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Column by Scott Green

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Anime News Network has called attention to a Yonhap News Agency report that Futabasha, publisher of the original Old Boy manga, is suing the Korean film production company Show East over rights relating to the Hollywood remake. Futabasha asserts that Show East violated, and nullified, their contract when they pushed for the production of a film remake with Universal Pictures. This lawsuit, filed on Monday, was revealed at the Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday.

The planned Hollywood project had Steven Spielberg and Will Smith in discussion, with the intension to model the remake on the original Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi manga rather than the Chan-wook Park directed Korean adaptation.

The Eisner Award winning manga was released in North America by Dark Horse.

Manga Spotlight:
Old Boy
Volumes 1-3
by Tsuchiya Garon and Minegishi Nobuaki
Released by Dark Horse Manga

Tsuchiya Garon and Minegishi Nobuaki's Old Boy manga has an almost second-cousin like relationship to Park Chan-wook's adaptation. If you've encountered the Park Chan-wook version, you can see the resemblance, and more importantly, you know what to expect from the manga, but the lineage and upbringing is substantially different. The manga is neither as artful or as beautifully, bizarrely disorienting as Park's version. It's not putting on a stunning visual display while playing games with the observer’s mind.

The gritty gangster potboiler could be thought of as inverted noir. Rather than investigating an external history, this Philip Marlowe is beating down doors trying to discover the truth behind his own past.
The kernel of Park's inspiration is still evident in the game being played, but with this twist, the manga is more directly screwing with the genre than it is the viewer/reader.

Rather than Oh Dae-su's 15 years of imprisonment, the manga's protagonist has spent 10 years jailed in a slummy apartment. He has spent this time, in what he compares to a monastery existence, preparing his body for a war on his unknown captors and catching glimpses at the outside world through television. Given a new suit, told that some people want revenge without death on their conscience and released back into the world, at age 34 he's been reborn as a man with no name. Diving into the Sin City of yakuza and toughs around him, it isn't log before he's judo thrown and muy thai kicked some ruffians, swilled some beer and taken a cute young woman's virginity.

So this hero knows that a third party was contracted to punish him by locking him up for a decade, but, he doesn't know who had it in for him or why. He's a scruffy guy with a dangling cigarette, an awful hair cut and the ability to handle himself in a fight, who sees a city full of bad elements, but little idea where to start. This situation boxes him ib again. Physically free, he's still a rat in a maze, stuck following the trail that his query deliberately leaves for him.

Compared to Park's Oh Dae-su, this version of the character is younger, less mentally cracked and didn't start out as a fuck-up. Instead, he was a regular guy, not given to questioning thoughts, who was harden, or in current political terms, radicalized, by his years imprisoned.

This is not a manga of Park's Old Boy. The same premise and twists yield different genre-bending results. Park's protagonist went from a drunken mess to an attention commanding urban wildman whose appearance alone immediately etches itself into the memory as the mark of a unique entity. The manga's version goes from everyman to genre convention, which isn't an uninteresting transformation. That this hero resemblances as textbook badass is part of the work's fun.

Those who are familiar with where the story is going will really appreciate how the manga is architected to throw crime noir into a maze of funhouse mirrors. Despite his street beating, the hero is not some sharp Sam Spade. As someone made into a tough guy, then spun around and made to walk into walls, he's the wrong guy for the job. But, thinking of himself as at war with the unknown antagonist, he's too personally wrong to abandon the mission. In his anger, he pulls some fast moves and thinks that he has freed himself, but rather than allowing himself to set the pace of the war, it is evident that he is putting his neck further into the noose.

The manga is kept from being dire by comic half beats. Especially given the characters exaggerated, rounded features, and especially knowing that the events are orchestrated by a half-known, half-visible force, it is possible to take the context and its events seriously and at the same time chuckled with a sort of meta-level detached appreciation. Without being gratuitously over the top, the events are striking enough that you feel for the characters, and you feel above them. Watching the hero as he's deliberately twisted around, watching yazuka in over their heads, watching scenarios such as one where a feme fatale has the hero bring her to orgasm to retrieve a clue that was fed to the her via post hypnotic suggestion, the manga is simultaneously gritty and gleefully offbeat.

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