Graphic Novels

Yep, going back to subtitles for this monthly - hey, remember when Bibliophile’s Journal was going to be a monthly series? Well, we just skipped a month or ten. No big deal.

Anyway, I’ve read a few things in the past month or so, so let’s bring the journal back.

First up, Alex Cross, Run by James Patterson, and Rules of Prey by John Sandford. Alex Cross was loaned to me by my boss, Rules by a co-worker. I’m fifty pages into the second and it’s tolerable; I finished the first and it sucks. Our hero, Alex Cross, perfectly fits the cliché of the “good cop,” so if you’ve seen most any B-grade crime movie or TV show, you’ve met this character. The villains are one-dimensional and more evil than Satan; Patterson tries to add some shock value by making their crimes perverse and adding some sexual tension between the two men, but it comes across as what an eighth-grader would write if asked to produce a “shocking” crime novel.

I’ll give Uzumaki this: I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Author Ito Junji’s concept sounds like one hell of a creative writing challenge: the town of Kurouzu-cho is cursed by spirals. Every chapter repeats the “spiral” motif somehow, and though some episodes succeed more than others, I have to tip my hat to Ito just because he could write a three-volume comic using such an odd hook.

The first few stories are the most effective, in part because the supernatural elements only appear late in the episodes. So, in the first story, a man becomes obsessed with spiral-shaped objects, like snail shells or whirlpools, which causes his wife in to develop a phobia of spirals in the second chapter. Throughout each of these chapters the characters look like they’re simply crazy, and the horror is more effective because the bizarre events in this town are ratcheted up gradually in each succeeding story arc. So, the audience isn’t shocked at the outset and desensitised for the rest. Also, a series of stories taking place in the same town like this runs a risk of straining the audience’s suspension of disbelief with questions like, “Why doesn’t everyone leave?” Because of the gradual escalation, though, it’s plausible that, at the end of each episode, the town’s residents would assume they’ve seen the worst and choose to stay. After the first couple chapters, the rest of the comic is loosely connected by the spiral motif, setting, and a few recurring characters, until the last few chapters where the whole town becomes aware of the curse, and which form a single, long arc. By then, though, Uzumaki isn’t a horror story so much as a grotesque version of Lord of the Flies with supernatural elements.

I’ve written before about my attempts, some more successful than others, at reading Japanese comics in the original Japanese. Since this strategy has worked fairly well at learning that language, last month I decided to order some comics in French. Since I don’t know many French comic artists, I figured I’d import the first four volumes of Pika Edition’s printing of Suetsugu Yuki’s Chihayafuru, which doesn’t look like it’ll receive an English-language release anytime soon.

Yeah, dropping the post subtitling thing after one week. Maybe next time, if I think of something good.

Anyway, this past month may mark the beginning of a change in the way I read books, since I’ve subscribed to Audible. I’ve listened to a handful of audiobooks in the past, and though I don’t like them nearly as much as sitting down and reading through a physical book I decided to give this a try since I often find myself listening to podcasts while, say, cooking or working out. I don’t actually follow many podcasts, though, but audiobooks seem like a logical step. Besides, I don’t get through as many books as I’d like, and this should help with that.

So, after a tumultuous, often uncertain journey of seven years, I’ve finished Gunslinger Girl. I’ve written a couple posts on Aida Yu’s series before, after its return from publishing limbo in North America, one enthusiastic (of volumes 7-8), one rather concerned about the direction the author had taken (of volumes 11-12). Though volumes 13-14 were fine, I’m afraid that this final (fifteenth) volume largely, though not completely, justified my concerns.

The climax to Gunslinger Girl’s story is in the next-to-last omnibus (volumes 13-14). Aida gives us one more big shootout with the most prominent terrorists the Social Welfare Agency had been fighting, including the man behind the Croce Incident. These volumes are very action-heavy, which is good because that’s what Aida is best at. Many, if not most, of the main characters are dead by the end (which shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve read even one volume, since the girls’ short lifespans is emphasised constantly throughout the series), so the fifteenth volume shouldn’t have much to do besides tie up a few loose ends.

Yeah, I’m classing it down this time with a rather silly subtitle. Couldn’t resist, for some reason.

Anyway, as you may guess from my last few posts I’m back to my usual self, devouring one book after another. Of course, there’s always a trade-off, so recently I’ve been watching fewer anime and movies than usual. There are several interesting-looking shows coming up this season, though, so perhaps my reading schedule will collapse again in a week or two. In the meantime, besides Haruhi and The Sea, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

Well, now that I’m mostly moved into a new apartment, I’ve had some more time to read. Part of my newfound free time has gone into resuming my study of Japanese, as well as my usual mix of film and anime, but on the literary front here’s what I’ve been up to:

I finally, finally finished Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. For the patient reader, the narrator’s frequent asides, long descriptions, and multitude of characters and plot threads can be quite entertaining. I enjoyed them for a couple hundred pages, but as the book dragged on and on I began losing interest. By the halfway point, I really only cared about Pip’s relationship with Estella, and that’s partly because I can identify a little with his feelings in a hopeless, one-sided romance.

So, say you’ve started taking Japanese classes. What do you want to do, especially if you’re a bibliophile like me? Start reading, right? Novels and poetry are pretty tough, though, so you go to the next best thing - comics, which you’ve just discovered are not mayn-guhs but manga. I mean, hey, they’ve got pictures and stuff to help you out, so they’ll be easy, right?

I won’t say “wrong,” but they’re not really “easy,” either. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, it depends on which series you have the fortune (or misfortune) of picking out. My experience with Japanese comics in the original language started inauspiciously with the first two volumes of CLAMP’s X, which I found at a Half Price Books. It may as well have been printed in Mandalay, for all I could get out of it; a few years later I got an English edition, which only improved matters slightly but did show me that the density is not a bug but a feature, so I needn’t feel too bad about getting totally lost in the Japanese volume.

Back in high school, ten dollars for a volume of manga (or mayn-guh, as I and many unfortunately pronounced it) was a pretty good deal for my precious allowance money. I could certainly afford more of it than I could American graphic novels, and it was also cheaper per volume than anime DVD’s. However, manga did have one drawback in that they could get very, very long.

I remember looking at the first volume of Ranma 1/2 in a Bookstop outlet, knowing it was popular and liking the first couple chapters I read in the store, and hey - I could buy two or three volumes at a time! At that rate, I’d finish the whole thing  in about a year, and spend over three hundred dollars. For that money, I could buy a new game console, and some games to go with it!

I’ve decided to provisionally make The Bibliophile’s Journal a regular, probably monthly, feature of the blog. My stated purpose with the blog is to share my thoughts on what I read and watch, but with most books I don’t have enough material to justify a dedicated review, but do have a few things to say. This is especially with individual volumes in ongoing series (e.g., Gunslinger Girl this month). Depending on how it goes, I may also just start posting very short, say one- or two-paragraph posts on everything I read.