Experience in female oriented manga

Note: This post is not intended to be a parody of a famous review of another vampire manga or an indirect response to a recently posted group conversation.

The Record of a Fallen Vampire Vol. 1-2 (Yuri Kimura, Shonen Gangan)

Despite being serialized in Gangan, this struck me as being something straight out of Square-Enix’s GFantasy magazine. In fact, I’d bet this was placed in Gangan as a sort of promotional effort for GFantasy. Nobody seems to be sure who that magazine is aimed at but after reading some of this series the answer is clear: females, or more specifically, feminine people. GFantasy seems like an effort to create a new shoujo (or shounen, technically) subgenre that consists of straight shounen manga for female shounen manga fans, distinct from the already existing fantasy/action/adventure shoujo subgenres. As for what led me to that conclusion, well this is a vampire story and we all know what demographic is big into those.

Now there are some superficial similarities to normal shounen manga, like the frequent action scenes, but there are more differences and all of them strongly suggest a more feminine audience is the target. First and foremost, the cast has its share of strong female characters with the obvious exception of the protagonist, Akabara Strauss, our fallen vampire king who is trying to break the seal binding his queen. Unfortunately for him, there are a lot of indistinguishable seals in place. There’s some hinting that this could have been a harem manga, what with how all of the females have an emotional tie to our hero, but my guess is that the purpose is to emphasize how this is not a harem manga.

Oddly enough the only other major male character so far, named Renka, has a back story that’s surprisingly similar to Strass. He too is struggling to get over his lost girlfriend, of which Strauss killed. This gives the two men an inherent connection that can probably be utilized for doujinshi fodder. More importantly, the fact that both men have had previous girlfriends informs the reader that these guys are not awkward geeks but are perfectly capable of forming relationships with girls despite their dark backgrounds.

For those of you who are still doubt about the intended audience of this manga, I offer one more observation. It’s reasonable common for shounen manga to feature very young children, if not as outright members of the hero’s party then as side observers who learn valuable life lessons. This manga’s take on the character is a Dhampire (half human half vampire) named Laeti. She’s a spunky young girl who can really aim a sniper rifle. Despite the presence of such characters, most shounen manga never lose their manliness appeal. However, here I felt Laeti’s childlike enthusiasm and appearance was deliberately used (exploited) to lighten things up, as if to assure the reader that things won’t ever get too dark or crazy.

All of this aside, I can still see more traditional shounen manga fans getting into this. The characters are fleshed out decently well and there’s no suggestion that the narrative will slide into a painful, tedious episodic structure despite the possibility of endless seal breaking quests. Select chapters also contain compelling framing and intriguing angles.

…Isn’t this manga supposed to be about breaking out of stereotypical expectations or something?

All he needs is one shot

Golgo 13 Vol. 1 (Takao Saito, Big Comic)

This volume was awesome but I’m hesitant to admit it since I still don’t know how I feel about the titular story, “Supergun”. I figure I either don’t get or don’t like the surface story but that’s fine because what I mainly enjoyed was following the visuals. The plot entails Duke (Golgo 13) going into Iraq to foil Saddam Hussein’s scheme to construct and utilize a super gun in order to blow up the Whitehouse. However, the principle villain is the Japanese ballistic expert by the name of Izumi Murai who sold the gun’s designs to Iraq and considers the project to be his dream.

I detected three relatively distinct color palettes being used applied throughout the story. The first is a typical realistic palette that uses a wide variety of grays. It’s featured on drawings of the Earth (viewed from space), the desert, water surfaces, ect. Its purpose is just as you’d think, to give the drawings a natural appearance. Conversely there’s the palette that consists of a limited number of solid tones that are typically used on machinery. This texture gives off a cold, unnatural feeling. The best example of these two styles being contrasted is the shot of missiles flying towards Baghdad. Lastly, there’s the style that’s associated with Duke, which consist of solid black and white shades but used in a very loose, even scratchy, way. According to editor Takashi Fukuda Duke can be thought of as a chemist who reduces complexity to simplicity. This idea is expressed surprisingly literally through the shifting color patterns.

The unusual thing about this story is that the super gun isn’t colored with any one of the above color palettes. The gun represents an additional layer of complexity that combines the personal and the impersonal which is fitting since it is Murai’s dream but it’s hardly a form of natural artistic expression. Colors are one thing but what do these vague concepts represent in terms of something tangible? I think it comes down to understanding Duke. My current take is as follows: He exists on his own moral plane that is both naturalistic and simplistic, reflected through the manga’s (expected) display of rampant masculinity. He overturns both the inherent complexity of the world and the man made systems that attempt to control it in one fell swoop.

The second story, “Hit and Run”, should be of interest to anyone who enjoyed my take on The Drifting Classroom from a few weeks back. It’s about a private eye whose girlfriend is killed in a hit and run accident. I’d say the real story is about the man responsible. After hearing that Golgo 13 has been hired to kill him, he goes from crime boss to model citizen almost overnight. His transformation is characteristically defined by his lose of sexual appetite, his doomed crime enterprise, and his newfound love for police cooperation and the safe prison life. It’s the anti-thesis to the hero inspires good behavior plot point that generally plague manga.

Puzzle Manga

Gambling Emperor Zero Vol. 1-8 (Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Weekly Shonen Magazine)

Young genius Zero and his three accomplices have been coerced into entering a bizarre competition where the winner will be awarded one trillion yen and be selected as the representative for the competition organizer head, a ruthless old man named Zaizen, in a tournament involving the world’s richest members that will determine who will be king of the world. This is really another entry in the shounen tournament genre but it’s based around puzzles (or gambles/games) instead of say, fighting or sports. The mangaka, who I’m unfamiliar with, is best known for his gambling seinen manga. What must be nice about writing a shounen manga is that it opens the doors for some very unique and fantastic puzzles.

The main point of interest for me is how the mangaka uses shounen manga clichés to explore elitism. This is a very natural, even inherent, theme for a puzzle manga where the hero surpasses obstacles using logic and mathematics instead of strength or athleticism.

In shounen manga it’s common for the reader to peak in on the villains as they revel in the impending doom that the hero faces so we can laugh at them when the hero proves them wrong. While this happens a lot in this series, there are some important differences. The elitism of this series is at its nastiest when the villains are correct in their low assumptions of not Zero, but Zero’s teammates. They’re really just expressing what the reader is probably thinking. After Zero uses the ego of his enemies against themselves, his own sense of elitism promotes false feelings of confidence in his ability to control his destiny. The reality is that the organizers are always aware of what Zero is up to and even bend the rules in his favor after they take a liking to him.

This leads me to two other relevant and related concepts: Teamwork and individualism. Another shounen manga cliché is to have side characters do or propose something incorrect so the hero can look all the better when he does what’s correct. The previous paragraph already suggests the dark side of this cliché. The side characters here are Zero’s teammates and all they do is hold him back. Any notions of teamwork are superficial at best. I emphasize, it is all Zero. What I liked about this was the added bit of emotional complexity. Zero develops a fear of holding responsibility for his teammates’ wellbeing.

This leads into a storyline where Zero’s teammates convince him they’ll take responsibility for themselves. They’re all placed in a quiz show game where the team suffers or benefits as a result of individual performance. Suddenly Zero is in big trouble. Instead of giving the teammates their moment to shine and save the day, Zero takes responsibility of his life into his own hands by purposely undercutting his teammates’ responsibility, limiting their impact. I guess we’ll never know if they had what it took to help win.

In closing, I just want to mention the cliffhanger that these volumes end on. It’s one of the most shocking and twisted things I’ve ever seen in a shounen manga. However, for those of you who hate the rampant elitism on display here, there’s a pleasant surprise for you. There’s a tournament round where the victors are determined entirely on the basis of luck…