Bluesman en Francais at digiBidi.com

Greetings friends! Akileos, the publisher of the French edition of Bluesman, has entered into an agreement with a digital comics hub called digiBidi for distributing the electronic edition of Bluesman en Francais. The website administrators were kind enough to pass along this link to a 16 page preview and now I'm passing it on to you. On a personal note, Pablo's cover for this edition is immensely badass and I can't wait to get a copy of this for myself someday soon. Enjoy!

Bryan Talbot's Grandville Trailer

Review: Pluto Vol 1

Pluto Volume 1
By Naoki Urasawa adapted from material by Osamu Tezuka and with writing input from the Tezuka estate
Viz Media
200 Pgs, PC, SC, $12.99
ISBN# 1421519186

By the time that manga pioneer, Osamu Tezuka was beginning to react creatively to the more sophisticated gekiga manga that had developed in the wake of his own influence, he was largely finished with the property that, fairly or unfairly, defines his legacy both in Japan and abroad, Astro Boy. This is not to say that Astro Boy lacks in gravitas or moral complexity. In contrast, however, to later works Phoenix or Buddha, Tezuka shows less of an impulse to drive the often grim foundations of his boy robot story to the extent of their logical, ethical conclusions. Fundamental inequities persist between humanity and machines because they must in order to justify the next story and then the next one after that. These realities may be enough to throw a slight damper on the emotional timbre of yet another otherwise triumphant victory for Japan’s most revered boy robot but it is certainly not enough to make him question his obligations to either his robot brethren or the often-flawed humans that created him.

In Pluto, the reader is offered the chance to change history or, at least, to view it from a different perspective as provided by artist and creator Naoki Urasawa. While one might be tempted to see this as a cultural analogue to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (National Icon Undergoes Radical Reimagination at the Hands of Contemporary Proponent of Bad-Assedness; Creators Roll in Grave.), the opening volume suggests that it is anything but by the ways that Urasawa’s differentiates Pluto from its source material in Astro Boy.

It begins with a question of scale. The story is drawn from a single episode among thousands that make up the Astro Boy series. If the work is to be a long-form serial, this necessitates first that Urasawa’s pacing be positively glacial in contrast to Tezuka’s frenetic original. The question then becomes: With what do we fill the extra space? Urasawa’s choice is two-fold; first, to explore in greater depth the ethical questions posited but never fully explored by Tezuka in the original and, to give every character in the story the same depth of backstory as its original protagonist, Astro (Atom) enjoyed.

Urasawa’s unique storytelling voice (comparable here to another of his works available in English, Monster) is on display to devastating emotional effect. His segments tend to build tension slowly, grounding in the often mundane aspects of ordinary life, but always progressively moving towards some event of unspeakable horror that is more often felt in its impact than witnessed directly. Where Tezuka imagines that the world would have Great Robots like it does Wonders of the World, Urasawa dwells on the relationship each one might have with the people who created it to save them. He appropriates Tezuka’s underlying theme for the Astro Boy series as a body of work, the elusive nature of consciousness, and uses it as the fuel to drill into the socioeconomic ramifications of thinking machines returning from a brutal war to reintegrate into the countries that have deified them as war gods.

With only one volume from which to pronounce a judgment on Pluto, the best I can really say is, “More, please.” Having established his credibility with English-translated manga readers with Monster, Pluto’s uniform excellence and savage drama come as no surprise. The only question lingering as I opened the book was whether Pluto would read like a loving but unnecessary retread of a time-honored classic or something vital unto itself. For me, the answer was resounding and unmistakable and I’m now very enthused, lord willing and if the creek don’t rise, to let Urasawa kick a hole in the top of my head as often as Viz will put a new volume of this out on the market.

Offered without comment

Liberal Artistry update

I've just posted a response to Plato's Crito on Liberal Artistry, the collaborative blog I write with my wife dedicated to reading from and responding to the Great Books of the Western World series.

Check it ooooooout!

Review- Phoenix: Karma

Phoenix: Karma (Vol. 4)
By Osamu Tezuka, trans. Jared Cook, Shinji Sakamoto and Frederik L. Schodt
Viz Media/Editor’s Choice, edited by Ian Robertson
360 pgs, B&W, $15.95
ISBN 1591163005

The fifth segment of the Phoenix cycle, reprinted in the fourth volume of the Viz English editions, is one of its finest. The scope is narrowed (for the most part) to a single human lifetime. Its themes are (nearly) reduced to a thorough meditation on one simple idea, karma. From a visual standpoint, Osamu Tezuka’s illustrative genius and relentlessly creative storytelling techniques are nearly without peer among his own immense body of work which, on average, enjoys few peers among his contemporaries. Simply put, there is a unity of focus to Karma that directs every aspect of the story towards the common but elusive goal of articulating the notion of karma in a way that is both visceral and nuanced, not to mention, ultimately effective beyond the sum of those parts.

Karma is set in the seventh century of the Common Era, known in Japan as the Nara Period. It was a paradoxical time as the government was consolidating its power over the people (thus fostering a distinctly Japanese sense of nationalism) by emulating the more advanced culture of the Chinese, especially in regards to integrating Buddhist worship into the affairs of the state. Karma, then, is the story of two sculptors with cruelly intertwined destinies that are swept up by their craft into the company of holy men and warlords determined to build a giant statue of the Buddha as a symbol of the state’s power.

The most noticeable element of Karma’s narrative design is Tezuka’s emphasis on complementing pairs of ideas. This tendency exhibits itself most forcefully in the cast; twin sculptors, twin holy men, rival politicians, women characterized as the polar opposite of their lover. It extends further into the structure itself as the narrative is split, perhaps unequally, between the two sculptors as they careen down remarkably similar paths of destiny towards their final awful meeting. The first, Gao is disfigured at birth by his father’s well-intentioned piety and begins Karma about as low on the social totem pole as one might be able to muster. The cruelty of his community starts him down a path of mindless brutality that defies the justification that might come for a victim of both the Gods and men. It is in this low state that he casually maims the second sculptor Akanemaru, reducing him to a one-armed state that mirrors Gao’s own.

There are two equally compelling readings of Karma, one limited in its focus to this book alone and one that considers how it reads within the Phoenix cycle as a whole. As a self-contained book, Tezuka zeroes in on notions about redemption and corruption and uses the two men’s lives as the tapestry on which to sketch out his thought experiments. Gao and Akanemaru are set up from the beginning as polar opposites—the former, disfigured, amoral, and sociopathic and the latter, handsome, pious, and gifted. Gao does everything wrong, for the wrong reasons and is essentially rehabilitated by his karma almost against his will. His transformation from villain to saint follows the Socratic axiom that when confronted with the truth, no man will choose the bad thing over the good. While Tezuka takes his sweet time in revealing that truth to Gao, his redemption is absolute and irrefutable.

Considered more broadly (most directly in context with the other works in the Phoenix cycle but tangentially in context with Tezuka’s fictional biography of the Buddha), Karma offers some equally interesting insights about the philosophical relationship of the Phoenix cycle to Buddhism. There is no disputing that Tezuka’s ruminations on the human condition in the Phoenix cycle are informed by his appreciation for and understanding of religions from all over the world. That said, it is also plain from the series’ beginning unto its end that the Phoenix philosophy is as indebted to Buddhism as the Japanese culture of which Tezuka was both a part and an active contributor.

In the two segments of the Phoenix saga that are set in time prior to Karma (Dawn and Yamato), the Phoenix’s message to humanity is presented as a sort of perennial philosophy that supersedes superstition and religion by virtue of the experiential nature of her revelation; at once in harmony with the animistic beliefs held by Japan’s original indigenous peoples as the well as practice of Shinto that developed alongside the subsequent Yamato culture. Contrasted against either of those worldviews, both the substance and mode of transmission of the Phoenix’s message are different and, inarguably superior.

What makes Karma unique among the historical pieces up this point is the direct contrast that it provides between Tezuka’s philosophy (as delivered through the Phoenix) and that of Buddhism. The distance between them, surprisingly, is measured not in doctrine but in mode of transmission. Both sculptors experience in their lifetime a set of complementing revelations, Buddhist and Phoenixian. One would be hard pressed to draw meaningful contrasts between the essence of both revelations and, indeed, can easily interpret them as yet another example of the conspicuous doubling that goes in this volume. Where the Buddhist revelations come through the teaching and example of each man’s spiritual mentor (a mystery revealed by a mortal to a mortal), the Phoenix’s revelations, as always, are experienced in the first person as a transcendent supernatural event. This gnostic primacy, along with Tezuka’s thinly-veiled criticisms of state-sponsored religion being used most often as tool of oppression and control, strengthens the thematic ligature binding each of the smaller segments of the Phoenix cycle into a cohesive whole but never completely erases the sense that Karma might just have easily been converted into one of the many winding sub-plots of Buddha.

One of the joys of reading the Phoenix series is that, read in any order, one finishes each volume convinced that it is slightly better than all the rest only to be disproven upon finishing the next. My best argument for Karma as among the finest in the Phoenix cycle lies in Tezuka’s relentless examination of a narrow topic from as many angles as he can muster. Not unlike the Gospel of Luke, the effect of the thematic doubling that permeates this story is one of magnification and, while cumbersome at times, serves its function well. Karma is also among Tezuka’s grimmer pieces but seeks the middle path throughout between depravity and sublimity and, by its end, manages to salvage something resembling inner peace from the shambles of human wreckage.

Read the review of Dawn

Read the review of Future

Read the review of Yamato

Read the review of Space

Review: Final Crisis #1-7

Final Crisis #1-7
Written by Grant Morrison, Art by JG Jones, various
DC Comics
32 pgs/ea, FC, $3.99/ea

For those looking for evidence that superhero comics have evolved into a fictional pornography informed by abstract allusions that would make a Kabuki dancer seem positively obtuse in her movements, they need search no further than Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Billed as the final chapter in the saga that began in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths back in the 1980s and continued in 2006’s Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis exhibits some of the same narrative strategies from Morrison’s recent run on Batman; forcibly reconciling decades worth of accrued continuity into a presumably cohesive whole. In this case, Morrison draws heavily upon Jack Kirby’s relatively late contribution to the DC canon, commonly referred to as the Fourth World Saga, and juxtaposes the cosmic promise left unfulfilled in Kirby’s abandoned opus against the convoluted multiverse structure that presumably explains (for example) how Superman could fight in World War II and also be a teenager during any decade that was convenient to the purpose of a given generation of storytellers’ needs.

Despite its heady ambitions, Final Crisis is troubled comics by any standard. Morrison’s tachycardic pacing hums along at about 40 bpms faster than the visual storytelling, creating the sensation that one is reading the story in a side-view mirror (where, as you know, things are bigger than they appear). The story is often hobbled by side references to entire comics that are not these seven that inform its plot movement in crucial ways, like an Eliot poem where the primary source material is drawn not from Milton or Aquinas but a recent issue of the Blue Beetle where Firestorm guest-stars. To the creators’ credit, this is some of the most nicely composed and wrought utter nonsense that money can buy. Morrison does not disappoint when it comes to bringing the mean and scary and artist Jones (getting by with the help of his friends) creates a visual world that is at once erotic and really discomforting. What Final Crisis lacks is not in execution but purpose.

Because, as we all know, the purpose of these giant, multi-line wide crossover is to make an amount of money and, ultimately, that is what Final Crisis is designed to do. Each issue hinges on some impossible unbelievable thing (well, by the DCU standards) actually happening. It’s all the nightmare scenarios, ticked off like a checklist as Morrison decides that the way to write a Crisis to end all Crisises is to just have them all again but all at once. Within the tangle of competing narrative threads, the integrity of the strand that ties them all together is constantly under stress and, in some cases, snaps altogether, only to mystically appear a few pages later. Whatever enjoyment I was able to extract from the jumble (meticulously crafted, aesthetically pleasing but jumble nonetheless), it baffles me how anyone with less than a PhD equivalent in DC continuity, past and present (and future probably wouldn’t hurt either) could even read this in anything but utter confusion and dismay. Maybe that’s Morrison and crew’s way of making superhero comics dangerous again but I think the gravest danger here is boring bored to tears.