutable and, as speculated by Tezuka's Phoenix cycle, the patterns will persist as long as the species does. This approach does not extend the promise of a dynamic narrative that mark popular manga works like Naruto. In place of the momentum of a long form story is the philosphical conviction and the flexibility to work that mindset into any concept that crosses into Tezuka's expansive consideration.
Manga Spotlight: Shaman Warrior Volume 7 By Park Joong Ki Released By Dark Horse Volume 1 eComic can be read at here
Shaman Warrior is the Ong Bak of comics. Five years ago, If I simply recommended watching a Muay Thai flick with a guy named Tony Jaa, it's doubtful that the suggestion would land on many "to do" lists. If I showed you a clip of Jaa leveling a heavy weight bar fighter with a power kick to the face, then kneeing and elbowing the foe into concussion-ville when the bruiser tried counter-attacking, that would be a different story. Shaman Warrior possesses the same sort of phone book tearing muscle in its action spectacle. It doesn’t matter if you have preexisting interest in its genre or medium, because Shaman Warrior's wuxia meets MMA battles have the juice to tear down any antipathy. Shaman Warrior is one of a number of Korean manhwa dealing with tribal and or feudalistic society in a fantasy setting, often situated in outposts along a wasteland. A number of these possess commendable elements - Banya: The Explosive Delivery Man squanders an effective high concept, Lord of the Rings style battles and some of the best monster illustration in the medium with an aggravating ending. Chunchu: The Genocide Fiend is a bit confused and overcomplicated, but it does have characteristics that I believe would be found to be appealingly comparable to many Final Fantasy games. While these series and others are recommendable, they don't have the creative momentum to leap a gap of apathy towards Korean desert sword fights. Alternatively, Shaman Warrior is the kind of work that could inject some adrenaline into any action fan, regardless of their media preferences. Shaman Warrior is set in one of those tribal wasteland societies. This one has bloodlines of shaman with extraordinary abilities, and as such could be considered low fantasy. In practice, the powers don't accomplish much more than the liberties taken by most semi-realistic samurai manga. If one of the people in question gets a foot onto the thigh of a guy from which to vault, they can leap over the heads of a few other combatants. Actions like this stretch the potential of human athletic ability, but no one is tossing fireballs or teleporting. Nor are there any unearthly creatures to be found. After outliving their wartime usefulness, an extermination order was issued for these shaman bloodlines. Before falling to the slaughter, Yarong entrusted his infant daughter Yaki to his non-shamanic comrade Batu. After successfully harboring Yaki for several years, Batu works with his former assassin associate Genji to hide Yaki in one of the most brutal places imaginable, the Butcher Camp, where he was savagely trained for Ssireum-Korean wrestling- style competition and Genji was trained in the killing arts. In the subsequent years, while Yaki is beaten into competitive shape, Batu works with his new allies repay to Yarong's killers. Architecting a series is not Park Joong Ki's forte. Despite an evident arc for Shaman Warrior's nine episode run, the manhwa doesn't adhere to a sharps focus. Efforts to establish context, allies and antagonists might be necessary or advantageous, but in the way that they are handled, the secondary developments feel like distractions. Consequently, the manhwa reads like it is the wrong length, as if it needed either a longer run, with more space in which to flesh out these contributing elements or more focus, with its attention narrowed to Batu, Yaki and their conflict. Park Joong Ki places engaging characters into a plot with tendencies to drift into the familiar or the confused. Yet, this fault does not shake Shaman Warrior enough to addle its foundation. While I can think of people who have read bookcases more comics and manga than me, I would claim that I have taken more than a representative sample of the media. I'd also claim that I've read enough fight comics/manga to qualify myself as someone who knows what they're talking about in that arena. Shaman Warrior is not the most brutal or the most visceral. It's not one of the works that get you so revved up reading, that you walk away with thoughts of hitting something. I would call it the best choreographed fight comic that I've seen. Park Joong Ki has an uncanny ability to place the actors on the battlefield. There's what I call shorthand in action comics/manga/manhwa: the extended fist that is accepted as a punch; the held out blade that registers as a sweep of the sword. The person throwing the punch or swinging the sword does not need to be in range of the target in the previous panel or even in a posture that would lend itself to moving into striking position. It's a comic, so the mind fills in the preceding setup movements, even if there wouldn't have been a reasonable transition. What distinguishes Park Joong Ki's work is that it adheres to a strict physical logic. Person A sweeps their sword in aright to left hook. Person B ducks under the blade such that they are now bent towards the center of person A. A responds with a right leg kick to the throat of B. You can look at the page, deconstruct the flow of action and see its sequence without having to figure out or imagine the lead in to any motion. In and of itself, I'd find this attention to fight logic cause to give the comic/manga/manhwa a vigorous thumbs up. Park Joong-Ki soars off that foundation with engagements that are clever, complex and brutal. You have Batu the heavyweight wrestler who’s picked up a large sword in his travels in addition to his various causes for rage. You have Genji, who turns up with some nasty throwing daggers and incendiary devices. And, you have Yaki ricocheting off foes, trying to get at their vitals with a small blade. The pandemonium sets in as emotions burn away survival instincts, guys get grabbed by their chest wounds, swords clash and blades and bombs fly. If you don't think comics can manage an exciting fight without super powers or shonen extravagance, check this out. Shaman Warrior either tried to fit too much plot into its nine volumes or nine volumes were not enough space to work through its objectives. As such, the story is not as satisfying as it perhaps could have been. Yet, there is an incomparable clarity to Park Joong-Ki's action scenes. The characteristics of the fighters as well as their motions are captured with a precision that is rarely found in the medium. Because of that visual articulateness, Park Joong-Ki produces narratives within the fight scenes that are captivating enough to elevate the manhwa. A Korean low fantasy might be the last place you would be inclined to look for a thrill, but Shaman Warrior is the kind of work that rewards a dabble into the unfamiliar.
